Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Activism

Prefigurative politics

Rebecca Tishler — Fri, 18 Mar 2022 16:51:10 +0000

University of St Andrews

Initially published 18 Mar 2022

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

Abstract:

‘Prefigurative politics’ refers to how activists embody and enact, within their activism, the socialities and practices they foster for broader society. Inspired by anarchist principles, the core practices characterising prefiguration include participative democracy, horizontality, inclusiveness, and direct action. Gaining visibility with the social movements that blossomed after 1968, and again with the post-1999 movements opposing neoliberal globalisation, prefigurative politics involve deploying political practices that are in line with the activists’ envisaged goals. These, in turn, tend to encompass the construction of a democratic and horizontal society, which must be enacted through egalitarian relationships between activists who refrain from resorting to authoritarian, sexist, and exclusionary means to reach political goals. Yet, what are the origins of this concept? What kind of politics are referred to as prefigurative? Since the concept’s consolidation, anthropologists have been at the forefront of answering these questions, as both researchers and activists. They look at how prefigurative politics intersect with themes dear to the discipline, such as social organisation, globalisation, social change, community-building, and everyday ways of inhabiting the world. This entry explores how prefigurative politics as a concept and as a series of practices have become relevant among those who build horizontal political and social relations, oppose representative democracy, and embody alternative lifestyles. Exploring prefigurative politics leads scholars to question the seemingly straightforward divide between the New Left and ‘old lefts’. Additionally, asking whether right-wing movements can also engage in prefigurative politics helps us better understand the pervasive practices that transform non-institutionalised activism into laboratories from where people foster change and experiment with new socialities.

Introduction

Prefigurative politics—and its cognate, prefiguration—is one of those concepts that appear to be rather abstruse, but whose meaning actually indicates something ordinary. It refers to the strategies and practices employed by political activists to build alternative futures in the present and to effect political change by not reproducing the social structures that activists oppose. Prefiguration has been widely associated with the modus operandi of the social movements that blossomed after the 1960s, drawing on anarchist-inspired principles, such as participative democracy, horizontality, inclusiveness, and direct action. Via the motto ‘another world is possible’, prefiguration is often part of activist-led social experiments that, rather than serving clearly established goals, create open-ended ways of reimagining society and contesting the entanglements of representative democracy, neoliberalism, social inequality, and globalisation.

Yet, before prefiguration gained prominence with the last decades’ protests against neoliberal globalisation, how did this concept come into being? First used centuries ago to betoken a form of Christian salvation, how did prefiguration acquire a different meaning among political activists? What kind of politics is referred to as prefigurative?

The 1960s witnessed the emergence of the so-called ‘new social movements’ and the ‘New Left’. These constituted movements that amplified causes which spoke not only to economic and class-related goals, but also to civil rights, ethics, and alternative ways of inhabiting the world. Such causes include feminism, environmentalism, the movements for gay rights, animal rights, the American civil rights and other anti-racism movements worldwide, students’ movements and, since the 1990s, alterglobalisation movements (against neoliberal globalisation). Questioning Marxist and social-democratic forms of political action, the prefigurative forms of activism at the heart of these movements do not necessarily seek to mobilise every means available to achieve a pre-established, future-oriented goal. Instead, they aim to create a more egalitarian and inclusive society by equalling a movement’s means with a movement’s ends: reaching a horizontal society requires building horizontal relationships between activists in the present, which will, in turn, prefigure the envisaged end.

Such movements and tactics were labelled ‘new’ when measured against the paradigmatic ‘old’ of institutionalised activism carried out by political parties and trade unions since at least the Industrial Revolution. Thinking about political activism from the perspective of grand narratives and ideologies—as well as of communist theories of comprehensive social change—has stimulated social scientists to regard the success of a given mobilisation as dependent upon the attainment of certain predetermined goals (Maeckelbergh 2011), such as a revolution that will dismantle capitalism and implement a new mode of production. Yet, seeking a revolution as the ultimate goal often assumes that any means are valid to reach a more egalitarian and classless society. Unlike this paradigm, prefigurative politics refrain, for instance, from using authoritarianism to build a democratic society.

Anthropology has shown a long-standing interest in prefigurative politics since this concept’s first links with social movements. Mostly through the work of anthropologists-cum-activists, prefiguration has been approached alongside themes dear to the discipline, such as social organisation, globalisation, inequality, social change, community-building, and the ways in which everyday lives are lived. While political scientists and sociologists have mostly concentrated on political strategies by drawing parallels between several cognate social movements, anthropologists have employed participant observation to explore particular movements, collectives, and networks. In such manner, they have produced a nuanced understanding of how prefiguration takes place on the ground—without losing sight of its shortcomings.

Due to ethnographers’ particular attention to prefigurative politics in Europe and the United States, the existing body of literature may convey the idea that prefiguration thrives particularly in the Global North. Existing analyses have also tended to focus on disruptive, contentious politics. By contrast, fewer studies stress the pertinence of prefigurative practices in the everyday lives of people in the Global South, and of those who are not full-time protesters. Even fewer have considered how right-wing activists also mobilise prefiguration. While scholars generally agree on what constitutes prefigurative politics, some highlight an apparent paradox when the anarchist-inspired principles underlying prefiguration are mobilised by activists who are, content-wise, anything but anarchists. Other scholars, in turn, accentuate prefiguration as a political strategy that can be similarly deployed by activists advancing progressive as much as conservative content. Lastly, as I will discuss, several researchers have used prefiguration as a rather problematic umbrella term to label which movements and forms of activism have a prefigurative character and which ones have not.

To explore the historical and current significance of prefigurative politics, as well as its limitations, this entry analyses how this concept and the practices it designates have come to bear relevance among those who oppose representative democracy, build small-scale politically organised entities as horizontal micropolities, and embody alternative lifestyles. Questioning the seeming straightforwardness of the divide between the new and old lefts and bringing right-wing movements to the discussion, this entry provides anthropologists and non-academics with a gateway to better understand the pervasive practices that aim to turn activism into laboratories from where people foster change by experimenting with new socialities.

Revolutions that dismiss the revolution

The concept of prefiguration is often credited to Carl Boggs (1977) to describe the logics and practices of left-wing movements that, mostly since the 1960s, opposed Leninism and the working-class politics aimed at structural reform. Yet, little did Boggs know that the term had been previously used by Augustine in the 4^th century BCE to explain a key tenet of Christianity. Examining the fall of lust-laden Rome, Augustine ([1470] 1998) pointed out that, to enjoy spiritual salvation and avoid collective perishing, people should resign their paganism and commit to charity and moral integrity. Only by prefiguring a divine beatitude could one near a state of holiness to be partially enjoyed in the present and fully realised in the future (Scholl 2016, 321; Buts 2019, 17).

Whereas Augustine heralded spiritual salvation via the earthly enactment of God’s conduct, centuries later, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels ([1848] 2015) would call for political salvation via overthrowing the bourgeoisie and bringing an end to class struggle. Moving away from prefiguration, the Communist manifesto (1848) urged proletarians to fight the monopoly of the means of production held by the few, in a form of political salvation that ousts reformisms and entails revolutionary macropolitical changes. Toppling all existing social conditions, according to Marx and Engels, makes the revolution the means to reach the ultimate end of inaugurating a communist, classless society. Yet, means and ends frequently clashed here: major streams of Marxism ended up reproducing the authoritarian state power and highly bureaucratic hierarchies characteristic of bourgeois society (Boggs 1977, 5). Thus, Marx’s anti-statist theories often gained materiality via statist practices.

Contrasting with such statist orientations, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of a new wave of radical politics. With the May 1968 uprisings in France and the civil rights movements in the US as their core symbols, the new social movements and New Left (Epstein 1991; Polletta 2002) reinforced the centrality of collective identity, civil rights, and lifestyles in activist agendas. In the French case, the emergence of youth mobilisations—initially associated with the fight against university funding policies—promptly gained the support of broader society. Via street barricades, occupation of universities, and France’s largest wildcat strikes, protesters—factory workers, students, and feminists, among others—built a communal agenda without having much in common. This implied replacing each group’s specific claims with broader demands, thus turning May 1968 into an open-ended experiment of society-building. Through grassroots practices collectively decided and enacted on the go, May 1968 had a long-lasting effect, enabling environmentalist, anti-fascist, and feminist perspectives to enter into the mainstream.

Meanwhile, Italian autonomism was gaining ground since the 1950s. Starting on factories’ shop floors, the worker’s autonomy movement (Autonomia Operaia) in Italy came to involve university students, women, artists, migrants, and other subaltern groups not traditionally conceived as ‘proletarian’ (Katsiaficas 2006). While occupying factories, universities, and abandoned buildings, autonomists sought to enact self-management and carry out everyday, small-scale revolutions by circumventing representative decision-making bodies (such as corporate boards, trade unions, governmental ministries, and political parties). On the other side of the Atlantic, the anti-Vietnam War demonstrations in the US succeeded in connecting students and workers, Black Panthers and pacifists, upper-middle-class white people, feminists, church organisations, anti-nuclear activists, and war veterans. Initially an uprising against warmongering, this coalition orchestrated a display of generalised political dissatisfaction despite not having a single, unifying agenda.

Operating outside the institutional frameworks of the state, political parties, and trade unions, these new social movements took shape through autonomous activists who organised in a mostly non-hierarchical, network-like manner. They sought to break with hierarchical and institutionalised politics in two main ways. Firstly, they expanded the scope of politics by bringing to the table previously marginalised political agendas. Mobilising prefiguration as an activist strategy, the New Left underscored issues from feminism and structural racism to drug policy reforms and environmental issues. Conservative activists equally deployed prefiguration to increase the relevance of anti-abortion and anti-drug advocacy. Secondly, the new social movements gave visibility to principles according to which the political means to achieve an end had to be consistent with that end. To build a more democratic and egalitarian society, one had to deploy democratic and egalitarian forms of grassroots activism. Likewise, building a white supremacist society means enacting ‘racially pure’ small-scale communities (Futrell and Simi 2004). Such uses of the concept have brought prefiguration to the core of post-1960s social movements’ political repertoire (Boggs 1977; Calhoun 1993).

Despite the diversity of prefigurative practices and the fact that the movements analysed here do not constitute a homogeneous whole, these practices tend to have in common ‘the embodiment, within the ongoing political practise of a movement, of those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal’ (Boggs 1977, 6-7). Hence, prefiguration is a way for activists to anticipate the changes they seek. And while everyday micropolitical action may not trigger a revolution or herald political salvation, it may progressively transform our ways of thinking, behaving, and imagining what society should be like.

An activist and anthropological field of action take shape

After its surge in the 1960s, prefigurative politics gained new momentum in the 1990s. With the dissolution of the USSR, social movements had to reinvent themselves beyond statism and rethink the capitalism versus communism divide. The 1994 Zapatista uprising in Mexico, for instance, gathered peasants, indigenous peoples, and marginalised urban groups in protest against the neoliberalism imposed by the Mexican state’s land reforms and the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). However, the Zapatistas did not address the government or political parties in their political demands: they fought for autonomy to implement by themselves the local-level changes they envisaged (Stahler-Stolk 2010). Ultimately, the Zapatistas managed to establish autonomous zones in the Mexican state of Chiapas, with local communities having more say in shaping state policies and school curricula. Twenty-four years on, in 2018, the Zapatistas put forward Marichuy, an indigenous woman, to run for the presidency of Mexico. Aware of the unlikelihood of her victory, the Zapatistas aimed to use the presidential elections to highlight to the subalterns at the margins of Mexican society that their reality can be changed for the better, especially outside the framework of institutionalised, representative politics (Ansotegui 2018). Prefiguring alternatives to market-controlled globalisation and state politics since 1994, the Zapatista uprising inspired movements that would increasingly tackle global issues.

Prefigurative politics gained even wider visibility with a movement that placed neoliberal globalisation as its nemesis: the 1999 protests in Seattle against the austerity, deregulation, and large-scale privatisation measures laid down by the Washington Consensus and advanced by international bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO). Following months of planning, the activists and collectives loosely gathered under the Direct Action Network formed a human barricade around the venue hosting the WTO ministerial conference. Contrasting with the WTO’s hierarchies and formalities, protesters wore costumes, danced, carried placards, and chanted anti-capitalist slogans, followed by marching bands performing in the blocked streets. Violence was also present, coming from police repression and from some protesters’ tactics of fighting neoliberalism by damaging institutional buildings, banks, and multinational corporations. Such lack of a consensus between partisans of violent and non-violent forms of direct action evinces the inherent diversity of activist tactics subsumed under the label ‘prefiguration’.

While the protesters prevented the WTO delegates from reaching the conference venue, activist crowds turned into a commons—a free space where people developed, at least for a limited number of days, an alternative sphere of social (re)production involving care, education, food, and housing (Varvarousis, Asara and Akbulut 2021). Through general assemblies, workshops, and encampments, they sought to prefigure locally the kind of relationships they envisaged for the world. In bonding with each other through solidarity, informality, horizontality, and inclusiveness, the activists sought to oppose, through their practices, the formality, authoritarianism, and exclusionary character of neoliberal organisations. The commons also created opportunities for radical learning: in a dialogical process of horizontal education (Backer et al. 2017), activists co-produced knowledge, learned from each other’s prior political experiences, and materialised alternative socialities. Keeping the movement constantly open to dialogue was their way to give justice to and make real their motto ‘another world is possible’.

Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers (2011) aptly illustrate the significance of open-endedness for prefigurative politics. Inspired by the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987), the authors argue that capitalism operates through apparatuses of capture by creating boundaries to autonomous thinking and paralysing collective action. In remaining open to multiple ways of imagining and rebuilding society, the Seattle protests had a ‘rhizomatic’ character: for being non-institutionalised, spontaneous, and made up of activists supporting diverse causes, viewpoints, and activist strategies, these kinds of protests are meant to be more resistant to capture by institutional politics. An open letter, petition, or even a march against the WTO conference would have constituted a more easily recognisable repertoire for politicians and the police. It would have enabled them to enact standard protocols to either repress or ignore such expressions of dissatisfaction. A carnivalesque demonstration, on the other hand, shows how resistance can also be aestheticised, making it difficult for politicians, business people, and the police to curb the protest.

In this fashion, Seattle sought to depict neoliberal globalisation not as an abstract, unstoppable process, but as a set of concrete austerity and deregulation measures that can be challenged and mocked by ordinary people. This power of the crowds was later underscored by the motto ‘we are the 99%’, made famous by the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, via the argument according to which the majority of the world’s population cannot pay for the mistakes of the upper-class minority.

The Seattle protests also consolidated prefigurative politics not as an ‘anything goes’ way of showing dissatisfaction, but as a strategy in itself (Maeckelbergh 2011). In opposing summits of the G8, NATO, and the World Bank (Graeber 2009), the New Left draws its political action on grassroots democracy, direct action, and the creation of alternative micropolitical relations of power (Yates 2015a). Holding voluntary working groups to set up tents in occupied squares, serving food to participants, protecting them from police action, and keeping spaces of protest clean work to turn hierarchical power relations into inclusive and participatory practices.

In anthropology, the prefiguration debate gained popularity mostly through the work of David Graeber. Actively participating in alterglobalisation movements and demonstrations mainly in the US, Graeber (2002; 2009, xvii) asserts that political activism in the twenty-first century will be increasingly influenced by anarchist imperatives and practices. What Graeber refers to as ‘anarchism’ emerges directly from the left-libertarian tradition that fosters social equality alongside individual freedom. Expressed via direct action, this conception of anarchism is grounded on prefigurative practices that turn activist settings into concrete examples of what ‘real democracy is like’ and how society can take alternative forms—even though such forms do not necessarily reflect left-wing contents. Social scientists who document how such strategies unfold in real life placed prefiguration at the heart of their analyses of mobilisations such as the Occupy movement (Graeber 2009; Razsa and Kurnik 2012), feminist movements (Polletta 2002; Ishkanian and Saavedra 2019; Carmo 2019), France’s Nuit debout protests (Kokoreff 2016), the 15M movement in Spain (Flesher Fominaya 2020), and the World Social Forums held mostly in the Global South (Juris 2005; Teivainen 2016). Going beyond Western urban spaces, some authors have brought anti-state forms of activism for self-determination among Aboriginal peoples in Australia and Amazonian indigenous peoples to this discussion (Petray and Gertz 2018).

Materialising participatory democracy

Prefigurative politics does not just refer to specific forms of protests in which the very process of planning, carrying out, and embodying political action becomes part of the message activists aim to convey (Flesher Fominaya 2014). It also denotes direct ways of living democracy. One of the most closely examined enactments of prefigurative politics are therefore the general assemblies, which are consensual decision-making spaces within occupied squares. As part of a ‘generalised revolt against representation’ (Tormey 2012, 136), participatory democracy carried out by the activists/individuals themselves has become a mechanism to counter representative democracy, which is epitomised by political parties and elections. In general assemblies, participants are placed in a circle to hear those at the centre. No one must block the view of others, so that those who are hard of hearing or far away can understand the speaker through lip reading and body language. When the circle is too wide, participants employ a technique known as ‘the people’s microphone’: people gathered immediately around the speaker repeat everything they say in unison, to make the speaker’s voice reach those at the edges without the need for amplification devices (Deseriis 2014).

General assemblies are expected to give voice to potentially everyone: once joining the speaking queue, participants should speak for themselves, not as spokespersons of any collective or institution (Teivanen 2016; Razsa and Kurnik 2012). Interestingly, giving voice to the 99% starts with empowering activists individually, by placing autonomy at the core of ideal-typical prefigurative politics. General assemblies and decentralised workshops make room for direct action and convergence of thought and action. For instance, middle-class environmentalists may ask manual labourers for guidance on preparing posters on veganism that could find broader appeal, and feminists may advise anarchist students on how to convey their agendas in neutral language. Workshops also propose self-reflection on the commons, raising awareness of issues like racism or ableism among activists, as in this 2011 Occupy Boston workshop:

The facilitator, a white male, began the activity by asking for 20 diverse volunteers to line up side by side at the front of the crowd assembled at the Occupy Boston encampment at Dewey Square. He then issued a series of declarations: ‘If your ancestors lost land by the conquest of the U.S. government, step back; Step forward if your ancestors gained assets through the slave trade; Step back if your ancestors were brought here in chains to be slaves; Step back if you or your ancestors arrived as immigrants from Latin America, Asia, Africa, or the Caribbean’. These and other statements produced a visible line of stratification, with mostly white participants at the front and people of color toward the back (Juris et al. 2012, 434-5).

Opening the microphone and refusing fixed leadership invite activists to enact horizontality and to develop a do-it-yourself attitude. In not belonging to any institutionalised group or political party, such activist spaces are meant to become potentially everyone’s. Joining these spaces involves showing a willingness to leave aside a world driven by discrimination, authoritarianism, and neoliberal practices and setting a ‘frame’ (Bateson 1972, 177–93) wherein hierarchies are temporarily suspended. This frame encourages each participant to act and express oneself not as a representative of given political agendas, social status, or cultural backgrounds, but as individuals who autonomously question, for instance, oppressive, sexist, and colonialist regimes of truth.

Yet, building a new society from the ashes of the old entails carrying with it some of the vicissitudes that activists try to purge from their settings—which evinces the shortcomings of prefigurative politics. Firstly, however globally-oriented and inclusive such movements attempt to be, at times they reproduce gender, racial, and class segregation, as white, richer, better-connected, and male citizens from the Global North (Tarrow 2006: 44; Juris et al. 2012) tend to have more resources and possibilities to afford the time to activism. Regarding horizontality, the assemblies’ open microphone is counterbalanced by how more experienced and articulate activists often dominate these spaces. Sometimes this may entail that marginalised and less educated people will be less prone to talk—and, as open as the microphone might be, less often heard (Beeman et al. 2009; Wengronowitz 2013). Ultimately, horizontal forms of activism may thus lean towards authoritarianism, especially on occasions when more charismatic activists become seen as quasi-‘leaders’ or spokespersons of entire movements.

In addition, while the assembly format implies participatory democracy and gives everybody a say, it means ideas will often be repeated, frequently slowing down the pace of decisions and actions. Paradoxically, processes aimed at consensual decision-making often result neither in decisions nor in consensus, which either hampers the political action or leaves the final decision to the most active and influential activists, thus reproducing the centralised power that prefigurative politics oppose. In a number of movements, the open-endedness and inclusiveness that prevail in prefigurative politics also result in the absence of a coherent overall agenda (Chomsky 2012; Graeber 2013). Although being a feature, rather than a flaw, of these movements, this is read by some as activists being clueless about how to reach their goals (Lipset and Altbach 1966), resulting in movements that may be more expressive than instrumental, privileging spectacle over substance (Polletta 2002: 1-2).

These critiques and seeming flaws stress that creating a democratic culture and experimenting politics differently are forcefully long-term processes. Yet as the commons offer people solidarity and mutual support, they may well emerge as the first steps for people to collectively challenge the mainstream while prefiguring the new.

Rebuilding communication and the media

As the previous discussion on the open microphone suggests, communication technologies and the media play a crucial role in gathering people around political agendas. Just as the screening of the Vietnam War boosted pacifist movements worldwide in the late 1960s (Mandelbaum 1982), recent years have seen the rise of digital media as major networking arenas triggering contentious politics.

Several ethnographies have analysed the emergence of activism on digital media, particularly revolving around hashtags (mostly on Twitter) such as #Ferguson (Bonilla and Rosa 2015), #MeToo (Pipyrou 2018), and #BlackLivesMatter (Yang 2016). While indexing information online, hashtags also create mediatised spaces of peer support and solidarity when people share about their struggles with racism, sexism, and state violence. Due to the heightened temporality in digital media, hashtags mimic the dynamics of face-to-face activism, enabling users to engage almost in real-time with what happens in in-person protests. Thus, the occupation of New York’s Zuccotti Park, Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, Athens’ Syntagma Square, Paris’ Place de la République, and Cairo’s Tahrir Square have been supplemented by the ‘occupation’ of Facebook timelines, YouTube channels, and Twitter feeds with global calls for action and constant updates from the streets (Postill 2014; Castells 2015).

The Arab Spring (2010-2012, beginning in Tunisia) and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution offer a prime illustration of how digital media enable the prefiguration of a more egalitarian society. Bringing together Christians who used to socialise primarily in church and Muslims who tended to gather in and around mosques, the internet helped these groups find commonalities and recognise their shared dissatisfaction with state violence and the Egyptian government. Learning via digital media about protests taking place in neighbouring countries in North Africa and the Middle East, a great number of Egyptians saw their outrage matched by the hope conveyed by activists abroad (Castells 2015). Thus, territorial activism in city squares fed and was fed by deterritorialised activism online, amplifying activists’ voices and the reach of their support. While digital media may usually serve mainstream purposes, they emerge in prefigurative politics as platforms to both build activist networks and critically rebuild communication. In this sense, digital media empower anyone to communicate their own narratives and challenge mainstream regimes of truth by sidestepping the mediation of journalists and the one-to-many functioning of mass media (Castells 2008, 90).

Thinking of the arts and citizen media as prime examples of what John Downing (2001) calls ‘radical media’ enables us to highlight the media’s potential to report state violence in protests and violation of human rights in war-laden countries, as well as to give voice to those who are systematically excluded from mainstream sources of news. In this vein, the 1999-born Independent Media Center (IMC) was a landmark in covering the Seattle protests in real time (Downing 2003). Through its call for arms—‘Don't hate the media, become the media!’—the IMC became the forerunner of analogous grassroots initiatives producing content online without links to corporate news outlets.

Bypassing mainstream mass media does, of course, not always correspond to left-wing forms of prefigurative politics. Aside from bolstering the Arab Spring, digital media also provided the mechanisms that granted the electoral victory to far-right presidential candidates such as the US’s Donald Trump in 2016 (Tufekci 2018) and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 (Cesarino 2020). The same can be said about the COVID-19 anti-vaccine campaigns. On the one hand, presidential campaigns do not concern prefigurative politics entirely as they resort to institutionalised politics and the state in people’s quest for change. On the other hand, online campaigning does retain some of the core traits of prefiguration: it empowers the individual as a key campaigner, who is outside the scope of mass media and is capable of being heard upon producing and sharing content on digital media with relatively little mediation. Campaigners supporting political candidates also enact alternative communities—taking the shape of an online commons—whose members feel safe and welcome to share their political agendas, be they left-leaning or conservative, in line or out of step with a scientific consensus.

Just as media is deconstructed and rebuilt, languages are equally repoliticised in attempts to foster horizontal and inclusive communicative practices. Across the world, translators-activists gather in transnational collectives such as Translator Brigades and Tlaxcala to translate politically engaged articles and subtitle activists’ videos. Translating from hegemonic languages (such as English and French) into non-hegemonic and minority languages, such collectives make multilingual content available online and update activists on the fringe on what is happening elsewhere. Similarly, translating from non-hegemonic languages ensures that language minorities can be heard in activist spaces (Baker 2013, 2016). Relatedly, to fight linguistic discrimination in a different manner, an international collective of left-wing activists resorts to Esperanto—a non-national, easy-to-learn language—to materialise anti-national and anti-imperialist activist spaces. Through face-to-face meetings, mailing lists, and zines, this collective raises people’s awareness of how activism can only be effectively horizontal if everyone has the linguistic and technological means to be equally included in consensual decision-making processes (Fians 2021). Hence, prefigurative politics involve the creation of non-hegemonic communicative and media practices, giving voice and ears to potential participants.

Beyond occupied squares: communities, lifestyles, and the old left

As the aforementioned scholarship illustrates, social scientists have systematically associated prefigurative politics with the ‘movement of the squares’. This invites us to address David Snow’s call to ‘broaden our conceptualisation of social movements beyond contentious politics’ (2004, 19). One way to do so is by exploring prefigurative aspects of community-building, alternative lifestyles, and forms of activism that do not quite fit the New Left label.

First of all, the results of social experiments become more long-lasting when prefiguration meets community-building. This is the case, for instance, of eco-villages, whose participants prefigure their sought-after ecological imaginaries on a daily basis. Eco-villages enable their participants to bridge a consumerist wider society and more eco-friendly forms of sociality by collectively enacting sustainable lifestyles through organic farming and self-sufficiency (Casey et al. 2020). Along analogous lines, other forms of intentional communities—such as ashrams in India and Catholic communities in the UK (Firth 2019, 497)—gather people willing to live according to their spiritual and religious beliefs. This is largely in line with the aforementioned use of prefiguration by Augustine ([1470] 1998), as prefiguring links between spirituality and social justice relates to enacting a spiritually exemplary behaviour that would bring people closer to God and desired forms of spirituality.

A further remarkable illustration of prefiguration in community-building is the celebratory arts community Burning Man. Taking place once a year in the Black Rock Desert, in the US, Burning Man advertises itself as an ‘invitation to the future’. Starting in 1986, it progressively came to gather more than 60,000 participants who spend a week per year living in tents, joining concerts, and co-organising arts projects. While working together to prepare this festival with community-building ambitions, participants fight the perception of labour as alienating. By partly replacing commodification with ‘communification’ through their community-building practice, they infuse mundane labour with a meaning that emphasises one’s connection with the larger Burning Man collective of participants. This altered approach to labour bears long-lasting significance: after having experienced human relations otherwise, participants return to wider society with a renewed perception of how things can work, which eventually encourages them to try and reproduce some aspects of this short-lived experience over their year-long everyday lives (Chen 2016).

While eco-villages, ashrams, arts communities, and even kibbutzim (Simons and Ingram 2003) may be read as escapism, the building of intentional communities does not necessarily mean evading mainstream society. Even within urban settings, community forms such as cooperatives, social centres (Yates 2015b), free schools (Swidler 1979), and communes (Kanter 1972) provide people with the opportunity to temporarily step out of their hierarchical surroundings and join in more horizontal and participatory spaces. These, in turn, do not need to be face-to-face: on the internet, hackers jointly develop free and open-source software as a way of opposing proprietary intellectual property. Through online communities, like-minded activist-developers prefigure the ownership relations, work ethics, and creative aesthetics they envisage by exchanging programming expertise and the source codes they develop (Coleman 2013; Kelty 2008).

Apart from building communities, prefigurative practices can also aim at personal change as the primary means to foster social change. This is the case in lifestyle movements, made up of individuals who seek change by cultivating everyday behaviour in line with their political agendas. These include being vegetarian, reducing one’s carbon footprint, practising ethical consumption (Haenfler et al. 2012), or embracing alternative therapies. Popular psychology, self-help, new-age spiritualities, and mindfulness are recurrently regarded as depoliticising forces that promote conformism. Nevertheless, embodying values that make life meaningful otherwise can also be a political act; one that gives its practitioners a sense of agency amidst disillusionment with collective and institutional ways of fostering social change (Salmenniemi 2019).

Lastly, even though social movement scholarship often associates prefiguration with the post-1960s New Left, prefigurative practices are also present in left-wing parties, trade unions, and hierarchical pre-1960 labour movements. Seeking to explore how anarchist-inspired prefigurative practices have been adopted by a wide range of activists, Graeber (2002, 72; 2010) outlines what he calls ‘capital-A’ and ‘small-a’ anarchists. While the former tend to act within anarchist groups, the latter mobilise characteristically prefigurative practices despite not conceiving of themselves as anarchists—or even as activists.

Despite such practices not being limited to strictly anarchist groups and New Left movements, prefiguration continues being largely conceived of as a marker dividing the New Left from other forms of activism. Why, instead, do not we approach prefiguration as a perspective that highlights the self-exemplification and horizontality inherent in several social movements and forms of activism?

Partly addressing this point, Craig Calhoun (1993) argues that the novelty researchers often associate with the new social movements is analytically misleading, since the issues, strategies, and constituencies that distinguish the New Left and the ‘old lefts’ have been in place for at least two centuries. Ultimately, this leads to a critique of the concept of ‘new social movements’ itself. Cooperativism and the 1871 Paris Commune, for instance, involved activists that, when fighting for their causes, also prioritised the establishment of non-hierarchical relationships. Similarly, issues related to sexuality, lifestyles, women’s rights, and child labour may have become increasingly visible after 1968, but have run alongside class-based demands for centuries. Lastly, exceeding the left versus right divide, conservative movements also deploy prefiguration as a core strategy. This is the case of anti-abortion and white power activists in the US, many of whom are involved in the establishment of Aryan settlements whose residents and visitors receive paramilitary training and cherish white supremacist music and books (Futrell and Simi 2004).

These three forms of prefigurative politics—as a feature of intentional communities, a means to shift individual behaviour, and a building block of New Left, old left, and right-wing movements alike—foreground how pervasive such practices can be, and, therefore, how important it is to understand them.

Coming to a close—but not to conclude

Prefigurative politics—as well as anthropological approaches to it—invite us to rethink social life and its foundations. In placing participation, horizontality, inclusiveness, and direct action at the heart of the social values and practices to be addressed, prefiguration works by changing the world on a small scale. While revolutions foster macropolitical changes, prefigurative politics dwell on micropolitics. Reimagining society locally may not bring about immediate large-scale changes, but it models the society one seeks to build, thus informing its participants’ practices and ways of thinking beyond local activist settings. This work of imagination is not to be underestimated: as climate change, structural racism, and a global pandemic require shifts of mentality and behaviour, practices involving open dialogue, solidarity, and mutual support can provide us with alternative answers to issues that appear not to be sufficiently addressed by institutional politics.

Since most scholars exploring prefigurative politics seem sympathetic to it, there is a lack of studies on prefiguration’s antagonists, such as the police and mass media who frequently link anarchism with chaos and direct action with violence detached from clear political agendas. For similar reasons, few studies analyse prefiguration among old left and right-wing activists, which culminates in the aforementioned misapprehension of prefiguration as a strictly New Left strategy. Aside from helping us to better understand the present-oriented efforts to build alternative societies, learning about prefigurative politics also provides us with tools to experiment with grassroots initiatives in our everyday lives and in our academic discipline. Ultimately, would not action anthropology (Smith 2010) be in line with such horizontal and inclusive practices? Remaining true to prefiguration, it is better to just leave this and other questions open.

References

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———. 2015b. “Everyday politics, social practices and movement networks: Daily life in Barcelona’s social centres.” British Journal of Sociology 66, no. 2: 236–58.

Note on contributor

Guilherme Fians is a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews (Scotland) and Co-Director of the Centre for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems (Netherlands/USA). Guilherme’s current research project—on social movements, language politics, and digital media, with a focus on France—is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and Esperantic Studies Foundation. In line with his commitment to multilingualism in academia, he has published and presented his research outcomes in English, Portuguese, French, German, and Esperanto.

Dr Guilherme Fians, Institute for Transnational and Spatial History, University of St Andrews, St Katharine’s Lodge, The Scores, KY16 9BA, St Andrews, United Kingdom, gmf7@st-andrews.ac.uk

Visual anthropology

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

Jenny Chio

University of Southern California

Initially published 26 Jul 2021

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

Abstract:

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

Anthropology has always been visual

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

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

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

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

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

Ethnographic film in practice and as theory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The parallax effect: Indigenous and activist media

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

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

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

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

An anthropology of the visual

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

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

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

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

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

From visual to multimodal?

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion: visual experiences and visual experiments

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

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

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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.

Climate change

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 26 Apr 2021 01:36:22 +0000

Thomas Hylland Eriksen

University of Oslo

Initially published 26 Apr 2021

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

Abstract:

Climate change, largely a product of human activities, is arguably the most comprehensive and dramatic challenge facing humanity. In the first decades of this century, its implications have become a major concern in anthropology. The first part of this entry shows why the contribution of anthropology is important to the interdisciplinary study of, and engagement with, climate change. Anthropology teaches us that climate change has to be related to global inequality and local diversity, and must be understood as a multi-scalar phenomenon embedded in local life, but with global ramifications. Anthropology can also show why political action to mitigate or halt climate change is sluggish and often inefficient. Tracing the origins and development of the anthropology of climate change in the late twentieth century, this entry then shows how the field has become more diverse, to include studies of resilience and adaptation, renewable energy, climate activism, as well as knowledge and discourses about climate change. While these studies are truly global by relating to a worldwide event, they retain an emphasis on local realities through ethnographic methods indicating variations in impact of and responses to climate change. They foreground that the issues having to do with climate change differ vastly across the world, from Australia to Peru, from Greenland to Mongolia. The entry ends by arguing that the anthropology of climate change represents a new approach to globalisation, one that shifts the focus from economics, culture, and politics to the ecological embeddedness of human life.

Introduction

Even if massive human impact on the climate is a recent phenomenon, the awareness that climate has an impact on human life is not new. One of the founders of medical science, Hippocrates (b. 460 BCE), wrote a treatise called Airs, waters, places which argued for a connection between the climate, the environment, and the human condition (Dove 2004). He held that temperament was related to climate, and that droughts, rains, heat waves, and seasonal changes in general had significant effects on health. Much later, during the Enlightenment, the social theorist Montesquieu (1689-1755) saw a close relationship between climate and social life. Notably, Montesquieu believed that cold air made people vigorous, while heat made them lethargic, with what he deemed to be important implications for cultural development. Dismissed by later social theorists as simplistic environmental determinism, similar ideas have never quite disappeared. What is new in the current age is the almost universal recognition of humanity's impact on climate and its potentially catastrophic consequences for life on the planet in the future. In this field, anthropologists are making important contributions to knowledge and policy. Before considering these contributions, however, it is necessary to provide a short review of the wider context in which contemporary concerns with climate change is placed.

Never before has humanity made its mark on the planet in ways even remotely comparable to the situation now. One-fifth of the way into the twenty-first century, human domination of the earth is such that the term ‘Anthropocene’ has become widespread as a label for the present time, not least because of the impact that humans have on global climate. This is a term which would, if widely adopted, make the Holocene – which began with the end of the last Ice Age about 11,500 years ago, and which had followed the two and a half million year old Pleistocene period – but a brief interlude in the long history of the planet. We live in an era which, since the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, is marked by human activity and expansion in unprecedented ways. Socio-ecological change, including temperature rise due to the human emission of greenhouse gases, continues to accelerate; one could even speak of an acceleration of acceleration since the early 1990s, or simply of global overheating (Eriksen 2016). This situation represents a major challenge for all of us, whether we identify with kin groups, nations, religions, humanity, or the entire planetary ecosystem.

It is difficult to think of a more urgently relevant research topic in the world today than climate change, as it threatens to undermine the conditions of human societies as we know them. The literature proliferates inside and outside of the academic world and numerous climate change research centres, academic faculty sections and task forces have been established, often with a mixed basic and applied research mission (see, for example, Fiske et al. 2014). Important transnational institutions, such as the United Nations, have produced authoritative examinations, appraisals, and increasingly insistent policy recommendations, notably including reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). At the time of this writing (2021), five IPCC reports have been published, the first in 1990, the most recent in 2014, with a sixth report due in 2022. Climate change has not just driven scholars to coin the term Anthropocene, but also the more recent and more controversial concept of the ‘Capitalocene’ (Moore 2016). The latter, a term created by the environmental historian Jason Moore, explicitly blames capitalism for the global predicament, suggesting that the overuse of resources, the relentless search for profitability, the translation of nature into quantifiable ‘resources’, and the commitment to endless growth are not characteristics of humanity as such, but of a particular phase in our recent history. The influential multidisciplinary theorist Donna Haraway concurs with Moore in preferring the term Capitalocene to Anthropocene (Haraway 2016), but goes further by coining the concept of the ‘Chthulucene’, which refers to the entanglements of, ultimately, all living species in a web of life. She argues that the new planetary awareness of impending ecological catastrophe may nudge humanity towards a recognition of the fundamental mutual dependency of all life. In a contribution of comparable ambition and scope, the collective volume Arts of living on a damaged planet (Tsing et al. 2017) explores options for human and non-human life in an era tainted and transformed by reckless human activities. Neither Haraway, nor Anna Tsing and her collaborators, call for a return to a pure and uncontaminated world, but explore ways of ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway 2016).

The contemporary world of climate change has not evaded the attention of the social sciences. In general social theory, climate change has been discussed as a consequence of the growth paradigm and uncertainties produced by modernity. While Anthony Giddens (2002) wrote about ‘a runaway world’ where rapid changes were out of control, and Zygmunt Bauman (2000) argued that modernity by default produces uncertainties and instability, Ulrich Beck (2009) increasingly considered climate change the defining global risk of modernity, one that an overly successful industrialisation had inflicted on itself, and that would not be solvable through single-state solutions. Focusing on speed, rather than risk, Hartmut Rosa (2015) has argued that social life increasingly accelerates as human beings produce, communicate, and transport more and more. Thereby, global capitalism creates a situation where resources are being depleted and the environment suffers. Discussions of climate change and the Anthropocene go hand in hand, as both are partially defined and measured by the rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, linked to the use of fossil fuels (Steffen, Crutzen & McNeill 2007). Some scholars go so far as to fear societal collapse in which climate change plays a fundamental role. The archaeologist Brian Fagan (1999) has argued that El Niño events, which disrupt precipitation patterns and temperature, have shaped South American societies for centuries (Fagan 1999). In a major work, the archaeologist Joseph Tainter (1988) compares our present to the collapse of the Roman and Maya empires, citing climate change as one factor in accounting for the decline of complex societies. However, the decisive cause, as Tainter sees it, is likely to consist of decreased marginal returns on investments in energy (also referred to as EROI), owing to population growth and subsequent intensification of food production with decreasing returns, coupled with growth in bureaucratic, logistic, and transport costs. According to him, resource shortages, a direct result of human dominance of the planet, may be a more acute problem than climate change (for a similar analysis intended for a broad readership, see Diamond 2005).

The issue of climate change thus inevitably raises questions of human energy consumption. Since the late eighteenth century, we have been able to exploit unprecedented amounts of energy; at first in the shape of abundant surface-near coal deposits, and subsequently through the extraction of oil and gas for the sake of economic growth, profits for capitalists, and the general improvement of the human condition (Mitchell 2011). The fossil fuel revolution has enabled humanity to support a fast-growing global population – it has increased eightfold since its beginning. Yet the cost of exploiting fossil fuels grows as this easily accessible resource is being used up. Production relying on fossil fuels also bears within it an inevitable element of destruction (Hornborg 2019) in a dual sense, since we are simultaneously exhausting resources which it has taken the planet millions of years to produce, and undermining the conditions for our own civilisation by altering the climate and ruining the environment on which we rely.

Interdisciplinary collaboration is necessary in order to understand the full implications of climate change. While climate scientists adopt a birds-eye perspective on the planet, and archaeologists move their gaze back in time, anthropologists enter deeply into local realities in order to understand perceptions of and responses to climate change. The last couple of decades have produced a fast-growing body of anthropological knowledge about climate change, much of which performs a double task in that it improves our understanding of society and may also be relevant for policy and action.

The unique contribution of anthropology

The strengths of anthropology in explaining the connections between the local and the global in the human-influenced global climate system have been demonstrated in a number of recent monographs and edited volumes. Taking on anthropogenic climate change explicitly, some emphasise the importance of studying local responses, from the Arctic to Mongolia (Crate & Nuttall 2009). Others describe lessons that can be learnt from indigenous people and their engagement with the environment, such as Amazonian or Melanesian peoples who leave a minimal ecological footprint by not altering their ecosystem through their harvesting and production (Hendry 2014). Since anthropologists focus predominantly on local realities, their gaze and methodology inevitably produces diversity rather than uniformity, displaying locally-tailored solutions to the problems facing actual human beings rather than standardised options of the one-size-fits-all kind. For example, Amelia Moore's research in the Bahamas (2015) shows how the archipelago's dependence on airborne and resource-intensive tourism contributes to the climate change that may ultimately lead these low-lying coral islands to vanish. Herta Nöbauer (2018), carrying out research in Austrian ski resorts, studies how artificial ski slopes are being built in anticipation of snowless winters. She highlights how the Austrian winter tourism industry anticipates mild winters and invests in new infrastructure to mitigate the effects of the melting snow. Harold Wilhite and Cecilia Salinas (2019) have shown how forest peoples, many of them indigenous, are victims both to resource extraction on their territory and global climate change. Climate change threatens their livelihood through changes in precipitation and temperature, and the problem is compounded by logging, further marginalising people on the peripheries of global modernity.

There is broad agreement that interdisciplinarity must be part and parcel of an anthropology of climate change, since climate change is a physical process, handled through political processes at the national and supranational levels, yet responded to at the level of local communities. Werner Krauss (2015), for example, has shown the need for understanding various disciplines in his work on fishermen and conservationists on the German North Sea coast. Krauss collaborates with natural scientists who search for a balance between objectivity and engagement, and has a dialogue with the political authorities by arguing the need to move beyond natural science and involve the human dimension in producing policy on climate change. Noah Walker-Crawford (2021) has followed a Peruvian activist to Germany in a litigation case against an energy company, engaging with political theory, legal scholarship, and NGO activism in his anthropological explorations. David Rojas's and Noor Johnson's (2013) work on climate summit meetings draws on knowledge from various academic disciplines, ranging from international law to climatology. This enables them to show why climate policy needs to move up and down different scales, and not assume that signed international agreements will necessarily lead to the desired changes in the physical world.

A position paper written by a group of American anthropologists lists three kinds of knowledge that anthropology can contribute to the climate change. It provides ethnographic insight, a historical perspective, and a holistic view of the problem at hand, meaning that the entirety of people's lived experience needs to be taken seriously; in other words, that no technical solutions work unless they are integrated with the world in which people live subjectively (Barnes et al. 2013). Anthropologists are well-positioned to make a difference as interpreters, translators, and experts on specific local lifeworlds, and can sometimes help mitigate effects or even propose deeper systemic change to combat climate change.

The growth of climate anthropology

The study of climate change has important precursors in environmental anthropology and the anthropology of energy. This theoretical approach was mainly developed in the United States, going back all the way to the nineteenth century and early studies of material culture, technology, and ecological adaptation. In fact, the pathbreaking anthropologist Franz Boas (1858-1942) already had an interest in the ways Arctic peoples survived under extreme climatic conditions. After the Second World War, Julian Steward (1955) championed the study of ‘human ecology’, focusing on social and political systems from a materialist perspective which encompassed both technology and ecology. Writing about ‘levels of sociocultural integration’, Steward saw a direct connection between the potential of ecological conditions to produce a surplus and social complexity. His contemporary, Leslie White (1949), studied technology and energy use from a social evolutionist perspective, arguing that cultural evolution could be measured as the amount of energy a given society was capable of making use of. The most culturally advanced group of people would thus be the one that uses the most energy per capita. White’s theories soon went out of fashion in academic circles due to the decline of evolutionary thinking. However, his early emphasis on energy and ecology as foundational to socio-cultural life remains relevant for the current anthropology of climate change.

As early as the 1970s, discussions shifted to the study of ecological crises, which at the time was associated with resource exhaustion and pollution rather than global climate change. Gregory Bateson (1972) identified three factors that were driving these crises. Firstly, the destructive side-effects of technological progress, such as the production of pesticides; secondly, population increase leading to resource depletion; and thirdly, a set of entrenched Western cultural values and ideas that place humanity in an unhealthy relation to the environment (what he calls a flawed epistemology based on Cartesian dualism and individualism). Bateson criticised the idea that humans should strive to control the environment rather than seeing themselves as part of a larger ecological system. He also condemned the strong focus on the individual, the belief in endless economic growth (which he considered logically impossible), the assumption that we live within an infinitely expanding frontier, and the conviction that technology will solve any problem facing us. What Bateson calls a ‘healthy ecology’ amounts to ‘a single system of environment combined with high human civilization in which the flexibility of the civilization shall match that of the environment to create an ongoing complex system, flexible and amenable to ongoing adjustments (Bateson 1972: 502). In this vision lies a quest for an equilibrium where humanity does not undermine the conditions for its own thriving.

Whereas Bateson identified ecological crisis as a central contradiction of contemporary civilisation, he did not address climate change explicitly. Margaret Mead, his ex-wife, may in fact have been the first anthropologist to do so (Kellogg & Mead 1980), as she convened a conference about the atmosphere as early as 1975. Whereas climate change was not yet on the agenda — in fact, many scientists at the time believed that we were heading towards a new Ice Age rather than an overheated world — the conference took on smoke, smog, and other forms of atmospheric pollution as genuinely global challenges that needed to be dealt with politically.

By the 1990s, climate change was still spoken of as ‘global warming’, and entered the political and research agenda. The term ‘global warming’ has since fallen out of fashion, as it does not emphasise the violent and erratic weather events, such as frequent hurricanes, that climate change brings with it. In anthropology, an early important contribution is that of Steve Rayner and Elizabeth Malone (1998). This interdisciplinary work, with contributors from around the world, intended to complement the natural science of the IPCC with knowledge about local livelihoods, political decision-making, and inequality. Another pioneering work was Ben Orlove's ethno-climatological research in the Andes, showing how farmers predicted interannual rainfall and temperature change, based on the visibility of the Pleiades star cluster, which in turn depended on El Niño weather events (Orlove et al. 2000). This work indicated that locally embedded knowledge about climate could be of great scientific and political relevance. In the 1990s, the concern with climate change was nevertheless still marginal and peripheral in anthropology.

A decade later, this was about to change. Coming from the anthropology of health, Hans Baer and Merrill Singer published Global warming and the political ecology of health (2009). The book investigates the impact of climate change on water, nutrition, and the spread of disease. It strongly emphasised that climate change affects different communities unequally, owing to an economic system which produces inequality. Thus it affects people in different ways, often corroborating pre-existing global inequalities. Like Hippocrates two and a half thousand years earlier, Baer and Singer showed how the proliferation of diseases, especially in tropical countries, could sometimes be attributed to climatic conditions, in their case anthropogenic climate change.

In the same year, Susan Crate and Mark Nuttall edited the widely-cited and read Anthropology and climate change (2009), which was a groundbreaking volume when it was published, with chapter authors working in different parts of the world. The main perspective is interpretive, and explores local responses to, and perceptions of, climate change, in a wide range of societies, many of them indigenous, from Siberia to Papua New Guinea. Many of the contributors emphasise local interpretations of change and strategies developed to adjust and adapt. It should nevertheless be pointed out that the societies which are the main contributors to climate change – the rich OECD countries, as well as China – are sparsely represented. This shortcoming is addressed in the second edition of the book (Crate & Nuttall 2016), as well as in the edited volume Cultures of energy (Strauss, Rupp & Love 2013), which relates ethnographic research to analyses of the global system, showing how the affluent are the main contributors to climate change, while poorer people tend to be the main victims. A perspective from the Global North is developed in Kari Norgaard's Living in denial (Norgaard 2011). Based on fieldwork in a rural Norwegian community where erratic winters interfere with winter tourism, the author asks how it can be that people who are aware of, and experience the effects of, climate change continue to lead unsustainable lives. Norgaard's analysis, which draws on psychology as well as sociology and anthropology, argues that people tend to rationalise their unsustainable lives (‘My driving and flying makes no difference’) and to compartmentalise their actions (‘After all, I do compost and take my bike to work’).

A few years later, a very substantial body of anthropological literature dealing with different aspects of climate change had appeared, and professional interest in the field had skyrocketed. Whereas there was just a single panel at the Society for Applied Anthropology (SAA) devoted to climate change in 2006, that number had increased to twenty a decade later. Crate and Nuttall sum up the growth and diversification of the field by stating that anthropologists today are engaging research that has a concern with resilience, vulnerability, adaptation, mitigation, anticipation, risk and uncertainty, consumption, gender, migration, and displacement. Anthropologists have developed significant work on the politics of climate change, inequality, health, carbon markets and carbon sequestration, and water and energy (2016: 11).

Global diversity

The body of knowledge that anthropologists have so far accumulated is far-ranging: from critical studies of the discourses and practices of carbon offsets (Dalsgaard 2013) to comparative studies of retreating glaciers^[1] in addition to a fast-growing number of ethnographies describing how communities deal with the local effects of climate change, in projects that look, in Kirsten Hastrup's evocative terms, at the ‘drying lands, the rising seas and the melting ice’ (Hastrup & Hastrup 2015). A political economy approach, informed by anthropological reflexivity, is provided, inter alia, in works by Hal Wilhite (2016) and Alf Hornborg (2019). Local responses to climate change are explored in a work I co-edited with my colleague Astrid Stensrud (2019), and anthropologists have also contributed some significant ethnographic monographs on climate issues, ranging from Jessica Barnes’ research on water in the Nile delta (2014) to Linda Connor’s work on mining in Australia (2016). What these studies have in common is the recognition of global-local linkages, where local lives and communities cannot be understood independently of the large-scale processes producing changed circumstances for future options and constraints. Climate anthropology is inherently multi-scalar, moving from the locality via government and corporations to supranational politics.

Not all environmental anthropology has a focus on climate. Important research on topics such as deforestation, mining, waste, and toxins may be only tangentially related to climate. However, it is fair to say that the broader field of environmental anthropology is being renewed and reformulated owing to the intensified attention to climate; as witnessed, for example, in the edited volume The angry earth: disasters in anthropological perspective (Oliver-Smith & Hoffman 2000, 2019) where, in the second, revised and updated edition of the book, nearly all contributors mention the atmospheric changes that have begun to affect the sites of their prior studies. It also deserves mentioning that the most famous living anthropologist without an anthropology degree, Bruno Latour, shifted his attention years ago to the causes and politics of climate change (Latour 2017). Building on his previous work on the production of scientific knowledge, Latour criticises the techno-scientific ideology of control and the sharp boundary, in his view misguidedly, between culture and nature, which can be traced back to Descartes's philosophy. Anthropogenic climate change is everywhere, and it is now. It is comprehensive, it brims with methodological implications, it buzzes with theoretical possibilities, and indeed, it may well be said to redefine not only the specialty of anthropological (or other) research, but raises the question of what it entails to be a human being within a new existential and conceptual framework, which will inevitably cause a reckoning with our ecological identity in a new way. Volatility and flexibility are key concepts in this exploration, which reveal inequality and an ultimately catastrophic separation of culture and nature. Climate change may retrospectively be seen as a major game-changer in intellectual and political life in general, and also in anthropological research. It is no coincidence that the increased interest in multispecies fieldwork, and the rise to prominence of the Deleuzian term ‘assemblage’ (which transcends the human-nonhuman and material-symbolic barriers), have shaped the work of many anthropologists in the present century. An assemblage, in this usage, consists in the connections that make up a particular social, cultural, and ecological configuration; it may include, for example, people, tools, soil, rain and sunshine, power relations, wild and domesticated animals, crops, weeds and discourses. The concept thereby transcends formerly rigid boundaries between things and ideas, as well as nature and culture.

As opposed to attempts to create top-down solutions through international agreements, some of which have a perceptible element of magical thinking (Rayner 2016), the anthropological view from below and within provides a number of useful insights, owing to its reliance on patient fieldwork.

First, an awareness of variation is essential to all anthropological research. The clunky distinction between developing and developed countries, for example, which produces a simple contrast where there is really a great deal of diversity and indeed the very category of the country, does not always fit the territory. The Seychelles is not ‘a place’ in the same sense as China is ‘a place’, although both are states. The former has 90,000 residents, most of them engaged in fishing or tourism, and is uniformly affected by rising sea temperatures and erratic rainfall. The latter has 1.2 billion inhabitants and spans many climatic zones with challenges ranging from desertification to flooding, which means that climate change in China cannot be described in the same way as in the Seychelles. Moreover, there is no reason to assume that actions that have been proved successful in Namibia would work in Nepal. The challenges faced by Greenlanders facing melting ice differ from those in Bangladesh, confronted with intensified flooding, salination of the soil and mudslides, or of Sahelian nomads who witness their pastures turn to dust.

Second, any successful social change has to begin with an appreciation of local lifeworlds and has to be developed not for, but with, the people affected. In the anthropology of development, this point has been made many times (Gardner & Lewis 2015). This insight, a matter of common sense to any working anthropologist, is rarely reflected in the abstract, large-scale worlds of international climate summits or global reports on climate change. In other words, a reasonable conclusion is that climate change policy must be scaled down and informed by the situation at the bottom, and not built exclusively managed from the top. The insistence on the primacy of the local is nevertheless both a strength and a weakness of anthropology, sometimes leading to myopia and a failure to see global connections, another reason that interdisciplinarity is necessary in this domain.

Comparison is a third asset. As one of anthropology's main methods for generating knowledge and opening new theoretical horizons, as well as stimulating the political imagination, comparison generates new ideas about human worlds. For example, anthropologists have often shown that land is not necessarily subject to personal ownership, and that ‘resource management’ and ‘sustainability’ are often integrated in the taken-for-granted knowledge, not least in indigenous groups. The economic historian Karl Polanyi (1944) described land as a ‘fictitious commodity’, showing – as economic anthropologists have later done – that in pre-capitalist societies it could usually not be sold and purchased. It goes without saying, because it comes without saying, that in societies where ‘the economy’ has not been disembedded from everyday life, making people accountable to their surroundings consists of ways that are unknown and perhaps unknowable to those who own and profit from property elsewhere.

The methodological and analytical holism on which anthropologists insist, which means that any social whole needs to be understood as a web of interconnections, has often made anthropological knowledge unwieldy and unmanageable for governments and development agencies, since it goes against the segmentation of worlds into separately manageable sectors and precise measurements that bureaucratic planning requires. Yet at this point in history, more holism may be precisely what is needed. The knowledge, often contested, enabling people to navigate, interpret, and act upon the world, must form an integral part of any project, whether academic or applied, concerning the human implications of climate change.

Forms of engagement

As indicated, the professional interest in climate change has grown massively in anthropology in the present century. Many anthropologists working on the topic are determined to use their knowledge to make a difference – not just in academia, but in the wider world of policy and practice. There are nevertheless significant variations in the ways different anthropologists approach the applied implications of their research.

The cultural ecological perspective, which looks at objective, measurable aspects of humanity's engagement with, and exploitation of, the environment, is less widespread in anthropological research today than in other fields. A main focus of recent anthropological research has rather been on cultural perceptions and responses to climate change. Crate is a spokesperson for this perspective, in that she recommends a cultural interpretive approach to climate change, arguing that anthropologists need to ‘listen, share, and accommodate our research partners’ way of knowing and observing and construct cultural models of how they perceive the local effects of global climate change on their world and worldview’ (2008: 574). In order to avoid being met with resistance and resentment, social change must engage with resources already in place where change is to be implemented, including knowledge and skills possessed locally. This is as true of the Global South as it is of the Global North, as nobody likes outsiders who come in and tell them what to do and how to think. Many policymakers, NGOs, and donor agencies hold that they already do so, which is doubtless the case. However, the quality of ethnographic knowledge collected over a sustained period of time is superior to that obtained through focus groups and interviews, and can be revealing of hidden and unexpected dimensions.

After the Great Acceleration of economic, technological and communicational change that has taken place since the Second World War (McNeill & Engelke 2016), and which has accelerated further since the early 1990s, our collective ecological footprint seems to have gone beyond the point of no return. According to the IPCC 2014, continued emissions of greenhouse gases will increase the likelihood of severe, pervasive, and irreversible impacts for people and ecosystems.^[2] Even if anthropogenic emissions should be stopped, climate change will impact life on the planet for centuries, according to the panel. On this background, some anthropologists connect insights into local effects on climate change to a systemic critique of the global economy.

Among the most consistent critics of the global economy from a climate perspective is Alf Hornborg (2019), who argues that in a world of limited resources, standard economic models presupposing growth are not viable. He argues that the capitalist fossil fuel economy is inherently destructive in that it consumes nonrenewable energy. Also invoking natural science, Hornborg refers to the second law of thermodynamics in order to show that the fossil fuel-based energy dissipates into heat, which is useless for further production and contributes to climate change.

The anthropological relevance of this analysis lies in Hornborg's emphasis on inequality and the exploitation of human labour as being inherent to the capitalist economy. He argues that capitalism is parasitical on both human and natural resources owing to the growth imperative, which relentlessly searches for resources and labour to turn them into profitable commodities. Hornborg's critique is thus dual, derived both from a Marxist analysis of surplus value production and from an ecological analysis, showing that we live in a world of limited resources.

Related to Hornborg's perspective is Baer and Singer's Anthropology of climate change (2nd edition, 2018). They provide an overview of extant research, while also developing a vision for climate anthropology which is fundamentally critical of global capitalism, seeing climate change as one of its major contradictions since the search for profits in their view neglects ecological limitations. Their alternative is a downscaled economy where economic activities aim to satisfy human needs rather than generating profits.

Also premised on political economy, but drawing on local ethnographies, the late Harold Wilhite (2016) focuses on consumption. Having previously worked in Kerala, India, he wrote extensively about the relationship between the fossil fuel society and consumption habits. Wilhite argues that deep reductions in energy use and carbon emissions will not be possible within our current political economies, which are driven by the capitalist imperatives of growth, commodification, and individualisation. In order to deal with climate change at the most basic level, he argues that it is necessary to understand the relationship between capitalism and the emergence of high energy habits at the level of family and household that are formed in a material world designed and built for high energy use, e.g. by replacing wooden houses with airtight concrete dwellings dependent on air-conditioning, or by marketing huge refrigerators where a smaller ‘icebox’ would do (Wilhite 2016). This view is shared by Richard Wilk (2016), whose anthropology of consumption is engaged in that it explores the deeper meaning of consumption and questions its feasibility, both ecologically and as a source of well-being.

Other research, which refrains from addressing the entire global economic order, explores the possibilities of changing the energy system in a renewable, sustainable direction. In a creative and productive juxtaposition of two complementary perspectives on climate change, Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe have published a duograph (as opposed to a monograph) based on fieldwork in a huge, but ultimately failed, Mexican windpower park. In their twin volumes, they focus, respectively, on the political economy of wind power (Boyer 2019) and on the destabilisation and reshaping of human/non-human relations (Howe 2019). Boyer coins the word ‘energopower’ to capture the complex relationships between energy, economics, politics, and local communities. The term calls attention to a dimension of social life which had fallen out of favour generations earlier following the tendencies to energy determinism in Leslie White's aforementioned work; namely, the ‘power of power’, the fundamental necessity of energy for human life, and indeed the high energy consumption necessary for the global system as we know it. Howe, in her part of the duograph, looks beyond the human world, investigating the impact of wind turbines on nonhuman life in the region.

This dual approach expresses clearly what is a main division in contemporary anthropology, including that of climate change: the contrast between a political economy perspective, where power, inequality, and global economics are at the forefront, and a localised perspective, which insists on the primacy of the local and rejects epistemologies which tend to render everything comparable with everything else. The duograph shows how these perspectives can be complementary and shed light on different dimensions of climate change. Boyer and Howe show that a shift towards renewables is not a straightforward exercise. In their joint preface, they state that ‘renewable energy can be installed in ways that do little to challenge the extractive logics that have undergirded the mining and fossil fuel industries (Boyer & Howe 2020: xii) Yet, they also suggest that renewables may in fact be part of the solution if implemented in the right way.

As these examples indicate, the anthropology of climate change is both multi-scalar (it shifts between a global and a local perspective), interdisciplinary (relying on natural science for some of its facts) and methodologically diverse (ethnographic and comparative). It is also clear that different climate anthropologists, by virtue of their differences in empirical focus and analyses, and also owing to different political views, advocate different solutions, whether implicitly or explicitly.

Climate anthropology as a new departure

What is new about the anthropology of climate change is not its global purview, but the recognition that climate change has enormous consequences for humanity and, in a slightly longer term, for life on the planet. As Moore (2015: 35) says, ‘Anthropogenic climate change has possibly surpassed biodiversity loss as the most widely recognized form of global transformation'.

The global dimension of climate change is indisputable, but it is also necessary to show in what ways climate change is always local in its implications and has to be understood as such: ecologically, socially, politically, culturally. Whereas politicians until recently might write off concerns of urgency by calling for more research, it is by now abundantly clear that the natural science knowledge needed to act has been available for many years. Yet, while the natural sciences have long documented the facts and global perils of climate change, it is by no means evident that the human dimension of climate change is understood sufficiently well. A simple question may be why so little is happening, since nearly all countries are signatories to a series of climate agreements, beginning with the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 which specifies the steps that need to be taken to mitigate the impact of changes that are already taking place. Later reports from the IPCC have been increasingly insistent about the need to take action immediately. Yet, global emissions continue to rise and are nowhere near to reaching the targets agreed initially in Kyoto and affirmed in later summit meetings.

Coal, and its close relatives oil and gas, the salvation of humanity for two centuries, are now becoming our damnation, and there is no easy way out. The lesson from cultural history may be that lean societies, decentralised and flexible, with less bureaucracy than farming, fewer PR people than fishermen, are the most sustainable in the long term. As Tainter puts it in his book about the collapse of complex societies: ‘Complex societies … are recent in human history. Collapse then is not a fall to some primordial chaos, but a return to the normal human condition of lower complexity’ (1988: 198). This insight, taken from an archaeologist, may serve as a reminder of the potential importance of climate anthropology. Providing a view from within and from below, anthropologists can not only report from and produce analyses of the multi-scalar linkages of climate and society, but they are also in a position to stimulate the kind of intellectual imagination needed not only to understand and explain, but also to deal with the challenges from anthropogenic climate change. This does not mean that anthropologists ought to advocate a return to pre-industrial life, but that they are in a unique position to strengthen the intellectual and political imagination by showing, as the discipline has always been prone to doing, that there are indeed many alternatives.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the three anonymous referees and, in particular, Felix Stein, for very detailed and useful comments on earlier versions.

References

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Gardner, K. & D. Lewis 2015. The anthropology of development. London: Pluto.

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Hornborg, A. 2019. Nature, society, and justice in the Anthropocene: unraveling the money–technology–energy complex. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Howe, C. 2019. Ecologics: wind and power in the Anthropocene. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

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McNeill, J. & P. Engelke 2016. The great acceleration: an environmental history of the Anthropocene since 1945. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

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Note on contributor

Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and carries out research on social and cultural implications of globalisation. Among his books are Small places, large issues (1995/2014, Pluto Press), Engaging anthropology: the case for a public presence (2006, Berg), Overheating: an anthropology of accelerated change (2016, Pluto Press) and Boomtown: runaway globalisation on the Queensland coast (2018, Pluto Press).

[1] See Ben Orlove’s website, https://glacierhub.org

[2] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2014. Climate change 2014: synthesis report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Geneva: IPCC (available on-line: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/).

Human rights

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

Harri Englund

University of Cambridge

Initially published 1 Sep 2016

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

Abstract:

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

Anti anti-relativism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enter the activists

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

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

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

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

Intimate human rights

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

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

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

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

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

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Note on contributor

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

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

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