Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Representation

Democracy

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

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

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Initially published 15 Dec 2025

Abstract:

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Transitions to democracy and local meanings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Secularism and liberalism

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

Secularism

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liberalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

Citizenship and governmentality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Representation and participation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

Acknowledgements

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

References

Agrama, Hussein Ali. 2012. Questioning secularism. Islam, sovereignty, and the rule of law in modern Egypt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Appadurai, Arjun. 2007. “Hope and democracy.” Public Culture 19, no. 1: 29–34.

Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Banerjee, Mukulika. 2014. Why India votes? New Delhi: Routledge.

Bauberot, Jean, Micheline Millot and Philippe Portier. 2014. Laïcité, laicités: Reconfigurations et nouveaux défis (Afrique, Amériques, Europe, Japon, Pays Arabes). Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de L’Homme.

Bock, Jan-Jonathan. 2021. “The Five Star Movement (M5S) in Rome: The real life of utopian politics.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 29, no. 1: 52–67.

Bubandt, Nils. 2006. “Sorcery, Corruption, and the Dangers of Democracy in Indonesia.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12 no. 2: 413–32.

Bubandt, Nils and Martijn Van Beek. 2012. Varieties of Secularism in Asia: Anthropological Explorations of Religion, Politics and the Spiritual. New York: Routledge.

Bubandt, Nils. 2012. "Shadows of secularism: Money politics, spirit politics and the law in an Indonesian election." In Varieties of Secularism in Asia: Anthropological Explorations of Religion, Politics and the Spiritual, edited by Nils Bubandt and Martijn Van Beek. 183-207. New York: Routledge.

Candea, Matei. 2011. “‘Our division of the universe’: Making space for the non-political in the anthropology of politics.” Current Anthropology 52, no. 3: 309–34.

Caldeira, Teresa. 2000. City of walls: Crime, segregation, and citizenship in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Caldeira, Teresa and J. Holston. 1999. “Democracy and violence in Brazil.” Journal for Comparative Study of Society and History 41, no. 4: 691–729.

Cesarino, Leticia. 2022. “Tropical Trump? Illiberal politics and the digital life of (anti)corruption in Brazil.” In Corruption and illiberal politics in the Trump era, edited by Donna Goldstein and Kristen Drybread, 162–81. New York: Routledge.

———. 2024. “New media's conspiratorial affordances: An ecology of mind approach.” In Populism and conspiracy theory: Case studies and theoretical perspectives, edited by Michael Butter, Katerina Hatzikidi, Constanze Jeitler et al, 308–22. Routledge: London.

Collins, Michael. 2021. “Behind the ballot: Democracy, chicanery, and electoral technique in modern India.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 44, no. 1: 28–42.

Coles, Kimberley A. 2004. “Election day: The construction of democracy through technique.” Cultural Anthropology 19, no. 4: 551–80.

Coronil, Fernando. 2019. “Transitions to transitions: Democracy and nation in Latin America.” In The Fernando Coronil reader: The struggle for life is the matter, edited by Julie Skurski, Gary Wilder, Laurent Dubois et al, 231–49. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Del Nido, Juan. 2022. Taxis vs Uber: Courts, markets and technology in Buenos Aires. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Dullo, Eduardo. 2016. “‘Seriously enough?’ Describing or analysing the native(s)'s point of view.” In After the crisis: Anthropological thought, neoliberalism and the aftermath, edited by James G. Carrier, 133–53. London: Routledge.

———. 2022. “A political ritual without closure: serial liminality and the escalation of conflict in Brazil’s street demonstrations.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 41, no. 5: 695–709.

Dunn, John. 2019. Setting the people free: The story of democracy. 2^nd edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1991. “Governmentality.” In The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality, edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller, 87–104. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Flynn, Alex U. 2021. “Once upon a time in utopia: Bergson, temporality and the remaking of social movement futures.” Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 29, no. 1: 156–73.

———. 2024. Forty years of the Landless Workers Movement: Landless perspectives. London: Routledge.

Furani, Khaled. 2015. “Is there a post-secular?” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 83, no. 1: 1–26.

Gauchet, Marcel. 1985. Le désenchantement du monde. Paris: Gallimard.

———. 1998. La religion dans la démocratie. Paris: Gallimard.

Gold, Marina. 2019. “The Swiss paradox: Egalitarianism and hierarchy in a model democracy.” Social Analysis 63, no. 1: 22–43.

Gonçalves, João and Gideon Lasco. 2023. “Anthropology, democracy, and authoritarianism: Reflections from Brazil and the Philippines.” Current Anthropology 64, no. 1: 27–48.

Graeber, David. 2007. “There never was a West: or, democracy emerges from the spaces in between.” In Possibilities: Essays on hierarchy, rebellion, and desire, edited by David Graeber, 329–74. Oakland: AK Press.

———. 2010. “Value, politics and democracy in the United States.” Current Sociology 59, no. 2: 186–99.

Grenberg, Jessica. 2014. After the revolution: Youth, democracy, and the politics of disappointment in Serbia. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Habermas, Jurgen. 2008. Between naturalism and religion. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Hall, Kira, Donna Meryl Goldstein, and Matthew Bruce Ingram. 2016. “The hands of Donald Trump: Entertainment, gesture, spectacle.” HAU 6, no. 2: 71–100.

Hartikainen, Elena I. 2018. “A politics of respect: Reconfiguring democracy in Afro-Brazilian religious activism in Salvador, Brazil.” American Ethnologist 45, no. 1: 87–99.

Hatzikidi, Katerina. 2023a. “Populisms in power: plural and ambiguous.” In Right-wing populism in Latin America and beyond, edited by Anthony Pereira, 50–68. London: Routledge.

———. 2023b. “‘The communavirus is here’: Anti-Communist conspiracy theories in Brazil's response to the Covid-19 pandemic.” In Covid conspiracy theories in global perspective, edited by Michael Butter and Peter Knight, 366–78. London: Routledge.

Hatzikidi, Katerina and Eduardo Dullo. 2021. “Introduction: Brazil’s conservative return.” In A horizon of (im)possibilities: A chronicle of Brazil’s conservative turn, edited by Katerina Hatzikidi and Eduardo Dullo, 1–33. London: University of London Press.

Heller, Patrick. 2022. “Democracy in the Global South.” Annual Review of Sociology. 48: 463–84.

Heredia, Beatriz and Moacir Palmeira. 2006. “O voto como adesão.” Teoria e Cultura (UFJF) 1, no. 1: 35–58.

Hickel, Jason. 2015. Democracy as death: the moral order of anti-liberal politics in South Africa. University of California Press.

Holston, James. 2008. Insurgent citizenship: Disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Juris, Jeffrey S. 2012. “Reflections on #Occupy everywhere: Social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation.” American Ethnologist 39, no. 2: 259–79.

Karlström, Mikael. 1996. “Imagining democracy: Political culture and democratisation in Buganda.” AFRICA: Journal of the International African Institute 66, no. 4: 485–505.

Koch, Insa. 2017. “What’s in a vote? Brexit beyond culture wars.” American Ethnologist 44, no. 2: 225–30. http://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12472.

Kunreuther, Laura. 2018. “Sounds of democracy: Performance, protest, and political subjectivity.” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1: 1–31.

Lazar, Sian. 2008. El Alto, rebel city: Self and citizenship in Andean Bolivia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Li, Tania Murray. 2007. “Governmentality.” Anthropologica 49, no. 2: 275–81.

Luehrmann, Sonja. 2011. Secularism Soviet style: Teaching atheism and religion in a Volga republic. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of piety: The Islamic Revival and the feminist subject. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

———. 2010. “Can secularism be other-wise?” In Varieties of secularism in a secular age, edited by Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen and Craig Calhoun, 282–99. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Mainwating, Scott. 1989. “Transitions to democracy and democratic consolidation? Theoretical and comparative issues.” Working Paper 130. Kellogg Institute for International Studies. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame.

Mauricio, Cleonardo, Jr. 2019. “‘Acordamos, somos cidadãos’: os evangélicos e a constituição ética de si na relação com o político.” Revista Anthropológicas 30, no. 1: 99–135.

Mayblin, Maya. 2025. Vote of Faith: Democracy, desire and the turbulent lives of priest politicians. New York: Fordham University Press.

Mayblin, Maya, and Katherine Clough. 2014. Vote of faith. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ng05Ke8BM8A.

Mazzarella, William. 2019. “The anthropology of populism: beyond the liberal settlement.” Annual Review of Anthropology 48: 45–60.

Michelutti, Lucia. 2007. “The vernacularisation of democracy: Political participation and popular politics in North India.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13: 639–56.

———. 2019. “Cast and the anthropology of democracy.” In Critical themes in Indian sociology, edited by Sanjay Srivastava, Yasmeen Arif, and Janaki Abraham, 195–204. New Delhi: Sage.

Mouffe, Chantal. 2005. On the political. London: Routledge.

Muehlebach, Andrea. 2012. The moral neoliberal: Welfare and citizenship in Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Navaro-Yashin, Yael. 2002. Faces of the state: Secularism and public life in Turkey. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

O’Neill, Kevin. 2010. City of God: Christian citizenship in postwar Guatemala. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Paley, Julia. 2001. “Making democracy count: Opinion polls and market surveys in the Chilean political transition.” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2: 135–64.

———. 2002. “Toward an anthropology of democracy.” Annual Review of Anthropology 31: 469–96.

———, ed. 2008. Democracy: Anthropological perspectives. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.

Palmeira, Moacir. 2004. “Eleição municipal, política e cidadania.” In Política no Brasil: visões de antropólogos, edited by Moacir Palmeira and César Barreira, 137–50. Rio de Janeiro: Relume-Dumará.

Pasieka, Agnieska. 2019. “Anthropology of the far right: What if we like the ‘unlikeable’ others?” Anthropology Today 35, no. 1: 3–6.

———. 2024. Living right: Far-right youth activists in contemporary Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Piliavisky, Anastasia. 2020. Nobody’s people: Hierarchy as hope in a society of thieves. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

———. 2023. “Hierarchy as a democratic value in India: An informal essay.” Current Anthropology 64, no. 5: 581–98.

Piliavsky, Anastasia and Judith Scheele. 2022. “Towards a critical ethnography of political concepts.” HAU 12, no. 3: 686–700.

Pinheiro-Machado, Rosana and Lucia Scalco. 2020. “From hope to hate: The rise of conservative subjectivity in Brazil.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10, no. 1: 21–31.

———. 2021. “Humanizing fascists? Nuance as an anthropological responsibility.” Social Anthropology 29, no. 2: 329–36.

Postero, Nancy. 2007. Now we are citizens: Indigenous politics in postmulticultural Bolivia. Stanford: Stanford University Press

Postero, Nancy and Eli Elinoff. 2019. “Introduction: A return to politics.” Anthropological Theory 19, no. 1: 3–28.

Razsa, Maple and Andrej Kurnik. 2012. “The Occupy Movement in Žižek’s hometown: Direct democracy and a politics of becoming.” American Ethnologist 39, no. 2: 238–58.

Ryan, Alan. 2012. The making of modern liberalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Schaffer, Frederic C. 1997. “Political concepts and the study of democracy: The case of demokaraasi in Senegal.” PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 20, no. 1: 40–9.

Spencer, Jonathan. 2007. Anthropology, politics, and the state: Democracy and violence in South Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

van der Veer, Peter. 2014. The modern spirit of Asia: The spiritual and the secular in China and India. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

West, Harry. 2008. “‘Govern yourselves’: Democracy and carnage in northern Mozambique.” In Democracy: Anthropological approaches, edited by Julia Paley, 97–122. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.

Note on contributor

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

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

Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

Mind

Rebecca Tishler — Sat, 02 Oct 2021 17:37:15 +0000

Tanya Marie Luhrmann

Stanford University

Initially published 2 Oct 2021

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

Abstract:

There is something phenomenologically basic about the human experience of awareness, or consciousness. All ethnographies describe people who think, feel, imagine, hope, and are aware. Yet anthropologists have shown that different social worlds understand mental life (we will call this ‘mind’) in different ways. Different cultures imagine mental life differently, both in what thought can do, and how one might draw the boundary between mind and world. These culturally different understandings have real social consequences. They affect the way that people imagine what it is to be a self, the way they understand time and history, the way they understand spirits and rituals, the way they experience illness and health. More recently, anthropologists have begun to use the phrase ‘anthropology of mind’ to describe the comparative exploration of specific dimensions in the way the mind-world boundary is imagined. For example, they have observed that in some social worlds, one finds mental ‘opacity’. In those social worlds, people understand that one cannot know—or, should not presume to know—what someone else is thinking or intending. Another dimension is ‘porosity’. In some social worlds, the mind-world boundary is imagined to be permeable, so that thoughts pass into the world directly, and are potent. Someone can feel vulnerable because a witch, for example, thinks envious thoughts—and those thoughts are understood to be powerful enough to enter someone else’s body and harm it. They have different views about who or what has a mind. It turns out that the way we think about the mind in the West is culturally peculiar.

Introduction

The basic question of an anthropological approach to mind is whether there are culturally different representations of mental life, broadly construed, and if so, whether and how they matter. (There is another, related question, which is whether people in different social worlds have different cognitive orientations; that is a more psychological question and will not be discussed in detail here.) The question starts with the presumption that the experience of conscious awareness—thinking, feeling, reflecting, knowing, hoping, desiring and so forth—is phenomenologically basic for humans, but that different social worlds often represent this domain of experience differently. Some social worlds sharply distinguish mind from body; others do not. Some treat thoughts as potent, so that one person’s angry private thought can hurt another person’s body directly; others do not. Some treat the mind as the source of identity, so that what someone thinks defines who they are; others do not. Some believe that personal feelings should be shared widely and easily; others do not. For some, the mind is an epiphenomenon of the brain, and it is the brain that is more real; for others, the mind is part of a spiritual reality more real than the everyday world. The anthropological approach to mind sets out to understand what we can know about these cultural differences in the representation of mind, and how those differences affect those who hold them.

Conceptions of the mind in early ethnographies

The observation that different social worlds imagine mental life differently was one of the great achievements of early anthropology and the source of some of its most interesting debates, although these observations were not always made systematically or explicitly. The first point to be made was that different representations of mental life did exist. One of the most important essays here was by a Frenchman, Marcel Mauss. His 1938 essay, ‘A category of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of self’ argued that across time and space, everywhere, something like a self is present, but it is not always expressed by the concepts ‘me’ or ‘I’, (‘moi’ or ‘je’). Everywhere, that is, humans are aware of themselves as individual beings: as Mauss writes, ‘There has never existed a human being who has not been aware, not only of his body, but also at the same time of his individuality, both spiritual and physical’ (1985 [1938]: 3). At the same time, they were not always aware of being aware. All humans, Mauss argued, had a sense of the moi, a sense of ‘me-ness’, but in different societies, with different systems of law, religion, customs, social structure, and mentality, they conceive of this moi in different ways. Among the Zuni, the Pueblo Indians in North America studied by Frank Cushing and Matilda Coxe Stevenson at the end of the nineteenth century, a person is first and foremost someone who occupies a role within the clan (Cushing 1896). A Zuni person’s sense of individual uniqueness receded against their sense of prescribed status, the way an athlete in a team sport can find that their sense of self feels so much less important than who they are on their team. One is first and foremost a ‘personage’, as Mauss put it: a name, a title, a placeholder for those who will come later. Among the Kwakiutl, another indigenous group in North America, studied in the early twentieth century by Franz Boas among others, every stage of life was named and designated, with many represented by masks used in sacred rituals (Boas 1921). Among communities like the Zuni and the Kwakiutl, people are imagined primarily through their definite location in the social whole—mother, child, ancestor, and so forth, cycling through their roles like leaves on a forest floor. Mauss argued that the idea that a person’s private, personal thoughts and feelings make them who they are is really quite recent. In fact, he claimed that even in the West, the psychological self—the person defined by personal thoughts and feelings—did not become of paramount importance until the nineteenth century.

Another French anthropologist, Maurice Leenhardt, provided an extended ethnographic example of a non-Western representation of inner mental life. Leenhardt had spent two decades among the Houailou speakers (he calls them the Canaque) who lived in the western Pacific archipelago known in English as New Caledonia, first as a missionary and then as an anthropologist, at the beginning of the twentieth century. In his classic ethnography, Do Kamo, Leenhard argued that the Canaque avoid the kind of analytic categories that came easily to his French readership. For them, ‘thought springs from viscera’ (1979 [1947]: 7). What he seemed to mean by this was that they did not have many abstract words. Before the missionaries came, he wrote, the Canaque did not use words to refer to thought or to thinking. They didn’t really have a term for the body either, nor did they talk as if anything happened ‘inside’ the body. ‘Man and world, the living and the dead, gods and totems, each plays its own role, but each lacks distinct boundaries’, Leenhard explained (1979 [1947]: 74). People have some sense of these distinctions, but their distinctness is not culturally meaningful. The Canaque did not have a sense that, for example, that time passes in a way that is the same for all. Nor did they clearly seem to separate myth from the empirical everyday. Leenhardt wrote that instead, the Canaque lived in ‘a reality where the mythic forms of life are visible to the eye, and where [Canaque] verbal expressions have a mythic tone in which myth can be perceived as an experienced reality’ (1979 [1947]: 19). Leenhardt told a now-famous story: that after decades of talking to the Canaque about Christianity, he asked them if he and his wife had brought the spirit to their way of thinking. No, they replied, we have always had the spirit: ‘What you have brought us is the body’ (1979: 164).

Yet another extended ethnographic example came from Godfrey Lienhardt’s Divinity and experience (1961). That book set out to understand the religion of the Dinka of Southern Sudan, with whom Lienhardt had lived for around three years in the late 1940s. The Dinka are a pastoralist people who move between permanent and wet-season settlements as the Nile river valley swells with rain. Lienhardt was fascinated by what he calls ‘symbolic action’: that, for example, a man hurrying home later than he wished might tie a tuft of grass to delay the meal at the journey’s end. Lienhardt’s ethnographic goal was to explain that this is not a magical act: ‘No Dinka thinks that by performing such an action he has actually assured the result he hopes for’ (1961: 283). The symbolic action, he wrote, is not a substitute for practical action, but a preparation for it. The person tying the knot makes an external representation of a mental intention: a model, as the author put it, of their hopes and desires. Symbolic actions do not change historical events. They change the way we prepare for and react to them.

All well and good: this sounds like something secular Western readers might say. But Lienhardt also laid out a local understanding of mind that, he argued, would have made symbolic action feel more real. He held that the Dinka had no conception of a domain of thought and feeling inside of them which symbolic action might effect: ‘The Dinka have no conception which at all closely corresponds to our popular modern conception of the “mind” as mediating and, as it were, storing up experiences of the self’ (1961: 149). Dinka culture did not model the mind as separate from the world. Lienhardt writes:

So it seems that what we should call in some cases the ‘memories’ of experiences, and regard therefore as in some way intrinsic and interior to the remembering person and modified in their effect upon him by that interiority, appear to the Dinka as exteriorly acting upon him (1961: 149).

You could not say to a Dinka person that a dream was ‘only’ a dream, or that an experience was ‘only’ psychological. ‘They do not make the kind of distinction between the psyche and the world which would make such interpretations significant for them’ (1961: 149). For those who hold such representations, symbolic action is more powerful. The doer of the action has fewer resources with which he can dismiss its efficacy as only a thought in the mind or only a dream.

Early anthropologists did not just show that representations of mental life were more or less abstract. They also argued that people in different social worlds thought differently about mental causation. One of the more forceful arguments was made by another French philosopher-anthropologist, Lucian Lévy-Bruhl. In How natives think (1979 [1926]), he argued that people who were not literate, and who lived in small scale, traditional societies (he called them ‘primitive’) imagined thought as potent in its own right. Such people imagined themselves as participating in the external world, and the external world as participating in their minds and bodies. A man might believe, for example, that his enemies would have power over him if they simply knew his name; he might believe that his dream was a visitation by a real and external spirit. Lévy-Bruhl called such an orientation ‘mystical’ and he described it as governed by ‘the law of participation’ in which objects are ‘both themselves and other than themselves’ (1979 [1926]: 76). He also called it ‘prelogical’. In the modern West, he thought, people define reality as independent of what they think and feel: ‘Our perception is directed toward the apprehension of an objective reality, and this reality alone’ (1979 [1926]: 59). Non-modern people, he argued, imagined their thinking as more entangled in the world. At this point, Lévy-Bruhl was more focused on what he took to be the mistaken thinking of the pre-modern world, and confused ideas about what was real, than on a different representation of the mind. These days, readers might find his evolutionist language to be dated and inappropriate. The question he raised—whether non-literate people in small societies might think about thought differently—is still important.

At the end of his life, in the posthumous Notebooks, Lévy-Bruhl abandoned the claim that so-called primitive people thought differently than modern Westerners do. (He did so in part because he had struck up a close relationship with Maurice Leenhardt.) Instead, he began to write of ‘a mystical mentality which is more marked and more easily observable among “primitive peoples” than in our own societies, but it is present in every human mind” (1975 [1949]: 100-1). The mystical mode of thought was both affective and conceptual, and had those features which he had attributed to ‘the law of participation’ all along: independence from ordinary space and time, logical contradictions (an object is both here and there), identity between objects and their arbitrary features (between hair cuttings and the person from whom they came, for example), and ‘the feeling of a contact, most often unforeseen, with a reality other than the reality given in the surrounding milieu’ (1975 [1949]: 108, 102). He thought that the mystical mode intermixed with everyday thought continually in our minds. He thought that the Kwakiutl switched back and forth between modes of thought as did the Catholic French. For him, the puzzle became, ‘How does it happen that these “mental habits” make themselves felt in certain circumstances and not in others?’ (1975 [1949]: 100).

This was in fact the puzzle that the English anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard focused on in Witchcraft, oracles and magic among the Azande (1937) based on fieldwork in southern Sudan in the late 1920s. Evans-Pritchard was quite struck by the social importance of ideas about witchcraft in the community in which he lived. The Azande spoke and acted as if some people had special abilities. The angry and envious thoughts of those people could make other people sick, hurt their crops, delay their travel, and in general cause bad things to happen in their lives. Ordinary people also used a variety of techniques to divine who was bewitching them and how to protect themselves magically against them. In his ethnography, Evans-Pritchard set out the conditions which he thought could help to explain why the Azande did not notice why witchcraft, as he put it, did not really exist—that envious and angry thoughts did not in fact have this supernatural power. He suggested many reasons for Azande failure to notice the futility of their magic, among them the failure to generalise across situations, the disinterest in experimental technique, and so forth. His work gave rise to extremely active debates about modes of thought, the difference between science and religion, the nature of rationality, and so forth. It also gave rise to active discussions about why witchcraft beliefs emerged in some social worlds rather than others. Mary Douglas’s important edited volume, Witchcraft: confessions and accusations (1970) concluded that witchcraft beliefs were more often found in agricultural societies where social conflict cannot be easily resolved by moving, as it can be in hunter-gathering groups. The authors also found them to be more frequent in communities where the transition to power—such as being headman of the village—is unstructured, rather than being determined straightforwardly by being the headman’s first born son, for example.

These and other classic texts share the basic intuition that human awareness is imagined differently in different settings—and thus, that there is something particular about the representation of mind in the modern West. This sense of mind as a thing, as the seat of the self, as the driver of action, as something inner which is separate from an outer world; these are Western preoccupations, not Kwatkiutl, Canaque, or Dinka preoccupations. And although the authors quoted above made their claims broad and thinly sketched, the basic point seems right. A remarkable collection published in 1981 by Paul Heelas and Andrew Lock, entitled Indigenous psychology, laid out clear comparative evidence of different representations of mental experience. One essay, by Signe Howell, demonstrated that the Malaysian Chewong had very few vocabulary words for inner states. The Chewong certainly experienced emotion—but their social concerns circled around suppressing those emotions, and around their fear that the person who did not suppress was vulnerable to ghosts, spirits, and malevolent forces. In 1998, a dense article by Angeline Lillard in Psychological Bulletin summarised decades of ethnographic work to argue that the model of mind most psychologists took for granted was in fact quite culturally peculiar. The time seemed ripe for a structured comparative exploration of representations of mind and their consequences.

And then the work stalled. Little was written about the anthropology of mind for some three decades. Work in the area likely stalled for two reasons. The first is the shift in the temper of the times. Post-1960s anthropology ushered in an intense guilt about replicating colonial power dynamics in scholarly practice, and psychologically-informed inquiry, focused as it was on the intimate and the private, seemed the most egregious of unmerited intrusions. Michel Foucault began to dominate anthropology and anthropologists began to diagnose power asymmetries and to doubt their own capacity to observe. The second was the publication of a book that seemed to be undergirded with the new theoretical sophistication of cognitive science. C.R. Hallpike’s Foundations of primitive thought (1979) reported an observation made repeatedly about adults not schooled with Western education: they fail the standard tasks that indicate advancement along the cognitive path to adulthood in the West. They systematically fail tasks devised by Western researchers (like Jean Piaget and Alexander Luria) to test whether a child has cognitively advanced from early childhood to middle childhood. For example, in one task, the person taking the test is shown a tall thin glass from which water is poured into a short, fat glass and then asked whether the second glass contains the same amount of water. Younger children say no; older ones say yes. Hallpike carried out his work in a Melanesian village. With apparent regret, he reported that his adult villagers failed most of these tasks. When water was poured from a tall thin glass into a short fat glass, they said that the amount of water had changed. Hallpike was careful, thorough, and, seemingly, knowledgeable. He concluded that his adult villagers had the cognitive abilities of a preschool Western child. Most anthropologists were horrified. Although his conclusions were roundly criticised (Shweder 1982, Hamill 1985, Cole 2013), many younger anthropologists backed away from the comparative study of mind altogether.

To be clear, this apparent failure is deeply interesting. It suggests that the tasks embed assumptions about how children should respond to adults, what it means when adults question children, and so forth (see Greenfield 1997). It also suggests that there may be ways in which people in non-Western settings organise information differently than those in Western settings. In fact, this was the deep question raised by Claude Lévi-Strauss across his work (see especially Tristes tropiques [1955] and Wild thought [1962]). He argued that people without writing thought about history quite differently, and that they imagined that the world was limited to what they knew, rather than assuming that the world had many things which they did not yet know (imagining a ‘closed’ rather than an ‘open’ society). He compared the way Westerners thought to an engineer constructing large new buildings, and he compared ‘wild’ or ‘savage’ thought to the work of a bricoleur, a do-it-yourself handyman who solves problems with materials at hand. Lévi-Strauss was very clear that the cognitive capabilities of people living in small-scale and non-literate societies were as sharp as those of people in the West. In recent years, as cognitive science has emerged within the academy, some anthropologists (and psychologists) have begun to explore the question of how culture affects cognitive analysis (see overviews by D’Andrade 1995, Strauss & Quinn 1997, Henrich, Heine & Norenzayan 2010). They find that people in non-literate, small scale societie are equally cognitively capable as those in the modern West, but that their analytic styles can be quite different.

The anthropology of mind

In recent years, interest in culturally different models of mind has re-emerged as psychologically-inclined anthropologists have encountered a mature cognitive science which is increasingly concerned with cultural diversity. These days the ‘anthropology of mind’ is an emerging field which studies the way different representations of thought, awareness, and the mental shape the way people move in their world. Rather than only looking at performances and tests and asking how culture shapes cognitive process, the anthropology of mind asks what leads to different conceptions about thought and thinking, and how those differences matter. Psychologists have used the phrase ‘theory of mind’ to refer to the ways that children learn to draw inferences about other people’s minds (Gopnik & Meltzoff 1996). The anthropology of mind tends to use the term ‘local theory of mind’ to describe the cultural ideas about the mind that shape the ways that they draw those inferences.

Current discussions tend to assume the following points. They assume that all humans make some kind of mind-body distinction, but map it differently in different social worlds. Anthropologists are sometimes tempted to use the work of Lienhardt, Leenhardt, Howell, and so forth as evidence that mind-body dualism is an aberration of Western society, and that in many other social worlds people simply do not make the distinction. Indeed, one anthropologist, Rita Astuti, has described the idea that non-Western people are free of dualistic thinking as ‘one of anthropology’s favorite claims about cognition’ (2001: 429). Here is an example: ‘Gahuku notions do not parallel, but collapse, Western mind/body categories. For them … the body swallows and contains the mind’ (Strathern 1994: 45). And another: ‘Many (if not most) non-Western peoples … simply do not recognize anything comparable to the social/biological distinction as articulated by Western discourse’ (Ingold 1991: 362).

In fact, they do. The Malagasy Vezo studied by Rita Astuti speak as if they do not distinguish between nature and nurture, what is inherited by the body and what is learned through the mind. They insist that birth parents do not have exclusive rights to, or authority over, a child, and that resemblance between parents and children arises out of rich social involvement. The adult who cares makes the child. And yet when adult Vezo were asked to reason about the characteristics of an adopted child—with a story about parents attacked by bandits, a child left alone in the bush, found by another couple and loved—they clearly distinguished between bodily characteristics and mental ones. Astuti showed that they thought that the body of the adopted child would surely resemble her birth parents, but her thought and opinions were more like to resemble those who had adopted her. In another study, the Vezo systematically attribute more thinking and feeling capacities to a dead man (does he miss his wife?) than bodily capacities (does he get hungry?), the more so if they were invited to think about religion (Astuti & Harris 2008). These observations are supported by systematic work in other groups (e.g. Bering 2004, Cohen et al. 2011; see Weisman et al. forthcoming). The evidence strongly suggests that most humans recognise the difference between mind (broadly conceived) and body (again, broadly conceived).

At the same time, the evidence suggests that in different social worlds people draw the distinction between mind and body in different ways. We now see efforts to understand systematically how this human terrain is mapped differently by different cultures. Phillipe Descola’s grand comparative study, Beyond nature and culture (2013), for example, seeks to show that the culturally different representations of the human-nature relationship shape basic mental schemas through which humans apprehend the world. Descola asks:

But what is the form of this structural subconscious? Is it present in each mind in the form of cognitive imperatives that remain tacit despite being culturally determined, or is it distributed among the properties of the institutions that reveal it to the observer? How is it internalized by each individual and by what means does it act in such a way that it may determine recurrent behavior patterns that can be translated into vernacular models? (2013: 96)

He answers, in effect, that we know that there are cognitive schemas common to all humans yet internalised differently through experience in a specific social and environmental setting (2013: 103). Some of these culturally shaped schemas, or models, are consciously available to those in the group, but some are not. ‘Many cultural models are not transmitted as bodies of precepts but are internalized little by little, without any particular teaching, although this does not prevent them from being objectified quite schematically when circumstances demand it’ (2013: 103). The models become ‘the tacit frameworks and procedures of objectivization by means of which actors in the system themselves organize their relations to the world and to Others’ (2013: 110). The rest of his book is an ethnographic argument that there are deep differences in representation that follow the logic he lays out. Descola describes his comparative account as explaining the way the nature-human relationship shifts around the world. One might as easily describe it as a comparison of who is held to have minds: no one but humans (the West); everything, including rocks (Amazonia and other animist societies); some plants and animals which represent humans, but not all (Australian indigenous peoples and other totemic groups); a more contingent, shifting relationship (in other settings).

The Mind and Spirit project, a Stanford-based comparative and interdisciplinary project under my direction, also set out to understand differences in models of mind across settings (Luhrmann 2020a). This project drew on the expertise of anthropologists, psychologists, historians, and philosophers to ask whether different understandings of ‘mind’, broadly construed, might shape or be related to the ways that people attend to and interpret experiences they deem spiritual or supernatural. We took a mixed-method, multiphase approach, combining participant observation, long-form semi-structured interviews, quantitative surveys among the general population and local undergraduates, and psychological experiments with children and adults. We worked in five different countries: China, Ghana, Thailand, Vanuatu and the US, with some work in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In each country, we included a focus on members of urban charismatic evangelical churches, with additional work in rural areas and in indigenous religious settings of local importance.

The Mind and Spirit Project showed systematically that there are local theories of mind by interviewing and surveying people with similar probes about thinking and feeling. In Thailand, we found that many people held what could be described as a ‘kaleidoscopic’ mind. Felicity Aulino (2020) argued that her participants generally understood phenomenal experience as contingent on a host of factors, from personal habits to the influence of others. Here, sensory perceptions themselves were understood as in part a consequence of prior action (karma) and were shaped by their moral import. In Ghana, Vivian Dzokoto (2020; see also Dulin 2020a) identified four dimensions of an Akan theory of mind: that the central function of the mind is planning, not identity; that one of the most salient qualities of the mind is its moral valence (the ‘bad minds’ of others are an ever-present potential threat to social harmony and personal wellbeing); that the mind is porous in nature and vulnerable to supernatural influences; and in many ways, what English speakers would describe as mind are instead depicted as bodily. In China, Emily Ng (2020) found an urban Shanghai world in which many had adopted a Western-style bounded mind, which was seen as an obstacle in knowing God, while in rural settings the mind was represented as porous and God’s word carried immediate authority. Here, people deeply feared supernatural evil. In Vanuatu, Rachel Smith (2020) found what she called an ‘empowered imagination’. She thought that inferences about others’ intentions were not accorded a privileged role in social interaction. People thought about knowledge, creativity, meaning and intention not as confined to an inner mental domain, but as discoverable within the body, and in the world. Sensations on the left side of the body were taken as bad omens; sensations on the right side as good opens. The sight of a native kingfisher was a portent of death. There was little sense of a boundary between mind and world. In this context, the US model of mind (see Brahinsky 2020, Luhrmann 2012, Taylor 2007), did stand out: highly bounded in the sense that thought is supernaturally inert, and non-opaque (Robbins even calls it ‘transparent’) with a sense that the mind is a thing, the seat of the self, the driver of action, something inner which is separate from an outer world.

Dimensions of mind: porosity and opacity

Two dimensions along which different representations of the mind have emerged in the literature are opacity and porosity. Opacity (Rumsey & Robbins 2008, Robbins 2021) is the idea that one cannot know what someone else is thinking, feeling, or intending. Opacity statements are known to be common in many South Pacific societies—among them, the Yap (Throop 2010), the Korowai (Stasch 2008), the Urapmin (Robbins 2004), the Samoa (Duranti 1988), and others. In such places, anthropologists have been startled when they asked what seemed to be a routine question about someone not present, or drew a banal inference about such a person—was she walking to the store, or to visit her parents—and had been told that no one knew but her. These assertions are startling because in the anthropologist’s home setting, people often talk freely about other people’s intentions and motivations. Statements that one cannot know are at the least statements that one should not attempt to know, but an active debate centres on the question of whether these opacity doctrines can actually inhibit the human capacity to infer what others are thinking (Keane 2018).

Porosity is the idea that thought can seep from the mind and act with supernatural power in its own right, and that minds are vulnerable to the powerful thoughts of others, sometimes with the power to affect the entered mind. Many of us have some porosity intuitions. These include the idea that a dream carries information about the world that the dreamer could not have known, or that something of a dead person—particularly a murdered one—lives on in the house when they are gone. Porosity was introduced by Charles Taylor (2007) but has been developed and taken up by others (Luhrmann 2020b, Dulin 2020b) to capture the observation that in many social worlds, gods speak into the mind, and someone’s anger and envy can be harmful to others. Porosity is about mental causation. One of the central questions here is about how deeply supernatural and religious claims are held in awareness: whether claims about the Holy Spirit entering the mind, or witchcraft envy affecting other bodies, are held with the same cognitive attitude as facts in the everyday world. At the moment, the answer seems to be that while these supernatural claims might be fervently believed, they are likely believed in differently (van Leeuwen 2014, Luhrmann 2020). Another question is whether anger and envy are generally treated as more potent than love. At the moment, the answer appears to be yes (Legare & Gelman 2008).

Both opacity and porosity have real-world consequences. The degree of the social commitment to opacity shapes whether and how much one person shares with another. Middle-class Americans, for example, often believe that they should share everything with others—that nothing, not even anger or envy, should be held secret. That tends to be a central commitment of psychotherapeutic thinking, which is not oriented to opacity. Emotions not expressed will fester and cause harm. Opacity also appears to affect the way children respond to classic theory of mind tasks which ask them to draw inferences about what another person will think. In these tasks, the child is shown something that a third person does not know—that a toy, which is hidden, has been moved, or that a crayon box contains candy. Then the child is asked whether that third person knows where the toy is, or what is in the box. The child ‘passes’ when the child say no. Most children do pass theory of mind questions, everywhere, at some point. But in the South Pacific, children tend to pass later than children in the US, and some adults never pass at all (Wassman, Träuble & Funke 2013). More subtle analyses lay out the way children draw inferences about other people—learning that other people can have different desires, different beliefs, different knowledge access, false belief, and hidden emotion. In different social worlds, children grasp these possibilities in different orders. In worlds which value opacity, children are slower in passing standard theory of mind tasks, but far quicker than US children in learning that people can feel things they do not show on their faces (Wellman 2013, Dixson et al. 2017).

Porosity, meanwhile, undergirds religion and magic, but is not the same as either. One can be religious without believing in prophecy, the healing power of prayer, and so forth. Both magical and religious systems have a host of specific limitations: the magician or priest must use particular words, be trained in particular ways, and so forth. But the core idea of magic is that the magician’s intention acts in the world. That is why Stanley Tambiah (1973) could call magic ‘performative’: the act entails its consequence. Porosity, too, has more specific real-world consequences. The Mind and Spirit Project (Luhrmann 2020, Luhrmann et al. 2021, Dulin 2020) found that the more people endorse porosity ideas, the more vivid their spiritual experiences will be. The more they endorse porosity ideas, the more they report voices, visions, unusual presences—a range of sensorially vivid events. It is as if the commitment to the supernatural power of thought allows immaterial events to be felt as more substantial. A specific model of the mind seems to alter our visceral sense of what is real.

Recent anthropological work also offers evidence that local thinking about thinking has an impact on human experience that seems fundamental, although for the most part, anthropologists have not yet systematically organised these and other efforts around the question of how models of the mind might be related to human experience. Let us consider two.

First, medical anthropologists have shown that different models of mental action alter the symptoms of disease. Those who struggle with despair but do not imagine sadness as a legitimate cause of illness (as, for example, in China) are more likely to focus on joint pains and to experience them more intensely than those who take the mind’s action to be central (Kleinman 1986; Kirmayer 2001; Kitanaka 2011). Those with psychosis may not experience the symptom of thought insertion—the sense that a thought has been placed in one’s mind by another being—if, like the Iban people of Borneo, they do not imagine the mind as a container but as an action of the body (Barrett 2004). If the mind is a place where feelings can be held down like a monster under a trap door, then you should help someone who is unhappy by talking with them: you need to help them see that they are the keeper of the keys. If the mind is the emergent epiphenomenon of a pulsating brain, unhappiness is best treated by a chemical that alter those neural connections (Luhrmann 2000; Lakoff 2005; Makari 2015).

Second, anthropologists and historians have shown that Christianity’s doctrine of ‘inner assent’, or the emphasis on the importance of belief, contributed to a new individualism, although they argue about when the new individualism became apparent. The famous sociologist Max Weber (1930) located one shift at the birth of Protestantism, with what he called its unprecedented inner loneliness. Anthropologist Webb Keane (2007) follows his lead in focusing on Reformation efforts to purify the relationship between human and God so that it was not tainted by people, practices, and even words. Louis Dumont (1980) saw individualism in early Christianity but then emphasised the Enlightenment and its aftermath as the point at which individualism became socially salient. Medieval historians identify a shift from more collective notions of personhood to modern individualism in the tenth and twelfth centuries, with the new emphasis on the inner propelled both by theology and by the emergence of guilds and other groups (Morris 1972, Bynum 1982). But the source of the idea of moral person as an individual lies in the Christian text itself: Romans 10:10 states, ‘For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified’. The main point is that the idea that inner thought is more important than outward behaviour—in conjunction with some other changes—may have changed the way people thought about who they were. Notions of the mind may thus be of great importance for understandings of personhood.

Conclusion: the understanding of mind in the West is peculiar

One important point that emerges from anthropological studies of the mind is that Western, post-Enlightenment ideas about the mind are unusual in the context of world cultures. By this I mean the idea that the mind is bounded (thoughts do not have supernatural power, and they do not leak of their own accord into the world and into someone else’s body) and that the mind is non-opaque (people think it is appropriate, even healthy, to ask about and seek to know what other people are thinking) are unusual when considered against ideas about the mind in other social worlds. I also mean that the idea that mind is sharply distinguished from the body and greatly important as a source of personal identity—that what you think and feel makes you ‘you’—is unusual. In psychology and medicine, these expectations about mental life are often taken to be straightforwardly natural, as the way mental life is experienced by all (see D’Andrade 1987). To be sure, some scholars have noted its historical specificity. They have explained the peculiarity of this Western model of the mind in different ways: as the effect of capitalism (Dumont 1992, Macfarlane 1993), Protestantism (Weber 1905, Keane 2008), secularism (Taylor 2007), and the idiosyncratic individualistic family structure of the West (Goody 1983, Henrich 2020). It is also clear that these ideas have political consequences. To count as fully human, a person has had to demonstrate full rationality—a goal thought for many years to be unachievable by persons with a different skin colour, and by women, among others. These matters deserve our attention. They are of profound social relevance.

Christina Toren (1993) was one of the first to call for a comparative anthropology of mind. Only once we grasp the degree to which our fundamental concepts of the mental shape our understanding can we appreciate that all humans are not only creatures with bodies but also with history, and that this history shapes us so deeply that, like a fish surrounded by water, we forget that it is there.

References

Astuti, R. 2001. Are we all natural dualists? A cognitive developmental approach. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7(3), 429-47.

Astuti, R. & P. Harris 2008. Understanding mortality and the life and the ancestors in rural Madagascar. Cognitive Science 32, 713-40.

Aulino, F. 2020. From karma to sin: a kaleidoscopic theory of mind and Christian experience in northern Thailand. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26(S1), 28-44.

Barrett, R. 2004. Kurt Schneider in Borneo. In Schizophrenia, culture and subjectivity (eds) J. Jenkins & R. Barrett, 87-110.

Bering, J.M. & D.F. Bjorklund 2004. The natural emergence of reasoning about the afterlife as a developmental regularity. Developmental Psychology 40, 217-33.

Boas, F. 1921. Ethnography of the Kwakiutl based on data collected by George Hunt. 35^th Annual Report of the Buerau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1913-4: Part 1. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

Brahinsky, J. 2020. Crossing the buffer: ontological anxiety among US evangelicals and an anthropological theory of mind. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26(4), 45-60.

Bynum, C.W. 1982. Jesus as mother. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cohen, E., E. Burdett, N. Knight & J. Barrett 2011. Cross-cultural similarities and differences in person-body reasoning: experimental evidence from the United Kingdom and Brazilian Amazon. Cognitive Science 35, 1282–1304.

Cole, M. 2013. Cognitive development and formal schooling. In Learning relationships in the classroom (eds) D. Faulkner, K. Littleton & M. Woodhead, 31-53. London: Routledge.

Cushing, F.H. 1896. Outlines of Zuni creation myths. 13^th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1891-2, 321-447. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.

D’Andrade, R. 1987. A folk theory of the mind. In Cultural models in language and thought (eds) N, Quinn & D. Holland. Cambridge: University Press.

Descola, P. 2013. Beyond nature and culture (trans. J. Lloyd). Chicago: University Press.

Dixson, H.G.W., A.F. Komugabe-Dixson, J. Low & B.J. Dixson 2017. Scaling theory of mind in a small-scale society: a case study from Vanuatu. Child Development 89(6), 2157-75.

Douglas, M. (ed.) 1970. Witchcraft: confessions and accusations. London: Routledge.

Dulin, J. 2020a. Vulnerable minds, bodily thoughts, and sensory spirits: local theory of mind and spiritual experience in Ghana. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26(S1), 61-76.

Dulin, J. forthcoming. Charismatic Christianity’s hard cultural forms and the local patterning of the divine voice in Ghana. American Anthropologist.

Dumont, L. 1992. Essays on individualism. Chicago: University Press.

Duranti, A. 1988. Intentions, language, and social action in a Samoan context. Journal of Pragmatics 12, 13-33.

Dzokoto, V. 2020. Adwenhoasem: an Akan theory of mind. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26(S1), 77-94.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1937. Witchcraft, magic and oracles among the Azande. Oxford: University Press.

Goody, J. 1983. The development of the family and marriage in Europe. Cambridge: University Press.

Gopnik, A. & A. Meltzoff 1997. Words, thoughts and theories. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Greenfield, P. 1997. You can’t take it with you: why ability assessments don’t cross cultures. American Psychologist 52(10), 1115-24.

Hamill, J. 1985. Theory in ethno-logic. Symbolic Interaction 8(1), 85-102.

Heelas, P. & A. Lock (eds) 1981. Indigenous psychologies. New York: Academic Press.

Howell, S. 1981. Rules not words. In Indigenous psychologies (eds) P. Heelas & A. Lock, 133-44. New York: Academic Press.

Ingold, T. 1991. Becoming persons: consciousness and sociality in human evolution. Cultural Dynamics 4, 355-78.

Keane, W. 2007. Christian moderns. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— 2018. Perspectives on affordances, or the anthropologically real. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8(1/2), 27-38.

Kirmayer, L.J. 2001. Cultural variation in the clinical presentation of depression and anxiety: Implications for diagnosis and treatment. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 62 (13), 22-30.

Kitanaka, J. 2011. Depression in Japan. Princeton: University Press.

Kleinman, A. 1986. Social origins of disease and distress. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Lakoff, A. 2005. Pharmaceutical reason. Cambridge: University Press.

Leenhardt, M. 1979 [1947]. Do Kamo. Chicago: University Press.

Legare, C.H. & S.A. Gelman 2008. Bewitchment, biology, or both: the co-existence of natural and supernatural explanatory frameworks across development. Cognitive Science 32(4), 607-42.

Lévy-Bruhl, L. 1978. Notebooks. New York: Harper Collins.

——— 1979 [1926]. How natives think. New York: Knopf.

Levi-Strauss, C. 1961 [1955]. Tristes tropiques. Boston: Beacon Press.

——— 2021 [1962]. Wild thought. Chicago: University Press.

Lienhardt, G. 1961. Divinity and experience. Oxford: University Press.

Lillard, A. 1998. Ethnopsychologies: cultural variations in theory of mind. Psychological Bulletin 123(1), 3-32.

Luhrmann, T.M. 2000. Of two minds. New York: Knopf.

——— 2011. Towards an anthropological theory of mind: position papers from the Lemelson Conference. Introduction. Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Association 36(4), 5-69.

——— 2012. A hyperreal god and modern belief toward an anthropological theory of mind. Current Anthropology 53(4), 371-95.

——— 2020a. Mind and Spirit: a comparative theory about representation of mind and the experienceof spirit. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26(S1), 9-27.

——— 2020b. Thinking about thinking: the mind’s porosity and the presence of the gods. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26(S1), 148-62.

———, K.G. Weisman, F. Aulino, J. D. Brahinsky, J. C. Dulin, V. A. Dzokoto, C. H. Legare, M. Lifshitz, E. Ng, N. Ross-Zehnder & R.E. Smith 2021. Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118 (5), e2016649118.

Makari, G. 2015. Soul machine. New York: Norton.

Mauss, M. 1985 [1938]. A category of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of self. In The category of the person (eds) M. Carrithers, S. Collins & S. Lukes, 1-25. Cambridge: University Press.

Morris, C. 1972. The discovery of the individual 1050–1200. Toronto: University Press.

Ng, E. 2020. The mind and the devil: porosity and discernment in two Chinese charismatic-style churches. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26(S1), 95-113.

Robbins, J. 2004. Becoming sinners. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— 2008. On not knowing other minds: confession, intention, and linguistic exchange in a Papua New Guinea community. Anthropological Quarterly 81(2), 421-9.

——— 2021. Mental opacity. In International encyclopedia of linguistic anthropology (ed.) J. Stanlaw.

——— & A. Rumsey 2008. Introduction: cultural and linguistic anthropology and the opacity of other minds. Anthropological Quarterly 81(2), 407-20.

Shweder, R. 1982. On savages and other children: review of The foundations of primitive thought by C.R. Hallpike. American Anthropologist 84(2), 354-66.

Smith, R. 2020. Empowered imagination and mental vulnerability: local theory of mind and spiritual experience in Vanuatu. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 26, 114-30.

Stasch, R. 2009. Society of others. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Strathern, A. 1994. Keeping the body in mind. Social Anthropology 2, 43-53.

Strauss, C. & N. Quinn 1998. A cognitive theory of cultural meaning. Cambridge: University Press.

Tambiah, S.J. 2017 [1973]. Form and meaning of magical acts. HAU: Journal of Anthropological Theory 7(3), 451-73.

Taylor, C. 2007. A secular age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Throop, J. 2010. Suffering and sentiment. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Toren, C. 1993. Making history: the significance of childhood cognition for a comparative anthropology of mind. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 28(3), 461-78.

Van Leeuwen, N. 2014. Religious credence is not factual belief. Cognition 133(3), 698-715.

Wassman, J., B. Träuble & J. Funke 2013. Theory of mind in the Pacific: reasoning across cultures. Heidelberg: University Press.

Weber, M. 1930 [1905]. The protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism (trans. T. Parsons). London: George Allen and Unwin.

Weisman, K., C. Deck & E. Markman 2017. Rethinking people’s conceptions of mental life. Proceedings of the National Academy 114(43), 11374-9

Weisman, K., C.H. Legare, R.E. Smith, V.A. Dzokoto, F. Aulino, E. Ng, J.C. Dulin, N. Ross-Zehnder, J.D. Brahinsky, T.M. Luhrmann. Forthcoming. Concepts of mental life among adults and children in five cultures. Nature Human Behavior.

Wellman, H. 2013. Universal social cognition. In Navigating the social world: a developmental perspective (eds) M. Banaji & S. Gelman, 69-74. Oxford: University Press.

Note on contributor

Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Albert Ray Lang Professor at Stanford University, in the Stanford Anthropology Department (and Psychology, by courtesy). She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 and received a John Guggenheim Fellowship award in 2007. She is the author of When God talks back (2012, Knopf) and How God becomes real (2020, Princeton University Press) and is currently at work on a book entitled Voices.

Freedom of speech

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 19:35:47 +0000

Matei Candea Fiona Wright Paolo Heywood Taras Fedirko

Initially published 26 Jul 2021

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

Abstract:

Free speech is a familiar concept. It is an established ideal of liberalism and democratic politics, and the subject of political debate and conflict across diverse historical and cultural contexts. Free speech has not primarily been considered, however, as a set of lived, valued, and contested practices, mediated by various linguistic, ethical, and material forms. While anthropology has not traditionally occupied itself with free speech, it has extensive tools for bringing free speech into view beyond its quality as an abstract ideal or legal category. This entry borrows theoretical perspectives, as well as ethnographic examples produced by anthropologists, to shed light on free speech within a broader comparative frame. It begins by focusing on free speech as a dynamic value or virtue, asking: what is it about ‘free’ or ‘direct’ speech that people value when they value it? Secondly, the entry casts critical light on the idea of an individual as the universal ‘free speaker’, demonstrating how collective or disaggregated subjects can also practice free speech. Thirdly, it explores the material settings, contexts, or technologies through which free speech is curtailed or realised. Finally, the entry considers the idea of ‘voice’ as signalling modes of embodiment, and auditory phenomena such as noise, sound, and silence, which are not spoken language but can inform and expand our understanding of free speech.

Introduction

Freedom of speech is a core tenet of liberal political philosophy, and a criterion frequently invoked to distinguish liberal democracies from their political others. In recent years, it has become a focus of extensive and embittered debates within the US and Europe. Some fear the rise of a ‘cancel culture’, and accuse proponents of ‘safe spaces’, ‘trigger warnings’, and ‘no-platforming’ of challenging freedom of speech. The latter in turn accuse their critics of invoking freedom of speech disingenuously in order to protect established interests. These debates invoke the notion of freedom of speech to apportion blame and responsibility for political injuries, but rarely involve a sustained analysis of the notion of freedom of speech itself. However they might disagree about the rights and wrongs of specific cases, the debating parties tend—with few exceptions—to subscribe to a familiar liberal vision in which freedom of speech, within certain limits, is broadly speaking good for individuals and polities, while silencing, except in certain carefully delimited cases, is broadly speaking bad. Despite appearances, these public debates are therefore still disagreements within, rather than about, a liberal consensus. Legal scholarship and classical political philosophy have given us more formal representations of this liberal space of disagreement over free speech and its limits.

Anthropologists can make a useful intervention by putting these familiar debates about freedom of speech into a broader comparative frame. This allows us to pick out, by contrast, some of the distinctive assumptions embedded in these familiar debates—assumptions about the nature of language, about speaking subjects and the polities they inhabit. These comparative explorations tend to challenge the idea that speech can ever be ‘free’ in any simple sense. Anthropologists have demonstrated extensive determinations—from grammar to sociolinguistics—that are entailed in any speech act; they have pointed to the pervasive and sometimes productive nature of silencing in social life; and they have shown the multiple ways in which authoritative speech is entangled in and produced by controls and limitations of other kinds of expression.

Nonetheless, it remains a persistent fact that many of the people anthropologists work with value, desire, or imagine something like freedom of speech as a particular goal, and mourn, fear, or protest its absence. Anthropologists have the resources to examine the varied ways in which free speech is imagined, valued, and practiced as a lived ideal in necessarily compromised and imperfect conditions.

Semiotic ideologies, religious and secular

The most sustained anthropological explorations of the question of freedom of speech have been in relation to recent debates around religious and secular representation. The case of the ‘Danish cartoon controversy’, in which satirical representations of the prophet Mohammed sparked outrage and violence, has been paradigmatic (Asad et al. 2013; Keane 2009, Favret-Saada 2015). This controversy was a natural entry-point into the subject of freedom of speech for anthropologists because of the wealth of material in the anthropology of religion focusing on comparable disputes about the morality and politics of speaking, silencing others or staying silent oneself, or of representing and stopping others from representing. Such ‘moral questions about semiotic form’ (Keane 2007: 6), arose, for instance, in the struggles of seventeenth century Quakers in England to separate out the word of God from everyday language as a ‘thing of the flesh’ (Baumann 1984). The Quakers’ project included a wholesale repudiation of accepted forms of politeness and honorific titles as insincere words that glorify the earthly person—a practice that exposed them to violence from offended interlocutors. The moral and political stakes of speech were similarly high in missionary encounters in non-Western contexts. For instance, Webb Keane details the struggles between Calvinist missionaries and followers of marapu (Sumbanese ancestral ritual) in the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia) about how to address spiritual entities. The Calvinists condemned the marapu followers’ uses of traditional ritual formulae as a violation of the ‘proper’ norm of speaking sincerely to God in one’s own words. Conversely marapu followers decried a form of hubris in Calvinist prayer aimed directly from the individual to the godhead without the mediation of ancestral formulae (Keane 2007: 176-96).

Considering liberal debates and concerns over freedom of speech alongside these cases points to the deep cultural assumptions about the nature and effects of language and representation that inform all of these moral struggles over semiotic form. Such assumptions about language and meaning have been described by anthropologists as ‘language ideologies’ (Woolard & Schieffelin 1994), or more broadly ‘semiotic ideologies’ (Keane 2007). By situating liberal concerns with freedom of speech within a particular (Western, modern, liberal, secular) semiotic ideology, anthropologists have thus opened up alternative angles on recent high-profile debates, such as the Danish cartoons controversy. Keane, for instance, argues that

[t]he classic [liberal] defence of freedom of expression draws, in part, on a semiotic ideology that takes words and pictures to be vehicles for the transmission of opinion or information among otherwise autonomous and unengaged parties and the information they bear to be itself so much inert content more or less independent of the activity of representation (2009: 58).

From this perspective, Muslims offended by cartoons of the Prophet are sometimes dismissed by liberal commentators as committing a category error, and one furthermore that designates them as insufficiently ‘modern’ in their continued attachment to the transcendent power of mere images (Asad et al. 2013: xiii). But as anthropologists such as Talal Asad have been at pains to point out, liberal freedom of speech also has well-defined limits, for instance in respect of patents, copyright, or pornography. These ‘liberal’ limits point to the extent to which liberal freedom of speech is premised on and limited by notions of property and ownership—ownership of one’s texts, ideas, or body (Asad et al. 2013). One might add that hate speech laws show that modern liberals do seem quite concerned with the capacity of words to do harm, at least in some contexts (Butler 1997; Heywood 2019). Or that contemporary laws of libel or insult in places like France or Germany have a genealogy that links them to honour codes, which many sociologists imagined to be extinct in ‘modernity’ (Candea 2019, Whitman 2000). While such comparisons may occasionally sound as if they are trying to score points by showing that liberals are not as liberal as they think, at its best this work provides a more subtle understanding, rather than a mere deconstruction, of aspirations to freedom of speech, liberal or otherwise. The point, as Asad puts it, is that ‘[t]he shape that free speech takes at different times and in different places [reflects] different structures of power and subjectivity’ (2013: 29).^[1]

Virtues: courage, truth, and risk

Another related way that anthropologists can contribute to our understanding of free speech is by examining its status as a value or a virtue. In a range of ethnographic contexts—perhaps most obviously but not exclusively those labelled as ‘liberal’—people understand ‘speaking freely’ to be a virtuous practice, and view the right to be able to do so to be an important value. Anthropology has an extensive conceptual apparatus with which to analyse and compare the ways in which people think about values and virtues in work on ethics (e.g. Faubion 2001; Laidlaw 2002, 2013; Robbins 2007, 2016; Lambek 2010; Keane 2015). In fact, one of the key conceptual sources for anthropological work on ethics, Michel Foucault, also had quite a lot to say about the genealogy of ‘free speech’ as a virtue.

Foucault’s late work on classical self-cultivation investigates how people work to make themselves into particular kinds of virtuous subjects. Despite its individualist overtones, self-cultivation does not occur in isolation. It is something done in a particular cultural and historical context, and in relation to others. In his final two lecture series at the Collège de France, Foucault sought to clarify this relationship between subject and context by turning to a very specific aspect of self-cultivation in the ancient world (2010; 2011). He believed that then—as now—there was a ‘necessary other person’ involved in work on the self. These are types of people whose role it is to help us decipher and establish the ‘truth’ of our selves (teachers, doctors, psychoanalysts, jurists, policemen). In the classical world, unlike ours, however, Foucault thought that this ‘necessary other’ was not an institutionally defined position. Rather, it was predicated on the possession of a particular virtue, namely parrhêsia, translated in the title of one of the lecture series as ‘the courage of truth’. To be the right sort of person to help others to work upon themselves, one had to possess the ability to speak freely and frankly, regardless of risk or consequence.

The history of this particular virtue in the ancient world is varied. For instance, there is what we might think of as ‘political’ parrhêsia, characteristic of pre-Socratic Athens. This is ‘free speech’ in which what is at stake are questions of the government of others. Later, and exemplified most obviously in Socrates, we find a virtuous ‘free speech’ that is much more concerned with ‘ethics’, and with the government of the self. Socrates eschews the political field to focus instead on the conduct of individuals, and to measure the gap between the way they think they ought to live and the way they actually do. Later still we find these modalities combined in the philosophy of the Cynics, who sought both to live their own lives as bare truth (naked and in the open) and to missionise this life to those around them, to make their lives speak as examples to others (Foucault 2011).

Like any concept, parrhêsia is situated in a particular context. Not all that is true about free speech in the ancient world applies to our own. While Foucault’s own account ends broadly speaking in the classical period, tracing the later history of parrhêsia gives us some insights into the origin of contemporary liberal notions of freedom of speech. Historian David Colclough argues, for instance, that classical parrhêsia served as one of the sources for imagining freedom of speech in seventeenth century England—the period which also gave us some of the classic sources of liberal defences of freedom of speech, such as Milton’s Areopagitica, or the works of John Locke. Somewhat ironically, however, Colclough notes that parrhêsia at that point was primarily a figure of rhetoric. Rhetorical manuals drew on examples from speeches by classical Greek and Roman orators, which consisted of prefacing one’s speech by warning that one’s position was controversial, daring, and likely to offend. For seventeenth century English commentators, ‘parrhêsia’ as a rhetorical figure therefore posed an inherent problem of sincerity. It could be a genuine warning and apology for speech that was necessary, but might offend. Equally, it could be merely a cynical way to flatter an audience by delivering, as if they were surprising or extreme, views which the speaker knew were perfectly conventional and likely to gain broad assent in any case.

Colclough notes that the debates around parrhêsia were only one amongst the cultural sources of seventeenth century English discussions of the value of free speech. Others included stories from the lives of Christian martyrs who had continued to speak the truth of their faith in the face of torture and death, or the legal prerogatives of unrestricted speech that applied (in principle at least) to parliamentary discussions. Colclough’s and Foucault's accounts point to the complex, diverse, and contested genealogy of liberal visions of freedom of speech.

Anthropologists have used Foucault's discussion of parrhêsia to ask comparative questions about the ways in which freedom of speech is understood and valued in various contexts today. Pascal Boyer, for instance, has suggested that some contemporary political movements based on satire, such as Iceland’s iconoclastic ‘Best Party’—a joke political party that eventually achieved electoral success—may resemble aspects of ancient parrhêsia (2013). On the other hand, Harri Englund has pointed to the dangers of assuming that parrhêsia is portable beyond its own specific context (2018). In Finnish talk radio, he argues, what might look like ‘parrhesiastic’ speech on the part of individual callers is in fact a process carefully cultivated by the show’s hosts, an arrangement of multiple voices, rather than any individual ‘speaking truth to power’ (see below for a fuller discussion). As with many concepts, there is probably little to be gained by arguing over exactly how transposable the precise details of classical parrhêsia are or are not. The point is rather that one can ask of any context similar questions to those Foucault was asking about Ancient Greece, or Colclough about early Stuart England: what is it about ‘free’ or ‘direct’ speech that people value when they value it? To what ends is it directed? What role does it play in relation to the broader system of ethics in which it exists? How is speaking freely supposed to affect one’s relationship to oneself, and to others? These questions already move us in a much more anthropological direction than the classic juridical and political arguments over the extent of free speech rights, or the balance between freedom of speech and other legal protections.

Subjects: whose speech, and whose freedom?

Building on the above discussion, one might look more closely at who or what, in any given setting, counts as the free-speaking subject. If free speech is in some cultural contexts considered to be a virtue, we could ask: whose virtue is it? More generally, the ethnographic record compels us to move beyond a virtue-based understanding of ethics, and reconsider familiar assumptions about the individuality of speaking subjects, and the forms of freedom that characterise them.

Liberal freedom of speech could be understood as involving a specific ‘production format’ of speech (Goffman 1981), in which the speaker is simultaneously the utterer, the author, and the responsible agent of speech. Erving Goffman (1981) proposed the notion of production format to disentangle the complexity of conversation roles in communicative situations, arguing that the figure of the speaker should be differentiated into several analytical roles: the animator, i.e. the ‘sounding box’ physically pronouncing the words; the author, i.e. ‘someone who has selected the sentiments that are being expressed and the words in which they are encoded’; and the principal, ‘that is, someone whose position is established by the words that are spoken, someone whose beliefs have been told, someone who is committed to what the words say’ (Goffman 1981: 144). Separating the different conversational roles entailed in speaking and hearing, Goffman demonstrates that they might converge in the same social roles, and indeed the same person, as when we think of an autonomous, sincere speaker of liberal language ideologies; or equally, they might be distributed across several persons. One example of the latter might be the Wolof griots in Senegal—low-ranking poets hired to perform ritual insults on behalf of noblemen (e.g. Irvine 1989). Here, the roles of the animator and author converge on the individual speaker, while the principal is thought to be the collective whole to which the speaker belongs.

Building on Goffman’s work, anthropologists (e.g. Hill & Irvine 1992; Merlan & Rumsey 1991) have further explored the relation between complex, dynamic speaking roles, and the autonomy of speakers. For instance, in his ethnography of royal orators, or akeyame, in the Akan-speaking areas of Ghana in the 1980s and ‘90s, Kwesi Yankah describes them as ‘social mediators of speech’ and ‘specialists in the artistic reporting or representation of speech’ (1995: 8) as they act as ‘surrogate speakers’ for their chiefs. Yankah argues that the hierarchical subordination of the ‘surrogate speaker’—the orator—to their chief does not preclude autonomy in speech acts, for without the orator’s voice ‘a royal communicative act is incomplete’ (1995: 8). The duties of the orator ‘range from strict reporting to discretionary interpretation’, which means that relations of subordination that formally characterise surrogate speech might here entail ‘mutual reliance and dependency’ (Yankah 1995: 9). Akeyame are indispensable to royal speech, and, for instance in court judgments, ‘a greater part of akeyame’s contribution during prosecution is not structurally linked to a patron’s; it is independent’ (Yankah 1995: 163). Nevertheless, ‘in spite of its autonomy, the akeyame’s contribution is still made on behalf of the royal realm, to which they make occasional reference’. Yankah’s ethnography prompts us to question the autonomy of action inherent to the different speaking roles, and the way such autonomy is shaped by the social relations among persons performing these roles.

A similar reconfiguration of roles can be seen in the historical Soviet practice of self-criticism (samokritika), a form of speaking truth to power in which the author and addressee of speech are understood to be collective subjects, even when the speech act itself is performed by an individual person (Kharkhordin 1999; also Glaeser 2011). State socialist regimes that curtailed individual freedom of speech through explicit forms of official censorship were one of the key counterpoints against which liberal visions of freedom of speech were articulated throughout the twentieth century (cf. Boyer 2003, see below for a fuller discussion). Yet state socialism was not without its own imaginaries and practical repertories of free speech. Oleg Kharkhordin describes samokritika in Soviet Russia as a key element of socialist ethics and a means to achieving the revolutionary consciousness of the masses in the nascent Soviet state. Samokritika meant ‘an open statement by the working masses of their opinions on the weaknesses in Soviet … administrative apparatus and life’ (Viktorsky 1929: 266). Crucially, in samokritika within particular Communist Party cells or workers collectives, contemporary commentators saw not acts of individual confession or complaint but ‘the working class that upholds the proletarian dictatorship … criticiz[ing] and correct[ing] its own mistakes and failures by itself’ (Ingulov 1930: 97, in Kharkhordin 1999: 146). In theory, this notion of collective critical speech reflected the understanding of the Soviet state as an expression of class will; the ‘self’ of self-criticism referred to the working class as the sovereign of the ‘proletarian dictatorship’. In practice, however, bringing this collective subject into being through particular acts of speaking was no small feat.

In the Communist Party discourse in the 1920s and early 30s, self-criticism ‘normally meant collective criticism by Party members of the weaknesses of the Party’ (Kharkhordin 1999: 146). Thus in the 1920s, ‘The Party continuously solicited self-criticism, which in practice meant urging rank-and-file members to criticize top leaders, in order to make the body of the Party homogenous’ (Kharkhordin 1999: 149). Party theorists who promoted samokritika as a form of accountability were aware that the imperative of collective speech gave rank-and-file workers an opportunity for political manoeuvring. When in 1928, self-criticism from below led to a wave of denunciations that evidently sought to settle personal scores, Party commentators had to remind Soviet workers to criticise collective, not individual, weaknesses.^[2] At a central Communist Party committee meeting in August 1928, for example, one high-ranking speaker proposed ‘a particular psychological technique’: ‘A worker was advised to imagine, before saying something critical of a manager, that the body he was kicking was not somebody else’s but his own, since in the Party view he was assaulting a corporate body of which he was a part’ (Kharkhordin 1999: 153).

Such critical truth-telling must be understood against the background of early Soviet techniques of the self and operations of power that aimed at creating socialist unity by orchestrating forms of action and speech that transcended individual subjects. Many Bolshevik revolutionaries wanted ‘to organize their experience and energy around an ideology that would help them lose their sense of self and acquire the sense of the collective’ (Williams 1980: 393). By submitting the self to the collective, revolutionaries aimed to achieve immortality through the lasting social effects of personal sacrifice. The notion of kollektiv—a collective of people united and transformed by the common experience of working on a particular task—is key to understanding samokritika. A kollektiv, typically a workplace collective, was imagined to act and think as one, and to exert group sovereignty that subsumed individual action under the imperative of a common goal. Regular, often ritualised acts of self-criticism revealed and analysed perceived flaws in the organisation of work, relations among workmates, or even between workers and their families, as seen in the light of communist ideals. But these acts of samokritika also objectified kollektiv before itself, helped it correct itself on its path to communism, and promoted its unity by strengthening horizontal surveillance of their members over one another. Unlike critical introspection or individual confession in Western Christianity, which Foucault sees as one of the historical forces underpinning modern individuation, samokritika was expected to be performed by workers and party members before—and on behalf of—their kollektiv. One was free to speak up as long as critique was directed at the self as part of the corporate whole of kollektiv, and in so far as it promoted the ‘fusion’ (spaika) of kollektiv into one. The subject and the object of samokritika was emphatically a ‘we’: a nested corporate subject, where a kollektiv of workers stood for and became aligned with both the proletarian class they represented, and the Communist Party leading that class. In the Party’s opinion at the time, ‘[T]hrough a certain person speaking up, the whole Party criticised itself’ (Kharkhordin 1999: 146).

These comparative cases remind us that the liberal framing of free speech as performed by individual persons is only one of many cultural possibilities. Yet comparisons of this kind shouldn’t lead us to assume that liberal visions of free speech are, by contrast, simply or uniformly individualist. Consider for instance the ‘speech’ of capitalist corporations. ‘Pronounced’ by corporate spokespeople, authored by PR and press offices, and attributed to the fictive legal person of the corporation, corporate speech rarely raises the question of freedom. Yet, in a recent landmark 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Electoral Commission, which enshrined the status of corporations as legal persons enjoying the same rights as human persons, the US Supreme Court granted First Amendment protections to corporations’ and unions’ direct spending on political election campaigns. The court had designated election spending as a form of protected free speech. Susan Gal and Judith Irvine explain that the consequences of speech mattered in this instance, rather than the identity of the speakers: ‘making speech available as a source of information for the public’ so as to ensure the political ideal of a well-informed citizenry (2019: 9). The Court’s majority opinion that ‘prohibition on corporate … expenditures is a ban on speech’ rested on an equation of money, a resource necessary for corporate persons to orchestrate political speech, to speech itself (Gal & Irvine 2019: 9). The opposition to the ruling predominantly focused on dismantling this analogy, and demonstrating the false equality between natural (human) and fictitious (corporate) persons. In sum, the Citizens United decision revealed competing understandings of speech in the contemporary United States: on the one hand, a view that ‘takes speech to be a material thing, equivalent to money, and independent of speakers’, and on the other, one that ‘takes speech to be different from material objects, and freedom of speech to be embodied only in natural persons’ (Gal & Irvine 2019: 10).

These and other ethnographies help us understand that the model of a self-owning, rights-bearing individual subject of free speech is only one of multiple possible ways in which human societies have thought about and organised the relation between speech and freedom.

Platforms: censorship, materiality, and mediation

The question of who is the subject of free speech leads, in turn, to a focus on the material devices, spaces, and media they engage in their communicative practices. The question of who gets to speak doesn’t exhaust debates over freedom of speech—just as important is the question of who gets to be heard, and how. This issue has gained particular visibility in contemporary debates in the US and UK over ‘no-platforming’ on university campuses and beyond. No-platforming includes practices of boycotting or uninviting a speaker, blocking their access to a forum or debate, be it online or offline, because particular views they hold are deemed offensive or harmful. A ‘platform’ in this sense refers to a literal or metaphorical stage from which to address an audience. Critics of no-platforming cast it as a new form of censorship, part of a broader ‘cancel culture’ emanating from a progressive left which is increasingly unwilling to allow views it disagrees with to be publicly expressed. Proponents of no-platforming by contrast argue that they are not censoring anyone, but simply refusing to ‘amplify’ the voices of speakers deemed not only offensive or dangerous but also—crucially—privileged in their access to other high-profile platforms for being heard. Simultaneously, some proponents argue that the public media debates occasioned by no-platforming such high-profile speakers are themselves an occasion to give more ‘platform’ to marginalised voices. From this perspective, no-platforming can be cast as a form of epistemic justice, a righting of the scales in a world in which access to platforms for expression is unequal to begin with.

Whatever one makes of these arguments, these cases usefully focus attention on the important distinction between the formal right to speak and the substantive means for being heard by others. Both sides in arguments about no-platforming appeal in various ways to a difference between what one might call, following Isaiah Berlin (1969), a ‘negative’ freedom of speech (the freedom from, for instance, legal impediments to speech) and a ‘positive’ freedom of speech (freedom to speak, which includes the means of accessing a platform from which to do so).

It is precisely because such a distinction between ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’ is so difficult to make in practice that debates and concerns over freedom of speech are so often also arguments over material settings, devices, and media, in the broadest sense: objects, spaces, and techniques that mediate communication. Thus, while freedom of speech is often imagined as a single abstract principle relating to intangible contents and messages (political opinions, artistic expression, scientific knowledge), the history of changing understandings of freedom of speech is inseparable from the rise and transformation of a host of technologies of mediation: mass-circulation newspapers (Keane 2009), radio stations (Englund 2018), the cinema industry (Mazzarella 2013), television, or the internet (Coleman 2009, Gershon 2014). These material devices, spaces, and media may seem like mere background when talk is of principles. And yet they profoundly shape what ‘freedom of speech’ can concretely mean in any given situation, in ways that are historically and culturally variable. Matters of principle take multiple forms through very concrete questions of access and presence: who can speak where and who can hear them? How long can people speak for and must they take turns? What kinds of expression, beyond the spoken or written word, can be made available and under what modalities? What does it cost? How far does it reach?

Thus, on the one hand, new media have frequently been linked with new possibilities for freed and challenging expression—the heavily internet-mediated uprisings in Arabic-speaking countries in 2011 being a classic case in point. On the other hand, the mediation of expression is often the most obvious means through which it can be impeded, filtered, and censored—from the explicit work of film censorship boards, for instance, to the subtle pre-publication pressures of in-house legal advisors in publishing houses (cf. Candea 2019). Mediation in this sense is not merely a matter of technology but of the particular social relations, forms of intervention, and expertise that different technologies enable and require. For instance, in his above-mentioned work on a vox populi phone-in radio show in Finland, Englund (2018) notes how radio hosts in practice manage conversations with callers whose anti-immigration views they find unpalatable. Rather than cut them off, or even directly challenge them, the hosts steer the conversation in subtle ways in order to ‘strive for harmony’, while making space for their callers’ ‘need to be heard’ (Englund 2018: 108). It is interesting to put this example alongside Dominic Boyer’s archival exploration of the practices of state censors in East Germany (2002). Boyer shows that the classic vision of censors as mere administrative agents of deletion—erasing offending passages or cancelling entire texts—underplays censors’ view of themselves as involved in an intellectual, even productive, enterprise akin to the work of editing. Censors intervened not merely in ideological matters, but also concerned themselves with questions of style and quality; they often worked in a back-and-forth (albeit unequal) dialogue with the authors of the work. Boyer argues provocatively that state censorship was thus not always that different from the practices of editorial intervention, review, and selection practiced by academic journals. Whatever one makes of the latter comparison (see Candea 2019) these two cases are useful to think of side by side because they highlight the extent to which concerns with freedom of expression in any particular case are inseparable from the particularity of the medium through which that expression occurs. Live airtime and peer-review, for instance, both bear on the shaping, allowing, and curtailing of expression, but they do so in profoundly different ways.

While material mediation poses the question of access, it is therefore not sufficient to think of freedom of expression merely as a singular good of which one can have more or less. Changes in media also involve changes in the nature of what is expressed. In his ethnography of film censorship in colonial and postcolonial India, William Mazzarella (2013) explores the distinctive affective power of cinema as a form of mass mediation. The moving image, in its sociocultural setting of production and reception, does things to people in embodied ways, things that cannot be reduced to or deduced from an analysis of its contents, meanings, or the ideas it ‘encodes’. This in part explains the permanence and broad acceptability of film censorship even in settings in which other forms of censorship—such as official censorship of the press—have been abandoned. But more broadly, as Mazzarella notes, a history of censorship shows the extent to which the attention of censors—and, one might add, the experimentation of producers of 'content'—recurrently focuses on new media and their new ways of generating affects, just as it moves away from media which have grown familiar and old: newspapers, the radio, film, television, the internet. Anthropologists studying censorship in practice have thus contributed to the chorus of challenges brought by social theorists (Bourdieu 1991; Fish 1994; Butler 1997; cf. Bunn 2005 for an overview) against arguments for freedom of expression in which expression is set apart as a special form of conduct which is essentially about conveying contents. Attending to the materiality of media reminds us not only of the material constraints on expression, but also of its material effects.

But the materiality of media also reveals how imaginaries of freedom of expression are transformed together with the appearance of new forms and visions of the public. Thus Ilana Gershon (2014) argues that the rise of social media has contributed to the emergence of a new conception of the public, in terms of access, reachability, and responsiveness. By contrast to the classic liberal visions of a public defined as a collection of anonymous strangers (Warner 2005), publics defined by accessibility—epitomised on platforms like Facebook—are experienced by their participants as collectives structured by links extending from close friends to distant acquaintances. In these kinds of publics named relations entail accountability, a responsible and graduated use of the information that is exchanged.

Gershon analyses the tensions between this ‘new’ vision of the public as a network of knowable persons enmeshed in relations with one another and the older vision of the public as a collective of strangers, from the perspective of young social media users whose comfort zone is broadly situated in the former. These younger informants, Gershon argues, ‘often believe that members of a public will experience certain obligations in managing information, and as a result will act responsibly. At the same time, they imagine that they can anticipate who might read their material’ (Gershon 2014:80). Yet these new online publics are also the home of internet ‘trolls’—anonymous users who post inflammatory comments or target and harry other users with pranks and attacks which seem designed to puncture this feeling of online safety. Gershon follows Gabriella Coleman (2011) in characterising trolls as self-appointed crusaders for a return to an older vision of the public as a collective of strangers who do not take things personally. It is thus unsurprising, perhaps, that Gershon’s informants feel that the public sphere beyond their own familiar and accountable networks is a space of risk, and ‘anonymity a cover for antagonism’ (Gershon 2014: 84).

In sum, Gershon’s argument shows how these new online public/private borderlands are the scene of struggles and accommodations between radically different ethics and politics of communication. These contested spaces increasingly overspill the porous boundaries between online and offline communication. Shifting struggles are illustrated in the rise of a bevy of neologisms—‘echo chambers’, ‘safe spaces’, ‘snowflakes’, ‘haters’, ‘trigger warnings’—which purport to diagnose communicational pathologies or, on the contrary, hoped-for solutions to the risks of expression through shifting and ambiguous media. Returning to the opening problematic of this section, one might say that attending to the materiality of media suggests that being heard is not simply a right, but can also be a vector of risk.

Voice: embodiment, affect and sound

Apart from being shaped by the materiality of their settings, practices of free speech are also constituted by what they look, feel, and sound like. Anthropologists have studied linguistic and vocal practices that do not involve the kinds of reasoned, articulate forms of speech ideally associated with democratic participation, but rather emphasise the embodied and affective nature of communication. Theories of free speech and political engagement have typically been premised on the idea of citizens having a ‘voice’ within the polis, with that voice understood as a transparent representation of the conscious, self-interested, individual self (Kunreuther 2014, 2018; Weidman 2014).^[3] In recent explorations of how voice manifests as part of the production and transformation of publics and political movements in various cultural contexts, though, where voice is often still used as a metaphor for political participation, actual practices of voicing involve bodies, sounds, and collectives of people in ways that do not map neatly on to traditional liberal notions of political and free speech. The notion of voice has been helpful as a way to consider political speech, as it can shift our attention away from the linguistic and semiotic content of the speech at hand, and focus instead on the actual sounds being produced and circulated, which in turn brings to light the various bodies and materialities at play in the making of free speech.

In her study of the sounds of protest events in Kathmandu, Laura Kunreuther (2018) shows how artists’ and demonstrators’ use of various kinds of noise—produced by cars moving through the city, protestors banging on pots and pans, and the radio broadcast of recordings of human crying—transform what is generally thought of as unruly, unproductive sound into political engagement. Kunreuther describes a 107-day demonstration in front of the Prime Minister’s residence protesting violence against women, in which everyday noises were repurposed to indicate popular support for the movement and a challenge to civic life as usual that, yet, was expressed through its very own auditory forms. The use of domestic items such as pots, pans, and plates, for example, served to bring the home and domestic sphere into the public and political realm, and in particular evoked the status of women as those who generally perform household labour and whose experiences of being subject to violence often remain hidden. Beyond these immediate resonances, the noise of the banging acted to reveal popular anger and discontent, as Kunreuther suggests, ‘signifying through noise a breakdown in communication between ruler and ruled’ (2018: 23). In this way, noise becomes a form of political 'speech' and a way in which protestors can shape the forms of their expression without necessarily having to use words at all.

Similarly, Kunreuther shows how sounds produced by humans, but that are not made up of words, can speak volumes as part of the non-linguistic, affective realm of politics. In a performance piece by a Nepali artist, staged during the Maoist insurgency and in the context of regular state violence against protesters, recordings of mothers and babies crying were compiled and broadcast both at the site of the street performance and on all national FM stations (2018: 14-15). The sound of the wailing was effective in calling forth a national, secular public given the anonymity of the voices heard, who, although clearly women and children, were not identifiable through accent, social class or caste, ethnicity or religion. Combined with the imagery evoked of the women, heard as mothers of the nation, and of a genre of sound mostly heard in funerary and wedding rituals, the broadcast had the effect of sidestepping the government/Maoist divide, with both sides claiming the piece was condemning the other. There was a sense, then, that a purer, more human voice was made possible through the use of the immediacy of the cry, devoid of language but able to express meanings otherwise hampered in the context of civil conflict. This interpretation stands in contrast to those theorists of liberalism who have framed the bodily and collective energy of the crowd as a threat to the measured, reasonable publics of deliberative democracy (see Cody 2011, 2015; Mazzarella 2015), and draws instead on theories of popular assembly that reframe how the gathering of publics and collectivities can be a central and transformative part of democratic and other political processes (Butler 2015, Butler & Athanasiou 2013).

Finally, even silence can be thought of as a form of free speech. The absence of words, sound, or noise is a tool that protesters in diverse contexts have employed to communicate opposition to government practices of censorship, war, and oppression. As an easily translatable technology of protest, silence symbolises popular dispossession or a government’s lack of listening to what is being said out loud in the public sphere. Through the intensity of the silence of a large crowd gathered in a normally noisy public space, it has a solemn emotional character while also emphasising popular cohesion in support of a political position. As Kunreuther (2018) explains, in its use both by the performance artist who employed silence in parallel with the broadcast crying described above, and by journalists and media personnel at other moments in Nepali history to highlight government censorship, silence recalls the modern liberal subject. It implies silent concentration and rational, reflective engagement with the political, but does so without concealing the bodily and collective instantiation of these democratic subjects, given the centrality of embodied presence to the protest. As Athena Athanasiou also observes about the use of silent vigils by activists in post-conflict Serbia, silence can be a powerful, subversive force precisely because it can express forms of mourning and of protesting injustice that, when people attempt to voice them through language, become tied up in the limits and politically exclusionary nature of speech and representation (Athanasiou 2005, 2017).

Free speech, therefore, may take the form of non-linguistic noise and sound, bodily presence, and symbolic resonance, as much as it can involve verbal forms of expression. By focusing ethnographically on the material, embodied, and affective forms through which political voice actually takes shape, we see that free speech is in practice a much wider and more diverse phenomenon than its abstraction as a category of liberal thought implies.

Conclusion

While anthropologists have not as yet written much on the subject of freedom of speech, this entry points to anthropological studies of language, voice, ethics, subjectivity, and media that can help to complement, critique, and contextualise political, scientific, legal, and philosophical accounts of the subject. One upshot of these studies is to put canonical liberal visions of freedom of speech in comparative and historical perspective, as one amongst a range of ways of imagining the proper relationship between subjects, speech, and freedom. Another effect of these studies is to highlight the ways in which visions of free speech—whatever cultural form they espouse—take shape within and against specific material and embodied possibilities and constraints. In these ways, anthropology can enrich our understandings of free speech as a multiple, contested, and frequently unattainable horizon of desire and action.

Note

The writing of this article was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement 683033).

References

Athanasiou, A. 2005. Reflections on the politics of mourning: feminist ethics and aolitics in the age of empire. Historein 5, 40-57 (available on-line: https://doi.org/10.12681/historein.72).

— — — 2017. Agonistic mourning: political dissidence and the women in black. Edinburgh: University Press.

Asad, T., W. Brown, J. Butler & S. Mahmood 2013. Is critique secular? Blasphemy, injury, and free speech (2^nd revised ed.). New York: Fordham University Press.

Bauman, R. 1984. Let your words be few: symbolism of speaking and silence among seventeenth-century Quakers. Tucson: Wheatmark.

Berlin, I. 1969. Four essays on liberty. Oxford: University Press.

Bishara, A. 2013. Back stories: U.S. news production and Palestinian politics. Stanford: University Press.

Bourdieu, P. 1991. Language and symbolic power. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Boyer, D. 2003. Censorship as a vocation: the institutions, practices, and cultural logic of media control in the German democratic republic. Comparative Studies in Society and History 45, 511-45.

Boyer, P. 2013. Simply the best: parody and political sincerity in Iceland. American Ethnologist 40, 276-87.

Bunn, M. 2015. Reimagining repression: new censorship theory and after. History and Theory 54, 25-44.

Butler, J. 1997. Excitable speech: a politics of the performative. London: Routledge.

— — — 2015. Notes toward the performative theory of assembly. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Butler, J. & A. Athanasiou 2013. Dispossession: the performative in the political. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Candea, M. 2019. Silencing oneself, silencing others: rethinking censorship comparatively [introduction]. Terrain (available on-line: http://journals.openedition.org/terrain/18773). Accessed 3 February 2020.

— — — 2019. The duelling ethic and the spirit of libel law: matters and materials of honour in France. Law Text Culture 23, 29.

Cody, F. 2011. Publics and politics. Annual Review of Anthropology 40, 37-52.

— — — 2015. Populist publics: print capitalism and crowd violence beyond liberal frameworks. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 35(1), 50-65.

Coleman, G. 2009. Code is speech: legal tinkering, expertise, and protest among free and open source software developers. Cultural Anthropology 24, 420-54.

Coleman, E.G. 2011. Anonymous: from the lulz to collective action. In Politics in the age of secrecy and transparency (ed.) E.G. Coleman (available on-line: http://mediacommons.org/tne/pieces/anonymous-traveling-pure-lulz-land-political-territories). Accessed 3 April 2020.

Englund, H. 2018. The front line of free speech: beyond parrhêsia in Finland’s migrant debate. American Ethnologist 45, 100-11.

Faubion, J.D. 2001. Toward an anthropology of ethics: Foucault and the pedagogies of autopoiesis. Representations 74, 83-104.

Favret-Saada, J. 2015. Comment produire une crise mondiale avec douze petits dessins. Paris: Fayard.

Fish, S.E. 1994. There’s no such thing as free speech, and it’s a good thing too. Oxford: University Press.

Foucault, M. 2010. The government of the self and others. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

— — — 2011. The courage of truth. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gal, S. & J.T. Irvine 2019. Signs of difference: language and ideology in social life. Cambridge: University Press.

Gershon, I. 2014. Publish and be damned: new media publics and neoliberal risk. Ethnography 15, 70-87.

Glaeser, A. 2011. Political epistemics: the secret police, the opposition, and the end of East German socialism. Chicago: University Press

Heywood, P. 2019. Fascism, uncensored: legalism and neo-fascist pilgrimage in Predappio, Italy. Terrain 72, 86-103.

Hill, J.H. & J.T. Irvine (eds) 1992. Responsibility and evidence in oral discourse. Cambridge: University Press.

Irvine, J.T. 1989. When talk isn’t cheap: language and political economy. American Ethnologist 16(2), 248-67.

Keane, W. 2007. Christian moderns: freedom and fetish in the mission encounter (1st ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press.

— — — 2009. Freedom and blasphemy: on Indonesian press bans and Danish cartoons. Public Culture 21(1), 47-76.

— — — 2015. Ethical life: its natural and social histories. Princeton: University Press.

Kharkhordin, O. 1999. The collective and the individual in Russia: a study of practice. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kunreuther, L. 2014. Voicing subjects: public intimacy and mediation in Kathmandu. Berkeley: University of California Press.

— — — 2018. Sounds of democracy: performance, protest, and political subjectivity. Cultural Anthropology 33(1), 1-31.

Laidlaw, J. 2002. For an anthropology of freedom and ethics. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8, 311-32.

— — — 2013. The subject of virtue: an anthropology of ethics and freedom. Cambridge: University Press.

Lambek, M. (ed.) 2010. Ordinary ethics: anthropology, language and action. New York: Fordham University Press.

Larson, J.L. 2013. Critical thinking in Slovakia after socialism. Rochester: University Press.

Levinson, S. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: University Press.

Mazzarella, W. 2013. Censorium: cinema and the open edge of mass publicity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

— — — 2015. Totalitarian tears: does the crowd really mean it? Cultural Anthropology 30(1), 91-112.

Robbins, J. 2007. Between reproduction and freedom: morality, values, and radical cultural change. Ethnos 72, 293-314.

— — — 2016. What is the matter with transcendence? On the place of religion in the new anthropology of ethics. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22, 767-808.

Schäfers, M. 2017. Voice. In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology (eds) F. Stein, S. Lazar, M. Candea, H. Diemberger, J. Robbins, A. Sanchez & R. Stasch (available on-line: http://doi.org/10.29164/17voice).

Viktorsky, G. 1929. Samokritika v sisteme sovetskoi demokratii (Self-criticism in the system of Soviet democracy). In Sovetskaia demokratiia (ed.) I.M. Steklov. Moscow: Sovetskoe Stroitel’stvo.

Warner, M. 2005. Publics and counterpublics (new ed. edition). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Weidman, A. 2014. Voice and anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 43, 37-51.

Whitman, J.Q. 2000. Enforcing civility and respect: three societies. The Yale Law Journal 109, 1279.

Williams, R. 1980. Collective immortality: the syndicalist origins of proletarian culture, 1905-1910. Slavic Review 39(3), 389-402.

Woolard, K.A. & B.B. Schieffelin 1994. Language ideology. Annual Review of Anthropology 23, 55-82.

Yankah, K. 1995. Speaking for the chief: ȯkyeame and the politics of Akan royal oratory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Note on contributors

Matei Candea is a Reader 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 (2010, Routledge) and Detachment: essays on the limits of relational thinking (2015, Manchester University Press) 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.

Matei Candea, Department of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, mc288@cam.ac.uk

Paolo Heywood is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at Durham University. He is the author of After difference: queer activism in anthropological theory (2018, Berghahn).

Paolo Heywood, Department of Anthropology, Durham University, Dawson Building, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE, paolo.heywood@durham.ac.uk

Fiona Wright is a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She works on care, activism, dissent, and ethics, and how they are linked to sovereignty and violence. She is the author of The Israeli radical left: an ethics of complicity (2018, University of Pennsylvania Press).

Fiona Wright, Advanced Care Research Centre, Usher Institute, University of Edinburgh, 9 Little France Road, Edinburgh BioQuarter, Edinburgh, EH16 4UX, fcw28@cam.ac.uk

Taras Fedirko is a British Academy Research Fellow in social anthropology at the University of St Andrews. He is the editor of Grammars of liberalism, a special collection in Social Anthropology with Farhan Samanani and Hugh Williamson. His research focuses on middle-class professionals involved in promoting political liberalism at the core (Britain) and semi-periphery (Ukraine) of global capitalism.

Taras Fedirko, Department of Social Anthropology, 71 North St, St Andrews KY16 9AJ, tf68@st-andrews.ac.uk

[1] It is also worth noting that stark contrasts between ‘Western/liberal’ and ‘Muslim’ language ideologies or perspectives on the Danish cartoon controversy overwrite the diversity of understandings within each of these ensembles, which are hardly mutually exclusive—as these anthropologists themselves acknowledge (Keane 2009: 57; Asad et al. 2013: viii). For a different anthropological reading of the case, which puts the emphasis on how specific actors worked to produce a global sense of a singular ‘Muslim reaction to the cartoons’, see Favret-Saada (2015).

[2] An instrument of socialist reflexivity and resistance, the notion of samokritika became a tool of punitive power towards the end of the 1930s, when it shaped the stakes and form of (forced) confessions of defendants during the infamous Stalinist show trials.

[3] This and other anthropological work on voice is explored by Marlene Schäfers (this volume).

Visual anthropology

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

Jenny Chio

University of Southern California

Initially published 26 Jul 2021

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

Abstract:

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

Anthropology has always been visual

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

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

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

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

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

Ethnographic film in practice and as theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The parallax effect: Indigenous and activist media

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

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

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

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

An anthropology of the visual

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

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

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

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

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

From visual to multimodal?

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: visual experiences and visual experiments

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

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

References

Aufderheide, P. 2008. ‘You see the world of the other and you look at your own’: the evolution of the video in the Villages Project. Journal of Film and Video 60(2), 26-34.

Anderson, C., & T.W. Benson 1993. Put down the camera and pick up the shovel: an interview with John Marshall. In The cinema of John Marshall (ed.) J. Ruby, 135-67. London: Routledge.

Banks, M. & H. Morphy 1997. Rethinking visual anthropology. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Banks, M. & J. Ruby (eds) 2011. Made to be seen: perspectives on the history of visual anthropology. Chicago: University Press.

Banfill, K. 2020. Retro Nuosu: reclaiming the past, present, and future through participatory portraits in Southwest China. Visual Anthropology Review 36(2), 296-318.

Barbash, I. & L. Taylor 1994. Cross-cultural filmmaking: a handbook for making documentary and ethnographic films and videos. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bateson, G. & M. Mead 1942. Balinese character: a photographic analysis. New York: New York Academy of Sciences.

Bowles, L. 2017. Doing the snap: storytelling and participatory photography with women porters in Ghana. Visual Anthropology Review 33(2), 107-18.

Buggenhagen, B. 2017. If you were in my sneakers: migration stories in the studio photography of Dakar-based Omar Victor Diop. Visual Anthropology Review 33(1), 38-50.

Bunn-Marcuse, K. (ed.) with C. Child, K. Child, and T. Child of the Kwakiutl (Kwagu’ł) First Nation. Forthcoming. Ḵa̱n’s hiłile (Making it right): a collaborative reframing of Kwakiutl film and audio recordings with Franz Boas, 1930. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Carelli, V. 1988. Video in the villages. Commission on Visual Anthropology Newsletter, May.

Carter, R.L. 2019. A house in Time: in search of a just image. Visual Anthropology Review 35(2), 123-37.

Chen, N. 1992. Speaking nearby: a conversation with Trinh T. Minh–ha. Visual Anthropology Review, 8(1), 82-91.

Chio, J. 2014. A landscape of travel: the work of tourism in rural ethnic China. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

——— 2017a. Guiding lines. Member voices. Fieldsights, May 2 (available online: https://culanth.org/fieldsights/guiding-lines, accessed 31 August 2020).

——— 2017b. Rendering rural modernity: spectacle and power in a Chinese ethnic tourism village. Critique of Anthropology 37(4), 418-39.

——— 2020. Theorizing in/of ethnographic film. In The Routledge international handbook of ethnographic film and video (ed.) P. Vannini, 30-9. London: Routledge (available online: https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9780429196997-4, accessed 31 August 2020.)

Collier, J. & M. Collier 1967. Visual anthropology: photography as a research method. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Collins, S.G., M. Durington & H.S. Gill 2017. Multimodality: an invitation. American Anthropologist 119(1), 142-6.

Crawford, P.I. & D. Turton (eds) 1992. Film as ethnography. Manchester: University Press.

Dattatreyan, E.G. & I. Marrero-Guillamón 2019. Introduction: multimodal anthropology and the politics of invention. American Anthropologist 121(1), 220-8.

Dávila, A. 2012 [2001]. Latinos Inc.: marketing and the making of a people. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— 2020. Latinx art: artists, markets, and politics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Deger, J. 2006. Shimmering screens: making media in an Aboriginal community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Dowell, K. 2017. Sovereign screens: Aboriginal media on the Canadian west coast. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Durrington, M. (2013). Ethnographic film. Anthropology: Oxford bibliographies online (ed. J.L. Jackson Jr.)(available on-line: https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199766567/obo-9780199766567-0110.xml). Accessed June 2, 2021.

Edwards, E. 2001. Raw histories: photographs, anthropology, and museums. London: Berg.

——— 2011. Tracing photography. In Made to be seen: perspectives on the history of visual anthropology (eds) M. Banks & J. Ruby, 159-89. Chicago: University Press.

——— (ed.) 1994. Anthropology and photography 1860-1920. New Haven: Yale University Press.

El Guindi, F. 2004. Visual anthropology: essential theory and method. Lanham: Altamira Press.

Elder, S. 1995. Collaborative filmmaking: an open space for making meaning, a moral ground for ethnographic film. Visual Anthropology Review 11, 94-101.

Fattal, A. 2020. Shooting cameras for peace: youth, photography, and the Colombian armed conflict / Disparando cámaras para la paz: juventud, fotografía, y el conflicto armado Colombiano. Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum Press/Harvard University Press.

Feld, S. 2012 [1982]. Sound and sentiment: birds, weeping, poetics, and song in Kaluli expression. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Fisher, D. & L. Bessire (eds) 2012. Radio fields: anthropology and wireless sound in the 21^st century. New York: University Press.

Flores, C. Y. & A. Torresan 2018. Visual anthropology from Latin America: an introduction. Anthrovision 6(2) (available online: https://journals.openedition.org/anthrovision/3672). Accessed 31 August 2020).

Foster, H. 1995. The artist as ethnographer? In The traffic in culture: refiguring art and anthropology (eds.) G.E. Marcus & F. Myers, 302-9. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Friedman, P.K. 2017. Do we even need to define ethnographic film?. Savage Minds (blog) (available on-line: https://savageminds.org/2017/07/20/do-we-even-need-to-define-ethnographic-film/). Accessed 2 June 2021.

Gardner, R. 2008. The impulse to preserve: reflections of a filmmaker. Cambridge: Peabody Museum Press.

Ginsburg, F. 1994. Culture/media: a (mild) polemic. Anthropology Today 10(2), 5-15.

——— 1995. The parallax effect: the impact of Aboriginal media on ethnographic film. Visual Anthropology Review 11(2), 64-76.

——— 2016. Indigenous media from U-Matic to YouTube: media sovereignty in the digital age. Sociologia & Antropologia 6(3) (available on-line: https://doi.org/10.1590/2238-38752016v632). Accessed 26 August 2020.

Griffiths, A. 2002. Wondrous difference: cinema, anthropology, and turn-of-the-century visual culture. New York: Columbia University Press.

Grimshaw, A. 2001. The ethnographer’s eye: ways of seeing in anthropology. Cambridge: University Press.

——— & N. Papastergiadis 1995. Conversations with anthropological filmmakers: David MacDougall. Manchester: Prickly Pear Pamphlet Series.

Grimshaw, A. & A. Ravetz 2007. Observational Cinema: Anthropology, Film, and the Exploration of Social Life. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

——— 2015. The ethnographic turn – and after: a critical approach towards the realignment of art and anthropology. Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 23, 418-34.

Groo, K. 2019. Bad film histories: ethnography and the early archive. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gürsel, Z.D. 2016. Image brokers: visualizing world news in the age of digital circulation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

——— 2018. A picture of health: the search for a genre to visualize care in late Ottoman Istanbul. Grey Room 72, 36-67.

Henley, P. 2020. Beyond observation: a history of authorship in ethnographic film. Manchester: University Press.

Hennessy, K., T. Smith & T. Hogue 2018. ARCTICNOISE and broadcasting futures: Geronimo Inutiq remixes the Igloolik Isuma archive. Cultural Anthropology 33(2) Special Issue: Indigenous Media Futures (ed.) W. Lempert, 213-23.

Hockings, P. (ed.) 2003 [1974]. Principles of visual anthropology. The Hague: Mouton De Gruyter.

Howes, D. 2019. Multisensory anthropology. Annual Review of Anthropology 48(1), 17-28.

Jacknis, J. 1988. Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in Bali: their use of photography and film. Cultural Anthropology 3(2), 160-77.

——— 2016. Doing the history of anthropology as the history of visual representation. History of Anthropology Newsletter 40 (available on-line: https://histanthro.org/notes/doing-the-history-of-anthropology/). Accessed 31 August 2020.

Jackson Jr, J.L. 2004. An ethnographic filmflam: giving gifts, doing research, and videotaping the Native subject/object. American Anthropologist 106(1), 32-42.

Jay, M. 2002. That visual turn. Journal of Visual Culture 1(1), 87-92.

Joseph, C. 2015. Illustrating the anthropological text: drawings and photographs in Franz Boas’ The social organization and the secret societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1897). In Texts, transmissions, receptions: modern approaches to narratives (eds) A. Lardinois, S. Levie, H. Hoeken & C. Lathy, 221-39. Leiden: Brill.

Kondo, D. 2018. Worldmaking: race, performance, and the work of creativity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Lea, T. & E. Povinelli 2018. Karrabing: an essay in keywords. Visual Anthropology Review 34(1) Special Issue: Hyperrealism and Other Indigenous Forms of ‘Faking It with the Truth’, 36-46.

Lee, T. 2019. Beyond the ethico-aesthetic: toward a re-valuation of the sensory ethnography lab. Visual Anthropology Review 35(2), 138-47.

Loizos, P. 1993. Innovation in ethnographic film: from innocence to self-consciousness 1955-1985. Chicago: University Press.

Lozada, E. 2006. Framing globalization: wedding pictures, funeral photography, and family snapshots in rural China. Visual Anthropology 19(1), 87-103.

Luvaas, B. 2016. Street style: an ethnography of fashion blogging. London: Bloomsbury.

——— 2019. The camera and the anthropologist: reflections on photographic agency. Visual Anthropology 32(1), 76-96.

MacDonald, S. 2013. American ethnographic film and personal documentary: the Cambridge turn. Berkeley: University of California Press.

MacDougall, D. 1982. Unprivileged camera style. RAIN 50, 8-10.

——— 1995. Subtitling ethnographic films: archetypes into individualities. Visual Anthropology Review 11(1), 83-91.

——— 1999. Transcultural cinema. Princeton: University Press.

——— 2005. The corporeal image: film, ethnography, and the senses. Princeton: University Press.

——— 2019. The looking machine: essays on cinema, anthropology, and documentary filmmaking. Manchester: University Press.

McLuhan, M. 1994 [1964]. Understanding media: the extensions of man. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Mead, M. 2003. Visual anthropology in a discipline of words. In Principles of visual anthropology (ed.) P. Hocking, 3-10. The Hague: Mouton De Gruyter.

Michaels, E. 1991. Aboriginal content: who's got it—who needs it? Visual Anthropology 4(3-4), 277-300.

——— 1993. Bad Aboriginal art: tradition, media, and technological horizons. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Mithlo, N.M. 2009. ‘Our Indian princess’: subverting the stereotype. Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press.

Miyarrka Media 2019. Phone and spear: a Yuta anthropology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Morris-Reich, A. 2015. Race and photography: racial photography as scientific evidence, 1876-1980. Chicago: University Press.

Moore, R. 1994. Marketing alterity. In Visualizing theory: selected essays from V.A.R., 1990-94 (ed.) L. Taylor, 126-39. London: Routledge.

Myers, F. 2002. Painting culture: the making of Aboriginal high art. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Nakamura, K. 2013. Making sense of sensory ethnography: the sensory and the multisensory. American Anthropologist 115(1), 132-5.

Nichols, B. 1994. Blurred boundaries: questions of meaning in documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Osman, W. 2019. Racialized agents and villains of the security state: how African Americans are interpellated against Muslims and Muslim Americans. Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas 5(1-2), 155-82.

Phillips, K. & D. Vidali 2017. Collisions: memory, voice, sound and physicality through a multi-sensorial radio remix installation. Seismograf (available on-line: https://seismograf.org/en/fokus/sound-art-matters/collisions-of-memory-voice-sound-and-physicality-though-a-multi-sensorial-radio-remix). Accessed 1 September 2020.

Pink, S. 2015 [2012]. Doing sensory ethnography. London: Sage.

Pinney, C. 1997. Camera Indica: the social life of Indian photographs. Chicago: University Press.

——— 2011. Photography and anthropology. London: Reaktion Books.

Pinney, C. & N. Peterson (eds) 2003. Photography’s other histories. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Ramey, K. 2011. Productive dissonance and sensuous image-making: visual anthropology and experimental film. In Made to be seen: perspectives on the history of visual anthropology (eds) M. Banks & J. Ruby, 256-87. Chicago: University Press.

Rony, F.T. 1996. The third eye: race, cinema, and ethnographic spectacle. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Rouch, J. 2003. Cine-ethnography (trans. S. Feld). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Ruby, J. 2000. Picturing culture: explorations of film and anthropology. Chicago: University Press.

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

Russell, C. 1999. Experimental ethnography: the work of film in the age of video. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Rutten, K., A. van Dienderen & R. Soetaert 2013. Revisiting the ethnographic turn in contemporary art. Critical Arts 27(5), 459-73.

Sniadecki, J.P. 2014. Chaiqian/demolition. Visual Anthropology Review 30(1), 23-37.

Sprague, S. 1978a. Yoruba photography: how the Yoruba see themselves. African Arts 12, 52-107.

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

Spray, S. 2020. Filming the other. In The Routledge international handbook of ethnographic film and video (ed.) P. Vannini, 40-8. London: Routledge.

Suhr, C. 2019. Descending with angels: Islamic exorcism and psychiatry: a film monograph. Manchester: University Press.

Strassler, K. 2020. Demanding images: democracy, mediation, and the image-event in Indonesia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Strathern, M. 2018. Portraits, characters and persons. Social Anthropology 26(2), 197-210.

Suhr, C. & R. Willerslev 2012. Can film show the invisible? The work of Montage in ethnographic filmmaking. Current Anthropology 53(3), 282-301.

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

Takaragawa, S., T.L. Smith, K. Hennessy, P. Astacio Alvarez, J. Chio, C. Nye & S. Shankar 2019. Bad habitus: anthropology in the age of the multimodal. American Anthropologist 121(2), 517-24.

Takaragawa, S. & L. Halloran 2017. Exploring the links of contemporary art and anthropology: archiving epistemologies. Critical Arts 31(2), 127-39.

Taylor, L. 1996. Iconophobia. Transition 69, 64-88.

Turner, T. 1992. Defiant images: the Kayapo appropriation of video. Anthropology Today 8(6), 5-16.

Vannini, P. (ed.) 2020. The Routledge international handbook of ethnogrpahic film and video. London: Routledge.

Weinberger, E. 1994. The camera people. In Visualizing theory (ed.) L. Taylor, 3-26. New York: Routledge.

Weiner, J.F. 1997. Televisualist anthropology. Current Anthropology 38(2), 197-234.

Wilson, P. & M. Stewart (eds) 2008. Global Indigenous media: culture, poetics, politics. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Wilson, P., J. Hearne, A. Cordóva & S. Thorner 2017. Indigenous media. Cinema and media studies: Oxford bibliographies online (available online: https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199791286/obo-9780199791286-0229.xml). Accessed 26 August 2020.

Wright, C. 2013. The echo of things: the lives of photographs in the Solomon Islands. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Worth, S. & J. Adair 1972. Through Navajo eyes. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Films and Videos Cited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Note on contributor

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

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

Image credit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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