Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Knowledge

Finance

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 14:23:20 +0000

Village savings and loan group in Gulu District, Uganda in 2016. Picture by Kristina Just, CARE International and CARE Denmark

Daromir Rudnyckyj

University of Victoria

Initially published 7 Feb 2025

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

Abstract:

Finance is a critical dimension of life for most contemporary human beings. Finance refers to the management of money as debt, credit, or capital. Financial practices and techniques date to the dawn of human communities characterised by the division of labour. Indeed, the earliest written records kept in ancient Mesopotamia are records of credit and debt. As such, finance should not be understood as a synonym for capitalism or modernity, but rather as means of administering populations through the management of money. Financial instruments have been deployed in economic systems based on both markets and redistribution. More recently finance has become increasingly indispensable to the organisation of human life, an essential economic sector, and a key domain of employment. As such, it has attracted the attention of anthropologists seeking to understand the systems and practices that undergird human organisation, production, and motivation. Historically, anthropologists have focused most intensively on personal finance, beginning with rotating credit associations and continuing through development initiatives premised on microfinance. More recently, corporate finance has come into focus, with critical work on the discursive practices of market traders, investment bankers, and financial analysts. Less attention has been paid to public finance, with the notable exception of ethnographic research in central banks and newer work on pension funds and municipal bond markets. Anthropology has played a critical role in understanding the black box that is contemporary finance by addressing its practices and its effects on human beings today.

Introduction

Finance has become a critical, if often unremarked, dimension of life for most contemporary human beings. Anyone who borrows money, uses a public road, attends a school, has a cell phone, or plans to retire, is affected by finance. Finance can be broadly glossed as the management of money as debt, credit, or capital. It has been defined as ‘the management of money or other assets, and, in particular, the management of debt and equity as a means of raising capital: making money with money’ (Maurer 2005, 178). Leaving aside the question of what money is, such a definition draws attention to the temporality of money (Miyazaki 2013), or how the value of money changes over time. This is evident, for example, in interest-bearing debt in which the value of money today is greater than its value in the future. Furthermore, finance presumes a community that relies, at least in part, on money or money-like objects and has developed techniques to manage those objects through the processes of organising and allocating labour and resources.

In approaching finance, it is useful, on the one hand, to distinguish it from capitalism, and on the other hand, to understand that there are at least three broad categories of finance with distinct particularities: personal, corporate, and public. ‘Personal finance’ involves the saving, borrowing, and investment decisions of individuals and households. Much of the early work in the anthropology of finance, especially that examining financial institutions and practices, falls under this rubric. Anthropologists examined practices like rotating savings and credit associations (RoSCAs) in Asia and Africa, where a group of individuals contribute a fixed amount of money to a common pool at regular intervals, and each member takes turns to receive the pooled funds (Ardener 1964; Geertz 1962). Personal finance also includes home financing, mortgage schemes, and student loans (Stout 2019; Zaloom 2019) as well as efforts to finance small-scale enterprises through techniques such as ‘microfinance’. Through microfinancing, low-income individuals or business who lack access to traditional banking are provided with small-scale financial services, such as loans, with the aim of promoting financial inclusion and to reduce poverty (Elyachar 2005; Kar 2018; Schuster 2015). ‘Corporate finance’ describes how firms procure capital through equity investment or credit devices (Lepinay 2011; Ortiz 2021; Souleles 2019) and the analysis of these arrangements (Ho 2009; Leins 2018). It further entails how the instruments and contracts devised to facilitate these sorts of commercial relations themselves become the object of investment and speculation (Hertz 1998; Zaloom 2006). ‘Public finance’ examines the role of states in managing economies through financial techniques as well as the deployment of finance for broader collective goals (Peebles 2021; Riles 2011). This includes activities such as managing inflation (Holmes 2023) or raising funds for public projects (Mizes 2023). Monetary policy, the management of national currencies executed by central bankers and other financial experts, constitutes fertile ground for anthropological analysis of public finance (Abolafia 2020). Taxation represents another emerging domain in which critical anthropological questions regarding finance and the public might be asked (Kauppinen 2020; Mugler, Johansson, and Smith 2024).

The importance of public finance, even in economies organised primarily around market action, illuminates the distinction between finance and capitalism. Given that capitalism relies on the management of money to facilitate the pursuit of profit, finance is essential to it. Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to conflate finance with either modernity or capitalism, as finance is also indispensable in any monetised economy whether based on redistribution or the pursuit of profit. Ancient Mesopotamian communities in which redistribution served as the primary mode of exchange required financial mechanisms to ensure the equitable allocation of resources and the preservation of public order. Indeed, the earliest complex human communities that left written records in Mesopotamia developed their systems of writing to initially serve financial purposes, such as the allocation of grain, which was made equivalent to monetary units (Hudson 2004). The vast majority of written records from ancient Mesopotamia document financial transactions, and set interest rates are a distinctive feature of these records (Goetzmann 2016). Soviet communism was also dependent on complex systems of financial management (Mills and Brown 1966). Today, finance is indispensable to any economic endeavour dedicated toward the public good. Sovereign wealth funds utilise ‘custodial finance’ which seeks to benefit the public and meet an array of social commitments (Myhre 2020, 171). Anyone who works at a public university likely does so in a building whose construction was financed through the issuance of bonds.^[1]Indeed, bonds serve as a critical means through which public infrastructure is financed, including universities, roads, hospitals, ports, rail lines, electrical grids, and water and sewer systems (Anand 2018; Muehlebach 2023). Such projects may facilitate the capitalist pursuit of profit, but they are not capitalist in themselves and may serve public or non-profit aims. For example, financing public higher education was justified under the prerogative of fostering a liberal citizenry capable of self-government. As Wendy Brown has argued, the massive post-WWII investment that North Atlantic states made in post-secondary institutions was instrumental to creating robust democratic polities (2015). Financial instruments such as bonds were critical to financing the establishment and expansion of these institutions. As the financing of higher education illustrates, although the bonds used for financing may circulate as tradable commodities on bond markets, it would be a mistake to reduce public finance strictly to the pursuit of profit.

In addition to distinguishing finance from capitalism, it is useful to differentiate it from the type of capitalism known as neoliberalism. Neoliberalism can be conceived of as an extension of market rationality to domains of life not previously conceived of as economic, such as child-rearing, crime rates, or even religious practice (Foucault [1979] 2008; Rudnyckyj 2010). Finance, as the management of money, can be a means or tool through which such an extension can be executed, but is not reducible to it. An emergent literature on financialisation, which examines the influence of capital markets in contemporary economic and political life (Pike and Pollard 2010), addresses how finance increasingly frames the practices of citizens in their everyday lives (Elder 2017; Pitluck, Mattioli and Souleles 2018; Rethel 2018).

Anthropology has made distinct contributions to understanding finance by focusing on the embodied practices of financiers, the reflexivity of financial knowledge, the symbolic nature of financial knowledge and practice, the irrational aspects of financial practice, the formation of subjects through finance, the politics of finance, and the ways in which finance reflects normative values. But before delving into these aspects, it is important to trace the development of anthropological scholarship on finance.

Contextualising anthropological scholarship

Domains of production and reproduction have long been foci of anthropological inquiry (Meillassoux 1981). In this regard, the discipline has focused on how human communities sustain and reproduce themselves, whether through hunting and gathering (DeVore and Lee 1968; Sahlins 1972), agriculture (Mintz 1960; Rappaport 1967; Wolf 1966), or industry (Dunn 2004; Ong 1987; Rudnyckyj 2010). Yet, despite this, finance is often regarded as a novel object of anthropological focus, best left to economists, or as constituting a distinct academic discipline. Business schools typically have several faculty members who focus on finance as a sub-specialisation of degrees in business or commerce (Orta 2019). Such scholars are engaged in the practical dimension of finance, pursuing research on applied topics such as investment strategy, portfolio management, financial engineering, risk management, and the trading of financial instruments, such as equities,^[2] bonds, and derivatives.^[3]This work may entail building mathematical models of investment techniques, the development of formulas through which to understand financial markets, and tools to facilitate risk management.

Finance as an object of anthropological inquiry is an outgrowth of the changing focus of the discipline. Whereas in its initial iteration, anthropology assumed a distinction between tradition and modernity and took as its object a primitive other presumed to be outside history (Fabian 1983), subsequently anthropology has focused on problems of modernisation and social change (Nash 1965; Peacock 1968; Wilson 1971). As a result, modernity itself became the object of anthropological analysis (Barker et al. 2009; Ferguson 1999; Holston 2008; Newell 2012). Given the constitutive role of finance as a tool of rationalisation (Weber 1958), finance, like other constitutive features of modernity such as science (Rabinow 1999), bureaucracy (Bear and Mathur 2015; Gupta 2012), and capitalism (Nash 1981), has become a focus of anthropological inquiry.

Since shortly after World War II, anthropologists became increasingly interested in addressing finance (Bascom 1952). Given the disciplinary engagement with economic development that emerged in this period and the ensuing wave of decolonisation that took place across Asia and Africa, where extensive ethnographic fieldwork was underway, this was a logical turn of events. Economic growth was the central problem in many of these locations (Bohannan and Dalton 1965; Geertz ed. 1963; 1963). Situated within these shifts, early anthropological works on finance approached it by focusing on development, including bottlenecks to it as well as by studying the existing institutions that might provide the capital to fund development. Anthropologists like Clifford Geertz pursued this line of inquiry and, through their ethnographic work, showed how anthropology could understand factors that inhibited economic growth. For example, in Indonesia, two different communities were seen to lack different critical elements to enable their and the nation-state’s development. While Muslim traders in Java had individual initiative but lacked collective institutions, villagers in Bali had strong collective institutions but lacked individual initiative (Geertz 1963). On the one hand, the Javanese traders were capable entrepreneurs but they did not have forms of social solidarity that facilitated institutions beyond individual or family units. On the other hand, people in Bali readily formed collaborative initiatives, but lacked entrepreneurial dynamism. Engaging with questions of economic development, anthropologists also drew attention to microfinance practices and institutions that were already an integral part of different societies. In this vein, RoSCAs were identified as pivotal institutions that facilitated household investment and consumption in both Asia and Africa (Ardener 1964; Geertz 1962). A major theme of these early studies in emergent post-colonial societies was how financial forms cemented social ties and served as a means of facilitating collective cohesion.

Over the past four decades finance has become an increasingly critical facet of global economic activity (Kalb 2023, 94). In the US, the financial sector accounts for over 20% of the value added to the GDP (Gross Domestic Product), compared to 11% for manufacturing (Tran 2023). In the UK, the financial sector provides for over 8% of national economic output (Hutton, et al 2024). Given the increasingly important role of finance in contemporary economic life, this domain has become an ever-more important site for ethnographic inquiry. Indeed, perhaps the most widely read anthropologist in the world, and certainly one of the most influential, is the long-time columnist for the Financial Times, Gillian Tett. Tett has brought an ethnographic sensibility to her explanation of financial crises (Tett 2009) and written explicitly on the value of an anthropological perspective on finance and other domains of contemporary capitalism (Tett 2021).

The difference between finance as an academic specialisation and anthropological work on finance is that anthropological approaches typically entail a ‘second-order observation’ (Holmes and Marcus 2006) and ‘para-ethnography’ (Holmes and Marcus 2006). Second-order observation involves documenting the observations of expert observers. Para-ethnography enjoins anthropologists to recognise the ethnographic practices in which their interlocutors might engage and take them as starting points for their own ethnographic inquiries. In this sense, anthropological work on finance sheds light on the context, assumptions, and background knowledge that constitute knowledge and practice in finance (Rudnyckyj 2024). This disciplinary approach has yielded many generative insights.

As a form of knowledge, practice, and academic discipline, finance is sometimes represented as an objective form of transcendental knowledge. Like other hegemonic forms of positivist knowledge, such as science or medicine, finance presumes that its facts are unassailable, its methods are objective, and the context of its knowledge production are irrelevant. Anthropology interrogates these assumptions by drawing close attention to the embodied, reflexive, and irrational dimensions of financial knowledge instead.

Embodied finance and the reflexivity of financial knowledge

Rather than abstract calculation, anthropologists of finance have shown how finance is embodied in its practitioners. In open outcry financial markets, where traders physically met to buy and sell financial contracts in trading pits, the physical size, gestures, and voices of traders were critical to the operation of the market. Bids and offers were articulated orally in full view of other traders as a means of ensuring the transparent functioning of the market. Traders added ‘lifts’ to the soles of their shoes and wore brightly coloured trading jackets to enhance their visibility and increase their chances of being recognised in trading pits (Zaloom 2003, 6). Even more revealing than the material characteristics of trading is the fact that those participating in the exchange of financial instruments came to embody the market, relying on their bodies rather than mental calculation in deciding when to buy and sell. As Caitlin Zaloom explains, ‘In training their bodies as instruments of both reception and delivery of the underlying information of market numbers, the first step is learning not to calculate’ (Zaloom 2003, 7). Although open outcry equity, bond, and derivative markets are largely an historical relic today and most trading is done through algorithms, this work offers broader insights into the embodied domains of financial action.

The embodied nature of finance and bodily dispositions also impact financial action. Thus, there are ‘ways of knowing that are normally repressed, subordinated, and considered slightly illicit—the ways of knowing relegated in such technocratic organizations to the realm of the anecdotal, hype, of intuition, of experience’ (Holmes and Marcus 2005, 237). A specific example is the gut pain that former US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan is reported to experience in response to market gyrations and movements in the rate of inflation; the decision of whether to raise (or lower) interest rates in response to such movements is often felt by Greenspan through a ‘pain in the stomach’ (Holmes and Marcus 2005, 241). In this sense, anthropologists have documented how managing the money supply in the largest economy in the world is not a purely mental or rational process but is quite literally conducted according to gut feeling.

A related intervention in qualitative studies of finance has been to show that financial knowledge differs from other forms of positivist knowledge in its reflexive power. In some scientific disciplines such as physics or geology, the objects of analysis are not fundamentally transformed by or through the act of scientific investigation. Yet financial knowledge can have profound effects on the objects it studies (MacKenzie and Millo 2003, 123). Take, for example, the Black-Scholes options pricing model, created by several professors of finance who were subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize. This mathematical model was developed in 1973 to approximate the value of derivatives based on other investment instruments, taking into account the impact of time and other risk factors, and became used to price options contracts.^[4]Critically, the model became more accurate over time as financial theory reflexively conditioned the financial world that it purported to describe. Traders began to adopt the Black-Scholes model as a ‘guide to trading’ (MacKenzie and Millo 2003, 123). Thus, it was no longer just used to describe the options trading market, but it was reflexively used by traders as a basis for their action in the market. ‘Gradually, “reality” (in this case, empirical prices) was performatively reshaped in conformance with the theory’ (MacKenzie and Millo 2003, 127).

While scholars of finance often presume efficient markets, such markets do not exist outside of textbooks and theoretical models. This is evident in financial practices such as arbitrage trading, which entails exploiting the price differences of an asset in two different markets (Miyazaki 2013). If markets were truly efficient, such differences should disappear as soon as they are noted, yet financial firms and traders can generate profits by exploiting these differences (Donovan 2021). Arbitrage traders themselves facilitate the disappearance of these price differences. In this sense, the practices of arbitrage traders are indispensable in the production of market truths.

Anthropologists have shown how financial techniques are deployed to extend the ideology of the market to reconfigure different aspects of life, including to alter employment and labour conditions. For example, ‘shareholder value’—the value assigned to different stockholders based on estimated calculations of the company’s profit generating potential over a period of time—was instrumental to rationalise the everyday operations of American business (Ho 2009). Dating to the New Deal,^[5]American corporations exercised paternalistic corporate practices and were largely insulated from the pressures of the stock market (Ho 2009, 136). This resulted in extensive hiring and generous employee compensation. According to investment bankers, until the 1980s, corporations could disregard the pressures and expectations of the stock market, which led them to insufficiently heed market norms. Instead, they sought to cultivate employee loyalty through generous salaries and benefits and the guarantee of lifetime employment. However, in a bid to make US corporations conform more thoroughly to market calculations and the dictates of economic rationality, in the 1980s, Wall Street investment banks began the widespread deployment of the notion of shareholder value. Making shareholder value the central tenet of corporate life precipitated a stunning transformation by forcing firms to conform more rigidly to market imperatives. Thus, shareholder value served as a vehicle to rationalise corporate practice in an effort to make firms more efficient, productive, and competitive, but at the same time leading to massive dislocations as many employees were laid off, or ‘liquidated’ (Ho 2009).

Representational effects and decentring numerical calculation

A key anthropological insight has been to document the effects of financial representation. In this sense, anthropologists have analysed how the presentation and communication of financial information impacts individuals and groups. Anthropologists working in central banks have shown how regulators introduce new guidelines to transform the market and achieve desired outcomes. For example, in an attempt to minimize ‘systemic risk’, that is, the potential for a disruption in one part of the financial system to spread and cause widespread instability or collapse of the system as a whole, regulators in the Bank of Japan transformed interbank payments from a ‘designated time net settlement’ system, in which balances are settled at a fixed point in time each day, to a new ‘real time gross settlement’ system, in which each transaction is settled individually, fully, and in real time (Riles 2004, 397). In so doing, regulators sought to transform the market practices of bankers. The new order that they envisioned would reduce the technocratic intervention of regulators and create an interbank settlement scheme which would reflect the ‘aggregation of the actions of individuals, rather than as an artifact of…planning’ (Riles 2004, 397). Ethnographic studies by Annelise Riles, Douglas Holmes, and others document not simply the actions of financial regulators, but rather how those actors seek to reflexively act on the actions of others.

Research in central banks reveals how financial regulators deploy representations to manipulate their objects. Here financial experimentation takes place in practice, rather than at an artificially created distance from the world, as is characteristic of the natural sciences. Often, language itself is mobilised by economic authorities and financial governors to create conditions conducive to economic growth. This creates an ‘economy of words’ in which the deliberate use of language by central banks influences economic behaviour, market expectations, and public perceptions (Holmes 2014). In this sense, regulators rely as much, if not more, on language than statistics and numbers in managing inflation. There becomes a complex but subtle practice of reflexive interpretation among the key economic players, including bankers, journalists, investors, and corporate managers, when they read the policy pronouncements of central banks. The economy of words operates at the limits of calculation ‘where knowledge is imperfect and experience and intuition can or must inform judgment’ (Holmes 2014, 28). Thus, modern financial power acts, through language, on the action of those who are subject to an economy. For example, central banks realise that doubts about the stability of a bank can become ‘self-fulfilling’, leading to the possibility of a bank run, an occurrence when a large number of customers withdraw their deposits simultaneously due to fears that the bank may become insolvent, potentially causing the bank to collapse. In response, central bankers must issue ‘calming statements’ to reassure the public. In this sense, central bankers self-consciously seek to ensure that they are ‘widely believed by the public to be more knowledgeable about the economy and its current state and path than the public itself’ (Holmes 2014, 117). In sum, the economy of words describes how central bankers, through communicative statements, enlist the practices of those who in turn constitute the economy—that is, the public—to realise the representation of central bankers.

A focus on the language deployed in financial contracts illuminates critical economic events, such as the economic crisis of 2008. This cataclysm can largely be attributed to the reliance of derivative contracts on promises, whereby derivatives can be used to make promises to repay in the event that other promises will be broken (Austin 1962 in Appadurai 2016). Leading up to the crisis, US banks had issued mortgages with adjustable rates to high-risk borrowers who promised to repay the mortgages. These risky loans were bundled into mortgage-backed securities (MBS), which were sold to investors. Because they were bundled together, the true risk was obscured. To protect against the potential defaults on these securities, investors and financial institutions had purchased a particular type of derivative called ‘credit default swaps’. These were essentially insurance against the failure of the MBS and thus represented a second set of promises: the promise by an insurer, most notably AIG, to compensate the purchaser in the event of default. When housing prices fell across the board, many of the subprime borrowers defaulted. This led to a collapse in the value of the mortgage-backed securities. AIG then faced massive payouts due to the second set of promises to repay. On a broad scale, what Arjun Appadurai calls the ‘failure of language’ can be disastrous, precipitating the waves of defaults that characterise financial collapse after asset bubbles burst (2016).

Attention to financial representation enables reflection on the tendency by financial actors and economists to naturalise economic events such as financial crises (Roitman 2014). Liberal economists represent financial crises as the result of failures in judgement. Such failures cause them to misrecognise value in false value. Marxist economists, in contrast, take financial crises as the inevitable outcome of the boom-and-bust business cycle endemic to capitalism. These accounts naturalise crises, rather than viewing them as the contingent outcome of human action and decision-making. Financial actors and economists thus represented the precipitous drop in house prices after 2008 as a ‘natural development’ (Roitman 2014, 44). This interpretation suggests that home values reset of their own organic accord, rather than as the concrete effects of the practices of financial professionals who made credit readily available to borrowers based on financial models that did not accurately represent the real estate reality that they were reflexively creating through subprime loans, the securitisation of these loans, and the credit default swaps that insured them. The chain reaction of financial losses that came from these decisions undermined the stability of major institutions and contributed to the 2008 global financial crisis.

The limits to the purely scientific and calculative nature of finance is further called into question through the empirical observation that financial actors are not strictly rational actors, but are prone to story-telling and emotional reactions (Chong and Tuckett 2015). This aspect distinguishes the anthropological approach to finance from the social studies of finance approach common in disciplines such as sociology and geography. The latter approaches can reproduce the very epistemology of finance by presuming that ‘markets are more or less analogous to scientific practice’ (Riles 2010, 795). Financial markets do not conform to predictable, rational models, despite the claims of practitioners (Riles 2010, 796). Indeed, anthropological work has shown that rational calculation can be an obstacle to financial action. As described above, many derivatives traders at the Chicago Board of Trade, for example, actively sought to avoid calculating and assessing risks mathematically because they found it a hindrance to profitable action (Zaloom 2003).

Ethnographic work on financial analysis shows how important narrative accounts, stories, and representations are in the transmission of financial knowledge (Leins 2018). Financial analysis entails evaluating financial markets by focusing on the present and future prospects of the share prices of listed companies. Qualitative stories provide a critical frame for the numerical data that constitute the intellectual products created by financial analysts. Rather than starting with statistical and quantitative data, financial analysts start with a qualitative narrative about the economy. This story explains the position of a specific company within the broader economy. Statistics and other quantitative data are then mobilised to augment the narrative. Relatedly, anthropologists have found that ideologically laden concepts, such as the efficient markets hypothesis—the idea that share prices reflect all available information—are central to the everyday practices of financial valuation.^[6]Making a determination of financial value on Wall Street is not an abstract process of calculation, but rather a practice that is shaped by subjective notions, such as investment skill and the presumption that share prices actually reflect available information (Ortiz 2021, 244-5).

Subject formation and the reproduction of norms

Anthropological work has found that financial technologies and practices create subjects insofar as they elicit certain habits, constitute identities, and mould dispositions (Chong 2018, 35-63). Some finance practitioners adopt the practices that constitute their work lives in their lives outside work as well. For example, some arbitrage traders, whose work involves buying and selling assets to profit from price discrepancies in different markets, extend the logic of the market and apply it to their own lives and surroundings (Miyazaki 2003). However, this can become more than just a job pursuit or means of earning a living. Tada, a trader with whom Hiro Miyazaki engages at length, proposes various domains in which to exercise fiscal reason. One idea he floats is purchasing a money-losing religion, restructuring it to operate better, and thus turning it into a financially viable enterprise (Miyazaki 2003, 261). Tada also notes that golf club memberships are overvalued in Japan and that people purchase memberships based on concerns about status and prestige. Tada proposes buying poorly managed golf courses, improving their management, and selling memberships to the public at large instead of just a select group, ‘thereby at once turning a profit and dealing a blow to the irrational Japanese propensity to overvalue status’ (Miyazaki 2003, 261). Tada is fixated on extending economic rationality into domains that were not strictly organised according to its calculus, both on the side of management and consumers. Consumers do not act according to the dictates of market logic as they overpay for something that is not as valuable as they make it out to be. Managers do not act rationally because they are mismanaging their enterprises, at once profiting off the irrationality of consumers but also not garnering maximum profit due to poor administration of their resource. Rather, traders like Tada seek to implement market logic in action to reform institutions and individuals that do not conform to its logic.

Similar to the extension of economic rationality, promoting risk-taking action is another critical tool for shaping a financial actor. Working with risk is a means through which traders form themselves and differentiate themselves from others (Zaloom 2004, 371). The prospect of accruing large profits or suffering devastating losses creates subjects who can not only tolerate the high-stakes scene of the trading floor, but also become vehicles for the accumulation of profits through risk-taking. Financial contracts are also deployed as key means of subject formation as evident in the ways that various branches of the Malaysian state sought to transform the types of contracts used in Islamic finance in the country from debt-based to equity-based (Rudnyckyj 2019). Whereas debt-based contracts encourage risk-averse, rent-seeking behaviour, equity-based ones entail more risk and encourage entrepreneurial dispositions. As part of its efforts to foster more entrepreneurial dispositions among segments of the population, especially among the Malay-Muslim majority, the state sought to re-centre Islamic finance around equity-based contracts (Rudnyckyj 2017).

Work on personal finance has shown how financial relations are not merely economic, but are embedded in moral obligations, social status, and kinship networks. In countries on the global periphery undergoing rapid economic transformation, such as Mongolia and Chile, finance shapes collective ties and everyday experiences. Given the breach between formal market economies and traditional systems of exchange, contemporary Mongolians engage in a mix of formal and informal economic practices, navigating risks and the unpredictability of income, market prices, and employment opportunities through flexible strategies (Empson 2020). This includes both a reliance on informal economic practices, such as bartering, family support networks, and small-scale trade, alongside formal employment in sectors like mining, government, or retail. Mongolian women navigating change live ‘in the gap’ between futures they desire and the difficulty of their everyday existence. Similarly, in Chile, financial precarity shapes everyday life. Families live in a constant state of economic vulnerability, where income is uncertain, and the need to rely on credit or loans is unavoidable. People use a variety of strategies to cope with their financial instability, including borrowing from formal financial institutions, local moneylenders, or friends and relatives (Han 2012).

The role of finance in producing subjects illuminates that it is a profoundly political tool and domain. Whereas disciplines like the scholarly study of business seek to represent commerce and the market as apolitical, anthropological work has documented the power relations inherent in financial relationships. In one of the earliest analyses that took engagement in financial markets as a central object, Ellen Hertz recognised that the ‘interpretative framework through which Shanghainese read their stock market is firstly political, and secondly, if at all, “economic”’ (Hertz 1998, 23). Indeed, although ostensibly communist, political leaders in China experiment with stock markets to tap into the individual savings of millions of petty entrepreneurs in the interest of national development. This initiative has yielded one of the most impressive economic transformations of recent times in which hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens have been elevated out of dire poverty (Pieke 2014).

In Malaysia, elites sought to make the country’s capital, Kuala Lumpur, into what they called ‘the New York of the Muslim world’ (Rudnyckyj 2014). By this, they meant making it a central node in a transnational alternative to the conventional financial system with its key hubs in the US, the UK, Japan, Hong Kong, and Germany. In so doing, they envisioned a new ‘geoeconomics’ based on hubs not only in Kuala Lumpur but also in places such as Istanbul, Dubai, and Manama. Malaysia is a particularly advantageous site from which to imagine such a project, given its strategic location between the world’s greatest source of surplus capital (the oil states of the Middle East) and its foremost site of industrial production (most notably China, but also the rapidly expanding economies of Southeast Asia). In this emergent economic configuration, Islamic finance experts seek to balance the ethical imperatives of Islam, such as fairness, transparency, and the prohibition of interest, with the practical need to remain competitive and financially profitable in the global market.

Ethical concerns are not only limited to efforts to reconcile religious imperatives with financial action. The emergence of environmental and social governance (ESG) concerns in the management and operations of corporations has drawn critical anthropological attention. Anthropologists have found that investors dedicated toward socially responsible investment use ethics as a tool to manage uncertainty in financial markets. In a field marked by unpredictability, ethics are employed not only as a moral guide but also as a practical resource to help investors make decisions when the future of investments is unclear. By embedding ethical considerations into financial practices, investors can create a sense of certainty and confidence about their investments, as they believe they are aligning their actions with long-term societal good (Leins 2020). Shareholder activism constitutes another domain in which ethical concerns intersect and shape financial action. Activist investors focus on issues like environmental sustainability, labour rights, social justice, and corporate governance. Such shareholder activism offers a way for investors to participate in shaping the moral direction of corporations, challenging the traditional view that financial markets are purely profit-driven (Welker and Wood 2011).

Relatedly, anthropologists have emphasised how finance can also be a site to address inequality. Following the financial crisis of 2008, a group of financial professionals formerly employed on Wall Street came together to deploy their expertise to rethink finance in the interest of creating a more equal and just society (Appel 2014). More recently, financial frontiers, as spaces where financial concepts and products are reimagined in ways that challenge traditional boundaries or structures, have become key sites for rethinking normative financial practices and values (Ballestero, Muehlebach, and Pérez-Rivera 2023). The use of microfinance, informal financial networks, or alternative banking systems that cater to populations that are not well served by traditional banking institutions, are some examples of such reimagining. In contrast, finance can also provide an avenue for deepening inequality, as in Macedonia, where finance served as a means by which an authoritarian regime could strengthen its grip on power (Mattioli 2020). Construction in the country’s capital, Skopje, was enabled by international investment. Although credit relationships expanded, political elites were able to monopolise access to this international credit. As financial flows were centralised and restricted, these elites were able to create a vast network of exploitative domestic debt relations.

Ethnographic work has revealed how normative values shape the perceptions of financial actors, particularly in their own understanding of the effects of their action. A case in point is private equity, a form of investment where firms invest in private companies, often taking a controlling interest, with the goal of increasing their value and selling them for a profit. Private equity investors justify their wealth and privilege based on the notion that they are hard workers and create value, and the Protestant values that attribute moral worth to labour provide a frame for the activities of these well-off private equity investors and serve to justify their actions (Souleles 2019). Similarly, Wall Street financiers enter the career of investment banking as fresh graduates of certain Ivy League universities as ‘the smartest’ and ‘the brightest’, and thereby become socialised into a world of high risk and high reward (Ho 2009). Moreover, the corridors of finance reproduced many of the same race, class, and gender hierarchies that likewise structure other domains of modern life (Fisher 2012).

Conclusion

Finance is a constitutive pillar of contemporary life for most human beings today. Whether considering credit provided though microfinance, the impact of stock market gyrations on retirement accounts, or public bonds that build our places of work, modern life seems almost unimaginable outside the management of money. Hence, finance constitutes a critical domain for analysis and inquiry. Given its centrality to modern life, yet how poorly it is understood, anthropological work dedicated toward understanding how power works must engage with dominant forms of finance as well as alternatives to it. Germinal anthropological accounts have opened the ‘black box’ of finance and illuminated many of its presumptions. These include its claims to scientific status, its apolitical nature, the power of its representations, the reflexive relationship that it has with the broader economy, and its power to mould subjects.

Finance is a complex system comprised of esoteric practices and symbolic representation. Whereas anthropology has long attended to symbolic systems such as language (Basso 1979), religion (Geertz 1973), kinship (Schneider 1968) and the symbolic dimensions of capitalism (Sahlins 1976), the symbolic nature of finance has yet to be thoroughly unpacked. Symbolic representation in finance is premised on stochastic models and high-level mathematical reasoning. With some notable exceptions (Maurer 2002; Myhre and Holmes 2022), anthropologists have avoided extensive inquiry into the symbolic nature of finance. It will be incumbent upon future anthropological research projects to engage on this level if the discipline is to continue to create generative insights into the operations of finance in the future and fulfil its role of unmasking the taken-for-granted truths of modern life.

In this sense, ethnographic research has the potential to raise the veil on the inner mechanisms of finance, demystify its opacity, and relativise its truth claims, perhaps contributing to bringing into being a more equitable future. To achieve this end, research in the domain of finance will be most effective if it entails analysis rather than critique or denunciation. Anthropologists can generate future insights into how finance operates by reporting on its practices and decoding its mode of knowledge, much as they have done with other domains of human life, such as kinship, religion, or language.

This is an unprecedented moment in the history of finance. The financial crisis of 2007-2009 violated long-accepted truisms about the behaviour of real estate markets and challenged the models that financiers use to model markets (Taleb 2007). The response to the crisis brought about widespread experiments with zero and negative interest rates, meaning that borrowing money at an institutional level was free and, in some cases, subsidised. More recently, states around the world have struggled to control inflation. The common strategy of controlling inflation through raising interest rates has proven to be inadequate. A recent paper published by an official of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the US, contends that economists have a poor understanding of how economies operate and the effects of the financial models they use (Rudd 2021). Given these developments, the time is nigh for anthropologists to further engage with this critical domain of expertise and bring to light precisely how these opaque domains shape contemporary human life.

Note

Research for this entry was carried out as part of research funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) under the Insight Program, Grant Number 435-2018-0453.

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Note on contributor

Daromir Rudnyckyj is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, where he serves as Director of the Counter Currency Laboratory. He is the author of Beyond debt: Islamic experiments in global finance (2019, Chicago University Press) and Spiritual economies: Islam, globalization, and the afterlife of development (2010, Cornell University Press). He is the co-editor of Religion and the morality of the market (2017, Cambridge University Press).

Professor Daromir Rudnyckyj, Department of Anthropology, University of Victoria, PO Box 1700 STN CSC, Victoria BC V8W 2Y2, Canada. Orcid ID: 0000-0003-3940-4881

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Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

Professionals

Felix Stein — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 15:51:42 +0000

Elizabeth Hull

SOAS University of London

Initially published 21 Apr 2020

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

Abstract:

Professions are institutionalised bodies of specialised knowledge and practice around which divisions of labour within contemporary societies are organised. As well as performing a collective function, membership within a profession offers individuals upward social mobility and meritocratic recognition. Professional expertise is so ubiquitous in societies around the world that we tend not to ask how and why specialised occupational groups have emerged, how they produce, control, and apply their knowledge, and how the meanings of professionalism differ from one context to the next. Anthropologists’ early focus on colonial settings attuned them to view professionals as instruments of political power and control, particularly in biomedical contexts. Subsequent studies have produced a diverse array of interpretations, seeing professionalism as a performative or aesthetic practice that sits apart from the messy realities of work, as a marker of prestige and class mobility, and as a site of ethical engagement and debate. Recent approaches tend to focus on the ways in which professional identity is made through everyday practice and the struggles entailed in maintaining it, rather than viewing it as a label conferred automatically on the basis of training. Finally, the study of professionals has prompted renewed attention to anthropologists’ own claims to professionalism, and the social networks, institutions, and epistemic assumptions needed to sustain it.

Introduction

In a conversation between Scottish physician David Livingstone and a Tswana ritual expert in 1857, the mission doctor attempted to disprove the rainmaker’s arguments about his influence on rain. Livingstone drew on European models of empirical reason, referring to himself as the ‘medical doctor’ and to the rainmaker as ‘rain doctor’. He implied ironically that their contest of ideas was being fought on equal ontological terms (Comaroff & Comaroff 1991: 211). Thereby, Livingstone also suggested something about the way in which an incipient ideology of professionalism served as a marker of expert knowledge and authority in this colonial setting of southern Africa.

This interaction took place during a period in which the professionalisation of spheres of expertise such as medicine and law was occurring alongside the acceleration of industrial capitalism and technological development in the nineteenth century. It was aided by various institutional forms such as associations, systems of accreditation, and ethics codes, which demarcated the formal parameters of professional knowledge and served as barriers to entry. As such, professionalisation was an exclusionary process of formalising and limiting claims to expert knowledge. It standardised expertise in ways that made it quickly transportable around the world. For instance, from the late-nineteenth century, the professionalisation of medicine rendered population health amenable to state intervention. Professionalism emerged as a new form of governance, intertwined with state projects at home and in the colonies.

The study of professionalism, tied to the emergence of modern state bureaucracies, traditionally fell under the remit of sociology rather than anthropology. Key figures studying it include the sociologists Talcott Parsons and Everett Hughes, influenced by the foundational works of social theorists Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. Both Weber and Durkheim witnessed the emergence of occupational groups in Europe’s transforming societies.^[1] Durkheim had asserted early on that professionals were custodians of morality and collective interest. Professional ethics provided solidarity in an industrial society that risked moral dissolution under the sway of free market philosophy (1992). Weber focused less on professionals and more on bureaucracies, maintaining that power in society becomes legitimised and regulated by rational and depersonalised bureaucratic systems that impose rules on human behaviour.

Writing in the 1930s during a period in which society risked collapsing into fascism, Talcott Parsons, was fascinated with the question of how society’s fragile stability was maintained. He held that professions did maintain stability but differed from bureaucracies because they emphasised collegial and individualist values rather than hierarchies. Yet both bureaucracies and professions shared important commonalities: they demarcated specific, restricted functions in the workplace and they formalised standards of practice, making people’s roles distinct from their personalities and individual circumstances. For Parsons, professionals—like bureaucrats—were essential components of ‘modern’ industrial society, harbingers of rational principles holding society together through the creation of shared values and goals. Concepts of ‘mandate’ and ‘license’ were later developed and deemed necessary for professions to exist, as they formalised relationships of trust within society (Hughes 2009). As well as entrusting some of its necessary functions to these contained spheres of expertise, society could offload onto the professions responsibility for its more disturbing elements. For instance, disease would be dealt with by medical professionals and crime by lawyers (Dingwall 2008: 4–5).

By the 1970s, the idea that professionals served as a kind of ‘glue’ for social cohesion gave way increasingly to a view of professionalism as a mechanism of control and elitism. This position was exemplified in the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who viewed professionalism as a source of power, or what he called ‘social capital’, that could be used to gain political and social status (Bourdieu 1990).

Given anthropology’s original focus on so-called ‘traditional’ societies, Parsons’ contemporaries in anthropology limited their interest in expertise to a focus on ‘ritual experts’, such as the rainmaker in Livingstone’s account. But as anthropologists turned their attention to colonial actors and to the bureaucratic workings of the state, they began to focus on professional expertise itself. Today there exists no distinct subsection of anthropology devoted to the study of professionals. Instead, work on professionalism is disparately nestled in a number of different areas, including the anthropology of expertise, science, and technology studies and the study of states, bureaucracies, and corporate settings. This entry therefore draws together some key strands from different sub-fields of the discipline. They include considering professionals as agents of social control, status, and class mobility, as well as a more recent focus on professionalism as an ethical and aspirational project.

Professionals as agents of social control

Anthropology’s early encounter with professionals, aside from within the academe itself, began in colonial settings. The study of colonialism highlighted early on that professionals are not just the benign experts they often see themselves as, but that they are also social actors embedded within colonial and other power relations. The aforementioned conversation between Livingstone and the rainmaker is a good example of this. In addition to the more overt forms of conversion, it was through assertions of professionalised expertise that the Tswana were drawn subtly and inexorably into the hegemonic structures of colonising culture (Comaroff & Comaroff 1991). Professional knowledge, religious authority, and colonial power converged to produce new regimes of domination. Medical missionaries and military doctors throughout the European colonies set out not only to ameliorate ill-health—often brought about or exacerbated by brutal labour regimes—but to ‘civilise’ colonised populations.

While medicine was a key locus of professional expertise in colonial settings, it was not the only one. In Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia) in the early twentieth century, colonial administrators were concerned about feeding a growing population; in particular, how to sustain rural populations while extracting the labour of male migrants who travelled for work to the mines. Worried about constraints on the self-sufficiency of ethnic groups such as the Bemba, they drew on the expertise of scientists who determined that the widely practiced agricultural method—a semi-nomadic, slash and burn system known as citimeme—was wasteful (Richards 1995 [1939]). A study by an anthropologist and a historian fifty years later revealed that a series of highly adaptive and varied aspects of citimene had been overlooked by colonial officials, tasked with the job of defining and controlling such practices (Moore & Vaughan 1994). Professional expertise in this instance reproduced narratives compatible with political agendas. The authors revealed, moreover, that the colonial preoccupation with citimene was not only to do with food supply but with how to control populations and to create permanent residences in order to implement taxation. However, the study is careful not to arrive at a singular conclusion, showing that while professional knowledge could not be taken at face value, neither could it be dismissed as mere colonial representation.

The work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault equipped anthropologists with a language to understand professionals as instruments of political power. Foucault was particularly influential in studies of medical settings. In The birth of the clinic, published in 1963, he argued that biomedical knowledge, formalised through systems of professionalism, rendered patients’ bodies passive objects of control and intervention (Foucault 2002 [1963]). His approach made it possible to describe how a ‘medical gaze’ became embroiled in systems of racialised exploitation. One ethnographic history of a mission hospital in the Belgian Congo shows that medical missionaries became ‘colonial agents of a form of indirect rule’ (Hunt 1999: 165). Nancy Rose Hunt describes the medicalisation of childbirth, in a context where concerns of colonial administrators about a falling birth rate motivated medical attention to safe childbearing. Locally trained midwives became valued professionals and important culture brokers, ‘inviting, persuading and compelling’ women to attend a clinic, despite growing fears prompted by caesarean deaths (Hunt 1999: 230-1). Notwithstanding their suspicions, local women also brought themselves to hospital during difficult births and appropriated colonial items such as soap and birth certificates to suit their needs. Colonial powers often viewed this process as a ‘civilising’ practice, using doctors in rural hospitals to implement hygiene and other state directives in what the author describes as a project of ‘medical, bodily and demographic control’ (Hunt 1999: 6). Yet through detailed descriptions of professionals such as the midwife Malia Winnie, Hunt resists straightforward arguments about colonial intrusion and local reaction. The experts in this setting – teachers, nursing men and midwives – were ‘colonial middle figures’, engaged in a process not just of control, but of cultural mediation and negotiation, such as between local and medical meanings of bodily incision. Professional practice was one of translation, ‘a necessary condition of colonial life’ (Hunt 1999: 13).

In contemporary hospital settings, ethnographic studies show how ‘professional logics’ exert control over patients. In the United Kingdom, for instance, enactments of professional identity can construct asymmetrical power relations in which patients become subordinate. ‘Professional logics’ place demands on patients, who must display ‘due deference’ to medical staff and their expertise as a prerequisite for accessing care (White et al. 2012: 78). Take the example of a distressed elderly woman who arrives in a UK Accident and Emergency (A&E) Department with a bleeding nose caused by a fall. An on-looking doctor remarks that ‘many people here have nothing wrong with them’ (White et al. 2012: 72). Since the doctor perceives the woman’s condition as too minor to require his clinical expertise, the patient is deemed undeserving of care and rendered a ‘problem’. Professional knowledge demarcates patients as either legitimate or unworthy, impeding ‘the recognition of patients as persons’ (White et al. 2012: 72).

Ethnographic attention to professional practice suggests the ways in which professional hierarchies may reproduce the kinds of ‘indifference’ (Herzfeld 1993) that have long been associated with bureaucracies. Professions are embedded within, and may help to reproduce, power relations prevalent in society.

Performance and aesthetics of professionalism

A key feature that unites studies of professionals is the attention to the work process itself. It reveals that activities involved in performing and hence maintaining one’s professional status may be quite distinct from other aspects of professional work.

In a volume on international development professionals, David Mosse describes their tendency to move towards agreement and coherence, and focuses on the political effects of such convergences. Professionals must navigate the messiness, complexities, and disagreements entailed in their everyday practice while maintaining the appearance of coherence upon which their professional identities rely. In his research about an international development intervention in India, Mosse encountered ‘a professional habitus that automatically transferred the actuality of events into the preconceived categories of legitimate meaning and ideal process’ (Mosse 2011a: 22). By reproducing models and templates, engaging in ‘group think’ (Woods 2007), or forming closed networks built around certain norms of social interaction (Eyben 2011), they can create an appearance of efficiency and disguise the complex problems encountered in daily work.

Documents are a key technology through which the official narratives of professionals are produced (Riles 2006). However, the ways that documents are used vary depending on professional cultures. In certain contexts, their creation may have as much to do with building consensus and reproducing convergence, as with the stated purpose or content of documents (Green 2011; Hull 2012). Yet, the uses of paperwork change in contexts where professionals operate with relative impunity, as work on the Nigerian gendarmerie suggests (Göpfert 2013). Gendarmes are military police operating in rural areas, responsible primarily for traffic control, public order, and criminal investigations. They closely associate their professional status with their training in writing, a skill which they perceive distinguishes them from the police and military. In criminal investigations, gendarmes produce a procès-verbal, a document containing information about events, observations, and evidence pertaining to a crime, to be transferred to a public prosecutor. In the absence of scrutiny by seniors regarding the accuracy of the reports, gendarmes produce documents that are ‘aesthetically satisfying’ and through which they express their individual identities and statuses. While adhering to the required template, they alter font, type size, spacing, and use of symbols in the place of certain letters to personalise the appearance of the document. Verbose or technical language signifies professional status. It entails translating a witness’s words in a way that prioritises the ‘dramaturgy’ of the document over the accuracy of its claims (Göpfert 2013: 330). Crucially, gendarmes operate in an environment in which professional worth is achieved through the appearance of documents, while processes ensuring the reliability of content are absent. To be a professional in this context is to perform one’s individualism and intellect through presentation and writing style.

The performance of professional status is similarly important among international development professionals, albeit taking a different form (Eyben 2011). Travelling abroad for work, development professionals are physically and socially distant from the communities they are sent to assist (Eyben 2011: 145). Instead, they encounter host countries through enclosed, elite spaces of expatriate sociality, forming friendships with one another at picnics, sporting events, and parties. It is in these spaces that meanings of professionalism are made, because socialising brings a donor community into being, a necessary step towards policy coherence. However, because these ways of socialising do not include ‘getting to know the country and its people’, these activities reproduce the gap between policy agendas and grounded realities, a well-known problem in development practice (Eyben 2011: 141). In these examples, the performance of professionalism—whether in documents or in social gatherings—is more important than the specificities of official roles that people might play.

A discourse of professionalism also provides a language for disciplining people's physical appearance at work, especially of women. In a data-entry firm in Barbados, women are expected to perform ‘professionalism’, defined by their seniors in terms of their appearance and comportment (Freeman 1993). Yet women were explicit in describing their jobs as a far cry from their understanding of ‘professional’, remarking that jobs in agricultural and domestic labour were better paid than theirs. Contradictions emerged since some women said they preferred these jobs because they liked to work in a ‘professional enterprise’. They thereby acknowledged the higher status it conferred to them, all the while recognising its façade-like quality. Here, professional identity turns out to be ambivalent, as both a source of social value and an empty signifier.

Despite their claims to meritocratic values, professions may be as likely as other kinds of labour practices to mobilise differences such as gender, ethnicity, religion, nationality, or citizenship status. This applies even to sectors we tend to think of as the most formally rational and calculative, such as finance. In London’s banking sector, a cohort of culturally working class ‘barrow boys’—defined as ‘streetwise dealers from East and South London’—dominated the trading floor, where conspicuous consumption and homophobic jokes signified status and belonging at work (Zaloom 2006: 77). This changed dramatically when managers diversified their staff and began to recruit graduates—especially women and ethnic minorities—whose diverse, individual approaches, it was felt, could be harnessed for greater economic success. Managers viewed this as a process of ‘professionalisation’, suggesting that meanings of professionalism are derived at least partly from performances of class and social status.

The idea of professionalism as a performance is captured by economic anthropologist David Graeber’s provocative claim that large numbers of professional, middle-management and administrative roles are ‘bullshit jobs’; that is, jobs lacking any meaningful contribution to society and existing ‘just for the sake of keeping us all working’ (Graeber 2018). These jobs include those located in industries such as financial services, telemarketing, corporate law, public sector administration, human resources, and public relations—as well as the various roles that exist to support these industries. There is a performative quality to the jobs since, Graeber suggests, those who occupy them would readily admit that their roles lack meaningful social purpose. However, this point of view may overlook the ways that such roles, even if failing to contribute to loftier projects of the public good, may meaningfully signify personal, aspirational goals, especially in places where upward mobility is by no means assured. This brings us to the next theme of professionalism: as a route to upward mobility.

Status, aspiration and class mobility

As well as focusing on cultures of work itself, anthropologists studying professionals have also shed light on class mobility and aspiration. They followed professionals not only in their official roles at work but also in their lives beyond the workplace, as family and community members and as citizens. They have sought to understand the role of professional identity within wider life projects shaped by lifestyle aspirations and class trajectories. Witnessing the burgeoning bureaucracies and professional networks emerging in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century, Weber recognised the importance of education and occupation as features of one’s ‘life chances’. New cultures of professionalism and white-collar employment were coming into being in ways that oriented scholars towards a focus on a growing yet differentiated middle class.

In India, professional employment in the government sector was formerly viewed as the hallmark of what it meant to be middle-class. Yet new cultures of consumerism have made middle-class lifestyles more widely accessible (Donner & De Neve 2011). Anthropologists turned their attention from workplace identity to cultures of consumption in trying to understand this so-called ‘new’ middle class. This shift partly reflected that labour casualisation and the decline of secure employment made it harder and harder for people to build their identities around their workplace. Instead, consumerist ideologies emerged that offered alternative forms of inclusion as well as opening up new lines of exclusion (Comaroff & Comaroff 2000). These insecurities also meant that middle-class lifestyles were increasingly precarious and were often funded by risky borrowing (James 2015). From these studies, it emerges that a focus on consumption practices is insufficient for understanding middle-class experiences. Instead, it may be necessary to look at the intersections between values created at work and the ways that status and aspiration are formed beyond it.

While consumption is a marker of class status, forms of belonging created by professional identities equally persist. In India, a rapidly expanding information technology (IT) industry has created demand for highly skilled jobs. This is accompanied by a growing disdain among young, educated people towards public-sector employment, which they associate with low salaries and the draconian hierarchies of an earlier era (Fuller & Narasimhan 2007: 142). Reflecting on what this shift means for people’s identification with ideas of Indian nationhood, C.J. Fuller & Haripriya Narasimhan draw on research with IT professionals in Chennai to repudiate assumptions that globalisation leads people to abandon a commitment to the Indian nation. While many of these young professionals seek to gain ‘exposure’ by working overseas, they aspire to settle and build their lives back in India, assured of a highly paid job in the sector. This optimism orientates people towards new ideas of nationhood that depart from earlier ideas associated with Nehruvian nationalism (cf. Saxenian 2016).

Elsewhere in India, professional work is less secure. In a remote, rural region of Uttarakhand, government programmes are increasingly delivered through the quasi-independent institutions of government-funded NGOs (Bear & Mathur 2015). These organisations are populated by ‘young professionals’, a term borrowed from international development jargon. They are university-trained engineers and computer programmers holding short-term contracts. While their salaries were on a par with those who held permanent state employment, their temporary status and lack of housing or health insurance made their positions more insecure than their government-employed counterparts. Nonetheless, many were relieved to have found employment at all, and hoped that it would pave the way to a job in the city, a gateway to the middle-class milieu they wished to participate in. They did not hold ‘government jobs’ and actively dissociated themselves from what they saw as an anachronistic workplace order of draconian hierarchies and deferent submission embraced by their permanently-employed colleagues. This represented a distancing from the state because of their insecure contractual positions and because of the appeal of the growing private-sector industries of the kind described by Fuller and Narasimhan. In Ghana, too, professional qualifications do not necessarily lead to economic fulfilment or middle-class status. Yet professionals in Accra’s media and knowledge economy nonetheless view themselves as bearers of ‘respectable nationhood’ (Kauppinen 2017: 270).

The meanings of professionalism are influenced by wider social and political shifts. In China, new values of professional autonomy came about as market-based practices of labour allocation began to emerge in the 1990s (Hoffman 2010). Formerly, the government allocated jobs to graduates according to a system known as ‘iron rice bowl’, leaving them with no choice about which job they would do or where they would live. In a new market-based system, emphasis is placed on individual choice, which is nurtured through events such as graduate job fairs. Yet the government continues to influence this process, through managing and funding some of the recruitment events and through an on-going ‘moral education’ of university students and graduates. New market practices encouraging choice and personal responsibility combine with earlier socialist ideas about service to the nation to produce a ‘patriotic professionalism’ among these young adults (Hoffman 2010). Despite the choices that people now have, the previous security provided by the state as part of the ‘iron rice bowl’ has given way to a more precarious set of circumstances with less secure pensions and poor access to health care (Hoffman 2010; Hsu et al. 2007: 3). Since the collapse of Chinese socialism amounted to a process of de-institutionalisation, understanding its aftermath requires studying the ways that institutions are being constructed (Hsu et al. 2007: 3). Hence, professional practice becomes an important site for understanding contemporary China.

Anthropologists have reflected on a number of other ways that people articulate ideas of belonging through their professional identities. For young urbanites in Nairobi, Rachel Spronk shows, professionalism offers a source of identity that allows them to bypass ethnic differences which they have come to view as divisive (Spronk 2012). Similar observations are made about civil servants in Ghana (Lentz 2014) and nurses in South Africa (Hull 2017).

Migration offers many professionals a route to new forms of prestige. But as professional expectations are formed in one context, working overseas can produce a jarring reassessment of one’s own credentials. Czech nurses felt their self-worth as professionals undermined when they discovered themselves ill-equipped to perform the strict workplace protocols they encountered in hospitals in the UK and Saudi Arabia (Bludau 2014). When they returned to the Czech Republic, some were frustrated by the absence of such protocols and were motivated to initiate change as a way to sustain the professional identity they had come to associate with overseas practices. Consequently, we can understand professionalism to be ‘rooted in one’s personal history and built on through professional and personal experiences’ (Bludau 2014: 877, italics in original). Migration offers a particularly useful lens for exploring this issue.

Professional status can also offer an alternative workplace ethic to ‘clientelism’. Among civil servants in Ghana, for example, professionalism is associated with the ‘state’ and with a universalist ethos of service to the nation. In contrast, patronage is associated with ‘government’, and was practiced ‘unofficially’ and less readily spoken about (Lentz 2014). Here, professionalism offers a language of political neutrality that is part of workplace ethos. Thus, we may need to investigate further how patrimonial practices frequently associated with post-colonial government dovetail with workplace configurations. Notions of professionalism promise to be important pieces of this puzzle.

Professional ethics and care

Viewing professionalism as a site of governmentality, a performance, or a route to prestige risks overlooking ethical projects at work. Recent anthropological debates have highlighted that bureaucracies do not only reproduce indifference, governmentality, or structural violence but are also sites in which ideas about the ‘public good’ come to be debated, contested, and developed (Bear & Mathur 2015). Bureaucracies are ‘an expression of a social contract between citizens and officials that aim to generate a utopian order’ (Bear & Mathur 2015: 18). A focus on professional values and practices offers a mode for investigating the ways that such ethical practices come into being.

As my own study of nurses in a rural government hospital in South Africa shows, a professional ethic can be located in a long history of mission medicine as well as in more recent forms of public sector management and post-apartheid ideas of citizenship (Hull 2017). Work and citizenship are in South Africa indelibly linked in the post-liberation period. If apartheid was to be understood partly as a system of racialised exclusion from the workplace, especially from professional work, then to be fully a citizen was to become synonymous with salaried employment as an entitlement and a signifier of national identity. Yet far from being an automatic entitlement, the identity of ‘professional’ can be precarious, especially for an occupation that has struggled historically to legitimise its status vis-à-vis the male-dominated world of medicine. Nurses struggle with the dilemma of how to care in a situation where ideas of public accountability are reduced to narrow techniques such as audit. In this setting, nurses build their identities as professionals in relation to memories of mission medicine, contemporary religious practice, and ideas of ‘calling’, as they negotiate and reimagine their role as carers. Professional identities have as much to do with the ‘relational, affective, and ritualistic’ dimensions of work, and the meanings of care that they produce, as with the disciplining practices more frequently associated with management professionals (Brown 2016: 592). Approaching public administration through the lens of ideologies and ethics of professionalism focuses attention on the ethics of care that are entailed.

In many of these studies, well-documented themes in the sociological literature reappear, such as the tension between collective values and individual reputation. For foreign news correspondents, professional legitimacy is less about official accreditation and more to do with in-house socialisation in which one absorbs organisational culture and builds one’s individual reputation through ‘face-to-face acquaintance’ (Hannerz 2004: 81). In a social-media dominated world increasingly oriented towards a work ethos of ‘self-as-business’, the imperative to engage in personal branding characterises many white collar fields (Gershon 2017). Such tensions have long featured as part of the search for professional identity, rather than being singularly located in the turn to neo-liberalism. Nonetheless their intensification during a period of privatisation and outsourcing raises interesting questions about the shifting parameters of professional legitimacy, autonomy, and ethics. So too do tendencies towards de-professionalisation, as more sophisticated technologies reduce the human skills required in certain fields. Challenges to professionalism have also been launched by professionals themselves: for instance, as development workers attempt to locate expertise in the realm of ‘local knowledge’; or new forms of participative, citizen engagement work to subvert the hierarchies that produce taken-for-granted expertise (Mosse 2019).

The study of professionals may lead anthropologists to turn a critical eye on themselves. It can be difficult if not impossible to carry out ethnographic research among professionals, since anthropologists often discover that their interlocutors refuse to be objectified according to the knowledge regimes of a different field of expertise (Boyer 2008: 39-40). Anthropologists might be most effective through a collaborative approach with their interlocutors and by becoming attuned to the scepticism and reflexivity that professionals harbour about their own practice. Attempts to achieve these aims in practice often encounter obstacles. Reflecting on his experiences of researching an international development intervention in India, David Mosse described the objections that professionals raised to his claims about the successes and failures of the project. They made official complaints, fearing their professional reputations were being compromised by his research findings (Mosse 2011b: 21). For Mosse, this tension had to do with the need for professionals to deny or suppress complexity as a core feature of sustaining professional identity and legitimacy. In their complaints, the concept of professionalism was drawn upon explicitly as a basis for denying that such informal practices existed. Mosse argues that professionals were ‘professionally committed to their denial’ (2011b: 21). This problem returns us to a central epistemological challenge for the anthropological study of professionalism, as outlined by Dominic Boyer: ‘How can I [the anthropologist] document another expert culture without precisely re-framing their expert knowledge in the analytical categories of my own, thus absorbing them into my jurisdiction?’ (Boyer 2008: 41). In order to reach a collaborative approach, anthropologists may have to recognise the contingencies of their ways of knowing and accept a kind of epistemic parity with the theoretical and technical frameworks of other professional fields.

Conclusion

A profession is generally understood as a standardised body of knowledge and practice situated within organisational or institutional contexts. Its authority is widely recognised, popularly mandated, and relies on state-sanctioned systems of training and accreditation. Yet as we scratch below the surface of formal definitions, it is evident that rather than denoting a fixed meaning, the category of ‘professional’ is produced and reproduced through messy organisational practices and socially embedded systems of knowledge production and power dynamics. Rather than being a label conferred automatically on the basis of formal accreditation, the term ‘professional’ is always in the making. Moreover, the work entailed in producing an appearance of coherent, successful professionalism can often sit apart from the ‘real’ work of professionals from day to day. Professionalism may best be understood, therefore, as ‘process rather than product’ (Mosse 2011a: 3). Running through the study of professionals is a core tension: are professionals seeking private advancement, perhaps even at the expense of those who rely on them, or are they committed to collective, ethical endeavours? The question is partly the legacy of early sociological understandings of society as a moral project existing in tension with private pursuits. It becomes more nuanced as we turn attention to the lived experiences of professionals, who strive to build satisfying working lives while navigating expectations of all sorts in their families, communities, and workplaces.

References

Bear, L. & N. Mathur 2015. Introduction: remaking the public good. The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 33, 18-34.

Bludau, H. 2014. The power of protocol: professional identity development and governmentality in post-socialist health care. Sociologický časopis: Czech Sociological Review 50, 875-96.

Bourdieu, P. 1990. Homo academicus (New ed.). Cambridge: Polity Press.

Boyer, D. 2008. Thinking through the anthropology of experts. Anthropology in Action 15, 38-46.

Brown, H. 2016. Managerial relations in Kenyan health care: empathy and the limits of governmentality. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22, 591-609.

Comaroff, J. & J.L. Comaroff 1991. Of revelation and revolution, volume 1: Christianity, colonialism, and consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: University Press.

––––––– 2000. Millennial capitalism: first thoughts on a second coming. Public Culture 12, 291-343.

Dingwall, R. 2008. Essays on professions. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Donner, H. & G. De Neve 2011. Introduction. In Being middle-class in India: a way of life (eds) H. Donner & G. De Neve, 1-22. London: Routledge.

Durkheim, E. 1992. Professional ethics and civic morals. London: Routledge.

Eyben, R. 2011. The sociality of international aid and policy convergence. In Adventures in aidland: the anthropology of professionals in international development (ed.) D. Mosse, 139-60. New York: Berghahn Books.

Foucault, M. 2002 [1963]. The birth of the clinic. London: Routledge.

Freeman, C. 1993. Designing women: corporate discipline and Barbados’s off-shore pink-collar sector. Cultural Anthropology 8, 169-86.

Fuller, C.J. & H. Narasimhan 2007. Information technology professionals and the new-rich middle class in Chennai (Madras). Modern Asian Studies 41, 121-50.

Gershon, I. 2017. Down and out in the new economy: how people find (or don’t find) work today. Chicago: University Press.

Graeber, D. 2018. Bullshit jobs: a theory. London: Penguin.

Green, M. 2011. Calculating compassion: accounting for some categorical practices in international development. In Adventures in aidland: the anthropology of professionals in international development (ed.) D. Mosse, 33-56. New York: Berghahn Books.

Hannerz, U. 2004. Foreign news: exploring the world of foreign correspondents. Chicago: University Press.

Hoffman, L.M. 2010. Patriotic professionalism in urban China: fostering talent. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Hsu, C.L., J. Adams & G. Steinmetz 2007. Creating market socialism: how ordinary people are shaping class and status in China. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Hughes, E.C. 2009. The sociological eye: selected papers. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers.

Hull, E. 2012. Paperwork and the contradictions of accountability in a South African hospital. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 18, 613-32.

––––––– 2017. Contingent citizens: professional aspiration in a South African hospital. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Hunt, N. R. 1999. A colonial lexicon of birth ritual, medicalization, and mobility in the Congo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

James, D. 2015. Money from nothing: indebtedness and aspiration in South Africa. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.

Kauppinen, A.-R. 2017. Accra’s professionals: an ethnography of work and value in a West African business hub. PhD dissertation, London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom (available on-line: http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3706/). Accessed 19 December 2018.

Lentz, C. 2014. ‘I take an oath to the state, not the government’: career trajectories and professional ethics of Ghanaian public servants. In States at work: dynamics of African bureaucracies (eds) T. Bierschenk & J.-P. Olivier de Sardan, 175-204. Leiden: Brill.

Moore, H.L. & M. Vaughan 1994. Cutting down trees: gender, nutrition, and agricultural change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890-1990. London: James Currey.

Mosse, D. 2011a. Introduction: the anthropology of expertise and professionals in international development. In Adventures in aidland: the anthropology of professionals in international development (ed.) D. Mosse, 1-31. New York: Berghahn Books.

––––––– 2011b. Adventures in aidland: the anthropology of professionals in international development. New York: Berghahn Books.

––––––– 2019. Can the experience of participatory development help think critically about ‘patient and public involvement’ in UK healthcare? Sociological Research Online 24, 444-61.

Richards, A.I. 1995. Land, labour and diet in Northern Rhodesia: an economic study of the Bemba tribe. Münster: LIT Verlag.

Riles, A. 2006. Documents: artifacts of modern knowledge. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Saxenian, A. 2002. Silicon Valley’s new immigrant high-growth entrepreneurs. Economic Development Quarterly 16, 20-31.

Spronk, R. 2012. Ambiguous pleasures: sexuality and middle class self-perceptions in Nairobi. New York: Berghahn Books.

White, P., A. Hillman & J. Latimer 2012. Ordering, enrolling, and dismissing: moments of access across hospital spaces. Space and Culture 15, 68-87.

Woods, N. 2007. The globalizers: the IMF, the World Bank, and their borrowers. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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Note on contributor

Elizabeth Hull is a senior lecturer in anthropology at SOAS University of London. She is author of Contingent citizens: professional aspiration in a South African hospital (Bloomsbury 2017).

Dr Elizabeth Hull, Department of Anthropology and Sociology, SOAS University of London, WC1H 0XG, London, United Kingdom. e.hull@soas.ac.uk

[1] A detailed discussion of the sociology of professionalism is provided by Robert Dingwall (2008).

Anthropocene

Felix Stein — Tue, 08 Jan 2019 07:26:40 +0000

Liana Chua Hannah Fair

Brunel University London

Initially published 8 Jan 2019

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

Abstract:

‘The Anthropocene’ is a term that is increasingly used to define a new planetary epoch: one in which humans have become the dominant force shaping Earth’s bio-geophysical composition and processes. Although it originated in the Earth Sciences, it has since been widely adopted across academia and the public sphere as a catch-all description for the overwhelming impact of human activity on the planet. This entry examines how anthropologists have engaged with the Anthropocene, both as a set of phenomena (e.g. climate change, mass extinction) and as a politically and morally loaded concept. It identifies four main anthropological approaches to the Anthropocene, those that: 1) take the Anthropocene as a context for or backdrop to ethnographic inquiry; 2) interrogate ‘the Anthropocene’ as a socially and politically constructed idea; 3) treat the Anthropocene as an opportunity for creativity and hopeful speculation; and 4) view the Anthropocene as the outcome of long-standing global political and socio-economic inequalities. Such approaches entail distinct methods, analytical frameworks, concepts, and ethico-political programmes. Collectively, they form a large and still-evolving body of work that destabilises divisions between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ and ‘humans’ and ‘non-humans’, as well as the scholarly disciplines traditionally built around them. In this capacity, they are also pushing anthropologists to ask what distinctive methodological, analytical, and ethico-political contributions their discipline can make to the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of Anthropocene studies.

Introduction

‘The Anthropocene’ is a term that is increasingly used to define a new planetary era: one in which humans have become the dominant force shaping Earth’s bio-geophysical composition and processes. Initially emerging in the Earth Sciences as the name for a proposed new geological epoch^[1] (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000), the Anthropocene has been widely adopted across academia as a catch-all description of the overwhelming impact of human activity on the planet. Its key markers include climate change and its consequences (e.g. sea level rise), the effects of plastic pollution on marine and terrestrial processes, unprecedented rates of biodiversity loss and extinction, and the changing chemical composition of soils, oceans, and the atmosphere.

Academic interest in the Anthropocene has been paralleled by a growing awareness of its existence in the public sphere. For example, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) dedicated an entire journal issue to the Anthropocene (UNESCO 2018), while many of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Sustainable Development Goals (2016-present) are built around key Anthropocenic concerns, such as global emissions, ecosystem damage, and overreliance on fossil fuels. At the same time, productions such as Edward Burtynsky’s film Anthropocene: the human epoch (2018) are drawing public attention to both the term and the challenges that it poses in the contemporary world. The Anthropocene has thus become a ‘charismatic mega-concept’ (Turpin & Davis 2015: 6) that bridges the natural and the social sciences, and academia and the public realm, igniting heated debates across all of them.

This entry provides a short and necessarily partial account of anthropological engagements with the Anthropocene—an immense, burgeoning, and still-embryonic field of study (Gibson & Venkateswar 2015; Swanson, Bubandt & Tsing 2015). After briefly considering what the Anthropocene is, we shall examine four key anthropological approaches to it: those that a) put ethnography to work in spaces most directly affected by Anthropocenic phenomena; b) critically interrogate the idea of the Anthropocene: its discourses, truth-claims, politics, and ethical injunctions; c) take the Anthropocene as an opportunity for speculation, creativity, and hopeful regeneration; and d) treat the Anthropocene as a political and socio-economic problem and symptom of global inequalities and injustices.

These approaches are characterised by distinct methods, analytical frameworks, conceptual vocabularies, and ethico-political agendas. However, they also share certain key traits. First, they point to how the Anthropocene destabilises dichotomies between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ and ‘human’ and ‘non-human’, as well as the academic disciplines built around them. At a time when microplastics have infiltrated marine food chains and ‘natural disasters’ like floods and coastal erosion are precipitated by human-induced climate change, such dichotomies have become increasingly hard to maintain. Many anthropologists have responded to this problem by transcending their own disciplinary boundaries, and engaging with methods and frameworks from other disciplines, such as biology and art.

Secondly, none of these approaches can be said to be agnostic about their subject matter. Rather, they exemplify what has become an increasingly pervasive tendency in this field: the imbrication of the analytical with the political and the ethical. More than analyzing the Anthropocene, anthropologists are increasingly asking what can and should be done in response to the threats and opportunities that it poses. Their agendas and interventions, however, vary significantly—as do the demands that they make on themselves. The upshot of all this, thirdly, is that anthropologists are increasingly pushed to ask what exactly their discipline can bring to the evolving ‘Anthropo-scene’, i.e. the intellectual field that has emerged around the concept (Lorimer 2017), and vice-versa. This entry suggests that classic anthropological methods, such as small-scale participant-observation and the critical juxtaposition of ‘strange’ and ‘familiar’ insights, are well suited to adding empirical depth and nuance to this multidisciplinary field. Yet the same time, it is also becoming clear that engagements with the Anthropocene are reshaping anthropological practices and imaginaries, with profound ethical and political implications.

What is the Anthropocene?

Since the early-2000s, the Anthropocene has received increasing scientific attention as a proposed new geological epoch: one dominated by the impact of human activity on planetary systems. These impacts include anthropogenic climate change, biodiversity loss leading to mass extinction, and the ubiquity of microplastics in terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Proposed bio-geophysical evidence for these and other features of the Anthropocene includes increasing global average temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations, rising sea levels and ocean acidification (Zalasiewicz et al. 2008; Lewis & Maslin 2015). On the basis of such evidence, in 2016 the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (founded in 2009) provisionally recommended that the Anthropocene be formally recognised as a distinct unit of geological time (Zalasiewicz et al. 2017). However, debates continue regarding its starting point.

Events as early as the extinction of mammoths through human predation 13,800 years ago (Doughty et al. 2010) and forest clearances and rice cultivation 5,000-8,000 years ago (Ruddiman 2003) have been proposed as boundary points that mark the start of the Anthropocene. While Paul Crutzen and other members of the working group previously endorsed the Industrial Revolution and the development of the steam engine as the Anthropocene’s origin (Crutzen 2002; Zalasiewicz et al. 2008), the working group’s members now largely favour the ‘Great Acceleration’ (Zalasiewicz et al. 2015)—the period of extensive technological, demographic, economic, and resource use expansion from 1945 onward—as the origin point. Members of the working group contend that the Great Acceleration represents a global synchronous phenomenon (a key criterion for selecting a stratigraphic marker), compared to earlier suggestions, which they argue were merely regional or did not occur simultaneously across the world.

Alternatively, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin (2015) have proposed 1610 as a starting date, due to the profound alterations to ecosystems produced by the Colombian Exchange^[2]as well as the dip in CO2 concentrations most likely caused by reforestation in the Americas, due to the enormous loss of Indigenous life. As well as identifying an event they deem stratigraphically significant, Lewis and Maslin therefore foreground colonial violence as a foundation of the Anthropocene. This position is endorsed by feminist scholars Heather Davis and Zoe Todd (2017), who contend that selecting this starting date would create space for Indigenous thought within the Anthropocene debate.

Decisions regarding the formal boundaries of the Anthropocene have political and socio-economic repercussions. Depending on the starting date that is chosen, particular processes will come to be held responsible for our current planetary predicament. This will suggest certain avenues for action, and foreclose others. For instance, selecting the Industrial Revolution as a start-date suggests that capitalism as a socio-economic system is primarily culpable for the Anthropocene, whereas 1610 foregrounds colonialism and the historic and ongoing exploitation of the majority world,[3] suggesting that former imperial nations have a particular responsibility to mitigate Anthropocenic problems. These debates reflect how the Anthropocene is not simply a natural scientific phenomenon, but a methodological, conceptual, and ethico-political challenge for scholars across a range of disciplines. The following sections examine how anthropologists have both approached and intervened in these debates.

The Anthropocene as context

While the Anthropocene encompasses many different processes, anthropogenic climate change is often treated as its main ‘yardstick’ due to the scale and ubiquity of its impacts (Rudiak-Gould 2015: 48). Ethnographic research into the effects of, responses to, and understandings of climate change constitute some of the earliest anthropological engagements with the Anthropocene. These approaches draw upon anthropology’s traditional strengths of rich qualitative research in small scale societies, focusing particularly on regions mostly critically threatened by climate change impacts, such as low-lying small island states. Such ethnographic research provides insights into how Anthropocenic phenomena are apprehended, experienced, and conceptualised in specific settings. In this way, they point to the heterogeneous nature of the Anthropocene, and the need to examine its social and cultural dimensions, rather than approaching it as a purely natural scientific concern.

Anthropologists have commonly tried to understand how climate change is experienced in particular local settings (Crate & Nuttall 2009). In these studies, the Anthropocene is treated as a backdrop to social life or a key factor shaping social relations, rather than as a purely geophysical phenomenon. For example, Heather Lazrus (2009) documents how, in Nanumea, Tuvalu, the tips of islands, which are associated with particular family lineages and corresponding levels of community prestige, are shifting due to coastal erosion, potentially causing changes in familial status and social hierarchies. Susan Crate and Mark Nuttall argue that climate change is ‘ultimately about culture’ (2009: 12) as it has emerged from a culture of mass consumerism, requires cultural change to mitigate it, and threatens Indigenous cultural practices by disrupting cosmologically significant human-environment relations. This emphasis on culture chimes with the work of geographer Mike Hulme (2008), who contends that climate change discourse is dominated by natural scientific frameworks, and consequently has been stripped of cultural context (see also Malm & Hornborg 2014). Instead, he argues both that the climate must be understood culturally, and that climate change must be locally situated and rendered culturally and ethically meaningful for those that it impacts. Thus, culture can be understood as both a cause of climate change, integral to understanding it, and a means of influencing responses to it. This latter process has been explored in relation to Christian responses to climate change, with ethnographies analyzing the use of Biblical stories in challenging the hegemony of predictions of sea level rise in Kiribati (Kempf 2017) and advocating for greater preparedness in the face of intensifying cyclones in Vanuatu (Fair 2018).

Many researchers advocate bringing Indigenous knowledge of climate change into dialogue with scientific knowledge, for example by drawing on Athapaskan and Tlingit oral histories of glacial travel in the Gulf of Alaska (Cruikshank 2001), or organising community knowledge exchanges that bring together ethnographic accounts and scientific data regarding changes to the permafrost in northeastern Siberia (Crate & Fedorov 2013). This approach, however, raises more fundamental questions about the distinction between local and scientific knowledge. There have been calls to recognise how scientific knowledge of climate change is shaped by specific local and cultural conditions, rather than accepting it as a ‘view from nowhere’ (Hulme 2008), as well as recognising that local knowledge itself is not isolated, static, or sealed off from scientific discourse. In this vein, anthropologists have explored how scientific knowledge is received, interpreted,and incorporated within specific local cultural settings. For example, Jerry Jacka (2009) shows how the impacts of El Niño in the Porgera Valley in Papua New Guinea have been accommodated within Christian narratives of punishment and apocalypse and understood as revenge for the destruction of significant ritual sites through road building. These local understandings can render problematic the anthropogenic dimension of climate change. While they concur regarding the human responsibility for global warming, they do not agree which specific human actions have caused it.

Peter Rudiak-Gould’s (2012) work in the Marshall Islands also highlights how scientific understandings are combined with local understandings and used to bolster existing moral frameworks, a process he describes as ‘promiscuous corroboration’. He identifies a prevalent Marshallese understanding of climate change as symptomatic of wider, pre-existing cultural decline, due to increasing American influences and the loss of traditional knowledges, lifestyles,and practices. Similar understandings have been identified in the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu (Fair 2018) where climate change impacts, including the intensification of cyclones, have been attributed to deviations from both Christian morality and kastom (traditional knowledge, beliefs, and practices). Climate change as rendered intelligible through these existing ethical frameworks therefore also lead Islanders to hold themselves morally culpable for Anthropocenic impacts, in distinction to their nation’s minimal contributions to carbon dioxide emissions.

Rudiak-Gould’s work reveals some of the tensions that can emerge between research and political advocacy. He argues that while most anthropologists subscribe to a narrative of climate change blame focused upon the responsibilities of industrialised nations, researchers should be open and alert to alternative narratives, even those that challenge their own politico-ethical standpoints. While the Marshallese narrative of Islander responsibility is at odds with conventional framings of small island states as victims of climate injustice, it is also empowering on a local level, as ‘innocence implies impotence’ (Rudiak-Gould 2015: 58).

This raises a broader question: what political and ethical demands does the Anthropocene make of social scientists? Crate and Nuttall (2009) argue that anthropologists have a privileged point of engagement: many are already working with communities who are experiencing the severest impacts of climate change while being some of the least responsible for those impacts. Consequently, some researchers have focused their energies not just on analysis but advocacy, engaging with legislation and policy (Fiske 2009), setting up university sustainability initiatives (Bartlett & Stewart 2009), and participating in climate justice movements (Chatterton et al. 2012). Their efforts exemplify a form of engaged research that seeks to alleviate, or at least highlight, the deleterious effects of the Anthropocene.

Studying ‘the Anthropocene’ as a concept

Much of the work cited above is situated in the Anthropocene, which serves as an encompassing, real-life backdrop to ethnographic inquiry. However, there is also a growing body of scholarship that advocates a critical understanding of the Anthropocene as an idea (Moore 2015: 28). Drawing partly on critical traditions such as science studies and post-structuralism, these writings examine how Anthropocenic knowledge practices and truth-claims are constructed, circulated, contested, and strategically deployed—as well as how these can bring new realities and relations into being.

This approach is marked by a commitment to rendering the familiar strange by showing how apparently clear-cut Anthropocenic ‘facts’, such as ‘climate change’, ‘carbon emissions’, and ‘biodiversity loss’, are inherently partial and dynamic constructs. Rather than assuming their veracity, anthropologists ask: how are such concepts defined, made visible or knowable, and formalised, and to what effect? In recent years, for example, scholars have examined how the Anthropocene is made ‘imaginable and comprehensible’ (Marzec 2014: 249) through specific technologies, including narratives, photography (Kember 2017), infographics (Houser 2014), and environmental visualizations (Carruth & Marzec 2014). Another fecund area of inquiry is that of climate science, with anthropologists examining the scalar, spatial, temporal, and speculative dimensions of climate modelling (Hastrup & Skrydstrup 2013), the universalization of carbon as a metric through which to quantify (and thus compare) a vast array of human activity (Günel 2016), and the impact of ideals of accountability (Hall & Sanders 2015) and expertise (Vaughn 2017) on climate science research. Their insights into the all-too-human production of scientific knowledge are exemplified by Jessica O’Reilly’s discussion of Antarctic research (2016), which reveals how scientific data about the shifting Antarctic landscape is indelibly shaped by scientists’ intimate, sensory engagements with the ice, national research logistics and nationalism, guesswork, and, often, pure chance.

By treating scientific practices and categories as objects of ethnographic scrutiny, such scholars highlight the vital point that

[k]nowledges do not ﬂoat free from their contexts of production, and cannot arrive any old way. They travel well-worn paths, and are preconditioned by other academic knowledges, knowledge-producing apparatuses, and institutional arrangements (Hall & Sanders 2015: 454).

These approaches thus reveal how seemingly ‘factual’ Anthropocenic discourses, categories, and epistemologies are in fact malleable, fragile, and socio-historically specific (see, e.g., Last 2015). Moreover, the truth-claims that they generate are often tied up with profoundly moral ideas that evoke specific ways of thinking and feeling. Some of these, such as paintings of scenes from the Industrial Revolution, romanticise and naturalise the very conditions of human dominance over nature that fuelled the Anthropocene (Mirzoeff 2016). Others, notably public discourses about climate change, are apocalyptic (Swyngedouw 2010), depicting the Anthropocene as a threat to humankind’s very survival.

More than making the Anthropocene knowable, such ideas and imaginaries can have powerful social, political, and material effects in multiple settings. Narratives of low-lying island states being imminently engulfed by rising sea levels, for example, can disempower affected communities and inhibit effective mitigative action by representing Islanders as helpless victims and their homelands as inevitably lost (Farbotko 2010). Rather than reflecting an inherent vulnerability to climate change, these discourses can actually encourage people in affected areas to produce and perform their vulnerability in order to receive development funding (Webber 2013), and in doing so divert resources from other areas. Other studies show how discourses of climate change vulnerability have been mobilised in order to reinforce existing stereotypes of certain places and groups of people as vulnerable, hazardous, and disadvantaged (Yamane 2009).

It is here that anthropologists are well-placed to intervene in ongoing conversations by producing detailed ethnographic accounts of the

events animated by the Anthropocene idea, from emergent political alliances and spatializations to modes of subjectivity and citizenship, from forms of scientific objectification and naturalization to shifting research methods and narratives, from green markets, products, and flows of capital to the materialization and embodiment of these ideas in spaces, places, bodies, and earthly relations (Moore 2015: 40).

Through such accounts, Amelia Moore suggests, anthropologists can begin to treat ‘the Anthropocene idea as a problem space’ (2015: 41; italics in original) that needs to be explored rather than taken for granted.

Moore’s work on the growth of sustainability, conservation, and eco-tourist initiatives in the Bahamas (e.g. Moore 2015) exemplifies the value of such an approach. Taking the Bahamas as one particular ‘Anthropocene space’ (2015: 31), she traces how rising sea levels, notions of sustainability, and concerns about biodiversity loss have collectively reframed and literally reworked the islands’ ecological, spatial, and socio-economic makeup—for example, through the promotion of sustainable fisheries, the establishment of new marine protected areas, and the growth of ecotourism initiatives. In her work, the Anthropocene is not simply a backdrop to ethnographic inquiry, but a material and imaginative space that constantly generates new relations and effects.

Similar approaches can be found in Jason Cons’ (2018) ethnography of the pre-emptive restructuring of Bangladeshi borderlands in the name of climate security; Cymene Howe’s discussion of multiple claims to ‘anthropocentric ecoauthority’ in the context of wind power development in Mexico (2014); and Nayanika Mathur’s description of the political work performed by Anthropocenic categories like ‘climate change’ in the context of human-wildlife conflicts in the Indian Himalayas (2015). Rather than asking how anthropology can illuminate small-scale responses to the Anthropocene, these writings push us to interrogate the very idea of the Anthropocene, the truth-claims and the ethical demands that it makes, and the effects of such claims and demands in multiple settings. By adopting this critical perspective, they imply, anthropologists can not only challenge the deleterious effects of oversimplified concepts such as ‘anthropogenic’ or ‘climate change’, but can also begin to explore ‘alternative visions’ (Cons 2018: 286) and possibilities for life in the Anthropocene. On this point, their work converges with that of another form of scholarship, to which speculation and creativity are central.

Remaking the Anthropocene: speculation, creativity, and experimentation

Rather than critically unpack the ‘Anthropocene’ idea, other scholars have opted to play with the speculative and regenerative possibilities that it presents. While not uncritical of its horrors and injustices, their writings approach the Anthropocene as an opportunity: as a still-emergent entity to be appropriated, recast, and even redone (Buck 2015: 372).

This diverse body of work is often animated by a shared concern with unsettling, reworking, and transcending dominant scholarly categories such as ‘nature’, ‘culture’, ‘human’, and ‘nonhuman’. Although social scientists have long questioned these categories’ universality, the Anthropocene has thrown their contingency into starker relief: if ‘human agency has become the main geological force shaping the face of the earth’ (Latour 2014), how, then, can we tell what is ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’, ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’? By thrusting this vital question into the public spotlight, the Anthropocene has, as Bruno Latour puts it, been a gift to contemporary scholarship—an invitation to ‘renegotiate the shape, boundary, limit and extent’ of anthropology’s core concern, ‘humanity’ (2014), and much more besides.

A common response to this invitation is to embrace rather than abhor the Anthropocene’s human-nonhuman hybrid ‘monsters’ (Latour 2011; Swanson et al. 2017: M4), from bacteria that have evolved to resist human-synthesised drugs to ‘blasted landscapes’, such as sites of oil spills, that are simultaneously ‘natural’ and ‘social’ (Kirksey, Shapiro & Brodine 2014). Many scholars point out that the Anthropocene has simply made visible the complex webs of relations in which humans and nonhumans have always been enmeshed, while also generating new, inescapable hybrids and relations in the present. Apprehending these old and new hybrids and relations means finding ways to transcend anthropology’s traditional focus on humans, and asking: on what other terms can the Anthropocene be approached? To this end, many anthropologists draw on methods and analytics developed in ‘multispecies ethnography’ (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010), a field of scholarship that foregrounds how all humans and nonhumans on the planet are ‘entangled’—tied together and interdependent in various ways (e.g. Haraway 2008; Mitchell 2016; Reinert 2016; Rose 2011; Tsing 2015; van Dooren 2014). Rather than shunning such entanglements, they posit, why not use them to engender new possibilities for thinking about and living in the Anthropocene?

Such calls are often underpinned by a distinct ethical injunction: to elevate nonhuman entities into subjects worthy of scholarly attention, and also care and solidarity. Musing on the presence of penguins and flying foxes in urban spaces, for example, Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose refute the assumption that such animals are ‘out of place’ (2012: 2), advocating instead an ‘ethic of conviviality for a genuinely inclusive multispecies city…that provides a space for the flourishing of as many different forms of life as possible’ (2012: 17). Similarly, Anna Tsing (2011, 2015) propounds a form of ‘multispecies love’—‘passionate immersion in the lives of…nonhumans’ (2011: 19)—as an antidote to the destructive excesses of global capitalism. For her, multispecies entanglements offer a glimpse of how life, like mushrooms in abandoned anthropogenic landscapes, can emerge from ruined places (2015: 6). Indeed, ‘in a global state of precarity’, she argues, ‘we don’t have choices other than looking for life in this ruin’ (2015: 6).

For many of the scholars mentioned in this section, then, the interdependence of humans and nonhumans is not simply an ontological fact, but it may be a potent conceptual and ethical way of moving forward on a ‘damaged planet’ (Tsing et al. 2017). As Swanson et al. put it:

Our continued survival demands that we learn something about how best to live and die within the entanglements we have. We need both senses of monstrosity: entanglement as life and as danger (2017: M4).

In such work, the Anthropocene is thus an opportunity to: 1) right old wrongs, particularly the anthropocentric hubris that caused such planetary ruination; and 2) create and experiment with new modes of understanding, living with/in, and transforming the Anthropocene, so as to make it plural, livable, even charming (Buck 2015). Here, hope and possibility (Kirskey, Shapiro & Brodine 2014) are key motifs; correctives to what Donna Haraway calls the ‘game over’ attitude (2016: 2) that characterises more cynical, hopeless responses to the Anthropocene.

Such hopeful interventions are often accompanied by an impulse to play and experiment with existing scholarly methods and frameworks. Rather than writing straightforward ethnographies, anthropologists are increasingly turning to cross- and trans-disciplinary engagements—with art and artists (Davis & Turpin 2015; Kirksey, Schuetze & Helmreich 2014), natural sciences and scientists (Tsing 2015), and stories and storytelling (Haraway 2016; van Dooren & Rose 2012)—to overcome the limits of disciplinary knowledges, practices, and barriers. These experimental, collaborative projects are generally characterised by two attributes.

First, many are ‘transgressive’ (Kirksey, Schuetze & Helmreich 2014: 17) and ‘speculative’ (Davis & Turpin 2015: 17; Haraway 2016). Defying, rather than conforming to, academic conventions and expectations, they experiment with different methods, forms of knowledge, and aesthetics to ‘imagine alternative [Anthropocenic] futures’ (Lorimer 2017: 131). For example, Terike Haapoja and Laura Gustafsson (2015), creators of the art installation The Museum of the History of Cattle (2013), use the narrative of an imaginary cow in a way that urges the reader to reimagine the world’s history, animal sociality, and the Anthropocene in bovine terms. In the process, they invite us to consider how we relate to nonhuman others in the Anthropocene, and what a non-anthropocentric Anthropocenic future might look like.

Second, as we saw above, these interventions are commonly framed as ethico-political manifestos that implicate their audiences in the urgent project of finding new ways to live and survive in the Anthropocene (see esp. Gibson, Rose & Fincher 2015; Kirksey, Shapiro & Brodine 2014; Tsing et al. 2017). Treating the ethical, the political, and the scholarly as of a piece, such speculative discussions impel anthropologists to embrace their connections with other entities and to formulate ‘alternative political visions, modes of relation and opportunities for ethical responsiveness’ (Mitchell 2016: 39). In contrast to the critical, deconstructionist agendas of the works cited in the previous section, these interventions are self-consciously experimental and collaborative—and always ethically and politically loaded. Yet, as the next section shows, they have their own limitations.

Re-politicising the Anthropocene

While enthusiastically adopted in some quarters, creative approaches to the Anthropocene have also been criticised for failing to rigorously interrogate the relationships between capitalism, power, inequality, and the Anthropocene. Such critiques typify a fourth main response to the Anthropocene in our discipline: one that emphasises historical contingency, political contestation, and socio-economic inequality. Contributors to this field have reproached both speculative and dominant scientific approaches for depoliticising their subject matter at a time when political engagement is most needed.

Three major concerns have been expressed regarding the dominant narrative generated by the Anthropocene Working Group. The first concerns its portrayal of the Anthropocene as a moment of rupture. In The shock of the Anthropocene, historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2016) contend that the dominant narrative perpetuates a historically inaccurate myth: that humans have suddenly awoken to the negative consequences of their actions upon the environment (see, e.g., Steffen et al. 2011). This awakening narrative, they argue, presumes that environmental inaction emerges from ignorance, as opposed to an ideological battle over how humans engage with the non-human world. It conceals longstanding environmental consciousness and previous grassroots political struggles against ecological degradation in the Global North and Global South, thereby depoliticising the contested history of the Anthropocene (Swyngedouw & Ernstson 2018). Bonneuil and Fressoz further argue that such narratives glorify the position of scientists, placing them above society and suggesting that science can provide straightforward solutions to the Anthropocene while concealing a need for political choices. This narrative frames the Anthropocene in terms of human accomplishments, rather than taking it as an opportunity for humility and recognising the distinction between human influence and human control (Nixon 2017). The notion that the Anthropocene represents a sudden new era of ecological dystopia has also been critiqued by Indigenous scholars. Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte (2018), for example, argues that this fails to recognise that, from one Indigenous perspective, the Anthropocene is a perpetuation of environmental destruction, displacement, and extinction due to the violence of colonialism: for some Indigenous communities, he argues, the apocalypse already arrived long ago.

Secondly, scholars have argued that the dominant Anthropocene narrative treats humanity —the Anthropos —as a ‘unitary species actor’ (Nixon 2017: 24), or a singular universal subject. In this capacity, the imaginary of ‘the anthropogenic’ covers over the global and historical inequalities between humans that caused the Anthropocene, and that continue to structure global politics today (Sayre 2012). It thus fails to recognise the inequity of responsibility for anthropogenic climate change, as well as the unequal distribution of exposure to its impacts, thereby depoliticising analysis. Moreover, far from being universal, this vision of the Anthropos has been criticised for making wealthy European perspectives stand in for the experiences of all of humanity, thereby replicating the homogenising violence of colonialism (Davis & Todd 2017). Métis scholar Zoe Todd argues that the Eurocentrism of the dominant Anthropocene narrative is a consequence of its emergence from white Eurocentric institutions, and instead advocates a decolonization of the Anthropocene through bringing in Indigenous knowledges that emphasise the ‘reciprocal, ongoing, and dynamic relationships’ (2015: 251) between humans and nonhumans.

Thirdly, dominant Anthropocene narratives may also naturalise the development of the Anthropocene, depicting it as inevitable rather than identifying it as a consequence of contingent historical developments and particular political choices. Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg (2014) note how, in some accounts, a linear trajectory is drawn from the discovery of fire to the development of the steam engine. This presentation of the Anthropocene as a natural, inevitable, teleological development depoliticises its origins, and limits political responses to it. Instead, they argue that the Anthropocene should be understood as a ‘sociogenic’ phenomenon, emerging from particular social relations and an uneven distribution of power between different nations, social groups, and species. Naturalising the Anthropocene can lead to an understanding of human domination of the planet and of nonhuman life as inevitable, with the epoch’s very name maintaining an anthropocentric perspective to the exclusion of all others (Crist 2016). This failure to recognise the Anthropocene’s historically contingent conditions can be attributed to a ‘consequentialist bias’ (Moore 2016) of dominant scientific approaches, reflecting their greater emphasis upon evidence of biophysical changes as opposed to systemic causes.

Responses to this singular Anthropocene grand narrative vary. Bonneuil and Fressoz advocate producing multiple histories of the Anthropocene, which recognise the different political choices that have been and can be made (2016). Bringing analyses of power into the Anthropocene and rejecting the homogenised figure of the Anthropos, Malm and Jason Moore present contrasting accounts of a ‘Capitalocene’, an epoch defined by the impacts of Capitalism upon planetary systems, as opposed to those of all of humanity. While Malm (2016) focuses on the Industrial Revolution and the role of fossil fuels in capital accumulation, Jason Moore (2016; but c.f. Hornborg 2017) identifies 1450 and the mercantile capitalist era as the starting point of the Capitalocene. He argues that this period witnessed the production of ‘Nature’ as an abstracted object of power, and that it was the violent exclusion of ‘Nature’ from ‘Society’ that enabled the development of capitalism. Meanwhile, Hann (2017) urges an even more long-term perspective on the development of capitalism, one that overcomes what he perceives as the Eurocentrism of existing analyses. He focuses on Jack Goody’s work and urban revolutions of the Bronze Age, arguing that the emergence of commodity as opposed to gift economies can be seen as part of the social, political, and cosmological preconditions of the Anthropocene.

Like the speculative scholarship discussed earlier, such writings undermine the Euro-American modernist division between ‘nature’ and ‘society’. However, their interventions take a markedly different form. Rather than treating the Anthropocene as an opportunity for hopeful, creative speculation, they view it as a spur to unmasking and contesting long-standing political and socio-economic inequalities in the present. But does this entail entirely dissolving the differences between ‘nature’ and ‘society’? Hornborg (2017), for one, rejects Moore’s view of nature and society as entirely entangled. He contends that without a clear analytical separation of nature and society, capitalism cannot be critiqued, thereby diminishing the possibility for political action. Similarly, Erik Swyngedouw and Henrik Ernstson (2018) challenge what they label as a post-humanist rejection of nature/society distinctions. For them, an understanding of nature as entirely part of society and capitalism creates a view of nature that can be too easily managed and co-opted by neoliberalism. This depoliticises the Anthropocene, as it perpetuates the fantasy that life and capitalism can continue as they are, ignoring the need for decisive, radical socio-economic transformation.

Such neo-Marxist concerns about depoliticising the Anthropocene extend to their critiques of the speculative and creative approaches discussed above. Hornborg (2017), for example, accuses scholars like Tsing (2015) and Haraway (2016) of ‘dithering’ in the face of ecological crisis: producing poetic yet inaccessible, theoretically imprecise interventions that preoccupy the attention of critical scholars rather than critiquing inequality or encouraging political action. While blunter than most, Hornborg’s critique typifies a specific kind of ethico-political position on the Anthropocene. Underpinned by the insights of political economy and political ecology, such scholarship treats anthropological critique as an intervention in the world: as a means of highlighting ongoing inequalities and historical contingencies and continuities, as well as the basis of a direct, engaged form of political action.

Conclusion

Jason Moore describes the Anthropocene as having ‘two lives’: one as a scientific concept and object of geological debate; and another as an idea that has moved beyond its natural science origins, permeating the social sciences and public discourse, and raising questions about the relationship between humans and the non-human world (2016: 80). This entry has offered a glimpse of the Anthropocene’s second life as it is playing out in various anthropological quarters.

As we have seen, the Anthropocene is apprehended in multiple ways within anthropology: as an encompassing, threatening backdrop to ethnographic inquiry; as an idea and ‘problem space’ to be interrogated; as an opportunity for creativity, speculation, and experimentation; and as the outcome of historical inequalities and injustices. These varied figurations of the Anthropocene give rise to equally varied ethico-political positions and interventions. As the approaches above reveal, there are different, and differently scaled, ways of responding to the Anthropocene: to take it apart and focus on its small-scale, localised challenges; to critique its truth-claims and politics on various levels; or to capitalise on the Anthropocene as an opportunity to formulate new, hopeful, experimental possibilities for the future.

Embedded in, but also evolving through, these propositions are thus different visions of what anthropology is, could be, and can do. But such competing visions—and they are likely to be joined by many more—are not simply about the future of anthropology. As lenses onto the world, they raise much bigger questions about how the very categories of ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ and ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are being reproduced, transformed, or even dissolved in the present moment. And as Anthropocenic phenomena impact ever more of the planet, and Anthropocenic discourses gain greater social, political, and moral traction, these are questions that will animate academic debates and affect the lives of millions of people for years to come.

Notes

Research for this entry was carried out as part of a project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, Grant agreement No.758494.

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Note on contributors

Liana Chua is Reader in Anthropology at Brunel University London. She has studied conversion to Christianity, ethnic politics, indigeneity, resettlement and development in Malaysian Borneo since 2003. She is currently leading a large multi-sited project that explores the global nexus of orangutan conservation in the Anthropocene. http://www.brunel.ac.uk/people/liana-chua

Hannah Fair’s doctoral research concerned Pan-Pacific climate justice movements and religious understandings of climate change in Vanuatu. She holds a PhD in Human Geography from University College London, and is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Anthropology at Brunel University London, investigating interspecies compassion, extinction, and orangutan conservation in the Anthropocene.

Anthropology, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH, United Kingdom.

[1] At the time of writing (late 2018), ‘the Anthropocene’ has yet to be formally recognised by the International Union of Geological Sciences or the International Commission on Stratigraphy as a distinct geological epoch.

[2] A term that refers broadly to the movement of plants and animals such as potatoes, tomatoes, cattle, and sugarcane between the Americas and Europe, Africa, and Asia in the fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies.

[3] The term ‘majority world’ collectively refers to the countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania – who make up the majority of the world’s population – without defining them negatively in comparison with Europe and North America (unlike the categories ‘third world’ or ‘developing world’).

Digital anthropology

Felix Stein — Tue, 28 Aug 2018 13:53:10 +0000

Daniel Miller

University College London

Initially published 28 Aug 2018

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

Abstract:

‘The digital’ is defined here as new technologies that are ultimately reducible to binary code. These have made many cultural artefacts easier and quicker to both reproduce and to share. The first section of this entry is concerned with populations and worlds that are largely the result of digital technologies. The second section examines the more general use and consequences of digital technologies on diverse populations around the world. Rather than separating off the impact of digital technologies, a major contribution of anthropology has been through holistic ethnography, which demonstrates that we can only understand new digital worlds in the context of wider social relations and practices. Rather than trying to adjudicate digital technologies as positive or negative, anthropology may also focus upon their inherent contradictions. A third section examines the way digital technologies impact anthropological methodology. In the final section the concern is with the impact digital anthropology may have on our conception of anthropology itself and what it means to be human.

Introduction

On almost any day one can find newspaper articles which tell us we have lost our humanity to smartphone or selfie addiction, or why we should be anxious about how artificial intelligence will replace our labour, or how algorithms reduce our selves to mere data. Sometimes there is a counter-narrative that new technologies can solve all health problems or prevent the catastrophic consequences of climate change. In short, akin with political anthropology, digital anthropology is an arena within which developments are constantly used to make larger normative and ethical arguments rather than merely observe and account for the consequences of technological change.

Anthropology as a discipline began with the study of small-scale societies, regarded as traditional or customary and often wrongly assumed to change slowly, if at all. By contrast, most people regarded the advent of digital technologies as a kind of speeding up of the world, a rather breathless and unrelenting deluge of the new. So an anthropology that is tasked with encompassing and understanding the digital world is perhaps also the final repudiation of that initial illusion that there have ever been societies outside of trajectories of change. It may grant us a more balanced or rounded discipline that is equally concerned with the entire gamut of human experience.

At the same time, rather than being merely a tool in debates over whether digital technologies have good or bad consequences, anthropology has retained its holistic methodology. It is therefore the discipline most likely to situate new technologies within a much wider cultural and social context and thereby appreciate the inherent contradictions and complexities that emerge from the larger study of their use and consequence. Ethnography will show how digital technologies produce both new possibilities for political activism and also for state oppression, creating conditions for the commodification of music and other media and the de-commodification of those same media simultaneously.

The term ‘digital anthropology’ can be used to refer to the consequences of the rise of digital technologies for particular populations, the use of these technologies within anthropological methodology, or the study of specific digital technologies. But the topic may also raise wider questions about the nature of contemporary anthropology itself, both what it now means to be human and how anthropology as a discipline should incorporate worlds that were neither precedented nor possible in the past. This essay will begin with the question of what we mean by ‘the digital’. It then divides the consequences of these technologies into three parts. The first consists of the study of the technologies themselves, via the populations specifically associated with them such as hackers. The discussion then moves to the more general assessment of increasingly ubiquitous digital technologies such as social media upon ordinary populations through traditional ethnographic fieldwork. A third section examines the uses of digital technologies for anthropological methodology. The final section will turn to the larger questions of the implications for the nature of anthropology and humanity.

What is ‘the digital’?

No attempt to define ‘the digital’ should go unchallenged. The definition that will be used for the purposes of this essay will be everything that can be reduced to the outcome of binary coding (Miller & Horst 2012). There are several alternatives. Some might focus more on the rise of cybernetic systems,^[1] while others concentrate upon a separate online world termed ‘virtual’ (e.g. Boellstorff, Nardi, Pearce & Taylor 2012). The reason for choosing a definition based upon binary coding for this entry partly lies in its simplicity. It also has the virtue of highlighting certain key implications. These are firstly that digital technologies made it easier to create products that are completely identical and can therefore be easily reproduced. Secondly, that digital forms are much easier to share. These two properties in turn account for what appears to be a rapid and constant proliferation of new technologies and subsequent products, some of which become ubiquitous and scale up to reach most of the world population in a very short time. So, almost every year the focus of both popular and academic attention is on something different – the internet, search engines, the virtual, social media, big data, artificial intelligence, Tinder, the internet of things, and so forth.

One approach to digital anthropology developed out of material culture studies, which focused as much upon how things make people as with how people make things. We understand who we are in the mirror of a material world within which we are born and socialised. But this world was never static. One way in which culture itself became more diverse and expansive was through the explosion of material products we associate with consumer culture. This has now been extended by the further dynamism and diversity found in digital forms. It is therefore important to remember that while the digital world may often be online, it is not immaterial. There is a material side to the world of ‘bits’ (Blanchette 2011), computers, memes, platforms, digital photography, or digital money.

So, the digital is not an abstraction but rather the creation of a plethora of quite concrete forms and processes. Furthermore, these are always encountered in the context of their use and consequences for some particular population, which means they become subject to cultural differentiation. The studies of social media referenced below reveal how the Chinese internet, where free instant messaging services such as QQ and WeChat focus upon avatars and hierarchies of users, is not the same as a Brazilian internet, with its emphasis upon political memes and gender relations. In one region we find an internet that constantly debates which digital forms are compatible with Islam, in another the concern will be on how the internet can be employed in mobilising feminist protests such as #MeToo, or how to prevent it from turning people into data which could be harvested. The development of coding allowed for new forms of sharing, not just of products, but also through what is termed ‘Open Source’; that is, the collaborative development of code itself. This has, in some regions, become a model for new political ideals (Kelty 2008). In Italy, the populist Five Star Movement, which advocates direct democracy through the internet, became in the 2018 election the largest political party in Italy. In turn, digital tools lead to new forms of surveillance and control that were previously unimaginable. Seen from an anthropological perspective, it is the diversity and contradictions of the internet that become prominent.

Digital anthropology therefore has to contend with the way culture itself has grown in scale and form, including new dreams and new nightmares about who we are becoming, and who or what should be regarded as modern or traditional. For the anthropologist, the digital is always approached in context. If biometrics in India seem to provide better access to welfare benefits, or in China to new forms of citizen control, this is because of political choices as to how they will be used. What biometrics as a whole represents is simply the increasing capacities of vast data banks sourced from people that can then be exploited in numerous ways.

Some newish worlds

The term ‘newish’, rather than new, is important here, since there is no clear divide between unprecedented worlds developed through digital technologies and the gradual transformation of the rest of life as they are impacted by these same technologies. Indeed one of the main trajectories in the development of digital anthropology has been through the previously established anthropology of media. This is a field in which we can all easily follow the gradual transformation of media into a largely digital form. Most of us will now watch what we still call television, but may be increasingly encountered through a variety of screens, including our phones. We can see how newspapers are being challenged by other forms of news dissemination, which brings ambiguity and precarity to those who would call themselves journalists. All of this has led to a corresponding shift in the anthropology of media (Pertierra 2017). While there is no absolute or clear division, it may still be worth drawing a contrast between ‘newish’ worlds, which largely could not have existed but for the development of digital technologies, as against the study of the use and consequences of digital technologies by ordinary people.

Digital technologies have given rise to a wide assortment of new populations that may at first appear quite alien. One role of the anthropologist has been to empathetically engage with those populations in order to help us understand both what they do and how to understand the world from their perspective. A pioneer of such work has been Gabriella Coleman (2012, 2014) through her long-term engagements first with hackers and then groups such as Anonymous who have come to occupy political or alternative niches that have been enabled by these new technologies. Her work helps shift our understanding of these groups from mere caricature to having a sense of their own internal debates over how they should or should not intervene politically. In a similar vein, Jenna Burrell (2012) worked with West Africans who became scammers. She was able to balance the focus upon the victims they had fleeced with the conditions of exclusion and poverty that often characterised the situation of the perpetrators of such actions and help us see the world from their point of view.

These hackers and scammers exploit niches created by new digital technologies without which they would not exist. More commonly, digital developments extend trends and possibilities that were already present; for example, through changing the infrastructure behind labour markets. In this instance the new technologies are thought to extend still further a long trajectory by which human agency is suppressed by the increasing sophistication of machines and powerful interests, generally understood as neo-liberal capitalism. An early debate about how digital technologies had extended transnational labour was over whether there was a practice of ‘gold farming’ where Chinese workers intensively played computer games to win treasures that were then sold on to less assiduous game players in other countries (Nardi & Kow 2010). More recently we have witnessed the rise of what is now called the ‘gig’ economy, digital technologies, such as smartphone apps, have blurred the boundaries and responsibilities of companies in relation to workers. Ilana Gershon (2017) examined the implications of the career-focused online network LinkedIn as a site where workers now have to perform particular appearances and claims in order to obtain work. She uses this example to show how digital platforms can turn neo-liberal political philosophies not just into new forms of work, but also new ways in which we visualise and understand ourselves as individuals as we craft the way we present ourselves to the world within the dictates of this platform.

Digital technologies have also drastically transformed the time and space of working practices. For example, a vast business complex near Chennai in South India has three periods of rush hour as call centre workers come in to serve markets in Asia, Europe, and North America, respectively (Ventkatraman 2017). There are also digital nomads who can carry out their paid work from almost anywhere. Digital technologies have caused the collapse of many traditional businesses and ways of working. Perhaps the most forceful example of how an anthropologist can convey the way human beings may become, in effect, an extension of the digital machine has been Natasha Schüll’s (2012) careful dissection of the new mechanisms that have transformed slot machines in Las Vegas through increasingly perfected technologies whose sole purpose is keeping people addicted to gambling. Not all these studies focus on the furtherance of oppressive forces. Thomas Malaby (2009), for example, in contrast to Schüll, examines the role of contingency and liberal fantasies that may emerge in the construction of game platforms, using the example of Linden Lab in creating Second Life.

Given their more holistic methods and perspectives, anthropologists are more likely than those in the media or political studies to present digital developments as contradictory. For example, rather than merely dismissing the rise of social media as against more traditional forms of news reporting, they are more likely to investigate particular examples of the use of social media for the dissemination of information (e.g. Chua 2018). Music reveals a constantly changing dynamic, including decommodification (e.g. Spotify), new modes of collaboration for musicians (see, for example, Haworth & Born 2016), and ways they interact with the public (e.g. MySpace).

Another way anthropologists have engaged with these newish worlds is by focusing upon specific digital platforms and their usages. An example is Patricia Lange’s (2014) work on how young people create material for YouTube. There is also Michael Wesch’s influential visual presentation An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube. Jamie Coates (2017) provides an anthropological perspective on the phenomenon of images and ideas going ‘viral’, as in the cases of the rapid spread of memes. Other media may themselves become the vehicles for the rapid acceptance of assumptions about how, for example, we are supposed to be prone to fake news or to live within political echo chambers where we only hear similar views to our own. By contrast, ethnographic work provides a much more nuanced sense of what people actually believe and why. This is partly because other disciplines mostly depend upon analysis based only on publicly available data such as Twitter, while ethnographers gain access to more private and often more consequential and intimate discussion on, for example, WhatsApp.

Communication media represent an arena where it is generally accepted that the digital has almost entirely transformed the landscape. But anthropologists have recognised equally significant transformations in many other fields; for example, that of money. The impact is vast. We can focus on the way finance capitalism exploded into greater fields of scale and abstraction following the technological developments which created the ‘big bang’ of 1986, and the further increasing use of digital technologies that lead to still greater volatility in capital markets that contributed to the 2008 collapse of those markets. At one end of this spectrum are the new abstractions of money represented by purely digital mechanisms, such as a ‘blockchain’, that can produce new currencies such as Bitcoin. At the other end is the way mobile-phone-based money systems such as M-Pesa have led to the enfranchisement of populations in Kenya and elsewhere who were previously excluded from banking and micro-finance. Here an exemplary anthropologist is Bill Maurer (2015) who has tried to consider the entire spectrum of these new forms of money and payment and their often contradictory consequences. Maurer argues that rather than seeing these consequences in isolation, we should come to regard different forms of money more as a repertoire or scale, which in turn reflects the scales of sociality that have been uncovered in studies of social media.

This section began with examples that are relatively autonomous, being created entirely by digital technologies. But we have gradually shifted to newish worlds of digital media and digital money that are more hybrid extensions to prior forms. By this criteria, most of the infrastructure of our contemporary world is newish. Does the vision of Open Source provide for new models of urban development, since, as with Wikipedia, it has demonstrated the viability of a much more democratic and open politics of creation (Jiménez 2014)? It is hard to imagine design today outside of digitization (Gunn, Otto & Smith 2013), while our sense of place has been transformed by new locational technologies such as GPS, Google Earth and mobile phones. Are digital forms challenging and extending the traditional relationship between museums, art galleries, and objects (Geismar 2018)? What about the enablement of new forms of transport such as driverless cars, new capacities in digital design, or 3D manufacture? These are just some of the fields in which digital technologies have proved transformational (Horst & Miller 2012).

Everyday digital life

The previous section examined groups that exist entirely as a result of digital developments and the wider impact of the digital upon the forms and infrastructures within which we live. By contrast, there is another clear responsibility for digital anthropology to observe and account for the consequences of all these developments upon the everyday lives of ordinary people around the world. This brings us back to a core component of anthropology: traditional holistic ethnography, in which we try to understand how people relate to everything that bears upon their lives. Nobody lives just online, so to understand their involvement with digital technologies we continue to focus on the wider context of their non-digital lives. Since these are general ethnographies of populations, the emphasis will also be on those forms of digital culture that have become more ubiquitous, such as social media and smartphones.

One of the key contributions of anthropology is to counter the constant claims made about the impact of digital technologies that come from more universalising disciplines such as psychology and internet studies. Because their model is the natural sciences, they may experiment with a proximate population, such as US college students, and then extrapolate their results more broadly. We are then told that new digital media has an impact upon attention span and possibly our brains, or that young people are confused as to what a real friend is. By contrast, anthropologists are committed to an inclusive understanding of the modern world that recognises that we need to be equally aware of populations in Africa, East and South Asia, and Latin America, and to be wary of generalizations that are not based on in-depth comparative studies.

What, for example, is the impact of digital communication technologies on Filipino women who migrate to care for children and the elderly across many regions? An appraisal may include studies of how the populations that remain within the Philippines use social networking platforms such as Friendster and, more recently, Facebook, to keep in touch with those who have gone abroad, but also how this now-global population of migrant workers use new media to retain a sense of Filipino sociality that can mitigate the separation of physical location by creating a more integrated online sphere (McKay 2016: 51-69). Many of these migrants are mothers who left behind their children to be brought up in the Philippines. As the internet replaced letter writing, this radically transformed the communications between mothers and children, from exchanges that could take months to constant daily interaction. Mothers and their children often had quite different views as to what these changes meant for transnational motherhood (Madianou & Miller 2012).

Instead of making universal generalizations, anthropologists may also demonstrate that in some places new phenomena such as social media have had relatively limited impact. For example, in Southern Italy, a place with a flourishing public sphere of people meeting each other around the town squares, there was relatively limited interest in social media (Nicolescu 2016). At the other extreme are the extraordinary findings of Xinyuan Wang (2016) who lived for 15 months inside one of the new Chinese factories that, as a whole, employs some 250 million people who have migrated from rural areas into this industrial sector. Social media has, in effect, become the place in which they now live. Rather than using social media to reconnect with their rural villages as had been anticipated, they use it as a more effective migration into the world of modern urban China than the move to the factory itself. Apart from eating, working, and sleeping, and interacting relatively little with their fellow workers, it is social media such as QQ and WeChat where they spend their leisure time, cultivating a sense of themselves as fully part of modern China and its consumer culture: something that the migration to the factory in itself had failed to achieve. It is often the Chinese digital developments that have both more extensive platform capacities and deeper penetration into the lives of their users than platforms such as Facebook or Twitter.

In the study of digital technologies there is a tendency to focus upon the more unprecedented or spectacular consequences. But, as in the example of the Filipino diaspora, anthropologists will pay attention just as much to what might be considered the more conservative consequences of digital technologies - in that case, bringing families back together online that have been fragmented offline by global migration. In a similar fashion, Elisabetta Costa has shown how Kurdish people reconstruct their traditional lineage organization when the families themselves have become dispersed as a result of decades of conflict in Eastern Turkey (2016). The value of ethnography is demonstrated in that in all these cases we find an appreciation that online activity can only be understood relative to changes that have taken place offline.

The area that has perhaps received most attention is political anthropology, because digital technologies are often seen in popular discussion as the ‘cause’ of contemporary political transformations. Thus, there is currently intense interest in ideas such as whether Facebook is responsible for the rapid spread of hate speech, such as anti-Rohinga sentiments in Myanmar; whether the Trump presidency is partly a product of Twitter as a platform; or whether a company called Cambridge Analytica employed these technologies to alter the results of elections by carefully and secretly targeting voters. Once again, the role of anthropologists is to contest assertions that are made about these political impacts through more long term and contextual considerations. For example, John Postill (2008) questioned debates about digital political communities, because often these make simplistic assumptions about the prevalence of prior offline communities. If we ask, ‘is this online forum a real community?’ it makes it sound as through previously everyone lived in such real communities, when actually, as Postill notes, that may not have been the case at all.

Because the appraisal of new technologies is generally moralistic, there is a constant tendency to simplify and romanticise the pre-digital world. Going against this trend, anthropologists strive to provide much more specificity to these debates. Victoria Bernal, in her study of Eritrean diaspora politics, examines a series of websites which are best understood not as expressions of national public spheres in general, but rather the very specific circumstance of Eritrean politics: a military regime that created an often unpaid army on the basis of nationalist requirements for the survival of the new nation, but which in some cases became tantamount to slavery (Bernal 2014). Bernal’s focus is on the use of online spaces to create but also to skew debate within the diaspora as to how Eritrean people should respond.

Moreover, digital anthropology tends to investigate the ways people regard each other as acting appropriately or inappropriately. The study of Filipino mothers mentioned above, for example, showed that their engagement with digital media opened up new possibilities for moral judgement. Previously, people had chosen media mainly because of cost or access. The Philippines was one of the first regions to make intensive use of text messaging because it was free. Today, most people have phone plans or internet plans, so there is no cost implication behind which communication is selected. The result is that media has become more integrated into social and moral concerns. Nowadays, a person is judged by the fact that they dumped their boyfriend by WhatsApp instead of by phone (Gershon 2010). People in several different regions also avoid discussion of politics on social media because it is divisive and other people let them know this is the case.

Establishing a moral framework as to what constitutes appropriate behaviour online leads to the more general question: how is the normative established? Especially when, for online activity, this seems to develop within months or weeks, as in the use of new platforms such as Snapchat or Line.^[2]Each of these platforms grew through an emphasis on some particular trait, such as the ability for images to self-destruct after ten seconds, or to add a plethora of visual abstractions and animations, capacities which are often then copied by rivals and become taken for granted. So, an important part of digital anthropology is observing and accounting for the rapid manifestation of new normative principles involved in these new forms of communication. For example, the way phones are used to establish what can and cannot be talked about in the Congo or Mozambique (Archambault 2017, Pype 2016). Examining the use of social media worldwide, it became apparent that the meme has developed as just such a mechanism for establishing the normative. Even people with very limited literacy can easily share a meme that expresses their moral views about good or bad behaviour (Miller et al. 2016: 172-3).

There is also obvious depth gained by developing long-term fieldwork, as in the extended study of mobile phone technologies in a Bengali village (Tenhunen 2018), since normativity today is not so much established as it is continually changing along with the ever-changing technologies. Historically, anthropologists have assumed that the main force behind the normative was the depth of tradition: what people in many places refer to as their customs. Digital anthropology, dealing with rapid change, represents a striking contrast. As such, what does digital anthropology imply for what anthropology and indeed humanity is now becoming? This will be the subject of the final section.

How we do anthropology digitally

The study of digital anthropology has already gone through several iterations. An earlier review concentrated on the exploration of online communities (Wilson & Peterson 2002), while a later review focused more on the ethnographic approach to digital media (Coleman 2010). A more recent edited collection (Horst & Miller 2012) examined the variety of fields of study, ranging from location to politics to domestic life, as well as the implications for theory and anthropology more generally. It is hard, however, to separate this sequence from developments in methodology, which have also arisen in response to new possibilities created through digital technologies. For example, ethnography often consisted of researching and describing a bounded space and time, where exit from the field site meant the end of the anthropologist’s relationships with their informants. But, with social media, the people anthropologists work amongst expect to retain those relationships over distance and subsequent to the completion of the ethnography, which is consequently harder to delineate.

Many new sources of information are now online and anthropologists may replace their traditional notebooks with devices such as voice recording, cutting and pasting from digital sources, or shared files (Sanjek & Tratner 2015). With these new mechanisms for recording and analyzing information, digital ethnography needs to be considered alongside the ethnography of the digital (Pink et al. 2016). It may be useful to think about these changes as part of much wider methodological debates. For example, Sarah Pink had previously argued for more attention to be given to the senses or to visual media, parallel to still earlier influences from phenomenology that implied that experience is something that has to be viewed from the interaction between our bodies and our environments.

This critical assessment of digital ethnography is all the more important since other disciplines have increasingly embraced ethnography as a means of linking the study of new digital technologies with an assessment of their consequences for populations. For example, STS (Science and Technology Studies) has provided several insightful ethnographies of the use of digital technologies of care (Oudshoorn 2011; Pols 2012). These have the virtue of considering not just medics and patients but also new forms of labour, such as data processors, who are often one of the hidden consequences of such technologies. They thereby link equally well to studies in medical anthropology and digital anthropology.

Within the field of digital anthropology, there is a more specific focus upon virtual ethnography, where anthropologists study online worlds and encounters in addition to conventional field sites. The key exemplar of this approach was Tom Boellstorff’s ethnography of the online computer game Second Life, a study that retains many of the characteristics of traditional ethnography but applied to an entirely online world (Boellstorff 2008). He shows, for example, how many of the disputes over property ownership and between neighbours online echo those familiar from traditional offline contexts. Many examples can be found within what are often substantial gaming communities such as World of Warcraft (Nardi 2010). Several of the anthropologists involved have provided textbook examples on how to engage in such virtual world studies (Boellstorff et al. 2012), examining, for example, some of the difficult ethical issues of observing peoples’ behaviours who one might not otherwise know or be able to obtain consent from. Others have looked to use digital technology to find a balance between online and offline that reflect the lives of their informants. For example, they have studied migrants who have become dispersed worldwide but who try to re-integrate their families online (Landzelius 2006).

Digital technologies can also enhance anthropologists’ involvement in the dissemination of their research results. The Why we post project (Miller et al. 2016) created a spectrum of short, highly accessible forms such as YouTube films under five minutes, social media activity, blogging, and a free online university course (MOOC).^[3] By making anthropological work freely available online in the languages of our field sites, even traditional ethnographic monographs can become very popular indeed, with that particular project reaching half a million downloads by 2018. These developments in free access mean that anthropological research can be more easily returned back to the often low-income societies that tend to be the subject of much of our research. This is true also for popular online anthropological magazines such as Sapiens^[4] and journals such as Cultural Anthropology.^[5]

Changing humanity

The first two sections represent a contrast. One dealt with relatively new worlds created through the digital, and the other with the more general consequences for peoples whose lives are not especially digitally inflected. The distinction was important partly because they are likely to lead to different conclusions. For example, currently one of the major developing interests within digital anthropology concerns the potential impact of the collection of vast amounts of data, their use in the construction of algorithms, and more generally the massive investments in artificial intelligence (e.g. Kockelman 2013). An example of one anthropological response to these interests is Minna Ruckenstein and Natasha Schüll’s (2016) survey of the ‘datafication’ of health. The emphasis is mostly negative. Data is regarded as at least analogous to the tradition role of capital, creating the conditions for more targeted commodification and new forms of power. Datafication gives unprecedented capacities for surveillance and control which not only predict, but also shape and modify human behaviour. There is also a sense of dehumanization where people come to see themselves more as visualizations of data, rather than simply as persons. Furthermore, these technologies reinforce given differences in gender and other unequal social parameters. As in the previous examples of digitally created worlds, the main emphasis is on groups that have been constructed around these new possibilities, such as people who identify with the Quantified Self movement^[6]and engage in various forms of self-tracking. An alternative focus is the active refusal of such technologies which may now be seen as a form of resistance.

By contrast, the studies discussed under the title of everyday digital life concern populations that either do not particularly embrace or refuse digital technologies, but rather simply accept them rapidly as normative within their daily life. Mostly people engage with the latest digital technologies as smartphone apps. For them, artificial intelligence and algorithms are experienced as, for example, more effective instant foreign language translation services, more effective GPS navigation, or more accurate voice dictation. Far from dehumanising, they see their phone as increasingly aligned with their particular personality and tend to feel bereft if by chance they have accidently left their digital companion at home. They are far more concerned with surveillance by their families than that by companies. With regard to health issues, they are more likely to welcome the degree to which the inside of their own bodies, which previously were largely unknown to them except when they erupted in disease, are now knowable as data. They may pay attention to apps that count their steps, or predict their menstrual periods, and use these for developing healthier or more planned lifestyles.

So, where does all this leave digital anthropology? Modern holistic digital anthropology should strive to combine the best of both these approaches. Ethnography may be employed in the direct study of corporations and states, and alert us to data gathering and subsequent usage. Studies of ordinary populations ensure that we are able to appraise the consequences of artificial intelligence and algorithms through studies of what people actually do on a regular basis with the apps that employ them. Those that focus upon digital practitioners help us appreciate the wider infrastructure of states and corporations and the potential for more malign consequences. The first conclusion is therefore that we need both kinds of research and both sides of these arguments: an attention to vast forces that may be oppressive, and the equal commitment to intimate and empathetic engagement with ordinary people that respects their views and experiences as authentic. The second conclusion is that the anthropological commitment is based on long-term scholarship, which may include the study of moralistic debates around these issues but as a way to understand them and account for them, rather than simply to affirm the anthropologists’ own ideological stance. Thirdly, anthropology should be the discipline that encompasses contradiction and recognises that in almost every instance, the new digital technologies raise new possibilities for both benign and malign consequences, which are usually two sides of the same coin.

Even prior to the rise of digital technologies, anthropologists such as Donna Haraway and Marilyn Strathern had raised profound questions about how other developments, such as those in reproductive technologies, impact upon questions of what it now means to be human. As noted above, one major concern has been with the potentially dehumanising effect of new digital technologies such as artificial intelligence. The anthropomorphism represented by the science fiction robot is now finally coming into being. In Japan, where there is a very high proportion of elderly people, a key interest has been in the development of robots that can then take ‘care’ of the elderly, incidentally potentially replacing those Filipina caregivers discussed above (Wright 2018). Similarly, the smartphone was referred to earlier as a digital companion: a phone looks much less like a person than a robot, but it may already show still greater scope for a more subtle anthropomorphism. On the one hand, corporations develop artificial intelligence, algorithms, and chatbots and provide digital assistants with names such as Siri and Alexa, which suggests this anthropomorphism is coming from digital innovation. But at the same time, the owner of a smartphone may ignore the built-in apps, and may instead download others, which they then reconfigure so that their phone is anthropomorphic by way of expressing their particular personality: as a highly organised administrator, a creative artist, or a rugged male who can claim all his usage of the phone is based on necessity.

All of the above suggests that perhaps the real problem here lies with the very term ‘humanity’. Could this be too conservative, since conventionally it refers to everything humanity has been up to now, but not all those things humanity may in time become (Miller & Sinanan 2014: 15-20)? Humanity might once have been defined as beings that could not fly, but then came the aeroplane. Instead of using terms such as post-human or trans-human, we might want to define humanity as including a latency that is achieved by each new technology. The concluding point is that digital anthropology, which can include the study of both use and consequence, is thereby as much a study of what people are becoming as what technologies are becoming. We now face an extreme contrast between anthropology’s initial interest in custom and tradition, compared to the speed of contemporary developments. At the same time, these may be just as expressive of persistent anthropological concerns, such as the nature of normativity. Furthermore, the speed of change makes a still stronger case for the role of long-term ethnographic studies that are prepared to encompass the complexity and contradictions that are intrinsic to an assessment of our new digital worlds. It seems reasonable therefore to also use digital anthropology to engage in debates about both what humanity is becoming and what anthropology is becoming.

References

Archambault, J. 2017. Mobile secrets: youth, intimacy, and the politics of pretence in Mozambique. Chicago: University Press.

Bernal, V. 2014. Nation as network. Chicago: University Press.

Blanchette, J-F. 2011. A material history of bits. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 62(6), 1042-57.

Boellstorff, T. 2008. Coming of age in Second-Life. Princeton: University Press.

———, B. Nardi, C. Pearce & T. Taylor 2012. Ethnography and virtual worlds. Princeton: University Press.

Burrell, J. 2012. Invisible users: youth in the internet cafés of urban Ghana. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Coates, J. 2017. So hot right now: reflections on virality and sociality from transnational digital China. Digital Culture and Society 3(2), 77-98.

Chua, L. 2018. Small acts and personal politics: on helping to save the orangutan via social media. Anthropology Today (available on-line: https://doi-org.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/10.1111/1467-8322.12432).

Coleman, G. 2010. Ethnographic approaches to digital media. Annual Review of Anthropology 39, 1-19.

——— 2012. Coding freedom: the ethics and aesthetics of hacking. Princeton: University Press.

——— 2014. Hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy: the many faces of Anonymous. London: Verso.

Costa, E. 2016. Social media in southeast Turkey. London: University College Press.

Geismar, H. 2018. Museum object lessons for the digital age. London: University College Press.

Gershon, I. 2010. The breakup 2.0: disconnecting over new media. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

——— 2017. Down and out in the new economy. Chicago: University Press.

Gunn, G., T. Otto, & R. Smith (eds) 2013. Design anthropology: theory and practice. London: Bloomsbury.

Haworth, C. & G. Born 2017. Mixing it: digital ethnography and online research methods – a tale of two global digital music genres. In The Routledge companion to digital ethnography (eds) L. Hjorth, H. Horst, A. Galloway & G. Bell, 70-87. New York: Routledge.

Horst, H. & D. Miller (eds) 2012. Digital anthropology. London: Bloomsbury.

Jiménez, A. 2014. The right to infrastructure: a prototype of Open Source urbanism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32(2), 342-62.

Kelty, C. 2008. Two bits: the cultural significance of free software. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Kockelman, P. 2013. The anthropology of an equation. Sieves, spam filters, agentive algorithms, and ontologies of transformation. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3(3), 33-61.

Landzelius, K. 2006. Native on the net: indigenous and diasporic peoples in the virtual age. London: Routledge.

Lange, P. 2014. Kids on YouTube. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Left Coast Press.

Madianou, M. & D. Miller 2012. Migration and new media: transnational families and polymedia. London: Routledge

Malaby, T. 2009. Making virtual worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Maurer, B. 2015. How would you like to pay?: how technology is changing the future of money. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Mckay, D. 2016. An archipelago of care: Filipino migrants and global networks. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Miller, D. & H. Horst 2012. The digital and the human: a prospectus for digital anthropology. In Digital Anthropology (eds) H. Horst & D. Miller, 3-36. Oxford: Berg.

——— & J. Sinanan 2014. Webcam. Cambridge: Polity.

———, E. Costa, N. Haynes, T. McDonald, R. Nicolescu, J. Sinanan, J. Spyer, S. Venkatraman & X. Wang 2016. How the World Changed Social Media. London: University College Press.

Nardi, B. & Y.M. Kow 2010. Digital imaginaries: how we know what we (think we) know about Chinese gold farming. First Monday 15(June), 6-7.

——— 2010. My life as a Night Elf Priest: an anthropological account of World of Warcraft. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Nicolescu, R. 2016. Social media in southern Italy. London: University College Press.

Oudshoorn, N. 2011. Telecare technologies and the transformation of healthcare. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Pertierra, A. 2017. Media anthropology for the digital age. Cambridge: Polity.

Pink, S., H. Horst, J. Postill, L. Hjorth, T. Lewis & J. Tacchi 2016. Digital ethnography: principles and practice. London: Sage.

Pols, J. 2012. Care at a distance. Amsterdam: University Press.

Postill, J. 2008. Localizing the internet beyond communities and networks. New Media Society 10(2008), 413.

Pype, K. 2016. ‘[Not] talking like a Motorola’: mobile phone practices and politics of masking and unmasking in postcolonial Kinshasa. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22(3), 633-52.

Ruckenstein, M. & N. Schüll 2017. The datafication of health. Annual Review of Anthropology 46, 261-78.

Sanjek, R. & S. Tratner (eds) 2015. eFieldnotes: the makings of anthropology in the digital world. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Schüll, N. 2012. Addiction by design: machine gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton: University Press.

Tenhunen, S. 2018. A village goes mobile. Oxford: University Press.

Ventkatraman, S. 2017. Social media in South India. London: University College Press.

Wang, X. 2016. Social media in industrial China. London: University College Press.

Wilson, S. & L. Peterson 2002. The anthropology of online communities. Annual Review of Anthropology 31, 449-67.

Wright, J. 2018. Tactile care, mechanical hugs: Japanese caregivers and robotic lifting devices. Asian Anthropology 17, 24-39.

Note on contributor

Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology, University College London. He is author/editor of thirty-nine books mainly concerned with the study of material culture, consumption, and digital anthropology. He has conducted fieldwork in India, Ireland, Philippines, Solomon Islands, Trinidad, and the United Kingdom.

Professor Daniel Miller, UCL Anthropology, University College London, 14 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW, United Kingdom. d.miller@ucl.ac.uk. @DannyAnth.

[1] These are systems that both provide and then act upon positive and negative feedback.

[2] Snapchat is a picture-based messaging service. Line is another messaging service that strongly emphasises visual content.

[3] Why we post: social media through the eyes of the world. University College London (available on-line: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/why-we-post?utm_source=UCL%20Press&utm_medium=UCL%20Press&utm_campaign=UCL%20Press).

[4] SAPIENS. The Wenner-Gren Foundation (available on-line: www.sapiens.org).

[5] Cultural Anthropology. The Society for Cultural Anthropology. American Anthropological Association (available on-line: www.culanth.org).

[6] The Quantified Self movement consists of people who focus upon the way their bodies and behaviours are increasingly visible as externalised and quantified data.

Science

Felix Stein — Thu, 06 Oct 2016 18:16:28 +0000

Matei Candea

University of Cambridge

Initially published 6 Oct 2016

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

Abstract:

'Science' features twice in anthropology. On the one hand, science is an object of anthropological enquiry, in much the same way as ‘kinship’, ‘religion’, or ‘nationalism’. Anthropologists have studied scientific practices and practitioners ethnographically, and have traced the effects of scientific knowledge in other spheres of human activity. Alongside other scholars in ‘science and technology studies,’ anthropologists have raised questions such as: is scientific knowledge ‘socially constructed’? Does the ‘culture’ of scientists matter? What is objectivity? Is science a distinct kind of activity or domain? Are scientists in the business of describing the world, or transforming it? And is science ‘western’? In a number of these cases, anthropologists’ answers have been distinctive.

On the other hand, for much of its history anthropology itself was understood as a science of society or culture - and continues to be so understood by some of its practitioners today. An anthropological look at science thus also involves turning the lens back onto anthropology itself, and examining it with the same tools we are using to inspect other scientific practices: how are the methods and concepts of anthropological knowledge production (culture, society, ethnography, the site, comparison) themselves put together? And how does applying these terms and methods to the strange object that is ‘science’ distort and transform them?

A science of non-science?

As noted above, anthropologists are only one voice in the broad chorus of social science and humanities disciplines which have taken ‘science’ as their objects. Philosophers and historians have been studying science for nearly as long as such a thing has been thought to exist. Sociologists joined the conversation in the twentieth century with quite far-reaching effects. Anthropology was a relative latecomer to the study of science, and there was no self-defined ‘anthropology of science’ until the late 1970s.

The main reason for this is that for much of its history, the discipline of anthropology was imagined both by its practitioners and by others as a ‘science of non-science’ (Viveiros de Castro; see also Nader 1996). In other words, anthropologists tended to assume both that their methods and approaches were part of a unitary project they thought of as Science, which belonged properly to the modern West, and that their object of study was made up of alternatives to this project: non-scientific or not-quite scientific ways of thinking and being amongst non-western peoples. When nineteenth century evolutionists and early twentieth century functionalists argued about magic, ‘animism’, witchcraft or religion, they often framed these, implicitly or explicitly, as the non-western ‘others’ of western science - including the western science of anthropology.

Another approach involved the study of what came to be called ‘ethno-science’. This line of enquiry was launched by Bronislav Malinowski’s (1884-1942) essay ‘Magic, science and religion’ (Malinowski 1925). Here Malinowski argued that, in fact, scientific and non-scientific ways of thinking existed alongside each other in all human cultures, ‘primitive’ as well as ‘modern’. Malinowski concluded that

If by science be understood a body of rules and conceptions, based on experience and derived from it by logical inference, embodied in material achievements and in a fixed form of tradition and carried on by some sort of social organization – then there is no doubt that even the lowest savage communities have the beginnings of science, however rudimentary. (Malinowski 1925: 34)

Anthropologists took up Malinowski’s point, to develop an interest in what came to be known as ‘ethnoscience’. The patronising language and the evolutionary assumptions were progressively abandoned, and studies of ethnoscience came to document sophisticated non-western cultural knowledge about the natural world, which contemporary western botanists or biologists might indeed seek to learn from. And yet, the very need to qualify these non-western beliefs and practices as ethnoscience intrinsically carries with it the assumption of a distinction between this and ‘proper’ – read: Western – science. Once the comparison has been set up in this way, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that ethnoscience is a more rudimentary, or more practical or limited version of something which in its full form is the prerogative of the West. A more radical point was just around the corner, namely that all science (including Western science) was an ‘ethnoscience’. But, as we shall see below, it took some time - and some help from other disciplines – for the full effects of this realization to sink in.

It is precisely against this portrayal of non-western people’s knowledge as a more practically oriented, rudimentary version of Western science, that Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009) built his theses about ‘the savage mind’ (Lévi-Strauss 1996). The point here was, as for Malinowski, to show that scientific and non-scientific ways of thinking co-existed in all human societies. But whereas Malinowski tried to argue that even the technologically ‘simplest’ peoples mix in a good dose of science with their rituals and beliefs, Levi-Strauss took a different tack. He started from a description of the incredible complexity of the symbolic systems through which many non-western peoples classify the natural world around them, to dispel the sense that this might be reduced to the mere satisfaction of their immediate practical needs. Rather, for Levi-Strauss, this ‘untamed thought’ which exists everywhere, but is particularly prevalent in ‘simpler’ societies, is a fully fledged intellectual pursuit, different but equal in sophistication to scientific thinking. It is a ‘logic of the concrete’ in which natural objects are combined and recombined into a complex symbolic language for thinking about social and existential problems.

From Science to sciences

The nudge to think ethnographically about western science itself, however, came from outside anthropology, as sociologists and historians started to rethink western science as an object of study. Many of these works, however, themselves drew on the findings and ideas that anthropologists had been developing in their studies of science’s ‘others’. Eventually, anthropologists joined the science studies party in their own right, and their contributions were distinctive.

Taking his cue from Durkheim’s sociology of knowledge, as well as Weber’s writings on science and ethics, sociologist of science Robert K. Merton (1910-2003) investigated science as a functionally integrated social institution whose role was ‘the extension of certified knowledge’ (Merton 1973). This institution operated through the production of a ‘complex of values and norms which is held to be binding on the man of science.’ (Merton 1973). A number of sociologists later took issue with Merton’s account of norms, noting in particular that these seemed to be mainly honoured in the breach by practising scientists (e.g. Mitroff 1974). More profoundly, what many later sociologists of science found lacking in Merton was the explicit way in which he cordoned off his account of the structure and norms of science from the positive content of science - its actual facts and findings. Sociology might explain failures or perversions of scientific knowledge and might give clues to the general conduct that would permit such perversions to be avoided. But it had little to say about the successes of science - its established facts and currently powerful theories. Paradoxically, while Merton’s account does suggest that the effective pursuit of scientific knowledge requires particular social and cultural factors, the nature of his ‘norms’ means that in most cases, what this structure requires is precisely that the interference of historical, sociological, and personal factors be eliminated. Ultimately, we are left with a picture in which, as in classic histories of science and in accounts of scientific practice by many scientists themselves, socio-cultural, historical, and personal factors could explain the context of science, always, but its content only in the case of scientific error. As for scientific success, it remained, presumably, a sign of the fact that scientists had managed to get in touch with reality and that extraneous social, cultural, and personal factors had been kept at bay. Merton just highlighted the idea that such keeping at bay was itself a social and cultural process - a thought to which later historians and anthropologists would return.

A more profound challenge, however, was under way. Long-standing assumptions about science as a broadly unitary method for moving from individual facts to general claims in a rational, value-free way - the sort of picture of science which remained at the core of Merton’s account and underpinned anthropologists’ own ideas about their own discipline – had started to be challenged from the early twentieth century onwards. Doctor and historian of science Ludwig Fleck pointed out that in tracing the history of a particular scientific object - syphilis – one did not find the expected history of the systematic application of a standard method, of rigorous hypothesis testing leading to a progressive history of discovery (Fleck 2012 [1934]). Science, for Fleck, could not be understood without a study of the particular communities of scholars and the ‘thought-styles’ which they developed and passed on through training. These thought-styles, and not simply evidence, reasoning, or logic, shaped what would count as an interesting question or an acceptable answer at any particular historical moment.

Years later, Thomas Kuhn expanded and popularised this notion through his discussion of ‘paradigms’ (1962). In a strong, and much debated statement, Kuhn claimed that paradigms represented ‘incommensurable ways of seeing the world and of practising science in it.’ (Kuhn 1962). This view of science exploded the idea of a single project with a continuous, progressive history. Instead, historians and sociologists were offered a new object of study: the rich tapestry of multiple scientific paradigms, each carried by a human community with its own internal rules, forms of transmission and structure - much like the ‘cultures’ or ‘societies’ which anthropologists had been investigating.

Studying scientists in their labs: two examples

By the later 1970s and early 80s, sociologists of science had begun detailed ethnographic studies of particular laboratories seeking to demonstrate the social construction of scientific knowledge in particular concrete settings. They showed how collective cultural assumptions, pragmatic negotiations between individuals, and the use of particular methods, tools and techniques rather than others, all came together to build a finished product which would later be packaged as a ‘mind-independent fact’. These sociologists opened up the practice of science to scrutiny.

A classic of the genre was Latour and Woolgar’s Laboratory life: the social construction of scientific facts (1979), based on fieldwork and interviews undertaken in a biology lab – the Salk institute in La Jolla California. The authors – of whom one, (Woolgar) was a sociologist influenced by Garfinkel’s ‘ethnomethodology’ (cf. McDonald 2012) – highlight that their aim is to treat scientific practice as if it were as unfamiliar and in need of explanation as the subjects usually tackled by anthropologists. They give a deadpan and minute description of the spaces of the lab, the kinds of people present there and their daily activities - all as if the endpoint of this bustling were mysterious and unknown. On the face of it, it seems that enormous amount of time and money, masses of physical materials (frogs, mice, paper, electricity, pipettes, etc.) are being expended to produce a seemingly rather slim result: some papers, published in scientific journals. These papers contain statements about the world, cast with more or less qualification. The less qualified a statement is, the closer it is to an indisputable fact. By the time papers are published, the scientists themselves, like the broader public, talk of the facts they contained as if they were merely abstract statements made of an ‘external reality’. Facts become independent of the process of production described above. The laboratory is thus rather like a factory - a factory for producing standalone objects called scientific facts.

As another prominent author in this tradition commented, the core point of sociological lab studies was to show that “scientific products are ‘occasioned’ by the circumstances of their production” (Knorr-Cetina 1983). That is to say, the facts cannot stand alone. The circumstances of their production are not just an external ‘context’ – they are what constitutes these facts. In sum, laboratory studies continued the philosophical discussions about the nature of scientific knowledge, by making knowledge empirical through and through.

Early anthropological studies of scientists at work had a slightly different flavour, and different concerns. In one of the earliest ethnographies of Western science, Beamtimes and lifetimes (1988), Sharon Traweek studied high energy physicists in America and Japan to elucidate their shared and contrasting cultural constructions of their subject matter and themselves. Traweek, like Latour and Woolgar, explicitly played up the strangeness of treating physicists as if they were an alien cultural and social form. She described their spaces and the tools and techniques they used in detail, as well as the social arrangements which tied their scientific communities together and the hierarchies and training trajectories that crosscut them, and built up a detailed and convincing ethnographic picture of the ways in which these scientists understood their world.

Unlike Latour and Woolgar, Traweek was not interested in the construction of particular facts in physics. Rather, one main takeaway of Traweek’s ethnography – beyond the rich description itself – was that social organization structures scientists’ perception of nature, and vice versa. Traweek noted, for instance, that core gendered metaphors about nature as a ‘female’ realm to be investigated and unveiled by forceful ‘masculine’ scientists both stemmed from and reinforced broader gender stereotypes and assumptions in scientists’ own careers and lives. In these respects, Traweek’s project was strictly social constructionist: it related the ways in which these researchers understood nature to the social structures within which they operated, such as their gender relations, or the structures of authority and training which characterised their scientific communities.

Three key lessons

The anthropology of science today is a complex and diverse field, which is not easy to systematize or order into ‘schools’. However, one might point to a number of key debates which arose over the past twenty or so years since the beginnings of the anthropology of sciences, and key lessons which contemporary anthropologists have drawn from them.

Beyond social construction: don’t forget the things!

The contrasts between the methods and approach of Latour and Woolgar on the one hand, and Traweek, on the other, is instructive. All took as their object scientists and their daily practices. All began with careful and methodologically ‘naive’ descriptions of the spaces, practices, and social organisation of scientific activity. But there the similarities mostly ended.

While Traweek’s aim remained fairly classically – to demonstrate that understandings of nature were socially and culturally constructed – Latour and Woolgar’s book actually drove the first nail into the coffin of this popular kind of explanation. As Latour noted in a review of Traweek’s book (Latour 1990), to describe scientists as socially constructing ‘nature’ on the basis of their existing cultural and social arrangements was to write past the fact that their work produced specific realities which would later impact the actual worlds they lived in (and not just western culture’s ideas about nature, but also westerners’ and others’ daily lives).

The broader point was that ‘social construction’ itself was in fact a misnomer, if one took it to mean that the solid facts of science could be explained away by pointing at ‘social factors’ lying behind them. To understand the construction of scientific facts, Latour argued, one had to attend not only to the activity of humans, as sociologists typically did, but also to the activity and effects of the non-human materials in the lab: the machines, which enabled particular stabilizations and inscriptions, and the biological entities which ‘behaved’ in particular ways. Both Traweek and Latour and Woolgar had paid attention to the machines and objects which enabled scientists to construct their explanations and seek to encounter nature. But Traweek’s interest, ultimately, was in the ways the scientists understood and symbolised these machines (reflecting for instance, on the gendered imagery of huge expensive machines with names like ‘SPEAR’ etc.). In Latour and Woolgar’s account, the actual activity of these machines, the ways in which they transformed phenomena, was a core element in the explanation. Humans, their account suggested, are not the only agents. Rather, action is distributed, and swathes of human and nonhuman actants have to be aligned to produce effects in the world. This may be construction, but there is nothing straightforwardly ‘social’ about it. From this point of view, to claim that scientific facts or ‘nature’ are mere social constructs becomes as absurd as arguing that a chair or an apartment block is a mere social construct.

This philosophically counterintuitive point of view was eventually articulated more broadly as ‘Actor-Network theory’ (Latour 2005). The point was general. It did not imply a return to the earlier position that western science was not socially constructed, but that other knowledges were. Rather, for Latour and the actor-network theorists, classical sociological approaches always failed when they sought to explain phenomena away as social constructions – it’s just that the sciences (and scientists) to whom they did this were rather more frequently in the position to speak back loudly enough to prove them wrong. Sociologists and anthropologists of science writing today, while they might object to particular elements of Latour’s approach and assumptions and want to retain a more traditionally critical stance, still hold on to the core lesson: never forget the effects of materials!

Science beyond the lab: no need to stay put!

But there were gaps in Latour’s picture too, as anthropologists observed (Martin 1998). Comparing once more Traweek and Latour and Woolgar’s books, one obvious gap in the latter is how little the scientists’ own understandings and perspectives - their words, even - featured. We will return to this below. Another was the rather myopic attention to one particular setting, the lab, to the exclusion of broader extensions and connections. This echoes a broader distinction. Where sociologists of science more generally had focused in on particular laboratories and research programmes, the tradition of comparative and holistic thinking in anthropology drove anthropologists to ask broader questions about the ways in which purportedly scientific and non-scientific ways of encountering the world relate, differ, or cut across each other. Note, for instance, the fact that Traweek’s work focused on physicists in Japan and the US, thus introducing sophisticated questions from the start about the notion of cultural ‘context’ and what is or is not shared. Anthropologists of science pursued these complexities by asking how scientific knowledge and practices travelled beyond laboratory settings. This brought to center stage questions of history, power, and culture.

One could move beyond the lab by relating scientific and non-scientific knowledges within western societies themselves. A classic example of this approach is Emily Martin's influential book Flexible bodies (1994). There, the author traces the changing ways in which Americans imagine immunity. Drawing on the history of immunology and on popular media representations of the body, and moving backwards and forwards between researchers in immunological laboratories and interviews with a wide selection of laypersons in Baltimore, Martin shows the complex interplay between changing scientific and popular conceptions within the broad cultural setting of late-twentieth century America.

Crucially, Martin's point is not that initially correct scientific understandings are 'dumbed down' in popular portrayals. Nor is she arguing that scientific facts are the straightforward effects of social structure or a stable 'cultural context'. Rather, she notes that there is a constant interplay whereby scientists themselves draw on changing popular conceptions and metaphors to think through their research questions and findings, and that these findings in turn shape and transform popular conceptions. Scientific facts and representations travel and change as they move beyond the lab. The question of the cultural construction of scientific facts thereby opens up onto the broader question of how ‘American culture’ itself is in part constructed by reference to certain popular understandings of scientific facts. More broadly, Martin’s work involved a critical reflection (responding to the ‘crisis of representation’ of the 80s) about the formerly rather static and bounded ways in which anthropologists had conceptualised culture. This also involved new and creative ways of re-imagining anthropological fieldwork stretching over multiple places and times (Marcus 1995). Anthropology’s ‘holistic’ imaginary was thus both challenged and reconfigured (Candea 2007).

The other way in which anthropologists moved beyond the lab was by explicitly challenging their earlier distinctions between 'Science' and 'ethnoscience' (see above). A fairly straightforward point was that all science, including western science, is after all an ethnoscience - each can only be understood in context, and none can act as a privileged vantage-point from which others can be judged. These comparisons demote western science from its unique and exceptional position (Nader 1996). But to leave it there might suggest that each (ethno-)science operates in a self-contained world, rather like Kuhn's 'incommensurable' paradigms. The more challenging task is to trace the multiple power-laden interactions between these various ethnosciences.

An example of a convincing attempt to do this can be found in Roberto Gonzalez's Zapotec science (2001). Gonzalez argues that while Zapotec farming practices are grounded in a range of beliefs which western scientists might dismiss (such as a humoral theory, or the belief in animate supernatural beings), they also involve the key elements of scientific thinking:

Like agricultural scientists, Talean campesinos conduct experiments, formulate hypotheses, mold their results to theoretical frameworks, and disseminate their findings, from campesino to campesino, and from parent to child. (González 2001)

So far, Gonzalez's argument sounds rather like Malinowski's regarding Trobriand gardening. But, as we saw above, where Malinowski portrays Trobriand science as a pragmatic and rudimentary version of 'proper' contemporary science, Gonzalez portrays the two as equally theoretical and equally complex. The difference is historical and political: Zapotec science is a 'local' science, whereas western science – Gonzalez calls it 'cosmopolitan science' – is an ethnoscience which has gone global, partly through the effects of colonial and capitalist expansion. Gonzalez traces the historical process whereby Zapotec and cosmopolitan sciences have historically borrowed knowledges and techniques from each other. In sum, Gonzalez shows us how anthropology can take us beyond relativism by putting different (ethno)sciences in historical relation - not only different views on the world, but different and unequally powerful views in the same world.

Science, norms and ethics: take scientists seriously!

Throughout these developments, an increasing distance crept in between the way most anthropologists and sociologists thought about science, and the way many self-defined scientists did. For many of the latter, as for much of the Western public at large, science remains, despite its occasional failings, a unique and broadly successful attempt to establish truths about nature.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the so-called 'science wars' (Ross 1996; Parsons 2003) erupted as a number of scientists struck back at what they read as anti-realist and politically motivated attacks on science from the humanities and social sciences. At the margins of this occasionally rather unedifying debate, a number of more interesting positions emerged within the anthropology of science. These voices asked again what it would mean to really take science and scientists seriously. This question has particular traction in anthropology - after all, one of the discipline’s core commitment had always been to take seriously the people with whom anthropologists work. If anthropologists’ accounts persistently irritate and offend the people they are describing, then surely something must be wrong? Again, one can distinguish two main approaches to dealing with this question.

We have seen the outline of one of these approaches in Latour’s comments about science’s power to talk back, which were made precisely in the context of the science wars. His far-reaching philosophical reconfiguration of science was cast as a partial response to these concerns. However, Latour’s radically performative view of science takes a very different turn when combined with the more engaged political stance stemming initially from feminist critiques of science. If science is a process of active world-making, rather than merely the discovery of truths about the world, then this recasts the question of how one might do science for ‘better’ or ‘worse’. Science becomes political through and through, not simply because it provides legitimising narratives for this or that political practice or social arrangement, but more potently and directly because it can build the world in different ways. For example, a world in which humans are understood as behavioural machines of the type described by some forms of psychology is a world in which voting, advertising, education, and taxation, will all take a certain form. Actual humans will be shaped and transformed in important ways by these various offshoots of scientific understandings built in particular labs, and will in turn live to confirm the value and reality of these understandings. Other paradigms in psychology might lead to different understandings of the human – different policies, different humans. In other words, the frontlines of the ‘science wars’ are not between science and non-science, or between science and the humanities who critique ‘it’ from the outside. The frontlines are within science itself.

One of the most influential exponents of this position is Donna Haraway. In her painstakingly detailed history of primatology (Haraway 1989), Haraway draws together Marxism, feminism, cultural anthropology, actor-network theory, and her own experiences as a trained biologist. Haraway shows how particular research programmes emerged out of a mix of assumptions, techniques, and human and non-human actors differently situated and positioned, and how these scientific practices and their results fed into and fed off of popular imaginaries. At every juncture, different sciences and different politics were possible.

What is crucially at stake here is a challenge to the ability of any one commentator to speak for ‘Science’. The sciences are multiple, contest-riven, and political. Anthropologists and other scholars in the social sciences and humanities learnt from Haraway to attend to the many voices within scientific debates, and occasionally to shed their reserve and enter debates ‘behind the lines’, forming alliances with particular scientists against others, rather than sniping at ‘Science’ from a self-definedly external position. In sum, a 'feminist technoscience' approach such as Haraway’s confronts the question ‘are you taking scientists seriously’ with another question: ‘which scientists?’. In some respects there can be no more serious engagement with science that to get stuck in and argue within it.

Nevertheless, one might argue that, as with actor-network theory, the alliances proposed by this approach paper over some deep philosophical divergences. At its core lies a radical assumption that one can only properly engage with scientists once a general narrative about the aims, norms, and duties of 'Science' (as an objective, value-free, method-bound quest for knowledge about the world detached from any particular standpoint) has been replaced with one that depicts sciences as this-worldly, inherently political, and grounded in multiple standpoints. While it may encourage engagement with scientists on particular issues and projects, this approach comes, in other words, with a strong ‘top-level’ sense of what science is and how it should be done, one which is intentionally and forcefully at odds with the way scientists themselves have usually imagined those broadest aims and meanings of their practice.

There is, however, a very different way of tackling the question of ethics and of taking scientists seriously. This way traces how these commitments are lived in practice - to return, in other words, to the question of science as a vocation, as launched by Max Weber, and developed by Merton (see above). As anthropologist Paul Rabinow noted,

Although each component of Merton’s picture of science has been subjected to historical, sociological and philosophical reevaluation, it is fair to say that many scientists believe that these norms guide their practice. Hence, a major gap has developed today between scientists’ self-representation and the representations of scientists by those who study them. (Rabinow 1996)

These norms were mostly denounced as ideological cover by an early generation of social constructionists, and ignored by those who chose to focus on the practice of scientists in their labs rather than their accounts of what they did. Finally, ‘performative’ approaches such as those of Haraway sought to engage them head-on by articulating specific counter-norms (for instance that of the scientist as 'modest witness' (Haraway 1997). Rabinow called, instead, for anthropologists to study them, as they would study any other social practice which exists in tension with particular ideals. That means accepting that norms may never be completely and coherently instantiated, but they can nevertheless guide practice and inform scientists sense of what they are up to and their judgment of each other. Despite the mention of Merton, Michel Foucault’s late interest in the subject of ethics and self-formation was perhaps more of a key conceptual influence and guide here.

This interest in norms had strong roots, too, in the history of science. Shapin and Schaffer’s account of the controversy between Boyle and Hobbes over the nature of scientific knowledge, Leviathan and the air-pump (Shapin, Schaffer, & Hobbes 1985), for instance, gave an account of the way proper scientific experimental procedure was articulated, from the start, in moral (as well as gendered and classed) terms as going hand in hand with a particular ‘gentlemanly’ ethos of honour and trustworthiness. Later, Shapin returned to the subject – with explicit reference to Merton – to trace the transformations in scientific norms which came with the increasing professionalization of science and the increasingly strong links which developed during the twentieth century between science and industry (Shapin 2008). Daston and Galison’s monumental history of changing understandings and practices of scientific objectivity (Daston & Galison 2007), traces the effects of changing instrumentation, new scientific problems, and historical contexts. At its heart, however, the book approaches objectivity precisely as an ‘epistemic virtue’ - something scientists genuinely strive for, although its content may change.

In anthropology, this interest in scientific virtues was bolstered by the broader consolidation of the anthropology of ethics as a field of study (Laidlaw 2014). It became easier to think of scientists at work as – much like persons everywhere – pursuing particular kinds of ethical projects and undergoing particular practices of self-formation. One could point out that scientists were not unique in this respect, and yet do justice to their sense that the aims, goals, and ascetic practices they underwent were distinctive (see e.g. Candea 2010).

In sum, from the diverse and interwoven strands and debates above, emerged three fairly strong elements of advice to the aspiring anthropologist of science: 1) Don’t forget the things: Pay attention to the power and effects of non-human entities; 2) Don’t stay put: think about sciences (in the plural) and other knowledges as they interact and intersect in power-laden ways in the world beyond the lab; 3) Take scientists seriously: keep in view the real politics of scientific world-building and scientists’ own sense of themselves as engaged in particular ethical projects. The best anthropology of science today does all of the above.

References

Candea, M. 2007. Arbitrary locations: in defense of the bounded field-site. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13(1), 167-184.

——— 2010. ‘I fell in love with Carlos the meerkat’: engagement and detachment in human-animal relations. American Ethnologist 37(2), 241-58.

Daston, L. & P. Galison 2007. Objectivity. Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books, distributed by the MIT Press.

Fleck, L. 2012. Genesis and development of a scientific fact. Chicago: University Press.

Foucault, M. 1984. Histoire de la sexualité 3: le souci de soi. Paris: Gallimard.

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

Haraway, D.J. 1989. Primate visions: gender, race and nature in the world of modern science. London: Routledge.

——— 1997. Modest-witness@second-millennium.FemaleMan-meets-OncoMouse: feminism and technoscience. New York: Routledge.

Knorr-Cetina, K.D. 1983. The ethnographic study of scientific work: towards a constructivist interpretation of science (available on-line: http://kops.uni-konstanz.de/handle/123456789/11543).

Kuhn, T.S. 1962. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University Press.

Laidlaw, J. 2014. The subject of virtue: an anthropology of ethics and freedom. Cambridge: University Press.

Latour, B. 1990. Postmodern – no, simply amodern – steps towards an anthropology of science. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 21(1), 145-71.

——— 2005. Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network theory. Oxford: University Press.

——— & S. Woolgar 1979. Laboratory life: the social construction of scientific facts. Vol. 80, Sage Library of Social Research. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.

Lévi-Strauss, C. 1966. The savage mind. Chicago: University Press.

Malinowski, B. 1948 [1925]. Magic, science and religion. In Magic, science, and religion and other essays, 1-71. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press.

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

Martin, E. 1994. Flexible bodies: tracking immunity in American culture from the days of polio to the age of AIDS. Boston: Beacon Press.

——— 1998. Anthropology and the cultural study of science. Science, Technology, & Human Values 23: S1 (1: Anthropological approaches in science and technology studies), 24-44.

McDonald, M. 2012. Medical anthropology and anthropological studies of science. In Companion to the anthropology of Europe (eds) U. Kockel, M. Nic Craith & J. Frykman, 459-80. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Merton, R.K. 1973. The normative structure of science. In The sociology of science: theoretical and empirical investigations, 267-80. Chicago: University Press.

Mitroff, I.I. 1974. Norms and counter-norms in a select group of the Apollo moon scientists: a case study of the ambivalence of scientists. American Sociological Review 39(4), 579.

Nader, L. 1996. Naked science: anthropological inquiry into boundaries, power, and knowledge. New York: Routledge.

Parsons, K.M. 2003. The science wars: debating scientific knowledge and technology. Amherst, N.Y: Prometheus Books.

Rabinow, P. 1996. Making PCR: a story of biotechnology. Chicago: University Press.

Ross, A. 1996. Science wars. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Shapin, S. 2008. The scientific life: a moral history of a late modern vocation. Chicago: University Press.

——— S. Schaffer & T. Hobbes 1985. Leviathan and the air-pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the experimental life: including a translation of Thomas Hobbes, Dialogus Physicus de Natura Aeris by Simon Schaffer. Princeton: University Press.

Traweek, S. 1988. Beamtimes and lifetimes: the world of high energy physicists (available on-line: http://library.wur.nl/WebQuery/clc/916015).

Viveiros de Castro, E. 2003. And. Manchester: University Press.

Weber, M. 1998. 'Science as a vocation.' In Science as a vocation (ed.) H.H. Gerth, 129-56. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Note on contributor

Matei Candea is a lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and former editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2013-2016). He is the author of Corsican fragments: difference, knowledge and fieldwork (2010, Indiana), and editor of The social after Gabriel Tarde (Routledge, 2010) and Detachment: essays on the limits of relational thinking (Manchester University Press, 2015) with Jo Cook, Catherine Trundle and Tom Yarrow. He has published a number of articles on politics, identity, hospitality, human-animal relations, behavioural science and anthropological comparison. His current research interests include anthropological heuristics and the comparative study of free speech.

Dr Matei Candea, Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, Division of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. mc288@cam.ac.uk

Colonialism / postcolonialism

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

Susan Bayly

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

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

Abstract:

The giant composite field of colonialism and postcolonialism studies has had a transforming effect on modern anthropology. Anthropologists have been innovative users of its multidisciplinary perspectives, and key contributors to its challenging accounts of past and contemporary global life and experience. The call to prioritise colonial and postcolonial perspectives in the framing of anthropology's central research questions has greatly extended the field's range and scope, including its distinctive approaches to the issue of whether it is colonialism that should be seen as modernity's most important progenitor, and the source of its most toxic forms of subjugation and disempowerment. This entry notes the sophistication with which anthropology has both embraced and challenged the forms of cultural and social analysis through which the epistemic and material transformations of global empire and its afterlife have been documented and theorised. And it argues that studies of colonialism and postcolonialism still have a strong and productive future in a world now widely thought to require the multidimensional framings provided by today's high-profile theorists of globalisation and cosmopolitanism.

Introduction

The giant composite field of colonialism and postcolonialism studies has had a transforming effect on virtually every academic field in the humanities and social sciences. Anthropologists have been particularly innovative users of its multidisciplinary perspectives, and have responded with vigour and creativity when accused by practitioners of its deconstructive critiques of being ‘handmaidens’ of colonial power and heirs to the subjugating knowledge strategies that underpinned imperial rule (Asad 1973). There have been major changes in anthropology’s aims and claims arising from theorists’ insistence that the enduring forms of subjugation and ‘epistemic violence’ (Spivak 1985) engendered by modern empires must be recognised as distinctive pathologies of the contemporary world. The call to prioritise colonial and postcolonial perspectives in framing virtually all analytical accounts and research questions has greatly extended anthropology’s range and scope. It has led to the use of tools from both within and beyond the discipline, including poststructuralist understandings of power and subjectivity, and the contingency and open-endedness of historical change. These perspectives have fed debate on a wide range of topics: anticolonial nationalism; religious conversion; capitalist market transformations; gender relations and domestic intimacies; urban experience and historicity; citizenship and migration, as well as resistance and hegemonic power effects.

Colonialism

Within and beyond anthropology, ‘colonial’ is now mainly used for the transformations wrought by high modern empire, i.e. for contexts of Western conquest and rule in the age of globally expansive commercial and industrial capitalism. Some 80 to 90 percent of the global landmass and a majority of the world’s population had come under direct or indirect colonial rule by the processes initially set in train during the so-called early modern Age of Discovery, though greatly accelerated in their range and impact by the early twentieth century.^[1] It is equally important for the study of colonialism and postcolonialism to acknowledge the massive violence and displacement marking these phenomena. These include, for example, an estimated 1 million deaths in Algeria’s 1954–62 liberation war, and as many as 500,000 deaths and 14 million people displaced in the catastrophic process known as the Partition of India.^[2]

There is much dispute about the extent to which the colonised can be seen as active agents in these dislocations and displacements. But it is widely agreed that modern empire produced unprecedented change and novelty, including massive and profoundly destructive material transformations, and the constitution of a new kind of person: a colonial subject with a ‘colonized mind’, painfully if never fully subordinated by the coercions and ‘othering’ effects of the coloniser’s power-knowledge. These processes have been documented in many settings, including the modern colonial metropolis and other sites of ‘panoptic’ surveillance and self-subjugation.^[3]

Despite their ancient origins, the terms colonial and colonialism are not widely used for pre-modern and non-Western empires.^[4] The rule of Rome, the Ottomans and China’s Qing (Manchus) are commonly defined as imperial, while the term colonial is commonly used for such cases as the rule of the British in India, the French in Algeria, and the Dutch in insular Southeast Asia. These, together with sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific, Latin America, and the Islamic Middle East, have been the main contexts for studies of colonial and postcolonial projects and practices, frequently in terms deeply critical of the strategies of historians, political sociologists, and anthropologists. The works thus targeted include classic ethnographies condemned for their purported failure to problematise Enlightenment epistemologies as the critical grounding of their work.^[5]

Some critics regard binary models of coloniser-colonised relations as too narrow to capture the full dynamics of imperial and post-imperial modernity. What has been seen as the open-ended or ‘rhizomatic’ qualities of empire has generated rich ethnographic work on such people as the ‘mobile cosmopolitans’ whose far-flung trading and religious networks challenged the boundedness of all the imperial systems that sought to contain them (Ho 2004).^[6] But for theorists including Barlow (1997) and Chakrabarty (2012), colonialism is modernity’s most important progenitor and the source of its most toxic forms and penetrations. These include its corrosive powers of individuation and commodification, and its routinization of state violence through the practices of bureaucratised truth-seeking: ranging from the legalistic witch-hunts of Spanish-ruled Peru to the treaties and constitution-making of more recent colonial regimes (Benton 2002; Comaroff 2001; Silverblatt 2004).

Postcolonialism

Postcolonialism has become an equally pervasive term, especially in studies of the enduring after-effects of colonial rule and the oppressive ‘necropolitics’ of post-independence states and elites (Chakrabarty 1992; Mbembe 2001; Sarkar 1985). Poststructuralist identity and language theory have been key resources for this work, initially through the concept of colonial discourse: the use of signifying regimens that delegitimate the knowledge practices of the colonised and install as authoritative truths the conqueror’s narratives of superior rationality and ‘civilizing mission’ (Chafer 1992). Foucault’s early work on governmentality and the biopolitical sources of modern power were the initial grounding for these perspectives, together with Said’s critique of the self-glorifying cultural essentialism engendered by European Orientalists (Said 1995). Those embracing these understandings of the colonisers’ power used them to illuminate the psychic and cultural dislocations of colonial rule, exposing as instruments of subjugation and disempowerment the compilation of scholar-officials’ dictionaries, maps and legal codes, their manipulation of foreign scripts and vernaculars, and their fabrication of subordinating ‘languages of command’ (Cohn 1996; Errington 2008; Raheja 1996).^[7]

The deconstructive analysis of imperial texts and representational strategies has generated much debate about whether colonial encounters were invariably collisions of radically divergent epistemes (Marglin & Marglin 1990). Cohn’s accounts of the Census of India and imperial darbar (ruler’s audience) (1987, 1996) treated the representational strategies of British rule as disruptively alien, its regimes of enumeration and visuality a break with the far more fluid relations and identities of the pre-conquest period. The idea of novel reality production under colonial rule has been contested from many perspectives, including those identifying India’s expansive Mughal dynasts and their successors as knowledge-gatherers in their own right, thus as creators of novel enumerating and classification strategies that anticipated and set the model for those of the British Raj (Peabody 2001).^[8]

Some historians have challenged the value of all deconstructive critique, dismissing the study of knowledge politics and colonial subjectivities and calling instead for continued attempts to understand the processes underlying such key transformations as the immiseration of peasantries and the spread of intercommunal blood-letting in colonised societies (O’Hanlon & Washbrook 1992; cf. Prakash 1992, 1993). What has been called for by anthropologists is not so much a change of research questions, as a search for better tools with which to study colonialism’s conceptual power and effects. For Kelly and Kaplan (2001), Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogics and heteroglossia make visible a process of ‘communicative traffic’ between colonisers and the colonised in British-ruled Fiji, hence ‘co-production’ rather than top-down imposition of authorising power-knowledge in the turbulent interactions which they explore.

Despite these challenges, the concerns of the early landmark studies still interest scholars debating the sources and effects of imperial power.^[9] So too does the radical feminist critique of Spivak (e.g. Spivak 1996), often united with Derrida’s treatment of writing as the inscription of difference as both source and manifestation of the will to power, with an emphasis on the inherent violence of such inscriptions, and the ‘deferrals’ of meaning inherent in their constitutive texts and narratives. A related reference point has been Lacanian psychology’s understanding of desiring selfhood and the decentred nature of subjectivity (Bhabha 2004; Khanna 2004). The treatment of colonial rule as agonising ‘psychodrama’ produced in the ‘play of power within colonial discourse’ (Bhabha 1996: 92) has drawn further inspiration from Fanon’s accounts of the crippling identity effects of empire, entangling colonisers and the colonised in a mesh of mutual desires and delusions.^[10]

Transforming events and resistance

Colonialism became a major scholarly concern in the late 1970s, while postcolonialism came to prominence in the 1980s. Both singly and together, their embrace signalled an attack on perspectives deemed outmoded and inadequate for an understanding of the global world order. A particular target for such challenges has been the concept of imperialism, formerly the dominant idiom in Marxist and related ‘world systems’ accounts of the global expansion of capitalist modernity (Frank 1978; Wallerstein 1974). In the study of imperialism, scholars’ key concerns were with motivations and actions initiated from colonisers’ metropoles: the economic logic of empires; how they were structured and expanded. Their treatment of what would now be characterised as ‘experience’ within the colonised world related largely to structural transformations in the material sphere. The most notable of these were massive social and environmental changes wrought by novel land control systems, including coercive cash-cropping schemes and the widespread destruction of forests and grasslands, and the forcible creation of new production and labour systems to meet the commodifying needs of Western capitalist economies.^[11]

With anthropologists’ turn to globally framed historical perspectives in the 1980s, the implications of empire and world systems theory were addressed by some of the discipline’s leading innovators. Taussig’s (1980) study of the economics of empire in Bolivia focused on Amerindian tin miners’ narratives of the Devil as presiding agent of the commoditization of their labour under Spanish rule. And in Sahlins’s celebrated account of the death of the English explorer-navigator James Cook at the hands of Hawaiians in 1779, the killing was a transformative event, interpretable through the concept of ‘mythopraxis’: in the islanders’ perceptions, an occurrence taking place in mythic rather than linear time (1985; see Weiner 2006). Sahlins claimed that this was not an account of a fixed Hawaiian cultural framing counterpoised to an equally static Western ‘trade and empire’ worldview. Instead, mythopraxis allowed for a notion of dialectical conjuncture between two dynamic historicities, thus a forging of something new in the context of this early moment of imperial ‘fatal impact’ (Moorehead 2000).^[12]

1. Relating the economic and the cultural

Though much contested, such studies created provocative links between anthropologists’ concerns with the economic and the cultural, as in Comaroff’s treatment (1985) of the southern African Zion Church faith as symbolic bricolage: an expression of ‘cultural resistance’ to the forced integration of adherents into the alienating structures of capitalist commodity production. In other studies too, resistance to colonial power is discerned not so much in confrontation or counter-hegemonic ‘hidden transcripts’ (Scott 1990), but in poetics, i.e. the expressiveness and play of the creative mind, as in the imagining of alternative spiritual realities in millenarian ‘cargo cults’.^[13] Related works on colonial contexts have discerned historicity in the form of invention or co-fabrication in what had previously been seen as timeless ethnographic givens, including ‘tribe’ in Africa and caste and ethno-religious community in India. This raised the contentious question of whether even grossly disadvantaged subjects were active agents in the making of their new epistemic and material realities, rather than mere recipients of whatever the coloniser constructed and imposed (Bayly 1999; Godelier 1975; Spear 2003; Wolf 1982).

Debate about how to relate the economic and the cultural in colonial contexts has been further nourished by anthropologists’ studies of the creation of new economies through the mass recruitment of enslaved or indentured labour. In another of Kelly’s works dealing with plantation-based sugar production in Fiji (1992), concepts once thought of as universals in economic anthropology are found to be the subjects of highly divergent moral narratives about trade, value, and production. These were not just a matter of disparities in the thinking of whites as opposed to non-whites, or even opposition in the thinking of the island’s massive influx of Indian indentured labourers as compared to native Fijians. What is striking in his account is that it was the two key groups of Indian incomers – field workers and trader-shopkeepers – who were sharply divided in their ideas about the morality of trade, value, and labour. Moreover, Kelly finds a way to account for this which productively rethinks and elasticises both the Marxist legacy as deployed in colonial political economy studies, and the theories of culture which have been embraced as their alternative.^[14]

Despite the sophistication of such ethnographically grounded political economy perspectives, many scholars reject them, even when insisting that they too see the world historically, i.e. marked and shaped by the predatory power of colonisers and their collaborators.^[15] The legacy of Marxism in the study of empire has been widely dismissed for its perceived evolutionism: identifying the effects of Western rule as bloody and disruptive for colonised societies, yet still a prelude to progress and emancipation in their transformative structural effects.^[16]

2. Typologies of colonialism

But what has become a very deep scholarly dividing line is the point at which anthropologists have turned their skills of ethnographic specificity to the forging of typologies, distinguishing, as many historians have done, between the effects of different varieties of imperial rule and power. A revealing case is the contrast drawn by Wolfe (2006) between two radically different forms or modes of colonial rule. The first of these was administrative/extractive colonialism, as in British India. Wolfe sees this as based on a framing logic that was dehumanising but not genocidal. It included the idea of the ‘native’ as a dangerous but desirable asset, making profit for empire through cash-cropping and other precarious forms of land use. Despite its many immiserating effects on indigenous peoples, this for Wolfe was still very different from colonialism in its other conceptual mode: mass-migration or settler colonialism. The critical premise in this case was that of ‘terra nullius’ (unclaimed terrain). It defined Aboriginal people as lacking the capacity to understand land as an asset with use-value, which determined for British colonisers who was and was not to be placed within the pale of productive humankind. The result was unabashedly exterminatory: portraying indigenous Australians as a nullity to be expunged, whether by direct violence or eugenicist child-seizure aimed at the ‘breeding out’ of non-white ‘racial stock’.^[17]

But rather than hailing this as an exercise in right-minded deconstructive critique, there are critics who see the thinking behind any typologising of colonialism’s variants as in itself colonial, a defining of difference which replicates the coloniser’s defining and thus silencing of the colonised subject, through the structural violence of ‘naming power’ (Krautwurst 2003). Studies framed like Wolfe’s have thus been condemned as a back-door whitewashing of empire, at odds with the mission of postcolonial criticism to expose and destabilise Eurocentric master narratives and ‘discourses of domination’ through ‘radical re-thinking and re-formulation of the forms of knowledge and social identities authored and authorized by colonialism and Western domination’ (Prakash 1992: 8).^[18]

3. The value of ethnography

Yet there are influential works in which the turning of an ethnographer’s eye to the specificities of context have been applauded for providing in-depth accounts of colonial and postcolonial settings, rather than broad-brush accounts of the colonial and postcolonial as generic states or qualities. Notable examples include treatments of colonial or formerly colonised sites as spaces of distinctive constructions of reality, through the operations of myth, narrative, and other processes of imagination and embodied practice (Ariel de Vidas 2002; Gow 2001; Graham 1998; Stoller 1995). Such works have greatly enriched the ways in which culture itself is understood within and beyond anthropology, revealing the great breadth of its manifestations as experience and reference point in different political and social contexts, for example:

as an indeterminate meeting ground between alien worldviews and meaning systems;
as the construction of essences and boundaries defining subjects’ ethnic or moral otherness;
and as a tool of resistance and assertive nationhood (Gupta & Ferguson 1992).

There has also been work on colonial cultural processes in which the concerns of classic land and labour studies have been productively reframed. Authors noting empire’s role as solvent of established forms of sovereignty and community and destroyer of livelihoods and environments such as those of pastoralists and hunter/gatherers have enriched these concerns through interest in colonialism’s dislocations of identity and selfhood. Key reference points in these explorations of fractured subjectivities and psychic trauma have been such concepts as mimesis, hybridity, and creolization to capture the blendings and assimilations as well as the traumatising disjunctures of the colonial encounter.

Thus another study by Taussig focusing on the extreme violence of colonial rule in the Amazonian Putumayo (1987) makes the region’s ruthlessly labour-hungry mode of rubber production central to his account. But Taussig’s claim is that the cruelty displayed towards the Amerindian plantation workers was not a tool used with the cold rationality of means-and-ends ‘trade and empire’ logic to solve a central problem of colonial political economy: how to control a workforce indifferent to money, clock-time, and the market. What he finds instead is a ‘culture of terror’ trapping coloniser and colonised in a state of mutual psychic dysfunction. Colonialism’s corrosive self/other identity effects are thus a pathology, to be understood in terms drawn from Benjamin and the Frankfurt School theorists Adorno and Horkheimer on the processes of mimesis in the perceiving mind: that is, the compulsive force of one’s destabilising identifications with those to whom we are ‘other’. The colonisers’ horrific acts are therefore to be seen as a projection of their own fears and aggressions. In the alienation and insecurity of colonial existence, the coloniser’s disordered mind strives nightmarishly through its mimetic image-making faculties to vest the colonised with an imagined subhuman otherness, in the unattainable hope of expunging or deflecting the savage urges they find within themselves.^[19]

Psychic dysfunctionality has been a major reference point in many works identifying the ambiguities of desire and sexuality in colonial settings as central to the ‘tensions of empire’ (Cooper & Stoler 1997).^[20] Stoler united disparate strands of Foucault’s work concerned with issues of gender, race, and sexuality to explore the destabilising biopolitical intimacies of interracial households and affective attachments in colonial Southeast Asian contexts (1995; 2002). Much use has also been made of the political psychologist Ashis Nandy’s notion of hypermasculinity as a critical dysfunction of the coloniser’s condition. Here the male coloniser is to be seen as perpetually unsure of his power, hence compulsively driven to inflate the expressions of his maleness through the fetishising of manly prowess and comradeship in pursuits such as hunting and team sport (Nandy 1989).

A striking exploration of dysfunctional hypermasculinity in the relations of colonisers and their subjects is provided in Banerjee’s account of the sexualised humiliations perpetrated by British officers against prisoners from one of India’s most remarkable anti-colonial nationalist groups: the Red Shirts, composed of Muslim Pathans (Pukhthuns) based in what is now the North West Frontier of Pakistan (2000). What Banerjee sees as the source of this abuse is that the Red Shirts were from a group classed by the British as a ‘martial race’ who had become keen adherents of Gandhi’s doctrine of pacifist non-violent resistance.^[21] This meant that they were no longer willing to play the game of manly conflict expected of them in the form of the raids and counter-raids which had nourished the white soldiers’ fragile male selfhood. This, Banerjee argues, is what generated the sense of psychic challenge to which they responded with eerily Abu Ghraib-like acts of violence.

Psycho-sexual dysfunction is also a central theme in Luhrmann’s account of fieldwork with western India’s distinctive Parsi community (1996). Under British rule this small urban group was disproportionately influential as a commercial and professional elite, much praised for their modernity: prosperous and Western-educated, both their men and women highly visible in the arenas and pursuits of the colonial public sphere.^[22] But in postcolonial India, she found them to have become strikingly akin to what Nandy found for the colonial period: a community enmeshed in the painful psychic life of ‘intimate enemies’. In their case, strikingly, this involved entangled relations with other Indians rather than the colonising ‘other’. Luhrmann found her informants much afflicted with anxieties about their place in a society where they had lost their former ‘collaborator’ niche, with these tensions playing out in the form of abiding fears about male Parsis’ masculine potency and procreative abilities.

4. Resistance

What then of the possibility of resistance in conditions of colonial subjugation and rule? The works of the historians and culture theorists whose initial inspiration was Gramsci’s neo-Marxist concept of the subaltern (from subalterno: the subordinated) identified the workings of an anti-hegemonic ‘subaltern consciousness’ in such events as India’s pre-Independence forest uprisings and peasant millenarian movements. Contributors saw these as expressions of a non-elite insurgent value system, wrongly treated as mindless disorder or criminality, both by Marxist historians and triumphalist ‘bourgeois nationalist’ narratives of the Indian freedom struggle (Guha 1999; see Chaturvedi 2000). Key contributors to this subaltern studies project saw only Gandhi as an exception to their view of organised nationalist movements and leaders as purveyors of ‘derivative discourse’, i.e. premised on alien concepts of the bourgeois liberal individual, and producing elitist and perniciously gendered scriptings of nationhood (Chatterjee 1986, 2012). Subsequent contributors lost interest in the study of rebellions and popular violence and merged their concerns with those of emerging theorists of colonial discourse and governmentality. Yet the possibility of resistance to the coloniser’s power was still a tantalising presence in some of this work. Bhabha’s celebrated reading of a key text of colonial discourse, the scholar-official T.B. Macaulay’s notorious 1835 Minute on education, raised the provocative possibility that even the most apparently one-sided exercises in authoritative power-knowledge may open up spaces for ‘sly subversion’ of the coloniser’s truth regimes. Thus despite the Minute’s unblushing dismissal of India’s entire cultural heritage, Bhabha’s claim was that the class of ‘almost white but not-quite’ Western-educated Indians – imagined by Macaulay as compliant props of colonial rule – were actually skilled parodists, using the arts of mimetic burlesque to destabilise the colonisers’ sense of confidence and superiority.^[23]

Colonialism and postcolonialism today

So do studies of colonialism and postcolonialism have a future in a world now widely said to require the multidimensional framings provided by today’s high-profile theorists of globalization and cosmopolitanism? One sign of the rich potential still offered by the colonialism/postcolonialism field’s tools and perspectives is its elasticity, as in the ways its insights have been merged and synthesised with those of other history-conscious areas of research and debate. This includes the work of scholars of socialism and postsocialism who have addressed the transformations and problematic vernacularizations of modernity in their own complex research contexts by reflecting productively on the ways in which key themes from the study of colonialism and postcolonialism can be engaged and expanded on (Bayly 2007; Kandiyoti 2002; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003).

Furthermore, as Ania Loomba has shown, many variants of contemporary globalization studies have absorbed rather than overridden the key elements of colonial and postcolonial studies (2005). Their use has provided a powerful means of avoiding the end-of-history triumphalism and ahistorical thinness with which many commentators have defined, celebrated or demonised the conditions of globalised cultural and economic life in today’s world of flexible citizenship and fractured sovereignties. Consciousness of empire and a continuing engagement with the rich and varied literature on its impacts and afterlife thus has the potential to nuance and ground the many ways in which scholars now seek to grasp all that is local, translocal and global in the world today.

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Note on contributor

Susan Bayly is Professor of Historical Anthropology in the Cambridge University Department of Social Anthropology and a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge. Her research focuses on colonialism and its cultural afterlife in Asia’s former French and British colonies. She regularly conducts ethnographic research in Vietnam as part of a larger comparative project on empire and post-colonial transformations in a variety of periods and settings. She also retains a long-standing research interest in India, where she has focused on caste, religious conversion and a variety of translocal social and cultural movements. She is a former editor of The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, and has theoretical interests in the study of modernity, globalization, theories of historical change, and the disciplinary interface between history and anthropology. Her publications include Asian voices in a postcolonial age: Vietnam, India and beyond (Cambridge University Press, 2007). She has also published studies of the Indian caste system and of Indian religion in its historical and anthropological contexts.

Professor Susan Bayly, Department of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. sbb10@cam.ac.uk

[1] Chiriyankandath (2007: 36). This includes the lands occupied or controlled by European colonial powers and also by Japan – a great competing modern expansionist imperial power. Britain alone ruled a quarter of the world’s population by 1914. It has been estimated that in 1880 the wealth of the industrialised colonising West was twice that of the colonised regions of the world and by 1913 the West was three times richer than its colonies and dependencies (Hobsbawm 1987).

[2] Plus the upheavals in Indochina, Kenya, Palestine, Burma, Rhodesia and other key sites of bloody twentieth-century decolonisation. Equally significant in the balance sheet of empire: the genocidal impact of colonial conquest and mass European migration to both the New World and Australia; the impact and enduring legacy of the Atlantic slave trade; the massive population transfers reconstituting the populations of Fiji and other Pacific societies. On the massive environmental transformations produced in colonial contexts, see Beinart (2008), Grove (1997), and Sivaramakrishnan (1999).

[3] The sites in which these processes have been documented include hospitals and mental asylums (Arnold 2000; Dwyer 2001; Mills 2000); schools, plantations, and prisons; and museums and other public exhibition spaces (Çelik 1997; Cohn 1996; Cooper 2005; Cooper and Stoler 1997; Glover 2007; Landau & Kaspin 2002; Mitchell 1991; Rabinow 1989; Silverblatt 2006; Zinoman 2001).

[4] In Roman Britain, coloniae were land grants made to demobilised veterans to stabilise imperial authority in difficult frontier regions; the English East India Company tried to do the same with its locally recruited sepoy soldiers. (Alavi 1993)

[5] Although classics such as Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer and Azande studies are still being productively engaged in important debates, e.g. about the nature of the secular in ‘late modernity’ (Engelke 2015).

[6] Hardt and Negri’s (2000) concept of ‘rhizomic’ (or rhizomatic) empire as an account of the world’s endlessly radiating and amorphous flows of power has been widely debated; see Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin (1995), Boehmer (2006), and Reyna (2002).

[7] Critiques of the Orientalist paradigm include Carrier (1992) and Coronil (1996).

[8] Studies exploring colonial science as a co-productive enterprise of mutual interaction and appropriation include Jasanoff (2004) and Sivasundaram (2005); compare Prakash (1999). On the extent to which translation and interaction are ever possible in colonial contexts, see Rafael (1993); Lockhart (1994).

[9] For example, Cohn (1996), Cooper and Stoler (1997), Inden (1986), Mani (1989), Mignolo (1993), Mitchell (1991), Parry (1987), Prakash (1990), Raheja (1996), and Williams and Chrisman (1993).

[10] ‘The central despair of the Black psyche, the fact that Black men and women are constrained to live in a world deliberately constructed to reduce and sicken them, and that as a consequence there is no such thing as normal Black people in the colonial world. They are all pathological cases, the main difference being between those who can see through the white mask and those who wear the mask as if it were real.’ (Smith 1973: 26; see also Fanon 1967)

[11] For Lenin, imperialism was the invasive and unstoppable force of capitalism. Its use as a basis for the analysis of actual global empires was a subsequent development in Marxist thought, initially inspired by the work of Rosa Luxembourg.

[12] See Sahlins (1985), Obeyesekere’s attack (1992) and Sahlins’s riposte (1995). See also Fabian (1983) and Mintz (1985). Sahlins also explored the transformative effects of Hawaiians’ subsequent ‘consumption craze’ for foreign goods in the context of the islands’ entry into worldwide trading networks as exporters of high-value local sandalwood (1985; see also Friedman 1994). There is in addition a rich literature using colonial ‘first contact’ case studies for reflections on the meaning and nature of ‘events’ and history as experienced in diverse cultural contexts: for example, Fausto (2002) and Strathern (1992).

[13] For example, in imagining Jesus as black or female (Hermann 1992; Kaplan 1995; Lindstrom 1993). Compare Comaroff and Comaroff (1991) and Silverblatt (2006). In African spirit possession too, there is the possibility that the conjuring of supernatural beings who appear to practitioners as parodic white men is a play on colonisers’ fears, or an enduring memory and appropriation of their aura and power (Stoller 1995).

[14] The commoditisation of labour in Fiji is thus not an experience bringing pain and alienation to those it objectifies, as in classic Marxism, nor is it a source of class struggle. The path of virtue is wage labour in a spirit of virtuous service for the ex-indentured labourers, and an ethic of sober, unaquisitive money-making for the Indian trader-shopkeepers (Kelly 1992).

[15] This is a contested term in colonial studies (see Mamdani 2001).

[16] Key works of postcolonial theory, notably Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe (2000), have been both praised and dismissed (Kaiwar 2014) as attempted renewals of Marxism.

[17] On race theory in India, see Moore, Kosek & Pandian (2003).

[18] See critical discussion in Dirlik (1994).

[19] More recent accounts of the mimetic in colonial contexts include Eaton (2013).

[20] See also Burton (2005), McClintock (1995), and Spivak (1996).

[21] For anthropological explorations of Gandhi’s distinctiveness as political activist and anticolonial moralist prescribing highly innovative understandings of emancipated selfhood (swaraj: self-rule) for both coloniser and colonised, see e.g. Fox (1989), Alter (2000), and Mazzarella (2010).

[22] Among highly critical deconstructive accounts of the notions of modernised male and female selfhood in the arenas of ‘home and the world’ of the colonial public sphere is Devji (1991).

[23] ‘ ... a single shelf of a good European library [is] worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia … [Through anglicized education, we ...] must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern, – a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect’ (Macaulay 1862).