Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Desire

Anti-Blackness

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 01:11:24 +0000

Anti Ku Klux Klan protesters marched in Philadelphia on 5 November, 1988, after white supremacist groups agreed to call off a rally that would have been held the same day. Picture by Lori Schaull

Sebastian Jackson

University of Virginia

Initially published 4 Dec 2025

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

Abstract:

‘Anti-Blackness’ refers to a pervasive and deeply entrenched form of dehumanisation and exclusion targeting people racialised as ‘Black’, particularly those of African, Afro-diasporic, and Australasian descent. While often categorised under the broader umbrella of ‘racism’, some scholars argue that anti-Blackness constitutes a distinct formation rooted in the histories of the Atlantic slave trade and European colonial domination. Globally, it manifests in structural inequalities and in the everyday experiences of communities shaped by the afterlives of slavery.

Anthropology has historically been complicit in producing and legitimising anti-Black ideologies—constructing Blackness as inferior or subhuman while centring a fictive white ideal. Yet, anti-racist anthropologists have long challenged these paradigms, exposing their role in sustaining racial hierarchies. Today, anti-Blackness continues to shape disparities in healthcare, housing, education, incarceration, and cultural representation. At the same time, anthropology’s theories and methods—especially ethnography—offer tools to document, analyse, and challenge anti-Blackness in everyday life. This entry traces the discipline’s entanglement with anti-Blackness, emphasising both its role in reinforcing racial domination and its potential as a critical site for resistance, repair, and reimagining justice.

Introduction

Anti-Blackness is a global structure of domination that positions Blackness as a threat, a problem, or a deficit. It operates through and encompasses a wide range of practices and systems—including violence, exclusion, exploitation, and neglect—that have targeted people of African and Australasian descent across time and place. Though often discussed under the broader umbrella of ‘racism’, anti-Blackness constitutes a distinct formation: it has been foundational to the development of colonial empires, modern capitalism, and liberal democratic institutions (Wilderson 2010; Vargas 2018; Allen and Jobson 2016). Anti-Blackness shapes policing practices, incarceration, and economic deprivation, but also standards of beauty, moral hierarchies, and social relations in everyday life. From the commodification of enslaved people to the surveillance of Black life, anti-Blackness remains central to the organisation of the modern world.

Anthropology has played a contradictory role in relation to anti-Blackness. As a discipline, it has contributed to racial classification, legitimised colonial domination, and excluded Black scholars from its intellectual traditions (Harrison 1992; Mullings 2005). Yet anthropology’s core methods—especially participant observation and ethnographic attention to lived experience—also offer tools for understanding how anti-Black structures are produced, contested, and navigated in everyday life. This entry explores that tension. It traces how anthropology has both reinforced and challenged anti-Black ideas, drawing from Black feminist theory, critical race studies, and decolonial ethnography to highlight how Black communities generate practices of endurance, resistance, care, and worldmaking.

Within white supremacist thought, African and Australasian Blackness has long symbolised radical alterity—a condition imagined as incompatible with civilisation, reason, or beauty (Davis et al. [1941] 2022; Smedley 1993). In this racial schema, Black people were often cast as subhuman, or as existing outside the category of the human altogether (Douglass 1854; Fanon 1952; Jung and Vargas 2021; Weheliye 2014; Wilderson 2020). These ideas were not merely ideological—they were embedded in laws, institutions, languages, and cultural norms around the world (Hall 1997; Morgan 2002; Spears 2021).^[1]

Consider, for example, Jim Crow segregation laws in the United States. This body of legislation, introduced between roughly 1877 and 1967 and predominantly across the US South, restricted the access of Black Americans to all major institutions of public life. It disenfranchised Black people politically, limited their economic possibilities, reduced their access to education, and supported a climate of anti-Black terror sustained by state officials and white militias. Anthropologists have argued that, under these laws,‘“Blackness” is the master-symbol of derogation in the society, and the “typical” Negro characteristics of dark skin color and of woolly or kinky hair are considered badges of subordinate status (Davis et al. [1941] 2022, 16). Such forms of anti-Blackness continue to shape institutions, economies, hierarchies, languages, desires, and intimacies in everyday life, even today.

This entry examines anti-Blackness in historical and contemporary perspective, showing how anthropologists and ethnographers have both enabled and challenged the racial orders that sustain white supremacy (Mullings 2005a; Beliso-De Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2025; Pierre 2020). Contemporary anthropologists draw on the Black radical tradition and interdisciplinary literatures on Black ontology (i.e. the study of what it means to exist as a Black person) and Afropessimism (i.e. the study of fundamental structural aspects of society that perpetuate anti-Black racism) to examine how anti-Black violence and stigma organise modern life and death (Fanon 1952; Sexton 2008; Vargas 2018; Wilderson 2020). While the social construction of race has been examined across disciplines, anthropology’s ethnographic methods allow for sustained attention to how anti-Blackness is lived, embodied, and resisted in everyday life.

Slavery and anti-Blackness

Slavery was not always synonymous with Blackness (Patterson 1983; Smedley 1998; West 2002). In antiquity and the medieval period, Blackness was often associated with symbolic or spiritual meaning, rather than biological inferiority. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus described Ethiopians as beautiful and noble; the fourteenth century Maghrebi intellectual Ibn Battuta praised the justice of West African Muslims; and medieval Europe venerated Black saints such as the Egyptian St. Maurice and the Black Madonna (Bindman and Gates 2010; Snowden 1970). Even when Blackness carried negative connotations, it was not yet biologically overdetermined and pathologised. The association of Blackness with heritable enslavement developed gradually through European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, as slavery became racialised in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Smedley 1998; Gates and Curran 2022).

By the nineteenth century, after centuries of institutionalised chattel slavery, i.e. a form of slavery where slaves are considered to be the ‘property’ of their ‘owners’, Blackness had become a symbol of perpetual bondage and degradation. To be Black in most Euro-colonial societies meant being marked by ‘social death’—alienated from kin, honour, history, and futurity (Patterson 1983; Trouillot 1995; Wilderson 2020). Early anthropologists and ethnologists—especially those associated with the ‘American School’, led by Samuel Morton, Josiah Nott, and Louis Agassiz—helped naturalise this association by grounding it in pseudoscientific theories of racial difference, transforming a historically contingent condition into an allegedly immutable ‘truth’ (Gould 1981; Painter 2010; Smedley 1993).

In the wake of slavery, Black life continues to be evaluated through a white supremacist gaze—simultaneously feared and exploited, always in relation to its utility for colonial-capitalist accumulation (Du Bois 1903; Robinson 1983; Sharpe 2016). This was the case in the late nineteenth century when recently freed American slaves and their offspring were kept in highly exploitative working conditions, constituting ‘a segregated and servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges’ (Du Bois 1935, 32). It continued in the twentieth century, when Black Americans served as a capitalist underclass both in the American industrial and service economies, but also in the privatised for-profit prison economy that relies disproportionately on Black labour (Gibson-Light 2023; Oshinsky 1996). And it persists today, as Black lives around the world continue to be considered largely disposable, whether they are Haitian emigrants seeking a better life or disadvantaged Black children in the favelas of Brazil being subjected to police abuse (Joseph and Louis 2022; Smith 2016). Anti-Blackness developed as a system of racial domination shaped by intersecting hierarchies of race, gender, class, religion, and ethnicity—privileging whiteness, and especially white men, above all (Baldwin and Mead 1971; Mullings 2005a; Shange 2019).

In the post-slavery world, Black bodies were recast as a ‘social problem’, requiring political and scientific intervention (Baker 1998; Du Bois 1898, 1903; Harrison 1992). In the US, this became the so-called ‘negro problem’; in the British Empire, the ‘native problem’. Both framed Black and Indigenous populations as inherently disorderly and unfit for self-rule—justifying ongoing racial domination. Anthropology was complicit in this global racial order. Emerging alongside imperial conquest, it helped classify, study, and govern the ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ subject (Baker 1998; Blakey 2010; Smedley 1998; Trouillot 1991). As Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot observed, ‘the savage was the alter ego the West constructed for itself… the raison d’être of anthropology’ (1991, 28, 40).

Yet anthropology also became a space for critique and resistance. Black, Indigenous, and other minoritised scholars have used ethnographic tools to expose structures of racial domination and articulate alternative visions for humanity (Mullings 2005a; Harrison et al. 2018). Understanding anti-Blackness through anthropological and historical frameworks is vital to building an anti-racist, abolitionist, and decolonial anthropology (Bolles 2001; Cox et al. 2022; Harrison 1991; McClaurin 2001; Perry 2016).

Anti-Blackness and the colonial foundations of anthropology

To understand contemporary expressions of anti-Blackness, we must first trace its genealogy through European ‘Enlightenment’ thought. Central to Enlightenment philosophy was the presumption that Black and Indigenous peoples existed ‘without history’, outside the temporal and moral horizons of Western modernity (Fabian 1983; Fanon 1952; Hegel 1894; Trouillot 1995; West 2002; Wolf 1982). Racial difference was increasingly cast not only in cultural or religious terms but as a biological fact, justifying colonial conquest as a civilising mission. Anthropological knowledge, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, became an instrument for racial surveillance and control. Black and Indigenous bodies were rendered as objects of study, classification, and debate, often in the service of slavery, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and genocide. Thus, anthropology helped to uphold the normative distinction between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’ people and situated it along the colour line. In its studies of Black and Indigenous people, anthropology all too often ignored white rule and allowed anthropologists to serve as diplomats and public relations experts for white rule (Willis 1972; see also Baker 1998; Anderson 2019).

The modern scientific racism to which early anthropology contributed emerged alongside Enlightenment rationalism. Carl Linnaeus’s Systema naturae (10th ed., 1758) classified humans into continentally-bounded ‘varieties’. He described Africans as ‘Black, phlegmatic, lazy… sly, sluggish, neglectful’, and contrasted them with idealised Europeans, ‘governed by rites’. Relying on dubious colonial travel accounts, Linnaeus also claimed African women had ‘elongated labia’ and ‘breasts lactating profusely’.^[2]These dehumanising descriptors shaped later anatomical and racial science, grounding anti-Blackness in the language of empirical objectivity and universal classification (West 2002; Moore, Kosek and Pandian 2003).

European theories of Black inferiority found fertile ground in the antebellum (1815-1861) United States. Thomas Jefferson—Founding Father, slaveholder, and third US president—substantially shaped American racial thought. In Notes on the state of Virginia (1781), he notoriously speculated: ‘I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks… are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind’ (222). This conjecture framed racial hierarchy as reasoned observation rather than prejudice, lending intellectual legitimacy to chattel slavery and segregation (Walker 1830; Chamberlain 1907; Finkelman 2014).^[3] Jefferson’s views were not merely abstract. He enslaved over 700 people and exploited the reproductive capacities of African-descended women. His long-term relationship with Sally Hemings—an enslaved woman of mixed ancestry—produced several children, all of whom inherited enslaved status through their mother (Cohen 1969; Woodson 1918; Finkelman 2014).^[4] This dynamic of sexual domination, denial of paternity, and commodification of Black life exemplified the intimate operations of anti-Blackness at the heart of American democracy.

Jefferson’s influence extended beyond the Monticello plantation in Virginia, which he owned, and even beyond the plantation system that dominated the economic development of the American South from the seventeenth until the twentieth century. As president, he severed trade relations with the newly independent Black republic of Haiti, fearing its revolutionary example would inspire slave uprisings across the Americas, and especially in the US South (James 1938; Scott 2004, 2014; Trouillot 1995). His statesmanship and racist writings laid the groundwork for the so-called ‘American School of Anthropology’ which codified pseudo-scientific racial theories and enshrined anti-Blackness in American science, law, and education (Chamberlain 1907; Finkelman 2014, 198).

While Jefferson laid the ideological foundation, the ‘American School’ formalised these ideas. Central was ‘polygenism’—the theory that racial groups like ‘Negroes’ and ‘Caucasians’ were biologically distinct species with immutable traits (Gould 1981; Keel 2013; Painter 2010). Polygenists claimed that Black people were naturally inferior and biologically suited for subjugation. Samuel G. Morton, often called the ‘father’ of American physical anthropology, used manipulated skull measurements to ‘prove’ that Africans ranked lowest in the human hierarchy (Stocking 1968; Smedley 1993; Blakey 2020). These claims helped justify slavery and segregation as the natural order (Morton 1839; Ralph 2012).

Closely linked was the theory of ‘hybrid sterility’, which pathologised racial mixing, and popularised the belief that ‘mulattoes’ were biologically unfit hybrids (Nott 1843). For example, an 1843 article in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, claimed: ‘[T]he mulattoes are intermediate in intelligence between whites and blacks… they are less capable of endurance and are shorter lived… the women are bad breeders and bad nurses… the two sexes when they intermarry are less prolific’ (Nott 1843, 29–30). From such claims, it was concluded that interracial reproduction should be prohibited. These arguments later informed eugenics (i.e. ideas about improving the biological makeup of humans through selective breeding) and anti-miscegenation laws, embedding anti-Blackness in US legal and scientific infrastructure (Hochschild and Powell 2008; Nobles 2000; Pascoe 2010).

Yet these theories were never uncontested. Black intellectuals like Frederick Douglass (1854; 1881) and Anténor Firmin (1885) repudiated scientific racism and established and defended the rights of Black people. Rather than accept white supremacist race science, they argued that differences among racialised groups stemmed from historical and environmental conditions—not biology (Allen and Jobson 2016; Drake and Baber 1990; Fleuhr-Lobban 2000). Similarly, theories of polygenism and hybrid sterility were attacked as fallacious by noted scholars who condemned white anthropologists for being ‘blinded by passion’ and relying on false ‘audacious paradoxes’ (Firmin 1885, 68). Against the myth of hybrid sterility, Firmin wrote: ‘The fecundity of mulattoes is a fact so well known… that one can only be surprised that a scientist… can question it’ (68). Despite these rebuttals, obsession with Black bodies and racial mixture continued to dominate anthropological debates into the twentieth century (Anderson 2019; Baker 2020). Nevertheless, the early vindicationists, as they were known, laid foundations for an anti-racist and decolonial anthropology—one that exposed race science as spurious ideology serving domination.

Although polygenism lost credibility by the late nineteenth century, Darwinian evolutionary theories did not end scientific racism. Racial hierarchies were rearticulated through social Darwinism and eugenics (Stocking 1968; Gould 1981; Dennis 1995). Darwin’s theory of common ancestry debunked polygenism but recast human difference as evolutionary hierarchy. In The descent of man, Charles Darwin wrote:

At some future period… the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races… The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider… between man in a more civilized state… and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian [Aboriginal] and the gorilla (1871, 156).

Such comparisons gave scientific credence to anti-Black and anti-Indigenous tropes, framing colonial violence as evolutionary progress. Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer used these ideas to justify imperialism and capitalist inequality as inevitable (Dennis 1995; Magubane 2003). The rise of eugenics, a term and theory coined by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, reinforced this logic. Eugenicists envisioned humanity as a grand evolutionary tree, with elite Europeans at the top and Black and Indigenous peoples as stunted lower branches. These arboreal metaphors ‘naturalised’ racial hierarchies in society (Moore, Kosek and Pandian 2003).

In Europe, anthropologists also illustrated ‘morphological’, ‘aesthetic’, and ‘intellectual’ trees to represent and legitimise these imagined racial hierarchies (Mantegazza 1881; see Fig 1). In these hierarchies, ‘Hottentots’, ‘Bushmen’, ‘Negroes’, ‘Caffres’, ‘Papuans’, ‘Australians’, and ‘Negritos’ are placed at the bottom, and ‘Aryans’—white Europeans—at the top (Taylor and Marino 2019, 116–7). In short, social Darwinism replaced polygenism but not racism—it simply gave anti-Blackness new scientific language.

racist_tree_diagram.png

(Fig 1). Paulo Mantegazza’s “Morphological, aesthetic, and intellectual hierarchies of the human race.” (1881).

The Black body

Building on the racial typologies of polygenism and the biological determinism of social Darwinism, physical anthropologists and early social scientists increasingly turned their attention to the Black body as an object of empirical study and political concern. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Black body became a central site through which scientific racism was naturalised and institutionalised. Rather than treating race solely as a taxonomic abstraction, anthropologists and state officials began to treat the bodies of Black people as repositories of deviance—biological, moral, and civilisational (Baker 1998). These discourses were not merely academic; they helped legitimise the structural realities of post-emancipation Black life, including structural poverty, segregation, political exclusion, and the ever-present threat of rebellion. Within this context, the Black body was framed not just as different, but as existentially dangerous—a problem to be studied, managed, and contained.

In post-Emancipation America (1865–1955), this racialised scrutiny took the form of what policymakers and social scientists called the ‘negro problem’ (Baker 1998; Du Bois 1903; 1935). The presence of millions of recently emancipated people in a supposedly democratic society raised an urgent socio-political question: What to do with the Blacks? Integration? Segregation? Expulsion to Africa? In response, segregationist laws known as ‘Black codes’, Jim Crow laws, lynch mobs, and the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan’s terrorism reinforced racial domination through legal, social, and extra-legal means—perpetuating exclusion from education, labour, property, and political life (Davis et al. [1941] 2022; Du Bois 1935; Woodward 1955).

The so-called ‘negro problem’ was thus a cultural trope shaped by deep-rooted ‘negrophobia’—the psychic and social condition in which Black bodies become projections of white fear, guilt, and fantasy, and the enduring legacies of slavery and settler colonialism (Butler 1993; Du Bois 1903; Fanon 1952; Ralph and Chance 2014). Black bodies became overdetermined by contradictory myths and stereotypes: biologically inferior yet physically threatening, hypersexual yet degenerate, human yet animal. They were objectified as specimens for medical and anthropological study and symbolically constructed as social threats to white civility and national order. As Frantz Fanon (1952) and Winthrop Jordan (1968) note, Black people were positioned somewhere between human and beast—feared, surveilled, and exploited.

American popular and scientific literatures alike portrayed Black men as ‘savages’ with uncontrollable lust for white women (Baker 1998; Fanon 1952). The myth of the Black rapist served to justify lynchings and other extrajudicial forms of racial terror (Wells 1909; Davis 1981). The Black male body was pathologised as criminal, immoral, and uncivilised (Muhammad 2010). These narratives were reinforced by legal mechanisms such as ‘anti-miscegenation’ laws, which limited Black people’s rights to get married, the ‘one-drop rule’, which asserted that anyone with a Black ancestor should also be racialised as Black, and the criminalisation of poverty through vagrancy and loitering statutes—all of which enabled the de facto re-enslavement of Black people through the convict leasing system, through which prisons could lease the forced labour of mostly Black prisoners to wealthy individuals and corporations (Blackmon 2008; Oshinsky 1996).

The trope of the Black criminal normalised systemic anti-Blackness and legitimated mass incarceration as a form of racial governance (Jordan 2014; Muhammad 2010). Structural racism, predicated on anti-Blackness, displaced responsibility for Black suffering onto Black people themselves. Structural racism refers to the ways that institutions, policies, and social arrangements collectively produce and reproduce racial inequality. Eugenicists, for example, used demographic data on Black mortality to predict the supposed ‘extinction of the Negro’ by the twentieth century (Brandt 1978; Ralph 2012; Muhammad 2010). These morbid fantasies ignored the systemic conditions of racialised death and pathologised Black existence that persist until today (Dennis 1995; Mbembe 2019). For example, young Black and Latinx men in East Harlem, confronting systemic unemployment, are made to navigate illicit economies —such as the street-level drug trade and other informal survival strategies that emerge in response to exclusion from the formal labor market—while their bodies are surveilled, punished, or absorbed into carceral systems designed for profit maximization (Bourgois 2003).

The commodification of Black bodies has long underwritten the global capitalist economy, from the extraction of labour under slavery to contemporary racialised markets in entertainment, sports, surveillance, and incarceration. Numerous ethnographic studies have examined how Black bodies are treated as fungible assets—valued for their productivity, aesthetic, or capacity for violence, yet systematically devalued as persons. In the US, for instance, Black bodies are hyper-visible in popular media yet constrained by controlling images that reflect and reproduce racial hierarchies (Gray 1995; Jackson Jr. 2005). In popular culture, recurring stereotypes such as the ‘mammy’—the loyal, self-sacrificing domestic servant—and the ‘welfare queen’—depicted as lazy, hyper-fertile, and parasitic—serve to naturalise Black women's social subordination and rationalise structural inequality through familiar visual tropes (Collins 2000).

Even in the American healthcare system, Black patients are often treated as less-than-human within clinical settings, where capitalist logics and anti-Black racism intersect to devalue Black patients’ pain, experiences, and lives (Rouse 2009). These racialised medical encounters are shaped by ‘ethical variability’, whereby clinicians justify unequal care by invoking culturally biased notions of responsibility, credibility, and worthiness.

Afrophobia

‘Afrophobia’ refers to a deep-seated hatred and fear of anything associated with Blackness or Africanness. The concept is closely related to ‘negrophobia’, both emerging from long-standing European traditions of imagining African peoples as inferior, dangerous, disorderly, or contaminating. Its discursive roots trace to Greco-Roman and medieval European portrayals of Africans as monstrous and uncivilised (Stewart 2005, 43; Cantave 2024, 863). In the modern world, Afrophobia encompasses not only aesthetic prejudice but also a globalised fear of African peoples, cultural traditions, and their capacity to unsettle white supremacy and Euro-American hegemony. In Latin America, this manifests in the stigmatisation and criminalisation of African-derived spiritual traditions such as Santería in Cuba, Candomblé in Brazil, and Haitian Vodou (Beliso-De Jesús 2015). These traditions—born in the crucible of slavery and colonial violence—are not simply forms of worship but cultural systems of Black survival, resistance, and world-making (Boaz 2021; Stewart 2005; Cantave 2024).

Historically, anthropology was complicit in shaping Afrophobic knowledge regimes. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ethnographers often depicted African spiritual practices as primitive ‘superstitions’, aligning with colonial regimes that sought to eradicate them. Classic ethnographies in French and Iberian colonies portrayed Vodou and Candomblé as irrational or pathological—reinforcing racist state policies. Early anthropological writing rarely took these belief systems seriously as coherent cosmologies, instead treating them as exotic curiosities or proof of Black primitivism (Brown 2003).

Yet anthropology has also helped challenge these frameworks. Contemporary Afro-diasporic ethnographers and critical anthropologists have reclaimed the study of African-derived religions as a site of political and epistemological contestation. In this vein, scholars have foregrounded how practitioners understand their own rituals as ethical, affective, and intellectual forms of life-making. They also show how gender, sexuality, and embodiment are transformed through spiritual practice (Pérez 2016; Daniel 2005; Tinsley 2008).

In the Dominican Republic, Afrophobia is materially enacted in everyday life—especially through racialised anxieties about beauty, hygiene, and spiritual purity (Candelario 2007). Dominican beauty salons serve as intimate spaces where Afro-Haitian features and aesthetics are policed and effaced. Here, Haitian migrants are stigmatised not only for their Blackness but for presumed associations with Vodou, often framed publicly as satanic or uncivilised. These anxieties are entangled with fears of national degeneration and cultural contamination. Ethnographic observations such as these show how the body becomes a moral frontier where race, nation, and spirit converge—and where Afrophobic violence is inscribed onto skin, hair, and comportment.

In this context, anthropological studies that centre the lived experiences of Afro-religious practitioners offer critical tools to decolonise knowledge and confront Afrophobia. They reveal African diasporic religions not as threats to national order but as vital repositories of historical memory, resilience, and political possibility. At their best, ethnographic methods can expose the micro-practices of racial domination while amplifying Black cultural life on its own terms.

Misogynoir and Black feminist anthropology

‘Misogynoir’ refers to the specific forms of violence and dehumanisation that Black women experience at the intersection of anti-Black racism and misogyny (Bailey 2021). Historically, Black women’s bodies were subjected to scientific, sexual, and symbolic violation. A paradigmatic example is Saartjie Baartman (c.1789–1815), a Khoi woman from South Africa exhibited in nineteenth-century Europe as the ‘Hottentot Venus’ (Gilman 1985; Magubane 2001; Strother 1999). Her semi-nude body was displayed to curious European audiences, and after her death, her remains were dissected by French anatomist Georges Cuvier and exhibited at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris until 1974. Baartman’s treatment exemplified how the Black female body was racialised, sexualised, and rendered a scientific object—central to the development of comparative anatomy and early anthropological inquiry.

Contemporary Black feminist anthropologists have shown how this colonial gaze continues to shape representations of Black women. They point out that Black women’s bodies have historically been ‘disciplined’ through contradictory social discourses—from Christian morality and motherhood to racist stereotypes of hypersexuality and labour, and that white and Black women are constructed in opposition to each other: white women as symbols of domestic virtue and Black women as oversexualised ‘workhorses’ (Shaw 2001). Consequently, Black women in postcolonial Zimbabwe, as well as the post–civil rights era in the United States, navigate persistent gendered-racial expectations, often by asserting alternative moral, religious, and familial frameworks to reclaim bodily autonomy and dignity (Shaw 2001).

Other ethnographic studies also reveal the complex ways Black women resist, negotiate, or internalise these intersecting oppressions. For instance, Afro-Caribbean girls in New York are simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible in public space—fetishised as style icons and simultaneously policed as disruptive. Their creative expressions through fashion, music, and dance are often criminalised, yet also serve as strategies of survival and identity (LaBennett 2011). Similarly, young Black women in a transitional housing shelter in Detroit use performance and expressive culture to resist the stigmatisation of Black girlhood (Cox 2015). These ethnographies illuminate the lived experience of misogynoir and demonstrate how Black women mobilise care, kinship, and creativity in the face of structural violence.

Importantly, Black feminist scholars have also highlighted the intra-racial dimensions of misogyny. Black women are often expected to subordinate their experiences of gendered violence to broader racial struggles, leading to silences around the harm they endure from Black men (Collins 2000; Combahee River Collective 1977; Crenshaw 2014; Davis 1981; Lorde 1984). Anthropologists have argued that ethnography is particularly well-suited to expose these overlapping systems of oppression by attending to the quotidian textures of abuse, labour, survival, and joy in Black women’s lives (Mullings 2005b; McClaurin 2001). Black feminist anthropologists aim to make Black women’s lives ‘both visible and audible’ (McClaurin 2001, 21), a political and methodological project that resists both invisibility as well as hyper-surveillance. Gertrude Fraser’s (1998) ethnographic research on Black midwifery and the racial politics of reproductive health exemplifies this approach. She shows how Black women’s bodies and labour are routinely devalued in clinical and institutional settings. Attending to the embodied and generational knowledge of Black women healthcare workers illuminates how racism, sexism, and professional hierarchies intersect to marginalise Black women’s authority and care work. By centring Black women’s voices, labour, and intellectual production, Black feminist anthropology challenges the discipline to reckon with its own racial and gendered hierarchies—and to imagine new possibilities for more ethical, inclusive, and liberatory knowledge-making (McClaurin 2001). Yet, despite these contributions, Black women anthropologists have historically been marginalised within the academy. Their scholarship remains under-cited and undervalued in disciplinary canons (Harrison et al. 2018; Smith 2021; Williams 2021). This epistemic exclusion reflects broader patterns of anti-Blackness and sexism that pervade the discipline of anthropology itself.

Racial capitalism

‘Racial capitalism’ refers to the process by which capitalist economies have always been structured by and dependent upon racial hierarchies and the exploitation of Black labour. First developed by Cedric Robinson (1983), the concept critiques the idea that capitalism is a racially neutral economic system only later corrupted by racism. Robinson argues that capitalism emerged from European feudal orders that already encoded racial difference, and that Black people have been subjected to a distinct form of economic subjugation central to the global capitalist order. In this view, anti-Blackness is not a by-product of capitalism but foundational to its formation and endurance (Du Bois 1935; Williams 1940; Robinson 1983; Matlon 2016).

Anthropologists have documented how Black life is shaped by systems of racialised accumulation and dispossession, from plantation slavery to contemporary neoliberalism. Insurance policies on enslaved Africans in the nineteenth century US South illustrate the fusion of racial logics and financial speculation (Ralph 2012). Enslaved people were rendered fungible labour and abstract instruments of credit and actuarial calculation. Their value derived not from their humanity but from their capacity to generate returns for owners and insurers. Slave insurance reveals how Black life was financialised in ways that shaped modern capitalism, including the development of life insurance, risk management, and governance of future value.

Historian Destin Jenkins (2021) builds on this understanding with a historical analysis of how municipal debt became a tool of racial governance in twentieth century San Francisco—a framework that offers important insights for anthropological approaches to racial capitalism. Drawing on archival research, Jenkins shows how bond markets and credit-rating agencies influenced public infrastructure decisions, disinvesting from Black neighbourhoods while underwriting white wealth accumulation. Racial capitalism thus operates not only through exploitation but through financial infrastructures that dictate whose futures are investable.

In the Caribbean, economic policies associated with globalisation, tourism, and austerity have likewise entrenched anti-Black hierarchies (Slocun 2006; Thomas 2019, 2021). In urban Jamaica, Black youth are simultaneously criminalised and commodified—as symbols of urban danger for tourists and as security laborers in the very industries that exclude them. In this way, Blackness is linked to economic disposability while also being monetised within global security regimes (Jaffe 2015).

Similarly, labour struggles in Guadeloupe are shaped by colonial legacies and racialised inequality, as Black workers mobilise both class and race to challenge French imperial domination (Bonilla 2021). Ethnographic research with rural St. Lucian women in the banana export industry also reveals the racialised and gendered dimensions of global capitalism (Slocum 2006). Here, Black women navigate the intersecting pressures of neoliberal trade regimes, postcolonial marginalisation, and local class hierarchies, and underscore how global capitalism reproduces racial and gendered inequalities. For example, many women farmers must absorb the risks of volatile export prices, perform the unpaid labour required to meet stringent quality standards, and contend with male intermediaries who control access to markets and resources, leaving them disproportionately vulnerable within global commodity chains.

Anthropologists working in the tradition of structural violence—a concept popularised by Paul Farmer (2004)—have shown how racialised violence is embedded in political and economic systems, not just individual attitudes. Structural violence refers to the historically produced social arrangements—such as poverty, segregation, and unequal access to healthcare—that systematically harm marginalised populations by constraining their life chances and exposing them to preventable suffering. While structural racism is a specific form of this violence, rooted in racial hierarchy and anti-Blackness, structural violence more broadly encompasses the multiple social forces that produce patterns of inequality and harm. Farmer’s work in Haiti traced how colonialism and neoliberalism shape health outcomes through institutional neglect and economic exploitation. Building on this, Adia Benton’s (2015) ethnography of Sierra Leone’s HIV response reveals how global health regimes reproduce racialised and gendered hierarchies, exposing whose lives are deemed valuable or not.

The Harlem Birth Right Project, led by Leith Mullings (2001; 2005b), further developed this approach in the US context, analysing how race, gender, and class intersect to produce structural vulnerability. Their research linked high rates of infant mortality among Black women in Harlem to housing insecurity, over-policing, and barriers to quality prenatal care. Other ethnographers have likewise shown how structural racism is embodied through cyclical poverty, over-policing, and healthcare inequality (Bourgois 1995; Scheper-Hughes 1992). Together, these studies reveal how anti-Blackness is infrastructural—woven into the built environment, labour markets, and social services—and how racial capitalism renders Black life both exploitable and expendable.

‘Colour-blindness’ and colourism

Anti-Blackness is a fact of everyday life across the postcolonial world (Fanon 1952; Essed and Goldberg 2002; Keaton 2023). Yet for much of the twentieth century, anthropology’s ability to study racism seriously was constrained by post-Boasian liberalism and its doctrinal commitments to anti-essentialism and ‘colour-blindness’ (Allen and Jobson 2016; Anderson 2019; Baker 1998; Mullings 2005a; Shanklin 1998). These liberal frameworks, dominant since the 1960s, often dismissed structural racism as a serious object of anthropological inquiry. As scholars have argued, late twentieth-century racial ideologies increasingly took the form of ‘colour-blind racism’ or ‘racism without races’—systems of inequality that deny the significance of race while reproducing its effects through ostensibly race-neutral institutions, discourses, and practices (Bangstad and Fuentes 2023; Bonilla-Silva 2015; Omi and Winant 1986). With the rise of Black Studies in the 1960s and 1970s, and the inclusion of more Black and Indigenous anthropologists, critical ethnographic research has increasingly foregrounded the structures and lived conditions of anti-Blackness—reshaping academic knowledge and the local-global politics of race.

Contemporary anthropology is especially well positioned to examine the overlapping and divergent manifestations of anti-Blackness worldwide. While unified by a global racialised formation, the expressions of anti-Blackness in Ghana, Brazil, the US, Haiti, Ethiopia, Jamaica, and Europe vary significantly, shaped by distinct colonial histories, nationalist projects, and local racial regimes (Jung and Vargas 2021, 2022; Mills 2021). Jamaica, for example, enjoys sovereignty without emancipation from US imperialism (Thomas 2019), while African Americans have experienced emancipation from slavery without sovereignty (Shange 2019, 8). These divergent trajectories shape distinct yet interconnected experiences of anti-Blackness which emerge from the afterlives of empire, revealing how racial domination is reproduced across multiple global sites (Thomas and Clarke 2013).

Anti-Blackness manifests through surveillance, discipline, and the differential valuation of Black life. Black people are routinely seen as threatening, unruly, or out of place (Browne 2015; Butler 1993; Sharpe 2016). These racialised perceptions give rise to punitive structures—both spectacular and mundane—that discipline Black bodies. In eighteenth century New York, for instance, Black, Indigenous, and mixed-race individuals were legally required to carry lanterns after dark to illuminate their faces (Browne 2015). Today, such logics persist in policing, education, and carceral systems. For example, in her study of a San Francisco school, Savannah Shange (2019) describes how Black and Latinx youth are disciplined through ‘carceral progressivism’, i.e. the use of multicultural rhetoric that claims to lament structural racism, but still insists on zero-tolerance and police-based approaches to disciplining Black people and justify racial control. In Australia, Aboriginal youth are incarcerated at 20 times the rate of their white peers, revealing how settler colonialism continues to target Black and Indigenous life under the banner of multiculturalism (Holland et al. 2024; Hage 2000; Povinelli 2002; Wolfe 2016).

Ethnographies in the Caribbean and Latin America show how anti-Blackness animates postcolonial statecraft and global capitalism. In Jamaica, American militarism and neoliberalism have shaped violent policing regimes (Thomas 2019) while in Brazil, anthropologists have documented how militarised policing specifically targets Black favelas (Alves 2018; Smith 2016; Gillam 2022). Perhaps the most striking example comes from Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, a place that is marketed as an ‘Afro-paradise’—a transnational fantasy that celebrates Afro-Brazilian culture for tourism and national identity—even as the state continues to subject Black communities to pervasive violence and surveillance. Indeed, Black communities have long been sites of routinised, yet spectacular, racialised violence (Smith 2016). Here, Afro-Brazilians resist anti-Blackness through protest and performance practices—particularly bloco afro processions, Carnival-based counter-performances, and community mobilisations against police violence—in everyday life.

In the US, Laurence Ralph (2020) shows how the Chicago Police Department systematised torture against Black men from the 1970s to 1990s. In Detroit, Aimee Cox (2016) details how unhoused Black girls choreograph strategic movements through hostile urban spaces to claim dignity and survival. These ‘choreographies’ are not only acts of endurance but also everyday refusals of disposability. Together, these ethnographies show that anti-Blackness is not limited to spectacular violence but is embedded in quotidian institutions that constrain and surveil Black life. Anthropology, when critically engaged, offers tools to document these dynamics and to amplify Black knowledge, resistance, and worldmaking.

‘Colourism’ is another important facet of anti-Blackness. It refers to prejudice and discrimination based on skin tone, often within Black and Brown communities (Glenn 2009; Jablonski 2021). Coined by Alice Walker (1983), ‘colourism’ names the global preference for lighter skin in proximity to whiteness (Bajwa et al. 2023). People experience it daily: in family life, dating, beauty, housing, healthcare, education, media, and policing (Caldwell 2007; Anekwe 2014; Monk 2015; Spears 2020). Though the term is modern, colourism is centuries old, shaped by slavery, colonialism, and racial science. In colonial Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), French jurist Moreau de Saint-Méry (1796) identified eleven gradations of racial mixture, praising the ‘mulatto’ as the ideal hybrid. He wrote:

Of all the combination of white and nègre it is the mulatto who brings together all of the physical advantages; of all of these crossings of race he is the one who has the strongest constitution, the most appropriate to Saint-Domingue's climate. To the sobriety and the strength of the nègre he joins the physical grace and the intelligence of the white (1798; Garrigus 2006).

Such fantasies fused early scientific racism with erotic desire, projecting European superiority onto the bodies of the enslaved. As many scholars have argued, early racial science was animated by anxieties over miscegenation, bodily purity, and racial control (Fanon 1954; Jordan 1968; Stoler 2002; Wolfe 2016). Moreover, ‘racially hierarchical social orders, which are rooted in the control and exploitation of (racially identified) peoples and places […] generate complex dynamics of hate and love, fear and fascination, contempt and admiration […] that seems to have a specifically sexual dimension’ (Wade 2009, 2).

Colourism is historically and geographically contingent. In the US, the ‘one-drop rule’ collapsed racial ambiguity into a rigid Black-white binary (Hochschild and Powell 2008; Jordan 2014). Yet lighter-skinned Black people—particularly women—have often been granted greater social capital and proximity to whiteness (Larsen 1929; Walker 1983). In South Africa, Haiti, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico, ‘pigmentocracies’ used gradations of skin tone to structure social life (Bacelar da Silva 2022; Jackson 2024; Sheriff 2001; Telles 2014). Terms like ‘coloured’, ‘milat’, ‘mulato’, and ‘mestizo’ mark intermediate racial categories, creating buffer classes that were closer to whiteness but denied its full privileges (Glenn 2009). This stratification fostered internalised racism and horizontal antagonisms (Spears 2020; Walker 1983).

Ethnographic research shows that in Latin America, racial identities are often expressed through skin tone rather than fixed categories, and are shaped by context, class position, and local understandings of ancestry. As Peter Wade (2009) notes, racial classification in the region is fluid, relational, and embedded in broader national ideologies of mestizaje that link colour, class, and sexuality. In many settings, individuals may be identified differently depending on region, social status, or interpersonal interactions. In Mexico, descriptors like ‘moreno’ or ‘güero’ serve as racial signifiers that shift with context (Sue 2013). In Brazil, ideologies of ‘racial democracy’ have long obscured structural inequalities perpetuated by anti-Blackness and colourism (Hordge-Freeman 2015; Sheriff 2001; Twine 1998). In the Dominican Republic, anti-Haitianism reinforces the association of Blackness with cultural and national undesirability (Aber and Small 2013; Candelario 2007).

Skin bleaching is a global phenomenon, not confined to Black Atlantic societies. In India, the Philippines, South Korea, Peru, and Ghana, lighter skin is linked with beauty and modernity (Glenn 2009; Jha 2015; Mishra 2015; Pierre 2015). Many products contain mercury, hydroquinone, or potent topical steroids, causing severe dermatological damage—including chemical burns, skin thinning, and ochronosis—as well as systemic risks such as kidney failure, hypertension, and neurological toxicity. Despite these severe health risks, the global skin-lightening industry exceeds $8 billion annually and is expected to continue growing.

Colourism reveals that anti-Blackness cuts across national borders and ‘people of colour’ (‘POC’) categories. Although the term ‘POC’ is often mobilised to foster cross-ethnic alliances and highlight shared experiences of marginalisation, the term can also flatten important differences by subsuming distinct racial histories under a single label. In particular, it can obscure the structural and quotidian nature of anti-Blackness, diluting attention to the specific forms of violence, exclusion, and state surveillance directed at Black communities.

This points to the fact that anti-Blackness is not just a legacy of colonialism—it is a structuring logic of the modern racial order (Vargas 2018). Everyday manifestations of anti-Blackness, whether through skin tone, surveillance, or institutional neglect, underscore the systemic nature of racial violence. Anthropology, at its best, offers the methodological tools to document and disrupt these patterns.

Conclusion

Anthropology has long been complicit in the perpetuation of anti-Blackness and white supremacy, at times functioning as a tool of racial domination and colonial conquest (Beliso-De Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2025; Gupta and Stoolman 2021; Mullings 2005a). Yet anthropology also holds liberatory potential, precisely because it seeks to understand how social structures and relations, political hierarchies, and hegemonic cultures are experienced by people themselves (Harrison 1991; Cox et al. 2022; Mullings 2005a). By engaging with theories of anti-Blackness—especially those developed beyond the discipline—anthropology can interrogate its own historical complicity while contributing to contemporary Black freedom struggles worldwide.

The Movement for Black Lives—a global social movement against the ongoing structural devaluation of Black life and the resurgence of white nationalist politics—underscores the urgency of this task (Beliso-De Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2025; Jung and Vargas 2021; Williams 2015). From anti-police violence protests in the US to anti-racist demonstrations abroad, this movement highlights both the persistence of racial violence and the resilience of Black communities.^[5] Anthropological perspectives are essential here—not only to bear witness to how Black people experience and endure anti-Blackness, but also to illuminate how they resist and reimagine these structures in everyday life.

Black feminist anthropologists have long shown that centring Black humanity requires analysing intersecting oppressions and committing to politically engaged scholarship in Black communities themselves (Bolles 2001; Harrison 1991; McClaurin 2001). Despite this, Black women anthropologists have themselves been marginalised or excluded from the discipline’s canon, and their work remains undervalued (Harrison et al. 2018; McClaurin 2001; Smith 2021; Williams 2021). This epistemic erasure not only marginalises scholars but also silences the communities they represent. It exposes how dominant notions of merit and rigor remain shaped by Eurocentric, anti-Black, and sexist assumptions (McClaurin 2001). In response, Black feminist anthropologists continue to counter this devaluation by making Black women’s lives and voices ‘both visible and audible’ (McClaurin 2001, 21).

Calls for abolitionist anthropology, informed by the Movement for Black Lives, remind us that the discipline must embrace more liberatory frameworks for representing human experience (Cox et al. 2022; Harrison 1991). Black practices of fugitivity, marronage—historically, the flight of enslaved people who formed autonomous communities in resistance to colonial domination—storytelling, witness-bearing, and radical ‘freedom dreams’ envision life beyond the ubiquitous ‘weather’ of anti-Blackness. These visions are grounded in the lived realities and cultural imaginaries of Black people (Allen and Jobson 2016; Kelley 2002; Sharpe 2016). To remain relevant to the critical study of the human condition, anthropology must treat anti-Blackness not as peripheral, but as foundational to understanding the modern world (Jung and Vargas 2021; Wilderson 2003). In this way, anthropology can not only interrogate its own colonial legacies, but also serve as a tool for amplifying the voices, experiences, and aspirations of Black communities globally, contributing to the broader struggle for racial justice.

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Note on contributor

Sebastian Jackson is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and a faculty affiliate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. He holds a Ph.D. in African and African American Studies and Social Anthropology from Harvard University. His research examines race, intimacy, and the afterlives of colonialism, segregation, and apartheid in South Africa, the United States, and the broader Black Atlantic world. He has published on racism, white supremacist ideology, and postcolonial kinship in academic and public-facing venues.

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[2] Charmantier, Isabelle. 2020. “Linneaus and race.” The Linnean Society of London, September 3. https://www.linnean.org/learning/who-was-linnaeus/linnaeus-and-race

[3] Jefferson, Thomas. 1814. “Thomas Jefferson to John Manners, 22 February 1814.” The National Archives Founders Online. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-07-02-0132.

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[5] 2020. “Vision for Black lives.” Movement for Black Lives. https://m4bl.org/v4bl/.

Editor:

Rachel Cantave

Queer anthropology

Felix Stein — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 17:09:29 +0000

Ara Wilson

Duke University

Initially published 31 Jul 2019

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

Abstract:

Once a slur, the term ‘queer’ now is used to critique restrictive, dominant norms of respectable conduct and to recast sexual and gender variations in positive terms. With roots in twentieth-century anthropological studies of sex and gender, queer anthropology is also part of interdisciplinary scholarship on queer existence that defines sex and gender as key axes for the distribution of status, resources, membership, and value in a society. The aim is not to describe gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender (LGBTQ) life in universal terms. Rather, ethnographies emphasise the different forms that queer existence takes. Queer anthropology explains the conditions that shape queer life, such as cultural understandings of sexuality, legacies of colonial regimes, or global flows of popular culture. This entry explores four foci that characterise queer anthropology: language, especially categories of identity; varying forms of transgender roles; a geographic emphasis on the United States; and the relation of local sex/gender diversity to the global expanse of Western forms of lesbian and gay identity.

Introduction

Queer anthropology studies variations in the expression of sexuality and gender, and the ways that societies treat such differences. Queer anthropology adopts an anti-homophobic approach predicated on critiquing the denigration of sex/gender variation and empathising with the subjects of that denigration; that is, those we call queer.

Twentieth-century anthropology publicised the existence of accepted homosexual behaviour and integrated transgender people in societies around the world. From earlier anthropological work, we are now aware that societies’ varying codes for sexuality and gender relate to their overall value systems, and that such codes deeply socialise how people evaluate their experiences and express their desires (see, for example, Mead 1935; Vance 1991). Queer anthropology takes this already-familiar anthropological sensibility in a new direction by identifying social-cultural forces as forms of power that distribute rewards and punishments in unequal ways. It is based on the insight that, as an axis for organising social life, sexuality is not a separate domain but is always intertwined with systems of meaning and structures of relations among people.

This entry first considers what twentieth-century anthropology said about sexuality and gender variance, a legacy that was explicitly rejected, subtly continued, and largely ignored in the new school of queer anthropology. It then discusses what queer anthropology (including lesbian and gay anthropology) tells us about this sex/gender variation, particularly about categories and forms of identities, with special focus on two areas rich in queer ethnographic research: Southeast Asia and the United States. Although it is ahistorical to do so, the term ‘queer anthropology’ will here serve as a convenient umbrella term for other incarnations of the anthropology of homosexuality, lesbian and gay (LGBTQ) anthropology, or transgender anthropology.

History

During its expansion around the world, Europe’s colonial agents, missionaries, and explorers encountered what they considered shocking sexual attitudes elsewhere in the world: peoples that accepted open sex play among children, pre-marital sex, sex between men, acknowledgement of masturbation, and more. In some societies, Europeans saw people with anatomically male bodies living out women’s roles, who were not only tolerated, but in some places valorised, such as in some Native American tribes (those with female bodies living as men were rarer, but also noted). In other words, Europeans confronted an embrace of sexual conduct or gender expression that their own societies rejected. They used such deviance from their norms to rationalise colonial domination, in a logic that continues to echo today (Morgensen 2011).

This entry focuses on anthropology’s intellectual accounting for diversity, rather than the ways that ethnographic knowledge played into colonial or white supremacist rule. What were the rubrics for making sense of this difference? The Christian world evaluated sexuality through its theology of sin, which underwrote the long-lasting criminalisation of certain sex or gender conduct – as in the form of sodomy laws – in Europe and its colonies. In the nineteenth century, following Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, an alternative explanation for social differences around sexuality came to the fore. The discipline of anthropology emerged by providing a scientific, rather than religious, explanation for different social practices and cultural forms. Sexuality was important to this emergence of anthropological thought — so much so that anthropology became associated with photographs of bare-breasted women and titillating details about other cultures’ sexual habits (Lyons & Lyons 2004) — the erotic equivalent to the ‘flora and fauna’ accounts of natural history (Weston 1993) — to the embarrassment of the discipline’s leaders.

Darwin’s evolutionary theories identified sexual reproduction as crucial to species evolution and survival. Much about maleness, femaleness, and sexuality then, was attributed to nature. Anthropologists described people as ‘man’ or ‘woman’ according to binary categories of sex differences based on anatomy, even when the society in question gave reality to alternate gender identities. Until very recently, ethnographies referred to someone living out a feminine role but with a body considered male with the masculine pronoun ‘he’. The earlier literature referred to them as ‘effeminate men’, ‘homosexuals’, ‘transvestites’, or other terms. Western researchers typically conflated phenomena that we now, in the twenty-first century, separate: same-sex sexual encounters or desires, named sexual identity, intersexuality, gender norms, gender expression, and psychic gender identity (to be fair, many of the societies studied also conflated anatomical sex with sexuality and gender identity). Homosexuality was viewed as gender crossing because a homosexual had the sexual orientation that properly belonged to the opposite sex.

In the wake of Darwin, the first wave of anthropology proposed a model for the evolution of human institutions that emulated the natural evolution of species. Nineteenth-century scholars studying reports of other cultures concluded that different forms of marriage, kinship, and sexual behaviour must reflect different stages in the evolution of human society. In this imagined evolution, humans began in an animal-like phase of ‘promiscuous hordes’ mating indiscriminately. We then evolved family systems, progressing from lower to higher forms of barbarism and savagery (including a debated matriarchal period) until culminating in civilization’s most evolved stage, that of the paternally-led nuclear family. Societies that did not centre on the nuclear family were assumed to belong to more primitive stages of human development, savagery or barbarianism. As the pinnacle of human development, white Christians were justified — even obligated! — to attempt to force couples to adopt appropriate sexual relations – hence the ‘missionary position’ – and the civilised form of the family organised around the heterosexual conjugal pair.

Entering the twentieth century, anthropologists radically changed their interpretation of cross-cultural variations in sexual codes. This new anthropology no longer described family systems as more or less primitive: evolutionary ranking was rejected. Instead, anthropologists asked why expressions considered deviant according to Western norms — homosexuality, pre-marital sex, or transgender identities — were accepted in other societies. The 1920s to 1930s were a heyday of anthropological research on sexuality and sex, or what we now call gender. One example is William Willard Hill’s ‘The status of the hermaphrodite and transvestite in Navaho culture’. Hill’s title used the English words of the period for intersex and transgender to translate the Navajo term nádleehi (also nadle^[1]). Navajo society, Hill found, treated the nádleehi differently from the way US society treated comparable people. A Navajo family who had an intersex baby or a transgender youth ‘was considered by themselves and everyone else as very fortunate’:

The success and wealth of such a family was believed to be assured. Special care was taken in the raising of such children and they were afforded favoritism not shown to other children of the family. As they grew older and assumed the character of nadle, this solicitude and respect increased, not only on the part of their families but from the community as a whole (Hill 1935: 274).

Hill bracketed his social schema in order to explicate the logic of the Navajo: the Navajo valued people (and animals) who did not fit into binary categories of male/female. His discussion of the nádleehi shows how a culture’s category for sex/gender identity connects to broader cultural values, concerning binaries, nature, resources, and kinship. By developing this kind of analysis, that interprets codes for sex or gender as a piece of the larger social system, anthropology developed both its intellectual method (cultural relativism) and its concept of culture (as holistic, integrated assemblage of values and habits). Sex/gender norms that diverged from Western orthodoxy offered key opportunities for illustrating this method and analysis.

Even as they were developing cultural relativist approaches to sex/gender variations, modern anthropologists fumbled for words that could translate specific cultural categories into a universal vocabulary of science, in ways that reproduced their own cultural attitudes. Not sounding particularly objective, Edward Westermarck wrote that in some societies, ‘[t]he gratification of the sexual instinct assumes forms which fall out the ordinary pale of nature’ (Westermarck 1926: 456).^[2]The main form that concerned him was men’s sex with other men, probably anal sex. Sex that was not undertaken by a heterosexual pair, hence not connected to reproduction, was beyond ‘the pale of nature’. Given the importance of reproduction to the species and the family, why would any society allow it? To answer this Darwinian puzzle of non-heterosexual sex, anthropologists turned mainly to psychological or functionalist frameworks. Functionalism said that cultural practices that seemed odd to the Western observer, as the acceptance of non-heterosexual sexuality, in fact serve a rational, if not conscious, purpose by handling basic challenges that confront human societies in ways that mesh with their overall social system. Psychoanalytic diagnoses of homosexuality as perversion, inversion, or neuroses provided a persuasive expert theory for interpreting, say, men’s sex with men or females wearing male clothing. These psychological terms were clinical yet not neutral, as the following example reveals.

Shamanism in Korea, Siberia, Southeast Asia, and other locations offered Western readers exotic examples of cross-dressing, transvestitism, the third-gender, or transgender expression. When shamans are possessed by a spirit that is not of their own birth-sex, they don the clothes and behaviours of the spirit’s sex. Here is how an anthropologist, Melvin Spiro, described Burmese female shamans in 1967:

[M]any are highly masculine in manner, and many others are married to weak, inconsequential males. If the female shaman does in fact have homosexual needs, they may be satisfied by identification with her nat [spirit] husband… At the very least, therefore, the shamanistic role enables a latent lesbian, one with a strong masculine component, to act out her masculine impulses (1967: 220).

Spiro analysed Burmese society through a psychoanalytical framework that considered sexual orientation to be related to gender identity — attraction to women was masculine, and vice versa — and to be a deeply seated, core element of a person. Psychoanalytical categories — ‘latent’ lesbian or homosexual men — placed the cross-dressing shaman into a presumed universal framework. Judging the husbands of ‘highly masculine’ women as ‘weak’ and ‘inconsequential’,^[3]Spiro’s reveals his society’s attitudes about proper heterosexual arrangements, rather than 1960s Burmese categories. At the time, such judgmental language passed as social science.

Like many anthropologists discussing sexuality, Spiro also drew on a functionalist interpretation. In works such as Sex and repression in savage society (1927), Bronislaw Malinowski put forth one of the best-known formulations of functionalism.^[4] It says that social arrangements manage basic human needs in ways that prevent dangerous disruptions, thereby allowing social forms to endure. Societies provided outlets for problematic queer desires; for example, through constructive roles for those who expressed alternative genders and sexualities, like shamanism. For the Navajo, Hill similarly explained the social valorization of intersex/transgender members as a way to ‘capitalize on an irregularity’ (1935: 273) — it made an aberration socially meaningful.

Margaret Mead’s pathbreaking book, Sex and temperament in three primitive societies (1935), deeply transformed thinking about sex roles. It challenged the idea that biological sex caused male and female personality differences. Socialization, Mead insisted, not biology, caused personality traits: it was cultures that linked qualities like aggression or nurturance to sex. Mead’s argument that societies shaped temperaments anticipated the later differentiation between biological sex and gender. (Gender is a relatively new term that became common from its use in sexology and 1970s feminism.) Mead was especially influential because she brought these ideas to a wide audience. As one sign of her significance, one of the anthropologists who launched queer anthropology, Esther Newton, titled her memoir, Margaret Mead made me gay (Newton 2000).

Twentieth-century anthropology shaped how we think about queer life today. It explained the power of norms and the social mechanisms that created men and women in their image while also demonstrating that some societies, like the Navajo or Burmese, did not reject, but positively valued people who Westerners considered psychologically abnormal. The fact that some societies integrated sex/gender variance showed that there were alternatives to enduring punitive Victorian codes governing women’s sexual behaviour, homosexuality, masturbation, or gender non-conformity. These cross-cultural examples were eagerly taken up by Euro-American efforts to make life more hospitable for those who did not conform to these strict norms of personal life.

Queer anthropology

In the 1960s and 1970s, a few bold anthropologists asked for more attention to homosexuality, which had been neglected for decades after the 1930s (Sonenschein 1966; Fitzgerald 1977). This led to a small subfield of the anthropology of homosexuality, which begat lesbian and gay anthropology, which later emerged as queer and transgender anthropology. This scholarship both extended and departed from earlier twentieth century scholarship on sex. Anthropologists used old-school ethnography to understand lifeways that defied sex/gender, albeit in novel sites, like lesbian bars or drag shows. Yet this new lesbian and gay anthropology also articulated distinct views of non-heterosexual sexuality.

Seismic changes from new social movements led scholars to examine conflict and inequality more than they had. Lesbian and gay anthropologists were explicitly committed to an anti-homophobic approach. In 1972, Esther Newton’s prescient study of drag queens, street faeries, and camp sensibility showed how this queer US world disaggregated elements of gender, how they were internally differentiated, and how they understood relations to dominant homophobic society; for example, through the wry stylistic of camp (Newton 1972). Gayle Rubin created a cultural map of US sexual norms as a concentric set of circles around a ‘charmed circle’ of the most valued mode of sexuality (married, heterosexual, ‘vanilla’) to outer rings of increasing stigmatization. Rubin, in particular, helped anthropologists to see sexuality as a ‘vector of oppression’ in societies (Rubin 1975). Their work, often ignored in mainstream anthropology, helped launch what became Queer Anthropology.

In the Anglophone world, older gays and lesbians painfully recall ‘queer’ as a hostile epithet that crystallised the alienation of being treated as abnormal. At the same time, communities excluded from mainstream society often use humour as a survival strategy, and many queers also used ‘queer’ sardonically in an insider way. Come the late 1980s, a younger generation reclaimed the epithet queer as a way to embrace, rather than suffer, this outsider status. They embraced violating sexual and gender norms: ‘We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it!’ went the chant. This appropriation of the slur turned ‘queer’ into a critique of normativity that showed how norms excluded people from resources, valorization, and social belonging while also targeting them for violence and harassment. Politically, taking up ‘queer’ defies the logic that only those who are ‘normal’ are entitled to the full expression of humanity (Rubin 1984). The categories of ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian’ came to be seen by some as too restrictive to capture the scope of (consensual) erotic experiences that mainstream desire considered perverse. Instead of continuing to represent different identity categories in an expanding LGBTQ acronym, many adopted queer as an encompassing shorthand. The radical turn to queer also reflected concern that gays and lesbians were assimilating into mainstream society.^[5] As some gays and lesbians became seen as ‘normal’, their membership in mainstream society could now reinforce the very boundaries that had kept them out, and that still excluded other sorts of queer sexuality, particularly those in Black, immigrant, poor, or transgender communities.

Queer theory is an academic response to this activism. Coined in 1989, queer theory is less focused on naming identities than identifying a political relationship of subjects to dominant modes of power, usually understood as resistance, whether intentional or not. One major queer theorist described queer capaciously as resistance ‘to regimes of the normal’ (Warner 1993: xxvi). The Western regime of the normal posits a biological sex binary, male and female, that shapes masculine or feminine gender identity and results in heterosexual sexual orientation and nominally monogamous relationships. These norms extend beyond evaluating individuals, because the heterosexual pair is viewed as the hub of the family, above other forms of intimate relationships, especially sex between men, women, and trans people. Queer theory shows how those whose sexuality and gender are considered deviant can be seen as freaks or monsters — not fully human (Weiss 2016a). To demonstrate that norms are forms of ideology, rather than natural or universal, Queer scholars highlight phenomena that show ‘mismatches between sex, gender and desire’ (Jagose 2002: 3).

Anthropologists draw selectively on strands of queer theory; for example, referring to normative discourses instead of a general concept of culture. In anthropology, Weston proposes that queer ‘defines itself by its difference from hegemonic ideologies of gender and sexuality’ (Weston 1993: 348). The European Network for Queer Anthropology (ENQA)^[6]adopts this meaning by situating itself against ‘the continued marginalization of sexuality and gender perspectives beyond those that are embedded in conjugal reproductive heterosexuality in contemporary anthropology’. The anthropologist Margot Weiss, who has written a great deal about what queer anthropology means, says that queer is meant to ‘signify transgression of, resistance to, or exclusion from normativity, especially but not exclusively heteronormativity’ (Weiss 2016a).^[7]With the phrase ‘not exclusively’, Weiss stresses the intersectional nature of queer perspectives, meaning that prevailing sex/gender norms are not isolated axes of social systems, but intertwine with class dynamics and histories of colonisation and slavery.

Anthropologists draw on queer theory’s concept of gender as performative (which itself derives from linguistics), seeing, for example, femininity as created continually through people’s conduct and speech, rather than resulting from biological female sex (Morris 1993). Based in the humanities, and rooted in critical theory or continental philosophy, queer theoretical writing relies mainly on the analysis of texts, mostly from European or US sources. Queer anthropology adds ethnographic methods that place sexuality in richer contexts beyond simply discourse, showing how, for example, capitalism (Rofel 2007; Weiss 2011b; Wilson 2004), religious meanings (Ramberg 2014; Allen 2011), or immigrant status (Manalansan 2003) contour people’s expression of sexual desires or self-definitions. A number of review essays provide different takes on anthropology’s relations to queer theory.^[8]This brief entry emphasises queer anthropological studies of sexuality and gender in relation to classic disciplinary concerns with social classifications and social and geographic contexts as well as anthropology’s more recent attention to global dynamics.

From homosexual to Tom: language, categories, meanings

By the 1980s, most anthropologists avoided using the word ‘homosexual’ to describe persons. Gay and lesbian activists had rejected an externally imposed, clinical label that linked non-heterosexual orientations with pathology (Tuvin 1991; Weston 1993; Rubin 1997). Moreover, defining people, rather than sexual acts, as homosexual, heterosexual, or bisexual relies on a particular psychological model of selfhood in which some enduring, core essence of a person’s inner being is determined by whether their desired sexual partners are of the same or opposite sex.

Queer anthropology often studies sexual expressions that differ from prevailing Euro-American notions of homosexuality, biological sex, or are subject to different social judgements. Feminist anthropologists, for example, recognised that Western vocabulary, like the term ‘lesbian’, did not adequately translate the self-concepts and cultural connotations of women’s erotic relations with other females. The newly-reclaimed Western term ‘lesbian’ was not even shared by communities of women in same-sex relations within the West, such as urban American working-class women who organised their self-concept around an erotically gendered persona, as ‘butch’ or ‘femme’, rather than emphasising the sameness in same-sex desire (Kennedy & Davis 1993). Yet specific gendered vocabulary for what we could call female masculinity – butch lesbian, gender non-conforming female, or trans man – is common in other parts of the world. In the twenty-first century Persian Gulf, boya (plural boyāt)^[9]refers to a female with masculine appearance. Boyāt’s short hair and male clothing become visible when they are not wearing the abaya, meaning in women-only spaces in malls, girls’ schools, or women’s beaches (Le Renard 2014; Nigst & Garcia 2010). As the Arabic boya represents a borrowing from the English word ‘boy’, Asian societies use tomboy or such derivatives as Tom,T, or Tibo (Blackwood 2010; Newton 2016). We still do not know how or when the word tomboy entered Asian lexicons.

Queer theory has argued for analysing sexuality as autonomous from gender (Rubin 1985). Yet anthropologists mostly find that sexuality is deeply embedded in gender schema. For example, males are often accorded different mobility in public spaces and standards for sexual activity from girls and women (Blackwood 2010). Femininity and masculinity are also commonly associated with particular sexual roles (Padilla 2008; Sinnott 2004). Tomboy or boya are gender terms, not necessarily equivalent to transgender, that suggest a more or less implicit sexuality. That is, in many sex/gender lexicons, labels for non-normative gender expression also codes same-sex sexuality. In my research in Thailand, I found that many women through the 1990s rejected the word ‘lesbian’ because of its overt sexual meanings, enhanced by the use of the word in heterosexual pornography and sex-shows for foreign men. Identifications that merge sexuality with a gendered term seem to be common. Bailey too finds that the participants in Black American drag balls use gendered terms, such as ‘butch queen up in drag’, ‘femme queen’, or ‘women’ (Bailey 2013; see also Johnson 2011).

Societies outside of the West also draw on the more sexual word ‘lesbian’. Nais Dave (2012) found rural Indian women outside of major cities described themselves as lesbians, to the surprise of urban organisers. Some language communities use diminutives of lesbian such as lesbi (Indonesia), les (Vietnam [Newton 2016]), or la-la (Greater China). Even when the term is derived from the English, it is conceptually inflected with local meanings. Writing about Indonesia, for example, anthropologists show how terms like lesbi (Blackwood 2010) or gay (Boellstorff 2005) function as Indonesian words, rather than being entirely commensurate with English meanings.

Communities of gay men, men who have sex with men (MSM), and trans women often develop their own community slang, or argot (Boellstorff 2005; Leap & Boellstorff 2004). E. Patrick Johnson provides a glossary for US Black queer slang in his book Sweet tea: black gay men of the South. There is a name for the argot of queers in the Philippines and its diaspora: Swardspeak, derived from a Cebuano word for the pejorative term, ‘sissy’. Swardspeak mixes dominant Filipino, American, and Spanish codes in a constantly evolving slang that unmistakably marks the speaker as bakla, a queer man or trans woman of the Philippines (Manalansan 2003: 46-7).

The point of this documentation of indigenous terminology for queer life is not to chronicle gay life around the world, but to alter conventional thinking about gender and sexuality. The variety of modes of queer existence belies the idea that sexuality takes the universal forms of heterosexuality and homosexuality. It shows that the connection between sexual activity to identity takes culturally specific forms that are inflected by sex, gender, class, race, and other social markers. The terms a person uses to describe herself are also situational, and change in different contexts (Valentine 2007; Gray 2009).^[10]Not all queer terms describe individuals, either. In mainland China, la-la was first used as an adjective for sites associated with what we name lesbian and queer women rather than as a noun naming a person’s identity (Engebretsen 2013). Gloria Wekker (2007) explains that in Suriname, the understanding of female same-sex erotic relations, called matiwroko (mati work or ‘friends’ work’), differs from the concept of lesbian. The Surinamese understand these sexual relations as activity rather than identity: a woman often would be heterosexually partnered and engage in mati work without contradiction. Non-Western queer life can involve radically different conceptions of the self. Being a bakla, Manalansan tells us, ‘is seen to be not a product of something inside of person, but rather as a product of an outside force or forces’ (Manalansan 2003: 43). Queerness in various societies is seen as divine fate, as akin to possession, or as the result of karma (Boellstorff 2005; Manalansan 2003; Sinnott 2004).

Queer anthropology has shown that applying Western categories for sexuality universally across cultural contexts limits our understanding of people’s self-concepts, and in turn, their motivations, choices, and behaviours. For one concrete illustration, in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic: because conventional epidemiological methods did not provide an understanding of gay men’s sexual cultures, medical researchers did not understand the patterns of HIV transmission. Ethnographic work explained the contexts for plural sex partners in this community. It also explained that health programs relying on the word ‘gay’ were failing to reach the many men who may on occasion enjoy intercourse with another male but do not feel gay, but as ‘normal’ (Boellstorff 2011; Vance 1991). ‘Using bisexual as a noun’ for men who have sex with men in Mexico, Carrier says, ‘obscures the diversity of their lifestyles, motivations, and sexual behaviors’ (Carrier 1995: 199). ‘Normal’, married men routinely having sex with male-bodied people challenges normative Western beliefs that having sex with a body with a penis establishes a man as homosexual, not heterosexual: more generally, that the sex of a partner defines one’s core sexual orientation and, hence, identity.

The transgender turn

As the work of Hill on the Navajo or Spiro on Burmese shamans noted above suggests, the discipline of anthropology described transgender lives as part of its analysis of cultural patterns and social function. These accounts displayed deeply ethnocentric judgements that changed as a response to transsexual and transgender advocacy. Taking hold in the US through the 1990s, the concept of ‘transgender’, coined by transgender people themselves, more or less supplanted the words ‘transsexual’ and ‘transvestite’, for similar reasons to the move away from ‘homosexual’. (Some people still identify in English as ‘cross-dressers’ or ‘transsexuals’ and comparable terms in other languages.) Language has been one of the most vital arenas for transgender struggles (Zimman 2017). Trans advocacy defines gender according to individual subjective experience — how people identify their gender — rather than according to legal identity, psychiatric diagnosis, social perception, or sex assigned at birth.^[11]Their political efforts have transformed language adopted in scholarship, medical literature, psychological care, and by international networks, such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs).^[12]While queer and transgender anthropology follows these recommendations, they also have alternative cross-cultural versions of transgender identity (Dutta & Roy 2014) and are equally exploring the historically specific construction of the American, and globalising, trans identity (Plemmons 2017; Zimman 2017).

The revealing subtitle of David Valentine’s Imagining transgender is ‘an ethnography of a category’, which flags his approach to the (then) new category of transgender as a cultural classification; in this case, in the context of gender-non-conforming communities in New York City (Valentine 2007). As with the Detroit drag ball participants (Bailey 2013), these queer New Yorkers described themselves with an array of terms, including ‘gay’. Cross-cultural terms often conceptualise personhood and gender according to different logics from the Western sense of the autonomous, interior self. For example, a Filipina baklais called ‘doll of god’, suggesting that the physical self is the plaything of the divine (Manalansan 2013). Sahar Sadjadi (2019) notices that the concept of the self from her cultural background differs from that expressed in US trans medicine. She explains that ‘my ethnographic gaze originates from a context where narratives of the self are not anchored in a deep inner core but are relational and situational’ (Sadjadi 2019: 104). Discussions in a paediatric trans clinic revealed ‘the hegemony of the interior origins of authentic self and identity and the rejection of possible external, including social, origins of identity’ (Sadjadi 2019: 104). Lal Zimman’s (2017) linguistic analysis of US trans discourse finds a similar emphasis on individual autonomy in trans emphasis on self-identification, which meshes with a US political economic context stressing individualism (neoliberalism). Despite their political emphasis on self-definition, Zimman notes, trans people are nonetheless conscious that gender identity is very much established dialogically: that is, in relation to others.

Queer, American style

In India, the hijra is a well-known figure: born as males, living a feminine identity in community with other hijras, they have attracted the attention of many scholars and are a staple of anthropological discussions of gender.^[13] Southeast Asian trans feminine identities (Thai kathoey, Filipino bakla, Indonesian waria) are also well known to tourists and researchers, as are South America’s travesti. Yet the queer life that anthropologists know the most about is in the United States. From the 1960s and 1970s, anthropologists have conducted participant observation within queer American subcultures, such as drag queens (Newton 1973), working class lesbian life (Kennedy & Davis 1993), or BDSM communities (Weiss 2011b). They show that queer communities, like others, are structured by shared codes, patterned behaviour, and the effects of urban policies, capitalist markets, and other encompassing systems.

We are most familiar with queer life in cities: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles. Generally, the American countryside is considered harsh, if not impossible, for lesbian, gay, or transgender living. Mary L. Gray’s ethnography Out in the country (2009) and E. Patrick Johnson’s Sweet tea (2011) provide close portraits of queer US Southerners, showing how they form their identity and sustain lives in the absence of metropolitan resources. Johnson’s personal narratives show how in Black Southern communities, queer life is simultaneously above and below the radar, as well as the centrality of both the church and drag to many Black gay men’s experience. Both white and Black Southerners face a different prospect of being out in their small communities (Gray2009).^[14]

The anthropology of queer American life counters the codified images of married white gays and lesbians or the staple images of American gay life found in TV shows like Modern family or The L-word. Those who fall outside the charmed circle of sex/gender norms, despite being subject to violence and poverty, build sustaining social lives – vibrant communities, with their own argot and symbolism – and create possibilities for pleasure, sexual and otherwise, which is part of survival and resistance (Bailey 2013; Gray 2009; Johnson 2011; Kennedy and Davis 1993; Manalansan 2003). Having long been excluded from full inclusion into kinship organised around conjugal heterosexuality, queer people established their own bonds of kinship, such as chosen families or houses (Bailey 2013; Lewin 2009; Weston 1997). They draw on, yet reformulate, heterosexual customs of family, weddings, marriage, child-rearing.

Studying a country shaped by the decimation of Indigenous peoples, chattel slavery of Africans, imperialism in Latin America, and racism towards non-white immigrants, Americanist Queer Anthropology has confronted these legacies for sexuality and gender. Their intersectional analysis sees sexuality as an axis of social differentiation that is interwoven with the residual structures of colonial and plantation societies (Morgensen 2011).

Is gay global?

Queer life is affected by social contexts that scale from the family to the transnational. In the 1990s, Dennis Altman argued that ‘gay’ was becoming a globalised identity, erupting in the Global South along paths of capitalist development (Altman 1996). He pointed to the way that gay bars, rainbow flags, and clothing styles could look so alike in cities like Rio, Bangkok, or Berlin as the manifestation of this global gay culture. Altman was not celebrating this development or arguing that there is a universal, essentialist gay identity. Altman proposed that this merging international gay culture resulted from global capitalism. His analysis raised important questions about how gay, queer, and trans life in the Global South or non-West, including post-socialist settings created after the breakup of the Soviet Union, relate to gay cultures of the Global North. Are gay, lesbian, queer, and transgender identities elsewhere part of the West’s expanse across the world? Is queer life in the non-West a derivative of Western forms, a borrowing from New York, San Francisco, or Sydney gay life?

Queer anthropology does not view transnational queer culture as a wholesale export of modern Western culture to the rest of the world. It also does not position the West as ‘ahead’ or more enlightened about LGBTQ rights than other regions: doing so would replicate the old evolutionary, civilizational claims used to rationalise colonialism. Instead, anthropologists of queer life tend to recast the nexus of West/global and non-West/local in three general ways. First, they show how local communities integrate transnational phenomena, often resulting in hybrid or syncretistic forms, such as the Filipino argot, Swardspeak. Second, they see where transnational dynamics are affecting queer life; for example, through geopolitics, communication technologies, or tourism. Third, queer anthropology identifies alternate geographic forms of queer life than the West-to-non-West flow.

Societies do not generally import sex/gender schema wholesale: local versions mix with the international circulation of gay, lesbian, and trans culture, in varying ways. Tom Boellstorff (2005) proposes that the Indonesian gay identity is one of the few truly national identities in a country shaped by insular cultural distinctions. When conservative voices in former colonies in the Global South decry homosexuality as foreign to their ‘tradition’, that tradition is often an outgrowth of imperialism.

Queer life anywhere is affected by intensifying flows of people, culture, and capital across national borders, or globalization. The concepts of gay, lesbian, and transgender are now global, transmitted through the communication technologies, NGOs, migration, and tourism. Gay male tourists have brought their concept of gay identity and its associated styles to sites considered appealing to gay men (Mitchell 2015; Padilla 2008; Stout 2014). In the twenty-first century, the Internet, social media, and digital applications (apps) are stages for sexual encounters as well as resources for information about marginalized identities. (Boellstorff 2010, 2014; McGlotten 2013). Information about hormones, surgery, and other modifications also travel (Ochoa 2014; Plemmons 2017; Zimman 2017). To a marked degree, transgender people are forming their self-understanding through digital communities formed on the Internet. These mediated dialogues have produced new, shared vocabulary for body zones, such as trans men’s replacement of the word vagina with ‘front hole’ or ‘boy cunt’ (Zimman 2017). Thais who formerly identified as kathoey and ladyboy (to foreigners) now also describe themselves as ‘transwomen’ in online communities like dating apps (Käng 2012).

Institutions of international civil society, notably NGOs, have also been a conduit for concepts around sexuality and gender (Gray 2009) as well as providing spaces for homosocial encounters (Wilson 2010). HIV/AIDS projects became sites for the gathering of men and trans women who have sex with men. These organizations dispersed authorised vocabularies about sexuality. At the time of Valentine’s research, those New Yorkers most connected with non-profit organizations were also most likely to name themselves as transgender (Valentine 2007). How does the term transgender relate to local concepts?

Many queers are influenced by flows within their region. In Asia, Korean cultural forms, like K-pop or bodily aesthetics (facial surgeries), are taken up by queer cultures elsewhere in the region (Käng 2014). Chinese language (Sinophone) queer materials flow between China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, and across the Chinese-speaking diaspora. In Hong Kong, people repurposed the word ‘comrade’, tongzhi, to describe queer solidarity or LGBTQ identities, a historically resonant usage that then spread to Mainland China. Queer community extends transnationally along migrant routes, for example, from the US to Latin America, or from the Philippines, which has one of the highest rates of emigration. Filipina/o queer men and trans women, while establishing connections to American gay worlds and navigating obligations to family and Filipino Catholicism, look to Manila to stay up to date on additions to Swardspeak (Manalansan 2003).

Geopolitical changes affect possibilities for queer community and LGBTQ rights. In the former Soviet Union, for example, rising authoritarian nationalism casts LGBTQ people as symbols of social decline (Renkin 2009; Shirinian 2018). In Latin America, queer communities under post-dictatorship governments find openings for more visibility and queer-friendly policies while also facing intensified stratification resulting from neoliberal economic policies (Amar 2013; Ochoa 2014; Stout 2014). Lesbians and gays in the hemisphere have also faced contradictory struggles for rights under socialist governments, such as in post-revolutionary Nicaragua (Babb 2003; Howe 2013), or under new capitalist developments in Cuba (Allen 2011; Stout 2013).

Conclusion

Anthropology transformed Western understandings of sexuality and gender from evaluations based on sin, racial evolution, or psychopathology to understandings that cultural values varied and that societies shaped the sex and gender expressions within them. Queer anthropology shows that societies makes sexual, gendered people and organizes their relationships, in varying ways. In turn, the plethora of gender expressions and sexual cultures that exist around the world reveals binary formulations like heterosexual and homosexual or male and female to be a culturally specific logic rather than universal reality. Being queer is a profoundly social position, inescapably embedded within a larger, often oppressive, culture, and also producing shared worlds inhabited by a society’s divergent subjects.

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Note on contributor

Ara Wilson is Associate Professor in the Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies Program and the Cultural Anthropology Department at Duke University, and is former chair of the Association for Queer Anthropology (AQA). Wilson is the author of The intimate economies of Bangkok: tomboys, tycoons, and Avon ladies in the global city (2004, University of California Press) and has published interpretations of significant concepts for queer social analysis, such as infrastructure, intimacy, and gender. https://scholars.duke.edu/person/ara.wilson.

Ara Wilson, Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies Program, Duke University, 117 East Duke Building, Durham, N.C. 27701, United States. ara.wilson@duke.edu.

[1] For more information on this term, see: Epple, C. 1998. Coming to terms with Navajo ‘nádleehí’: a critique of ‘berdache’, ‘Gay,’ ‘Alternate Gender,’ and ‘Two-Spirit’. American Ethnologist 25(2), 267-90.

[2] In his chapter on ‘Homosexual love’ in his 1926 book, The origin and development of the moral ideas, Westermarck works hard to prove that homophobic disgust is universal. His own evidence challenged the conclusion he desired.

[3] Strong women paired with weak men was a trope of mid-century, Cold War discourse. Powerful wives and mothers were deemed to cause less-manly husbands and homosexual men: in general, men not powerful enough to fight against communism.

[4] Malinowski intended functionalism to be an alternative theory of sexuality to psychoanalysis, which he criticized.

[5] American lesbian and gays were achieving fuller membership in society through markers of normativity: marriage, advertising images, military service. Such membership decentered a gay male culture that enabled sex with multiple partners, at times in public spaces.

[6] European Network for Queer Anthropology (available on-line: https://www.easaonline.org/networks/enqa/). Accessed 5 February 2018.

[7] Those considered outside a ‘charmed circle’ of sexuality (Rubin 1984) include sex between men and women (technically speaking, heterosexual), such as female sex workers or kink practices, like BDSM (Weiss 2011b).

[8] Review essays explaining the queer dimension of Queer Anthropology include Allen 2013; Boellstorff 2005; Boellstorff & Dave 2015; Boyce, Engebretsen & Possoco 2018; Graham et al.2016; Weiss 2016a, 2016b.

[9] Le Renard (2014) spells this as ‘buya’.

[10] In the US, where anthropological linguistics is its own subfield, gay, lesbian, transgender and queer language research sustains a regular conference called Lavender Languages, which beganin 1993. For more information, visit: https://lavenderlanguages.wordpress.com/information-about-lavender-languages-and-linguistics/

[11] Other US terms affiliated with transgender are ‘gender non-binary’ and ‘gender non-conforming’. A person’s earliest biographical information is conveyed by describing them as ‘assigned female/male at birth’, or ‘AFAB’, ‘AMAB’ for short. The term ‘cis’, an antonym to trans in chemistry, is used to refer to those who live out the gender connected with their assigned sex, e.g., men who identify as male.

[12] Transgender nomenclature is in flux. The shortened version ‘trans*’, which adopted the asterisk from the late 20th -century database search code to produce inclusive results, is less commonly used. Some replace the asterisk with a hyphen, as in, ‘Trans-’. Many now just use ‘Trans’. Phrases preferred by advocates have evolved so rapidly that words used commonly a decade ago (or less) – like ‘transgendered’, ‘transgenderism’, ‘male-bodied’, ‘born-female’ – are now subject to critique.⁠This makes older works, including path-breaking studies in Queer Anthropology (e.g., Newton 1973), feel outdated, and, therefore, politically problematic.

[13] Queer scholarship on hijra includes Boyce 2007; Cohen 1995; Reddy 2005; Dutta & Roy 2014.

[14] The prevalent model of LGBT rights relies on the ocular trope of coming out and promoting visibility. In addition to the anthropologies of the US South, other anthropologists have argued that this mode of politics is not feasible or salient for some queer communities, such as immigrants (particularly undocumented) and poor queers of color.

Cargo cults

Felix Stein — Thu, 29 Mar 2018 11:51:14 +0000

Lamont Lindstrom

University of Tulsa

Initially published 29 Mar 2018

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

Abstract:

Cargo cult—the term—appeared in 1945, at the end of the Pacific War. Anthropologists rapidly embraced the neologism to label the Melanesian social movements that had come to their attention during the colonial era (which began in the region in the second half of the nineteenth century) as well as post-war movements that captured ethnographic attention. A southwest Pacific example of messianic or millenarian movements once common throughout the colonial world, the modal cargo cult was an agitation or organised social movement of Melanesian villagers in pursuit of ‘cargo’ by means of renewed or invented ritual action that they hoped would induce ancestral spirits or other powerful beings to provide. Typically, an inspired prophet with messages from those spirits persuaded a community that social harmony and engagement in improvised ritual (dancing, marching, flag-raising) or revived cultural traditions would, for believers, bring them cargo. Ethnographers suggested that ‘cargo’ was often Western commercial goods and money, but it could also signify moral salvation, existential respect, or proto-nationalistic, anti-colonial desire for political autonomy. Although some one-time cargo cults have been institutionalised as indigenous churches or local political organizations and remain active, few new movements of the classic cargo sort emerged after most of the Melanesian colonies achieved national independence in the 1970s. Cargo cult stories, however, today continue to circulate widely beyond Melanesia, serving as useful metaphors of contemporary unrequitable desire, both ordinary and peculiar.

Introduction

Anthropologists have invented or cultivated a number of important keywords, including ‘culture’, ‘ethnicity’, ‘worldview’, ‘socialization’, ‘ethnography’, and ‘rite of passage’. Among these terms is ‘cargo cult’ which, although more particular in scope, has enjoyed surprising popularity both inside the discipline and beyond. Peter Worsley, who compiled an early overview of cargo cults in The trumpet shall sound (1957), offered what had already become the standard definition. Cargo cults are:

strange religious movements in the South Pacific [that appeared] during the last few decades. In these movements, a prophet announces the imminence of the end of the world in a cataclysm which will destroy everything. Then the ancestors will return, or God, or some other liberating power, will appear, bringing all the goods the people desire, and ushering in a reign of eternal bliss (1957: 11).

In the Melanesian islands of the southwest Pacific, ‘cargo cult’ provided a handy label which could encompass a variety of forms of social unrest that ethnographers elsewhere tagged millenarian, messianic, nativistic, vitalistic, revivalistic, or culture-contact or adjustment movements. After the Second World War, anthropological attention (including Worsley’s) had shifted from functionalist accounts of simpler social systems to issues of social change, and how to describe and explain that change. The label presumed that these Melanesian movements typically focused on the acquisition of ‘cargo’ or kago (supplies, goods) in the Pidgin Englishes of Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu (then the New Hebrides). Anthropologists offered a variety of explanations for cargo cult outbreaks, within the broader context of global social transformations that the War had caused. Simple greed and cupidity, fundamental Melanesian cultural and religious belief systems, or colonial inequality and oppression variously accounted for cult outbreaks. The term fell out of anthropological favor by the 1970s when Melanesian colonies obtained national independence (Fiji in 1970; Papua New Guinea in 1975; Solomon Islands in 1978; and Vanuatu in 1980). Active social movements continue, however, in colonised West Papua, the western half of New Guinea that Indonesia annexed in 1962. Some have tagged these anti-Indonesian liberation movements as cargoistic (e.g., Giay & Godschalk 1993; Timmer 2000), but caution is warranted insofar as the label undercuts the political gravity and legitimacy of organised liberation efforts. Although most anthropologists have abandoned ‘cargo cult’ as misleading, and even embarrassing (although, see Otto 2009 and Tabani 2013, who defend the label’s merits), the term enjoys a post-ethnographic afterlife and continues to pop up frequently in popular commentary and critique.

Cargo cult erupts

Anthropologists briskly adopted, but did not invent, the term ‘cargo cult’. The label first appeared in print, as a calumny, in the November 1945 issue of the colonial news magazine Pacific Islands Monthly (Bird 1945). Norris Mervyn Bird, an ‘old Territories resident’, wrote to express worries that wartime upheavals, a more liberal postwar colonial regime, and ill-digested Christian teaching would unsettle local people and spark cargo culting. Bird introduced the term as an alternative to an earlier cultic label, ‘Vailala Madness’:

Stemming directly from religious teaching of equality, and its resulting sense of injustice, is what is generally known as ‘Vailala Madness’, or ‘Cargo Cult’. . . . A native, infected with the disorder, states that a great number of ships loaded with ‘cargo’ had been sent by the ancestor of the native for the benefit of the natives of a particular village or area. But the white man, being very cunning, knows how to intercept these ships and takes the ‘cargo’ for his own use. . . By his very nature the New Guinea native is peculiarly susceptible to these ‘cults’ (1945: 69-70).

F. E. Williams, Government Anthropologist employed by the Australian Territory of Papua, had investigated curious incidents around Vailala in 1922 (Williams 1923). Predictions circulated about the return of ancestral spirits on ghost steam ships carrying desirable cargo. Enthusiasts abandoned the traditional male initiation ceremony and destroyed ritual artifacts, mimed Australian tea parties at flower-bedecked tables, and took up marching, drilling, and ecstatic dancing. By the time Williams arrived to investigate, colonial officials and others had tagged all this as ‘Vailala Madness’, and Williams adopted the label as ‘the most distinctive and suitable’ of various alternatives (Williams 1923: 2).

‘Cargo cult’ bested ‘Vailala Madness’ as a movement cover term as it was not tied to a particular locale, elevated madness to cult, and featured catchy alliteration. Australia-based anthropologists including Lucy Mair and H. Ian Hogbin, who then lectured at the Australian Army School of Civil Affairs in Canberra and had served as anthropological consultants during the War, embraced the label, importing this into anthropological circles (see Mair 1948; Hogbin 1951). ‘Cargo cult’ quickly spread through Australian academia and beyond as anthropologists and journalists borrowed the term to label almost any sort of organised, village-based social movement with religious and political aspirations—movements that were increasingly on the colonialist and academic radar throughout Melanesia, as elsewhere. Anthropologists retrospectively applied the new term to pre-1945 Pacific movements, including Vailala Madness itself.

Although anthropologists had occasionally grappled with social change (e.g. Malinowski 1945), post-War transformations focused ethnographic attention on disorder and disruption, including social movements. Several important analyses of historical movements appeared in the 1950s, including Norman Cohn’s The pursuit of the millennium (1957) and Eric Hobsbawm’s Primitive rebels (1959). The Melanesian cargo cult expanded the catalogue of notable global movements, old and new, including Handsome Lake’s (Wallace 1956) and the Ghost Dance in North America, China’s Boxer Rebellion, Kenya’s Mau Mau, and more (see Lanternari 1963). By 1952, seven years after Pacific Islands Monthly introduced the versatile label, South Pacific Commission librarian Ida Leeson found enough ethnographic and administrative material on cargo cults to produce a robust bibliography. Peter Worsley’s comparative compendium, The trumpet shall sound: a study of ‘cargo’ cults in Melanesia, which tracked 60-some movements across the southwest Pacific from Fiji to New Guinea (including West Papua), followed in 1957.

Celebrated cultists

Melanesian social movements before and after the 1950s were each distinct and particular, but similar enough to come under the cargo cult label. Steinbauer (1979) tallied 185 of these. The new term disposed observers to find common elements and themes, including: desire for cargo (however imagined); expectation of spiritual assistance, whether from the ancestral dead or Christian figures, as locally reimagined; mimetic ritual reflecting European colonial or wartime practices (flags and flagpoles; marching and drilling); the washing and other manipulation of money; and ecstatic dancing and other forms of paroxysm. Cargo prophecy varied from movement to movement, although a common assertion was that ancestral spirits (who governed natural forces and fertility) were equally implicated in the production of manufactured goods. A technologically wise ancestor, perhaps, had sailed off to America, or Europe, or Australia and there was taught the secrets of cargo. Or, wily Europeans were filching cargo that ancestral spirits were beneficently shipping to their descendants.

The period between 1956 and 1964 was cargo cult research’s golden age. During these years, five important cargo ethnographies were published: Jean Guiart (1956) on Tanna’s (New Hebrides) John Frum Movement; Margaret Mead (1956) and Theodore Schwartz (1962) on the Paliau Movement, Admiralty Islands; Kenelm Burridge (1960) on movements in Madang Province; and, not too far away, Peter Lawrence (1964) on the Yali Movement. One might also include here Robert Maher’s (1961) New men of Papua: a study in culture change about the Tommy Kabu Movement of the Purari River delta area, except that Maher did not use cargo cult idiom to frame his analysis. The term only appears as a bit of an afterthought on the book’s final page, where Maher warns that Purari people, although pragmatic, might turn to cargo culting should their desire for social change be thwarted. Malaita’s Maasina (Marching) Rule also was labeled a post-war cargo cult, although Keesing (1978; see Akin 2013) and others argued that it was rather a nationalist movement with only minor spiritual rudiments.

On the island of Tanna, the shadowy figure who people called John Frum (or Jon Frumm, or John Broom) appeared in the late 1930s and instructed new devotees to return to original lands, resume kava drinking and dancing, and in general maintain island tradition, or kastom (Guiart 1956). Presbyterian missionaries had attempted to prohibit kava (Piper methysticum) drinking as men, when under its mild psychoactive influence, communed with their ancestral spirits, with local kava-drinking grounds serving also as burial grounds. John Frum foretold reversals of land and sea; mountains and plains; and black and white. He also predicted American material assistance that, indeed, eventuated in 1942 when US forces landed to establish military bases in the archipelago. A series of mostly male leaders (in spiritual contact with John Frum) originated movement rituals shaped by both Christian liturgy and wartime experience. As did Vailala adherents and cultists elsewhere in Melanesia, movement rituals included marching and drilling, flags and poles, and flowers. Followers gathered weekly, each Friday evening, to dance through the night. On 15 February 1957, leaders raised two red flags hoarded from American ammunition dumps, and this day remains the main annual movement holiday. Over the years, John Frum talk of cargo has shifted from new money and goods, to local autonomy, to economic development projects (Lindstrom 1993).

On Manus and neighboring Admirality Islands, the Pacific War likewise stimulated and shaped the Paliau Movement (known subsequently as The Noise, Makasol, or Wind Nation). Paliau Maloat, a mature man returning home from conscript service with the Japanese military, and drawing on Christian teaching, proposed a ‘New Way’ wherein people could better pursue economic development through cooperation. He proposed that people from different communities join to share garden and sea resources, working together to advance economically. Younger followers, claiming spiritual contact with Jesus, predicted Christ’s imminent return alongside the ancestral dead. Expecting impending arrival of cargo planes, ships, bulldozers, sheet metal, money, and tinned food, followers destroyed property, danced ecstatically, shared ancestral inspirations, and waited (Schwartz 1962: 227, 268). Over the years, the movement morphed into a political bloc (Makasol) and independent church (Wind Nation) (Otto 1992). Paliau was elected to Papua New Guinea’s pre-independence Parliament in 1968 and then to the Provincial Council in 1979. Wind Nation and Makasol continue to enjoy some support on Manus.

In Madang, Peter Lawrence (1964) followed the history of regional social movements through five phases, between 1871 and 1950. Road belong cargo’s opening chapter on the ‘native cosmic order’ is a magisterial summary of the cultural context of these disturbances, culminating in the poignant story of Yali, Madang’s most recent and celebrated prophet.

Yali Singina from Sor village on Papua New Guinea’s Rai (Madang Province) coast, like Paliau, was caught up in the Pacific War, working with Australian forces including coast-watchers (during the Pacific War, Australian and American servicemen, with Indigenous support, manned a chain of remote outposts, reporting on Japanese military movements.) At war’s end, also like Paliau, Yali returned home to push economic development through cooperation, attracting followers across Papua New Guinea’s Rai Coast. Weekly on Tuesdays (the movement’s holy day), ‘flower girls’ decorated ritual tables:

At the core of this cult was ritual sexual intercourse between Yali and these women, following which the sexual fluids were collected in a bottle decorated with specific flowers (codiaeum variegatum). The bottle was placed on a table in the hope that the ancestors worshipped would offer their help by producing money at the bottom of the bottle (Hermann 1992: 58).

Yali also ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the colonial House of Assembly. His son James Yali, however, was elected several times to Papua New Guinea’s national Parliament.

The Mambu Movement, which developed in the Bogia region on the western side of Madang Province in the 1930s, was still active in the 1950s when Kenelm Burridge (1960) arrived to undertake investigative cargo fieldwork. Mambu, a former plantation worker and Catholic convert from Apingam village, near Bogia, had disappeared during the Pacific War, but his prophesies continued to echo around the region. These foretold that ancestral spirits living inside Manam Island’s volcano were preparing cargo for shipment to the faithful, and that followers would no longer need to pay colonial head taxes. Waiting for tinned food, axes and bush knives, soap, cloth, and the like, people built cargo sheds near cemeteries and cult temples adorned with red flags, abandoned mission churches, gave up minding their crops and drying coconut for the market, underwent cultic rebaptism in water, enjoyed promiscuous if ritualised sexual intercourse, and adopted European clothing. Colonial authorities jailed Mambu for six months, as they would Yali and also John Frum leaders on Tanna, to little avail, as upstart prophets and new movement leaders carried the message over several decades.

Following Lawrence, anthropologists have suggested several aspects of Melanesian cultures that shaped these renowned cargo movements, along with many others. These cultural elements include the traditional importance of wealth, presumptions of necessary spiritual contribution to economic production, a disjunctive temporality, and village polities wherein big-man leadership facilitated that of cult prophets.

New cultic orders

Many movement leaders and prophets, where these existed, were typically concerned with social harmony and order, insisting on new orders for cargo to arrive, and blaming disorder when it failed to do so. Worsley argued that cargo cults functioned to ‘weld previously hostile and separate groups together into a new unity’ (1957: 228); and that ‘by projecting his message on to the supernatural plane’, a cargo cult leader demonstrates that his authority ‘transcends the narrow province of local gods and spirits associated with particular clans, tribes or villages’ (1957: 237).

Ethnographers have repeatedly documented Melanesian dreams of unity alongside attendant fears of social disintegration—the difficult political balance between ideals of social harmony and competitive status games. People’s ongoing pursuit of status and power subverts the sociability they strive to achieve. Social movements cultivated new orders, new ways, and new men that might transcend Melanesia’s fissiparous social systems. The prophet of the Kekesi Rites—an early twentieth century Papuan movement – commanded: ‘the people are to observe the moral code of the tribe’ (Chinnery 1917: 453). Within the cult, totalitarian social orders could be imagined as a new ‘Law’ (lo in Pidgin) or social regime (Lindstrom 2011). Burridge called such totality ‘rigorism’, noting that ‘every millenarist believes he has grasped the secret and is driven to enforce it on others’ (1969: 127, 135; see also Guiart 1962: 133). Worsley, too, documented the new orders’ new moralities:

All prophets, therefore, stress moral renewal: the love of one’s cult-brethren; new forms of sexual relationship; abandonment of stealing, lying, cheating, theft; devotion to the interests of the community and not merely of the self (1968: 251; see Burridge 1969: 165).

Marching and drilling, and communal dancing, embodied these new social unities and orders that cults, at least for a time, made possible.

Cult luminaries frequently instituted regularising, and sometimes repressive, mechanisms to protect a new Law’s totality. Some leaders commissioned guards, police, and courts to enforce this (Guiart 1956: 173). Sex and sorcery were particular worries, given their capacity to roil social order. In some movements, sexual morality was relaxed, and customary restrictions of exogamy and incest ignored (see, e.g., Worsley 1957: 251; Kolig 1987: 189). During Espiritu Santo’s Naked Cult, for example,

the sexual act was to take place in public, since there was no shame in it; even irregular liaisons should be open affairs. Husbands should show no jealousy, for this would disturb the state of harmony which the cult was trying to establish (Worsley 1957: 151).

In other places, cultists concluded that the best way to deal with sexual conflict is not to have any sex at all. New Laws and orders also often promised to vanquish sorcerers and the disruptions they caused.

Money, too, which people found alien and difficult to acquire or comprehend, was often targeted as a threat to unity. Burridge (1969) argued that money, as this became a new measure of personal value and prestige, created Melanesian moral crises and sparked cargo cults. Leaders of many movements, including John Frum bosses on Tanna, urged followers to rid themselves of old money by hurriedly spending it all or dumping it at sea (Guiart 1956: 155; Worsley 1957: 154-55). Prophets instead promised new money that would replace colonial coinage. When every believer acquired money and other desired cargo, people would be free at last from the onerous personal debts and economic obligations that the region’s complex reciprocal exchange systems engendered.

Cargo cult explanation

Beyond describing cargo movements, anthropologists also ventured to explain them. Cargo theorists argued whether cults spontaneously combusted in many communities given a shared, volatile Melanesian culture, or whether cultic elements originated in fewer places and then diffused across the region. They also compared the roles of charismatic prophets; whether cults were nativistic (concerned with reviving waning traditions) or iconoclastic (focused on replacing local culture with modern [Western] substitutes); who, exactly, was charged with bringing home the cargo (returning ancestral spirits; the American military); why cults broke out in certain areas but not others; and also what ‘cargo’ meant. Was this simple cash or tinned foods? Did cargo stand for proto-nationalist desire for autonomy, the removal of colonial authority, even independence? Or did cargo represent existential concerns with respect and spiritual salvation?

Explanation hinged particularly on what, exactly, cargo signified. What was the object of Melanesian desire? Some in early days took cargo literally, as did Lucy Mair: ‘the motive force of cargo cult is a feeling of hopeless envy of the European with his immensely higher material standards’ (1948: 67). Seemingly cupidinous Melanesians of course desired European commodities including tinned foods, cloth, tools, money, and (perhaps curiously) refrigerators (Lindstrom 1993: 139-42). Simple education could thus ‘cure’ cargo culting when Melanesians learned the value of hard work and the intricacies of modern manufacture (e.g., Burridge 1960: 228).

Anthropologists, however, soon complicated cargo explanation, rooting cargo cults within essential elements of Melanesian culture itself (e.g., Lawrence’s [1964]), or colonial oppression and disruption of local communities, or both. Those who argued that fundamental Melanesian culture led to culting focused on key elements thereof. These included concepts of economic production that presumed the necessity of both human and spiritual effort; the significance of various forms of wealth for personal prestige; belief in spiritual inspiration rather than individual creativity to account for novel ideas; notions of episodic time with expectation of sudden jumps from one period to another, rather than of constant temporal progress (McDowell 1988); and big-man leadership systems that easily incorporate charismatic prophets as big-manlike leaders. Some, because of these cultural elements, argued that Melanesians are inherent cargo cultists, inexorably imbued with ‘cargoism’, ‘cargo thinking’, or ‘cargo sentiment’ (Harding 1967). Or, reverting to earlier Vailala Madness themes, even a cargo psychology, whereby pervasive, underlying anxiety or schizophrenia (Burton-Bradley 1973; Lidz, Lidz, & Burton-Bradley 1973), paranoia (Schwartz 1973), or other mental disorders induced cargo culting. Following this train of thought, a few suggested that cargo culting is an antique Melanesian phenomenon, antedating the arrival of European colonialists (Berndt 1954: 269; Salisbury 1958: 75; cf. Iteanu 2017).

Others, while acknowledging that aspects of Melanesian culture facilitated cargo cults, pointed instead to the existential and political effects of colonial domination. The desired cargo, here, was emancipation of spirit and body. Burridge (1960: 215) was exquisitely sensitive to the painful condition of Papua New Guineans, distressed by European colonialism and racism. They desired to be New Men because Australians mostly treated them as animals or children. Drawing on substrate culture, they thus spun out cargoist ‘myth-dreams’ to self-medicate: ‘The most significant theme in the Cargo seems to be moral regeneration: the creation of a new man, the creation of new unities, the creation of a new society’ (1960: 246-47).

Some writers, more religiously inclined, took cargo desire to symbolise human yearning for spiritual salvation. John Frum, Mambu, and the rest were indeed avatars of Jesus to their followers (Steinbauer [1979] favored the term ‘new salvation movements’). Cunning missionaries therefore might step in and redirect cargo desire to Christian ends.

Those with a more critical perspective rooted cargo cults in post-war political and economic relationships. Rather than pointing at Melanesians and Melanesian culture for cargo culting, cults erupted because of insufferable social conditions. Some, like Mr. Bird, continued to cast cargo cult blame on liberal Christian missionaries whose preachings about man’s brotherhood natives might ill-digest. But most explained cargo culting as a desperate reaction to colonial inequality and oppression. They were, as Guiart put it, ‘forerunners of Melanesian nationalism’ (1951: 81). Worsley’s observation that cults functioned to weld scattered, autonomous local and kin groups together into wider ‘new unities’ (1957: 228) echoed the contemporary political expectation that classes-in-themselves might transform into classes-for-themselves, on the road towards some sort of future political independence. Explanations by the 1980s favored the critical stance: ‘Cargo thinking was a product of the forced interaction between two economic systems, the gift economy and the capitalist economy, with their religious support structures’ (Buck 1989: 164; see Kilani 1983). When taken to be spawned by colonial inequalities, as social disruption caused by an intensifying world system, cargo cults were reframed as a Melanesian sort of ‘globalization movement’—this term replacing earlier adjustment or culture-contact movement labels.

Sackett (1974), along these lines, proposed to explain why cults occurred in some places but not others. Key factors were distance and degree of local and colonial authority. Remote communities at the fringes of administrative systems had yet to develop hostility towards them. Those located nearby colonial centers had better access to cargo, in its material form, and the knowledge of ruling regimes. But those at some middle distance who suffered colonial meddling and lacked access to cargo (goods and knowledge) were ripe for cargo culting (this essentially is a theory of relative deprivation [Aberle 1962]). Moreover, cults mostly flared up in locales with weak local authority structures. Effective leaders, where these existed, could step up to quash any upstart, troublesome cargo prophet. This might also explain the post-1970s decline in cargo culting, insofar as authority structures have strengthened and social distances shortened.

Cargo cult embarrassments

Anthropologists since the beginning have not been altogether comfortable with their adopted term. ‘Cargo’, they knew, meant more than mere manufactured goods. And ‘cult’ could be discourteous, even insulting, deprecating people’s fervent beliefs. ‘Movement’ often read better than cult. Some ethnographers refused to use the term, defaulting instead to local appellatives (e.g., Rimoldi & Rimoldi 1992), or relying on Pidgin English kago to signpost cargo’s complexity. Kaplan (1995) insisted that Fiji’s Tuka Movement was ‘neither cargo not cult’.

Others have deconstructed cargo cult as a misleading analytical artifice, an observer’s false category. It bundles together diverse and particular uprisings, disturbances, and movements that may have little in common (McDowell 1988; see Lindstrom 2004). Hermann argued that ‘“cargo cult” should be written under erasure for the good reason that it is an inadequate concept’ (2004: 44). The scare quotes that often bracketed the label when cargo cult emerged in the 1940s are back, as ethnographers distance themselves from its discomforting implications. Others, however, defend the term as ethnographically useful, even if it has been applied to ‘heterogeneous, uncertain, and confusing ethnographic reality itself that, after all, cannot be claimed to exist in the minds of Western observers alone’ (Jebens 2004: 10). Although some find cargo cult to be at least historically useful, setting the bounds for comparative analysis, few ethnographers apply the label today. This partly reflects disciplinal embarrassment but, more directly, shifting forms of organised and disorganised Melanesian desire that, today, takes the form of charismatic, ‘health-and-wealth’ Christianity, new interests in Islam or the lost tribes of Judaism, bingo and numbers games, and dubious Internet money-making scams.

Cargo cult echoes

Several Melanesian movements remain active but, whatever their ‘cargoist’ heritage, these certainly no longer are cargo cults – rather, they have institutionalised themselves as indigenous churches and/or regional political organizations. These include John Frum on Tanna, Makasol/Wind Nation in the Admiralties, the Peli Association of the eastern Sepik region, the Pomio Kivung and Kaliai movements on New Britain (Lattas 1998), Tutukuval Isukal Association of New Hanover, and the Lo-Bos Church descending from the Yali Movement in Madang. To these, some would add Vanuatu’s Nagriamel Movement and New Georgia’s Christian Fellowship Church. Some adherents, like John Frum supporters on Tanna, earn a little income by performing as cargo cultists for bemused international tourists.

Cargo culting may have died away in Melanesia but cargo cult—the term—has jumped into global popular media where it thrives, alive and well. As in Melanesia, cargo culting anywhere can be appreciated or deprecated. Cargo cult originated as invective, and it retains its sting. Any sort of woeful or forlorn desire for material goods or other coveted objective, joined with a seemingly irrational program to obtain this, can be blasted as a wrongheaded cargo cult. It is instructive to run an Internet search on the term (text and image). This turns up a wild tangle of popular cargoist discourse. One finds entire parliaments of cargo cult politicians, cargo cult computer code, cargo cult development plans, cargo cult trade policies, cargo cult science, and much, much more (Lindstrom 2013). Brexit is cargo cult (Kuper 2017). Donald Trump is a cargo prophet (Davis 2017). Melanesians themselves continue to lob the term at one another, when outraged by the ludicrous plans or claims of political rivals.

Oppositely, cargo culting and wild desire can signify personal development, creativity, and individual freedom: the noble resistance to oppression by the state, global forces, or any intrusive authority. Just as John Frum supporters on Tanna battled colonialism, so might we all defy troublesome authority. Moreover, cool cargo cult can boost market share. Far beyond Melanesia, we might enjoy cargo cult rock band music, purchase cargo cult art, or read cargo cult literature. Fervent consumers sip John Frum rum, spray John Frum perfume, or enjoy the 2015 Portuguese film John From which, of course, featured rash, unrequited love. Held in the Nevada dessert, the trendy Burning Man Festival’s 2013 theme was Cargo Cult. John Frum got torched.

If Melanesian cargo cults have faded away, why have cargo cult stories persisted and spread? Our interest in cargo cult tales reflects normative modern desire as much as it does anything actually happening in the Pacific (Lindstrom 1993). Cargo stories are desire stories. They function to remind us how modern, consumerist desire operates. This is desire—for things as for others—that is never sated. We seek perfectibility but we would be astonished should we one day actually achieve this. Self-development is a lifetime’s work. We find reassurance and desirous echoes in strange tales of people who are madly in love with what they cannot have. The marketplace, where one may never stop shopping, never fully satisfies. Even when cargo does arrive, this fails to quash desire and may even make things worse. It turns out to be not at all what one really wanted in the first place and, worse, often causes unexpected injury and suffering when it arrives. If cargo is potentially dangerous, culting and myth-dreaming are honorable, even essential human capacities. Unending desire is our human duty. Although cargo cults have vanished in the southwest Pacific, cargo cult stories of foolish, unrequited, but necessary and understandable love, remind us of our modern condition.

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Lindstrom, L. 1993. Cargo cult: strange stories of desire from Melanesia and beyond. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.

— — — 2004. Cargo cult at the third millennium. In Cargo, cult & culture critique (ed.) H. Jebens, 15-35. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.

— — — 2011. Personhood, cargo, and Melanesian social unities. In Made in Oceania: social movements, cultural heritage and the state in the Pacific (eds) E. Hviding & K. Rio, 253-73. Wantage: Sean Kingston Publishing.

— — — 2013. Even more strange stories of desire: cargo cult in popular media. In Kago, kastom, and kalja: the study of indigenous movements in Melanesia today (eds) M. Tabani & M. Abong, 169-85. Marseille: Pacific-Credo Publications.

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— — — 2009. What happened to cargo cults? Material religions in Melanesia and the West. Social Analysis 53, 82-102.

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Note on contributor

Lamont Lindstrom is Henry Kendall Professor of Anthropology and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Tulsa. He is the author of Cargo cult: strange stories of desire from Melanesia and beyond (1993, University of Hawai'i Press) and various other cargo cult explorations.

Prof. Lamont Lindstrom, Department of Anthropology, University of Tulsa, 800 S. Tucker Dr, Tulsa, OK 74104, United States. lamont-lindstrom@utulsa.edu

Deleuze

Felix Stein — Thu, 11 Jan 2018 08:38:52 +0000

Jon Bialecki

University of Edinburgh

Initially published 11 Jan 2018

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

Abstract:

This entry takes on two subjects. First, it addresses the influence that anthropology had on the work of the mid-twentieth century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, and second, the influence that Gilles Deleuze’s work has subsequently exerted on anthropology. In Deleuze’s encounter with anthropology, he ended up seeing anthropological structuralism as a limit to thought. However, he saw Anglo-American anthropology, and some later French anthropology, as powerful tools for conceiving different arrangements of the world, and he ended up relying heavily on these materials when he constructed his own Nietzschian longue durée speculative anthropology. As a discipline, anthropology has had little interest in Deleuze’s speculative anthropology; however, it has seen both Deleuze’s overall aesthetics and many of his concepts as theoretical engines that could be used piecemeal at will, with little concern for the role they played in Deleuze’s overall thought, or for how having these ideas reterritorialised in anthropology might affect them. In the end, this entry suggests that despite the outsized reception of Deleuze in anthropology, a real encounter with Deleuze’s thoughts have yet to occur; despite this lack of a true, sustained engagement, anthropological use of Deleuzian concepts has still been incredibly productive in the discipline.

Introduction

Gilles Deleuze’s (1925-1995) reception in anthropology has had multiple, and often incommensurable, dimensions. That may not be a problem, however. It certainly wouldn’t have been a slur for this thinker who has been treated in so many different and disjunctive ways, because if there ever were a figure that would be happy being a multiplicity, it would be Gilles Deleuze. This entry will present what anthropology was for Deleuze, and also what Deleuze would be for the subsequent anthropologists that would read him. In the end, it will argue that despite a high degree of mutual interest between the thinker and the discipline, there has not been a real encounter between anthropological thought and the thought of Deleuze; this entry will also suggest that this may be just as Deleuze would have wanted it.

Deleuze was a twentieth century philosopher, known both for his own works as well as for a series of collaborations with the psychiatrist and political activist Félix Guattari.^{^[1]} To reduce this thought to a few rough intellectual axioms, it could be said that the center of Deleuze’s project was prizing difference over identity, privileging immanence over transcendence, the pre-subjective over the subjective; an attention to intensity as the other side of seemingly extensive objects and processes; an interest in the promise of novelty that could be found both in combinatory logic of different objects, processes, and thought; and in underdetermined potentiality that these objects, processes, and thought contained. Deleuze is often presented, especially in an American academic context, as being ‘postmodern’ or ‘poststructural’ or as a part of ‘French Theory’, even though these categories are an artifact of Anglophone reception instead of an expression of any common value or signification in the so-designated works (see, for example, Cusset 2008). Even if these categories were intelligible, however, there would be good reason for setting Deleuze and his oeuvre apart from the rest of the mid-twentieth century thinkers that he is often lumped in with. The reason that Deleuze should be set apart is that his work is singular when held up not just against post-war French thinking, but arguably when held up against the history of modern philosophy as a whole. The British analytic philosopher W.B. Moore has stated that Deleuze was a ‘remarkable … polymath’ who achieved a break with previous philosophical tradition that is on the order of the ‘Copernican turn’ effectuated by Immanuel Kant (2013: 542). That Deleuze, of all people, could be credited with such a break could be considered surprising, especially since it would be easy to see him as an intellectually (as opposed to politically) conservative thinker. He spent a large part of his career working in the history of philosophy, and even after he became established as a philosopher in his own right, he continued to write what were essentially pedagogical précis on the works of canonical philosophers such as Hume, Leibnitz, Kant, and Nietzsche. Furthermore, his own original work is self-presented not as a break with western metaphysics, but as a continuation of it, even if he understands himself as expressing a particular ‘minor’ philosophical tradition, one that runs (in his telling) from Spinoza to Heidegger, that he considers to be at odds with the more established modes of philosophy. Deleuze likened his work to that of picking up the arrows of ‘great thinkers’ so that he could ‘try to send them in other directions, even if the distance covered is not astronomical, but quite small’ (1993: xv).^{^[2]}

However, there is no consensus on what direction he was shooting these metaphorical arrows, or how true his aim. He has been seen as both a continuation of traditional philosophy and a break with it, a subjectivist and a realist, a champion of postmodernity and a critic of postmodernity, an ontologist and an enemy of ontological thinking, a thinker of pure difference and a monotonous thinker of ‘the one,’ a Leninist enemy of capitalism and a proponent of an unfettered hypercapitalism.^[3]

If we want to operate in the very ‘un-Deleuzian’ register of blame (Deleuze felt that blame was supersaturated in the toxic Nietzschian affect called ressentiment), then it should be acknowledged that some of the responsibility for this wide variation in the reception of Deleuze’s work lies with Deleuze himself. Deleuze’s writing style and technical vocabulary does not invite any easy understanding. Part of it was his interest in variation, change, and in ‘multiplicities,’ which meant that he was more interested in exploring all the various forks in a line of thought rather than in didactically tracing a thought’s borders.^{^[4]} Further, he has produced a dizzying array of neologisms, and he often purposefully uses already-extant technical terms in idiosyncratic and sometimes perverse ways. His work is full of odd terms such as ‘rhizomes’, ‘arborescent’, ‘smooth and stratiated space’, ‘desiring machines’, ‘the body without organs’. But perhaps the chief reason for Deleuze to receive such a varied and vertiginous reception lies in his critique of what he called the ‘dogmatic imagine of thought’, which he understood to be the grounding assumptions behind almost the entirety of western philosophy. This ‘dogmatic image’ includes a suspicion of the primacy of representation, skepticism that ‘good will’ is all that is needed to reach the truth, and even doubt about the primacy of truth. It was not that he did not believe in truth; he did not deny truth as a mode of thought or measure of validation across the board. Rather, Deleuze observed that most true statements are banal statements, and that relevance, importance, or novelty were often more vital measures of evaluation.

While Deleuze claimed that he was an empiricist in the style of Hume, his work seems distant from the sort of empiricism that constitutes most of ethnographic writing and thought (but, see Rutherford 2012). Therefore, his concern with both nose-bleed level metaphysics and with radical critiques of the history of western philosophy would seem to suggest that any anthropological hybridization with Deleuze would be stillborn. But this is not the case. Not only has there been substantial anthropological interest in Deleuze, but Deleuze himself was also a close reader of anthropology. Deleuze even produced what might be called an ‘anthropology’ of his own, not in the sense of a philosophical theory of man, but more along the line of Kant’s anthropology, a large-scale rubric to think through the forms and histories of various human collectivities. The rest of this entry will consist of rehearsing this anthropology, and of discussing how anthropologists have repurposed Deleuze for their own intellectual project. The reader should be prepared for multiple infelicities in these discussions. Despite Deleuze’s familiarity with the then-current state of the discipline, his anthropology has features that make it indigestible to most contemporary anthropological sensibilities. And while there are some important exceptions, the contemporary anthropological engagement with Deleuze suggests a lack of command of his system of thought. This feature does not invalidate these anthropological works, of course; Deleuze would most likely applaud having his work deployed in different intellectual environments; having it mutated so that it works to new ends; having it vivisected and sutured to other theoretical systems. But this does mean that these theoretical hopeful monsters may in the end not be very Deleuzian, despite their apparent intellectual paternity. In the opening passage of A thousand plateaus, which Deleuze co-wrote with Guattari, the authors invoke the imagine of a wasp and an orchid to illustrate the way two heterogeneous systems could engage in a ‘double capture’, each repurposing the other to their own ends without at the same time assimilating the other or erasing the fundamental differences between them. The wasp treats the orchid as a sexual partner or rival, and the orchid treats the wasp as a pollen vector. The attentive reader, however, will note that there is some ambivalence in French between when one should use the term ‘guêpe’ (or wasp) and when one should use the term ‘abeille’ (or bee), and that while both bees and wasps pollinate orchids, there are few orchids that are pollinated by both species. There is always, therefore, the possibility of confusion and misuse; and we should also remember that for one of the two parties, such a mating is always sterile. What is true for bees and orchids may be true in some cases for Deleuze and anthropology as well; but whether either is necessarily the wasp or the orchid will remain an open question.

What anthropology was for Gilles Deleuze

Engagement with structuralism

Any discussion of Deleuze and anthropology has to begin by addressing the former’s relation to structuralism. Structuralism is a topic too complex to completely rehearse here; it can perhaps be best summarised as the claim that sense is not inherent in any one sign, but is produced by systems of reciprocal differences between two signs, or sets of signs (Stasch 2006). While structuralism as a theoretical framework has its roots in the linguistic work of authors such as Jacobson and de Saussure (Percival 2011), and there were also ‘structuralisms’ in fields as diverse as literary criticism (Barthes 1974), political philosophy (Althusser 1971), and psychoanalysis (Lacan 2007), it seems fair to say that the most influential formulation of structuralism at the period that Deleuze was intellectually active was the anthropological one promulgated by Lévi-Strauss. Like many other Francophone intellectuals of that time, Deleuze had an ambivalent relation with structuralism. As can be seen in his 1967 essay,^{^[5]} ‘How do we recognize structuralism’, there seems to be moments where Deleuze takes this approach up without hesitation or qualification (Deleuze 2004). Deleuze’s essay is expressly written as a dispatch from a particular moment. It is careful to situate where it sits in intellectual history: this essay starts out with the statement ‘This is 1967’. It goes to great care to mark itself as being written in an early moment, and several times marks important elements of structuralism as having still open, though possibly determinable, questions (for example, when discussing the symbolic order, it states that ‘We do not yet know what this symbolic element consists of’) (Deleuze 2004: 173). While not endorsing structuralism outright, he presents a meticulous re-articulation of it using language almost identical to that found in his first two ‘non-history-of-philosophy’ books, Difference and repetition (1993) and Logic of sense (1990a). But this also means that Deleuze’s structuralism, even as it acknowledged its debt to Lévi-Strauss, was very much his own. What interests Deleuze is seeing structure as a net of potentiality, nodes of which are only transitorily inhabited by particular actualised figures. What is more, Deleuze’s structuralism is one that is very concerned with the tempo and rhythm of the time and events that are the expressions of structure: while the architectonic aspects of structuralism are not absent, they are secondary to the variation that occurs in different iterations of a set of structural relations (see Alliez 2005: 92-93). Because of this, is it possible to read Deleuze and Guattari’s later rejection of structuralism in A thousand plateaus not as a retrenchment or reposition, but rather as emphasising that any reading of structuralism must take temporal unfolding into being. For instance, Deleuze and Guattari complain that Lévi-Strauss presents myths where humans transform into animals (and where animals engage in their own strange transformations) as ‘a correspondence between two relations’. Such a framing, Deleuze and Guattari note, ‘impoverishes the phenomenon’, and that myth as Lévi-Strauss presents it is ‘a framework of classification [that] is quite incapable of registering these becomings, which are more like fragments than tales’: Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism has no role for either ‘graduating resembles’, or ‘resemblances in a series’, instead inevitably producing an ‘order of differences’. Worst of all, structuralism ‘denounced the prestige accorded to the imagination’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1999: 236-7). It is not the poles in structural oppositions that interests Deleuze, but rather the extended continuum between them.

This later stance should not be taken as an across-the-board rejection of Lévi-Strauss, or as indicating an actual fundamental incapability between these thinkers. Understanding Deleuze and Guattari as presenting a total critique of Lévi-Strauss might be going too far. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2015), a close reader of both Deleuze and Lévi-Strauss, has stated that the latter’s four volume Mythologique series is more Deleuzian than perhaps Deleuze himself appreciated. The endless variations expressed in Lévi-Strauss’s kaleidoscopic recounting of the imagination of the indigenous Americas suggests not just a controlling logic of difference and differentiation, of translation and transformation. Further, the refusal of any transcending code or horizon that apparently characterises Mythologique by the project’s end is read by Viveiros de Castro as an instance of pure immanence of thought, a mode of thinking that Deleuze prized over transcendence. Of course, one could be skeptical of this reading: others have seen Lévi-Strauss as too caught up in the concrete to throw themselves into a Deleuzian play of pure difference; under this reading, the senior anthropologists unable to make the leap into iterative abstraction (Kaufman 2007) (though again, to some anthropological sensibilities, such a limitation is not necessarily a fault). However, even if one is skeptical of Viveiros de Castro’s reading, it is obvious that, regardless of his attitude towards structuralism as a totality, certain anthropological claims made by Lévi-Strauss were accepted by Deleuze. While some of Lévi-Strauss’ claims were rejected as being too centralised, too interested in locking down transformations in the service of a rationalising logic, others, such as the social organization outlined in ‘Do dual organizations exist’ are ratified (Deleuze & Guattari 1999: 209-10). Likewise, Lévi-Strauss’s groundbreaking work on kinship is acknowledged, albeit as one that only addresses ‘extension’, which is only one face of a common Deleuzian extensive/intensive diptych (Deleuze & Guattari 1983: 157).

Deleuze as a reader of anthropology

Of course, even granting his importance during the time that Deleuze was active, Lévi-Strauss did not exhaust all of anthropology; Deleuze both read widely and borrowed freely from other contemporary anthropologists. ‘Flux’ and the ‘war machine’, important categories in Deleuze and Guattari’s jointly authored works, are both credited to French anthropologist Pierre Clastres (Deleuze & Guattari 1983; Guattari 2008; Biehlo 2013: 584). Likewise, Gregory Bateson’s (2010) concept of plateaus as ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’ were important enough for Deleuze and Guattari that they used it as the framing conceit in their second major work (Deleuze & Guattari 1983: 22). But this is just the tip of the iceberg. It is in in Capitalism and schizophrenia (1983), Deleuze’s first collaboration with Guattari, where we see Deleuze engaging in depth with anthropology as a body of literature and as a discipline. In this work, we have substantive references to what almost amounts to a mid-century ‘who’s who’ of the field. In presenting his argument, Deleuze and Guattari invoke: Paul and Laura Bohannan’s work with the Tiv on spheres of exchange and the way that they react to the introduction of cash (176, 248); Victor Turner’s work on healing and symbolism among the Ndembu (167, 350); George Deveroux’s conjecture on social structure and sexuality (33, 165); Jeanne Favret on segmentary organization (152); Myer Fortes on filiation, including an off the cuff reference to the classic Oedipus and Job in West African religion (142, 146); Malinowski’s work on Kula exchange, but also his consideration of the (lack of a) Trobriands’ Oedipal concept (53, 159, 171-2); Edmund Leach on possible (again) filiation, on critiques of Lévi-Strauss’s understanding of presentation and counter-presentation, as well as on the relevance of possible psychological origins of social symbols (146, 150, 164, 172, 179); Marcel Mauss on the Gift (150, 185); and so on. This pattern is repeated in A thousand plateaus, where, in addition to many of the aforementioned authors, the list is expanded to include figures such as Marshall Sahlins and Robert Lowie.

This engagement with anthropology and ethnography was something that Deleuze deeply desired to get right. When writing on this subject, he broke form and did something he rarely did: he consulted with actual experts in a different discipline (Dosse 2010: 201). But this engagement should not be taken to mean that the joint project he and Guattari were engaged in was itself an instance of conventional anthropological thought, or in harmony with the mainline form of the discipline. For all its breadth, their reading of the literature has been strongly criticised for being superficial, for having numerous factual errors, for being blind to some of the complicity with colonialism that characterised some of the anthropology of the period, and for being quick to catapult from particular ethnographic depictions, such as leopard cults in the Belgian Congo or Kachin witchcraft, to ungrounded generalities (‘the sorcerer’ or ‘becoming animal’ in ‘Black Africa’), making concrete populations into philosophical metaphors (Miller 1993; see Holland 2003 in defense of Deleuze and Guattari on many of these points). It should also be noted that anthropologists who went to the field familiar with Deleuzian conceptions abstracted from specific collectivities have found it hard to use those concepts to describe the very social practices that Deleuze and Guattari relied upon, and have often had to modify them substantially in order to make them fit (see, e.g., Pedersen 2007).

Deleuze’s speculative anthropology

Deleuze and Guattari’s interest in anthropology should not be taken to mean that they were interested in repeating the form of the anthropological essay or the ethnographic monograph. This is indicated by what they present as the ultimate template for their anthropological project: ‘[t]he great book of modern ethnology is not so much Mauss’s The gift as Nietzsche’s Genealogy of morals’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1983: 190).^{^[6]} This engagement with anthropology was in service of a longue durée historical anthropology, the sort of stratigraphic, teleological projects as such nineteenth century authors as Lewis Morgan (1907) or E.B. Tylor (1871a, 1871b). The specific history that they want to trace out is that of production, both in the specific Marxist sense, but also as a general rubric which would encompass the creation of other material, with the most central material being libido.

This interest in seeing both capitalist production and the production of desire could make their project seem to be just another example of the sort of Freudo-Marxism that characterised so much of critical thought during the immediate post-war years of the twentieth century (see, e.g., Marcuse 1974). But it is in the details that Deleuze and Guattari’s project separates itself from others of its kind. Rather than seeing Marx’s process as, in essence, an epiphenomenon of Freudian forces, or as reversing the process and privileging Marx as base and seeing Freud as superstructure, Deleuze and Guattari see both Marxist production and Freudian libido as different instances of the same abstract ‘universal primary process’. This is corrosive not only of these two separate theoretical framings, but also of the actors that Freud and Marx saw as central to their respective projects; it also undoes the ‘modern constitution’ of the Nature-Culture split (Latour 2012) in as much as socio-cultural production and psycho-biological drives are subsumed under the same mechanism. In Anti-Oedipus, there is no subject, whether that subject be conscious, unconscious, or a labor-producing class acting in accordance with its species-being. Rather, everything is just an endless concatenation of semi-autonomous units that Deleuze and Guattari refer to as ‘machines’. These machines (rechristened in later works of theirs as ‘assemblages’) include the various biological bodily features that would be considered ‘part objects’ under more mainline psychoanalytic thinking (examples include an ‘anal machine, a talking-machine, [and] a breaking machine’) (Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 2) But also actual biological processes, human or otherwise, are machines as well. The category of machines is more capacious than the category of physiology or biology. Machinery in the more traditional sense in included as ‘machines’ in the Deleuzian sense of the word, as are various institutions, social arrangements, and psychological and biological systems. In the understanding of Deleuze and Guattari, the function of all these machines can be grasped as either connective, disjunctive, or conjunctive, and the synthesis of these operations allows for broader operations such as production in the common sense, recording, and enjoying.

The reason that the mechanic nature of things is invisible to us is that these operations are situated on what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘socius’. The socius organises production by being the site where all these disparate machines are woven together, but the socius is also misrecognised as the source of all this production as well.^{^[7]} The socius is an abstract or cognitive space, and as such the kinds of regions where it is ‘located’ can and have changed over time (or at least can and have changed in their account). This brings us to the crux of Deleuze and Guattari’s anthropology. It is shifts in the location of socius, and in the way that the flows on it are organised, which give structure to Deleuze and Guattari’s anthropologic ‘big history’, and demarcates objects of ‘traditional’ anthropological inquiry from the sort of large-scale societies that anthropology only turned to as it matured.

What are these shifts in the socius, and what effects fall from them? In a way that is again not dissimilar to Lewis Morgan’s (1907) Savagery/Barbarism/Civilization triad, Deleuze and Guattari divide humanity’s periods into tribal, empire, and capitalist dispensations. In the tribal period, the socius is understood as being the body of the earth, and flows are situated or ‘territorialized’ on it. In periods of ‘tribal’ organization, both territorialization and the (re)organization and situating of flows on the socius are done through what they call ‘inscription’, which might best be understood as including all forms of ‘leaving one’s mark’ on social life. Inscription is done directly, whether as a mark or as a social action, and because of its unmediated nature it therefore cannot be held to be signification; this means that ‘tribal’ societies are ecologies of effects and not systems of meaning. For Deleuze and Guattari, the business of making kin is the premier form of inscription. It is the creation of kin which organises bodies in relation to one another and to the ground that is worked upon, ‘coding’ the earth. In their eyes, this is the most important mode through which the flows of intensive filiation are made into the code of alliance and affiliation.

In the following period of ‘empire’, the socius shifts from the surface of the earth to the body of the despot, with the body of the despot discussed in a sense not dissimilar to that found in Kantorowicz (1985). Various agents and subjects of the despot take up the role of his ‘eyes’ or ‘hands’ (or whatever other body part that mapped onto the function that was at issue), thus constituting a sort of leviathan where the focus is more on the outline of the total body than of the composite bodies that constitute the subsumed parts. This means not just a reorganization of the socius, and a concomitant ‘deterritorialization’ of the various already-situated machines, but also an ‘overcoding’ of the already-extant mechanic systems from the previous dispensation as they are utilised by and thought of in relation to the primitive tyrant. The stage is eventually supplanted by capitalism. In this stage, capital itself is the socius, and codes are replaced by axioms. Axoims are half imperative, half algorithm, at once demanding, instructing, and measuring the maximization of flows, accelerating them as surplus value is ‘skimmed off’ of these streams. The speed causes ‘everything solid to melt into air,’ (Marx & Engels 1970: 35) and create a torrent of deterritorialization as flows are decoded, mathematised, and mapped onto the individual bodies of workers and consumers that have been assimilated into the socius. This last mapping is to create the minimum territoriality needed to keep capitalism from running off the wheels, and is also the point of entry to the Oedipal complex, a mode of control that is treated as much as an institutional dispositif as a psychoanalytic reality.

It would be a mistake to see this system as being foundational to either Deleuze and Guattari’s collaboration, or to Deleuze’s own conception of the order of things. In later works by these authors, machines are replaced by assemblages, and the tribal transforms into the nomadic, a dispensation constituted by disciplined itinerants whose rootlessness operates as a Clastres-like (2007) self-inoculation against the formation of the State. Nor should this be seen as exhausting Deleuze’s concerns. Very little of this material or terminology is referenced in Deleuze’s own work. However, it was in articulating this systemitization of the world that Deleuze had his greatest and most prolonged encounter with ethnography and anthropology.

What Deleuze is for anthropology

Reception of Deleuze’s speculative anthropology

That deep engagement does not mean that this system caters to anthropological tastes. Even the anthropologists that Deleuze was in conversation with as he crafted his system expressed to him anxieties about his epoch-spanning periodization (Dosse 2010: 201). And as has been pointed out by Ian Lowrie, while Deleuze and Guattari’s picture of ‘tribal’ societies does seem to resonate with some classical cybernetically-informed ethnographies of small-scale societies (such as Roy Rappaport’s Pigs for the ancestors [2000]), Deleuze’s vision of capitalism as a space and time where mathematics has replaced semiotics seems unlikely to agree with the anthropological palate, and Deleuze and Guattari’s teleological periodization would not be that welcome, either (Lowrie 2017). The social-evolutionary element of the argument is also a bone that many anthropologists would choke on, even though Deleuze and Guattari deny that their schema could be described as social evolution. Finally, their reading of flows and circulation in tribal economies seems more informed by Nietzsche’s concept of debt (which has not received much ethnographic confirmation) than by Mauss’s vision of the Gift (which has) (Graeber 2011: 402).

Depth and breadth of Deleuze’s influence in anthropology

It is not surprising that Deleuze and Guattari’s account has been given very little time by anthropologists. But that should not be taken to mean that anthropologists have accorded the same low level of respect to Deleuze himself. And while Deleuze does not have as deep a gravity well in the discipline as ‘Planet Foucault’ (Boyer 2002), many anthropologists have turned to Deleuze to hash out their ethnography, or to provide the ligaments for their theoretical constructs.

However, any attempt to pinpoint the influence of Deleuze immediately runs up against one difficulty: the fact that Deleuze’s thinking not only has been dispersed to the degree of being almost atmospheric in the present age, but also the fact that his thinking seems, in many ways, to have presaged the present age as well. Foucault infamously once stated that perhaps the present period would be remembered by historians as ‘Deleuzean’ (Foucault 1998: 343). And while Deleuze brushed this off as ‘a joke meant to make people like us laugh, and make everyone else livid’ (Deleuze 1995: 4), it seems that his work in some ways anticipated much of our zeitgeist. The difficulty is that anticipating the zeitgeist, and being an intellectual influence on thinkers who express it, are two different things (and this is putting to the side the possibility – and to be honest, the high likelihood – that the current era is informing our reading of Deleuze in such a way that other readings of Deleuze, including readings that Deleuze himself might have endorsed, are either foreclosed to us or unrecognizable.) There is also the question of what counts as influence, and what simply counts as being a part of an intellectual genealogy. To take one example, the sociologist of science and self-proclaimed philosopher Bruno Latour has not been shy about the influence that Deleuze’s works have had on him; but does this mean that those who have in turn been influenced by Latour should ‘count’ as being influenced by Deleuze at one remove?

We will put to the side a discussion of ‘accidental’ Deleuzians,^[8] and focus on those who have explicitly acknowledged Deleuze as being an important plank in their thoughts. Most anthropologists have declined to take on Deleuze’s thought whole hog (Jensen & Rödje 2010, Markus & Saka 2006), and generally tend to take a single concept and conjoin it to concepts or framings that originate elsewhere. A loose map of anthropologically-repurposed Deleuzian part-concepts would have to include Deleuze’s vision of modern society as he presented it in his essay ‘Postscript on the society of control’, the ‘rhizome’ and ‘the assemblage’ (two ideas of which are given the greatest elaboration in Deleuze’s collaboration with Guattari), Deleuze’s understanding of affect, Deleuze’s concept of temporality, and finally his use of virtuality.

The anthropological assemblage

Some of these terms have also been adopted with greater degrees of fidelity than others: the assemblage is likely the instance where use differs most from the original sense (see Marcus & Saka 2006). Assemblage is a term taken from A thousand plateaus. The various translators represented the word agencement as ‘assemblage’, but the more common English translation of this term in other contexts would be ‘layout’ instead (on this point, see also Phillips 2006). This was a bit of a “traduttore traditore” moment. For Deleuze and Guattari, agencement was their term to describe cognitive/linguistic or physical arrangements where each element in the set was in a determinate relation to the others, and which acted in concert. In their minds, assemblages did very specific things, and operated in a particular manner. Assemblages both territorialised some space or material, but also deterritorialised others as it undid whatever organising or emergent logic preexisted it. Further, not only did all assemblages have content (the material organised in a determinate pattern) but all assemblages also had expressions, which could be either physical or communicative. And most of all, each assemblage was specific to a particular ‘strata’, which might be thought of as a particular domain, space, or classification (see Deleuze & Guattari 1999: 503-5). Finally, assemblages can be thought of as particular instantiations of purely abstract relations (or ‘diagrams’: see Bialecki 2016, 2017b; Zdenbik 2012) that can also be found in other assemblages located in different strata. Given all this structuration, one can see why ‘layout’ may have been more on point than ‘assemblage’. Anthropology, by comparison, has taken the assemblage as something different. For anthropology, assemblages are not determinate relations, but conglomerations of contingent, heterogeneous material that by chance or design (mostly the former) have congealed together to form the ephemeral assemblage (Collier & Ong 2004; Marcus & Saka 2006; Rabinow 2003; Rudnyckyj 2010; Zigon 2010, 2011, 2015). Rather than serving as expressions of an iterable, abstract relationship, each anthropological assemblage is an underdetermined, random, and possibly unique, collage.^[9] As Marcus and Saka phrased it, ‘none of the derivations of assemblage theory…is based on a technical and formal analysis of how this concept functions in [Deleuze and Guattari’s] writing’ (2006: 103).

This does not render the anthropological repurposing (reterritorialization?) of the original Deleuzian concept of agencement ethnographically deficient, or their anthropological conclusions manqué. But it is probably a symptom of what divides Deleuze from contemporary Anglo-American anthropology (apart from, of course, discipline, language, subject matter, and history). While both Deleuze and contemporary anthropology share an interest in novelty, they have differing senses for the frequency and ease with which novelty is brought about. Anthropology often sees its objects as ‘haecceities’: as unique and therefore valuable expressions of human imagination, capacity, and resistance. Even when they are treated as tokens of a more general type, they are presented as if they are not just representative, but exemplary: this retains their novelty while still making them of particular interest for those investigating a more general phenomenon. Deleuze was interested in haecceities as well, but he also held that novelty, and particularly novelty in the form of thought, is relatively rare. For him, it was not subjects agentively producing novelty, but rather passive subjects who were forced to produce novelty by the press of events, when all other existing conceptual or material tools were exhausted.

Becoming

Anthropological discussions of ‘becoming’, another Deleuzian trope, can be juxtaposed productively with the anthropological assemblage. In Deleuzian parlance, becoming is about a process of continual transformation without a complete transition into some other form or mode; it is used to characterise an asymptotic movement towards a particular local telos. Unlike assemblages, which seem to litter the landscape, in anthropology many ‘becomings’ are hard won. In an article by Biehl and Locke that is probably the most cited discussion of Deleuzian ‘becoming’ in anthropology, there is no claim to be taking up Deleuze’s thought as ‘a theoretical system of or set of practices to be applied normatively to anthropology’ (2010: 317). Rather, they merely wish to take up aspects of Deleuze’s conception of desire and of a socially-informed but still-specific capacity for transformation as a corrective to Foucauldian conceptions of biopower and governmentality. But the two ethnographic circumstances presented (destitution and psychic disintegration in Brazil, and the collective continuing aftermath of conflict in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina) underline the claim that the sort of transformations that Deleuze is interested in are often the result of a press of circumstances beyond the ordinary. It is of course possible to see these two case studies as a further post-culture-concept anthropological interest in what Joel Robbins (2013) has called ‘the suffering subject’. But it would also be possible to see this not as a focus on abjection and trauma as a human universal, but rather as an impetus to experimentation.^{^[10]} Biehl and Locke do not exhaust the anthropological use of Deleuzian becoming; like the Biehl and Locke essay, becoming is invoked thematically rather than technically, to communicate an interest in variation in and through the repetition of acts and forms, as opposed to some other more totalising approach that would be blind to internal gradations and mutations (see, e.g., Khan 2012, Ahmad 2017). Often these works do not share Deleuze’s arid anti-humanism: they often favor explorations of subjectivity over Deleuze’s interest in the pre-individual and the pre-subjective. But because these works foreground a thematic interest in Deleuze, as opposed to an interest in his technical concepts, to judge them for this seems wrong (putting to the side the fact that judging authors in this way, instead of merely contrasting works as intellectual mechanisms, seems a particularly un-Deleuzian exercise).

Rhizome

Differences between the anthropological assemblage and the Deleuze-Guattarian agencement can also be better understood by contrasting it with anthropological discussions of the ‘rhizome’. For Deleuze and Guattari, rhizomes are decentralised networks. In rhizomes, individual nodes in the network can have quite different expressions from one another; the network itself is capable of qualitative variation; its internal multiplicity and variety means that it cannot be reduced to any dualisms or structural oppositions; and, because of its decentralised nature, the rhizome is resistant to being broken apart. The term rhizome is taken from botany (again via anthropologist Gregory Bateson), but it is not limited to the vegetative. Examples of the rhizome include: pack animals, hive insects, human-virus relations, and at one point, the music of Glenn Gould.

Anthropologists have used the rhizome in ways not dissimilar to the ways that they have invoked the assemblage: as emergent systems of pure difference that are characterised by lateral, as opposed to hierarchical, relations. The rhizome is frequently invoked in discussions of globalization, particularly as it interacts with other complex systems such as biology, ecology, and demographic representational regimes (see, e.g., Mauer 2000, Muehlmann 2012, Rosengren 2003). In contrast to most anthropological discussions of the assemblage, though, many authors working on rhizomic arrangements have noted that it has a relationship with other organizational modes that exceed mere opposition. Deleuze and Guattari state that the rhizomes at times become arboreal: if sufficient pressures are placed upon a rhizome, or sufficient cuts administered to it, rhizomes will in effect become trees, with an internal hierarchy controlling the way the rhizome can spread, and the internal organizational logic of its constituent nodes. As it appears in anthropology, various bureaucratic or top-down processes are quite deft in this sort of pruning. Political moves to present a dispersed and open population as a discrete political actor, or to identify, and thus demarcate and bind, ‘at risk’ groups, are shown as repeatedly creating arboreal systems out of dispersed rhizomes (Muehlmann 2012, Rosengren 2003).

Affect

Other anthropological uptakes of Deleuze differ from Deleuze’s prior concept not because of different interests and priorities in the anthropologists engaging with his thought, but rather because of what might be called an ‘interference pattern’ from other conceptual homonyms. An example of this is the almost cosmic-inflation level of growth in discussions of affects in anthropology. Interest in affect, particularly as a force that has a special relation with late-capitalist and neoliberal forms of social organization, has been increasingly common (see, e.g., Mazarrella 2009, Muehlebach 2012, Navaro-Yashin 2012, O’Neil 2013, Richards & Rudnyckyj 2009, Rudnyckyj 2011, Stewart 2007). Influenced either by Deleuze’s account of affects, or more commonly, influenced at one remove by Brian Massumi’s (2002) account of Deleuze’s accounts of affects, they understand affects as a pre-linguistic, embodied intensity.

There is some confusion in discussions of affects: for instance, there is the representational problem in using language to narrate a pre-linguistic, pre-subjective phenomenon (see Bialecki forthcoming). But even more confusing is the simultaneous influence in anthropology of the concept of ‘affect’ as understood by the psychologist Silvan Tompkins, who understood affect as a limited number series of cognitive modules that, in various combinatory constellations, could co-produce the entire run of human emotion (see Tompkins et al. 1995). This second understanding, in which affect is heavily psychologised, as opposed to the Spinoza-influenced Deleuzian reading of affect as a force that either dilates or contracts human capacities at any single moment, has muddied the conceptual waters, as these are actually quite different phenomena (see Schaefer 2015). Most anthropological authors have not been careful to both specify whether they are dealing with affect as a pre-linguistic mix of a Spinozian illocutionary force (affectus) and perlocutionary capacity to be affected (affectio), or whether they are dealing instead with cognitive/psychological modules. This failure to specify has meant that elements of a very American psychological subjectivity can be found in many discussions of what purports to be a pre-subjective, pre-linguistic affective register.

Societies of control

Other discussions, though, have tended to hue closer to Deleuze’s self-presentation of the issues. These tended to either address minor works in Deleuze’s oeuvre, or (interestingly enough) some of his most demanding technical exercises. Let’s take an example of the former first. In a short essay entitled ‘Postscript on the societies of control’, Deleuze (1992b) presented the thesis that the advancement of networking and information technologies in the twentieth century has allowed a shift away from the sort of societies organised around disciplinary enclosures described in the middle period of Foucault; rather than creating standard, generic subjects through individually targeted disciplinary means, the society of control allows for decentralised monitoring and shaping of continually-evolving aspects of the person through processes that are not confined to any one space such as the factory, the barracks, or the schoolroom. As Deleuze says, this is a society of ‘passwords’ and ‘surfing’, where persons are grasped as data and not subjects. This 1992 piece, which seems to have grasped presciently much of the first-world present, has been well received, particularly by anthropologists interested in deploying Foucauldian concepts of discipline and biopower to contemporary neoliberal societies (see, e.g., O’Neill 2015: 230-1).

Temporality and the virtual

As for the more technical concepts that have been taken up with greater degrees of fidelity, we have Deleuze’s presentation of both time and of virtuality. Deleuze’s temporality is marked by its disjunctive logic, where numerous different autonomous modalities of time co-exist, operating at different scales and with different degrees of intensity, and hence creating emergent effects. Deleuze’s Henri-Bergson-informed concept of time as duration, a kind of qualitative flow, has been taken up with success, where the experience of time’s unfolding is seen as a vital part of any process. These discussions, which often also invoke the language of becoming, have been particularly fruitful when addressing creative endeavors (see Pandian 2012). Others have highlighted the clashing constituent elements of Deleuzian temporality, with cyclic temporalities of habit, a temporality of continual fissure with the present already yet continually being sundered into the past and future (or, to put it differently, the present always consisting entirety and only of the past and of the future), and a disruptive temporality of the event which consists of series of breaks with extant states of affairs (see Williams 2012; see also Bialecki 2017: 22-47). Matthew Hodges (2008, 2014) has relied on this polychronic aspect of Deleuze’s account of time to suggest ways in which now-dominant narratives of temporality such as ‘process’ and ‘flux’, which he associates with late capitalism, might actually be challenged, rather than ratified, by Deleuze’s thoughts.

Like temporality, virtuality is another Deleuzian conceptual tool that has received more rigorous amounts of attention. This should not be understood in the sense of ‘virtual worlds’, digital milieus that aim to wholly or partially create creditable simulations of, or rift on, aspects of the larger analogue universe (see, e.g., Boellstorff 2008). For Deleuze, the virtual is a concept that is meant to replace the possible. The problem with the possible is that it seems to be indicating states of affairs that were already complete, but simply lacking reality. This makes the possible, in essence, a static lack. Instead, Deleuze wanted to underscore the virtual as something that is real, albeit in way different from more conventional modes of existence. Rather than lacking existence, the virtual is an extant, open set of potentials that are always ready to be actualised. But the actualization of some virtual form may look quite different in different places and different times. This is not only because the actualizations may happen in different places and different times, and thus be part of different ecologies of sense. It is also because the virtual can be actualised in different manners, through using different material. For that reason, Deleuze stresses that the virtual and the actual do not ‘resemble’ one another; the virtual is not a platonic ideal. Rather, the virtual could be thought of as a series of variables set in a determinate relation to one another, or, as Deleuze put it, a series of multiplicities that are effectively topological, and thus capable of quite different instantiations, in the same way that a donut and a coffee cup are both actualizations of a torus, a purely mathematical entity.^{^[11]} This means, in a sense, that every entity or phenomenon is double faced; on one hand, there is a virtual aspect, a set of relations implicit in an object that can be repeated with or without distention, depending on the state of forces, and then on the other hand, there is the actual object, which in turn gives rise to the set of virtual relations that will be the ‘quasi-cause’ of the next instantiation.

Again, there are several ways to understand what Deleuze meant by this discussion of virtuality. It is clear that the virtual included the conceptual, or at least involves it. Deleuze’s conception of philosophy was as a retrospective mapping of the virtual, a way to trace back the virtual from what falls from an event, and thus identify other possible ways in which that virtuality could have been made actual; this practice of working from the actual to the virtual is called “counter-effectuation” in Deleuze’s parlance (Deleuze & Guattari 1994). To some, this makes the virtual in effect ideational, or at least a prelude to the experience of thinking particular thoughts. For others, though, this suggests that virtuality is a way to speak not merely of human ideational processes, but of all phenomenon (Delanda 2002).

The open nature of the concept of the virtual has again catalyzed different anthropological uses of it as a core idea. For some, the idea of the concept as a way of mapping possibilities has become their understanding of what it is that anthropology works towards, with these new concepts either being framed as creations of the anthropologists that are sufficient to think through ethnographic phenomena in a way that is adequate to the description given by those people they speak to, or by granting the thought of the informants themselves with the same kind of stature and formal qualities that are credited to western philosophy (Holbraad & Pedersen 2017, Viveiros de Castro 2014; see similarly Willerslev 2011). Virtuality and the virtual is also being used by anthropologists to account for variation and difference without having to adopt pure nominalism (that is, a mode of thought characterised by the rejection of universalisms and abstractions; see Bialecki 2012 ). This includes using virtuality to think of the sort of variation and potential inherent in either a particular practice or a mode of religiosity (Bialecki 2012), or variation that results when similar abstract forms or operations are expressed in different material (Bialecki 2016). Suzanne Kuchler (1999), for instance, has argued that the various senses of the word ‘Malanggan’, as used in New Ireland, which includes a memorial right, a carved object used in such rites, and for a larger system of ideas and practices that seems to envelope the rite and the object, are not three separate objects or categories, but instead are all expressions of the same virtual topological form.

Another use of virtuality is to account for the effectiveness of religious and ritual practice. The claim here is that much of ritual and religious activity can be understood as an attempt to work back to the virtual through practice or sensual experience instead of thought, and thus open up ethical, social, or even ontological possibilities that are currently blocked by the arrangement of the current state of affairs (see, e.g., Kapferer 2004, 2007; Viveiros de Castro 2007). It has also been proposed that the engine of religion, if we can speak of such a thing, lies in a virtual pliability found in modes of religiosity that allows for it to take on an infinite number of expressions, all with different material entailments and therefore different effects as they combine with other assemblages (Bialecki 2016b, 2017).

Conclusion

This conversation does not exhaust discussions of Deleuze in anthropology.^[12] But despite the partial nature of this discussion, a pattern should be apparent. The first aspect of the pattern concerns Deleuze’s thought. While shot through with a host of self-invented or repurposed terminology, the logic of each of these terms resonates with each other. The diagrammatic logic of the assemblage and particular instances of the assemblage shares aspects with the virtual/actual distinction, aspects of Deleuzian becoming and Deleuzian temporality seem to parallel one another, and Deleuzian discussions of the society of control seems to be a particularised and historically-situated exemplar of the play of rhizomic and arboreal modes of organising. It would be wrong to consider Deleuze a monolithic thinker, since each of these concepts have their own utility and targets, but one can see how together they seem to be themselves examples of Deleuze’s interest in the intimate relationship between repetition and difference.

The second aspect of the pattern is that anthropology has, for the most part, had a cafeteria approach to Deleuze, taking just an element or two that is to their liking, rather than the whole set of mechanisms. This has created an interesting phenomenon. At what was (at least in terms of the temporality of academic publishing) the same time, two assessments were presented of Deleuze’s reception of anthropology. One assessment was that ‘relatively few anthropologists had made use’ of Deleuze (Jensen & Rödge 2010: 1). The other assessment was the claim that in American anthropology, 2010 was the year of Deleuze (Hamilton & Places 2011). Both assessments may be right. While we are no longer at the point where we can say, as Marcus and Saka once did, that we are lacking ‘technical and formal’ encounters with Deleuze (2006: 103), it is also true that rather than dedicate themselves to the intellectual mechanisms that Deleuze constructed, many anthropologists have decided not to, in João Biehlo’s (2013) words, let theory get in the way of ethnography. This may be for the best: Deleuze, interested in creativity, would honor sly theft over dutiful exegesis. But while such redeployments may be fruitful, they also run the risk of being glib, or of not even understanding how the pilfered tools work at all. It remains to be seen which anthropological borrowings of Deleuze are the pollinated flower, which uses some alien presence to perpetuate its own being, and which borrowings are the wasp, pointlessly copulating with an alien other due to an act of complete misrecognition.

Notes

The author would like to both thank and lay blameless Ian Lowrie and Razvan Amironesei for their contributions on some technical matters. The author, of course, owns all breaks from the image of thought.

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Note on contributor

Jon Bialecki is an honorary fellow with the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. His first monograph, A diagram for fire: miracles and variation in an American charismatic movement, is a study of the miraculous and differentiation in American religion, with a focus on ethics, politics, language, and economic practices. He is currently working on his second manuscript, A machine for making gods: Mormonism, transhumanism, and speculative thought.

Dr Jon Bialecki, The Lihosit Research Institute, 8434 via Sonoma #65, La Jolla, California, 92037-2722, United States. Jon.Bialecki@ed.ac.uk

[1] Following a convention that has arisen in the secondary literature regarding Deleuze (despite the fact that even those who inaugurated it feels that it is a grotesquely unfair distribution of credit), in this essay Deleuze’s co-authored works will be treated as if they were an extension of ‘his’ thought, even as we will try to acknowledge when we are referring to collaborative material.

[2] This modesty should not be mistaken for unwavering respect: he referred to his work in the history of philosophy as a ‘sort of buggery’ where he takes the philosopher he is writing on ‘from behind…giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous’ (Deleuze 1995: 6).

[3] The claim that there are multiple, incommensurable readings of Deleuze may be to understate the argument. For instance, he has been described as continuing Kant’s transcendental project (Voss 2013) even though he has claimed that he treated Kant like ‘an enemy’ (N: 6). At the same time, Deleuze’s work has been described as ‘essentially phenomenological’, and deeply indebted to Husserl (Hughes 2008: ix). But before we see him as rejecting any knowledge of the noumenon, or as centering himself on the subject and on subjectivity, we should also note that he has also been called a ‘realist philosopher’ who broke with idealist ‘postmodernity’ by affirming an anti-idealist, anti-subjectivist ‘mind-independent reality.’^{^[3]} (Delanda: 2). His project has been cited as centered on creating an ontology that purposeful erases the human/nature opposition (Ansell-Pearson 2012), and, conversely, he has been described as writing against ontology, and instead presenting an ethics of immanence and the ‘event’ (Zourabichvili 2012). He has been called a philosopher concerned with the production of difference and the new (Smith 2008). However, his detractors argue that he was actually a ‘monotonous’ thinker, obsessed with a philosophy of the one (Badiou 2000), a gnostic who rejects the actual and the political to favor aesthetics and a realm of never-materializable phantasmic possibilities (Hallward 2006, Žižek 2003). Because of this, many critics claim that Deleuze offers no political project, though at this point the reader will be little surprised to hear that there are differing opinions on this front, too. He has been depicted as someone taking up a democratic, emancipatory Foucauldian micropolitics of short-term tactical action by collectives of disparate parties (Bialecki 2017), as someone whose ascetics and ethics drives him to reject democracy (Mengue 2013, see also Toymentsev 2015), as someone whose politics are essentially Leninist, and as someone who has inoculated himself against any Leninist appropriation (Tampio 2009), as a staunch anti-capitalist, and as a wild-eyed precursor of the accelerationist desire to chase the dragon of late capitalism all the way to its likely ugly, possibly inhuman, end (Mckay and Avanessian 2014).

[4] These ‘multiplicities’ are taken in part from Deleuze’s reading of Bergson, but also from the work of the nineteenth century mathematician Bernard Reinmann; Reinmann’s mathematical concept of space, not as a totalized Euclidian grid, but rather as a series or collectivity of local spaces, each of which may be characterized by different dimensions, and thus escape any global determination; in the standard English translation of Riemann’s work the concept of the constituent elements of a topological space is translated as manifolds, while Anglophone scholars of Deleuze translated the term as multiplicities, following the French translation of Reinmann’s work, multiplicitê. See Plotinksy 2009.

[5] It should be noted that this was a piece that was not published until 1973.

[6] To an extent, this emphasis on Nietzsche could be seen not only as an attempt to address the whole expanse of the history of the species, but also as Deleuze presaging a later anthropological interest in ethics, which has acknowledged the importance of Nietzsche (Laidlaw 2002), though perhaps not fully embracing what a Nietzschian psychology would entail (Bialecki 2016c).

[7] Despite its fictive location, the socius is actually located ‘on’ the body without organs, the term Deleuze and Guattari use for the entirety of production before any ordering or ranking is visited upon it.

[8] Among the anthropologists and anthropological sub-fields that constitute ‘accidental Deleuzians’, one of the most surprising may be mainline American linguistic anthropology; while this does not prove kinship, both Deleuze and linguistic anthropology share an antipathy for structural linguistics and Chomskian linguistic formalism, an enthusiasm for Labov’s sociolinguistics, a high regard for Austin’s speech-act theory, and a facility with the Peircian semiotic triad of icon, index, and sign. This is also almost certainly completely accidental, as suggested by the divergent approaches taken towards other core issues. Take, for example, materiality and language. Linguistic anthropology tends to deal with issues of ‘semiotic ideology’ (Keane 2003), which can be glossed as metapragmatic concerns for the communicative potential and ethical valence of not just speech, but of material culture as well. In contrast, Deleuze handles material aspects of communication through ‘collective assemblages’, a term for ecologies or arrangements which include both material objects and speech acts or writing (Deleuze and Guattari 1999: 7). Even greater distance can be found in the respective treatment for affect. Affect, as will be discussed shortly, is a foundational concept for Deleuze, which he takes in the Spinozan sense of a force measured by its intensity and not by way of any extension (Deleuze 1990b, 1992a), while linguistic anthropology (Silverstein 2004) tends to see any differentiation between speech and affect as an idiosyncratic western understanding (see Bialecki 2015, in press).

Another accidental – or perhaps crypto- – Deleuzian field in anthropology is the line of thought that is referred to as the ‘New Melanesian Ethnography’. Roy Wagner and Marilyn Strathern, the two most exemplary thinkers in this movement, display certain tendencies in their thought that are strongly Deleuzian, though in different ways. Roy Wagner’s concept of culture as invention, with both the achieved elements and the elements that are understood as fixed and conventionalized requiring continual creation though both effort and through being thrust into new contexts, echoes Deleuze’s concerns for fluid and emergent forms, and for the way that thoughts, practices, and material are at times decontextualized and deconstructed to allow for novelty (‘deterritorialized’) or are at other times set in determinate relation with one another (‘territorialization’, which maps onto Wagner’s counter-invention) (Wagner 1975). Marilyn Strathern’s interest in privileging relation over identity also has a Deleuzian cast, as for Deleuze it is the web of connections, rather than the essence of a thing itself, that often controls how some person, process, or object is expressed; this in part could be an expression of Strathern’s and Deleuze’s common interest in the nineteenth century sociologist Gabriel Tarde. The commonality between these three thinkers has been noted by many of the later authors that they have influenced, with the ‘ontological turn’ often articulating their thought, and justifying their project, through explicit references to Deleuze (see, e.g., Holbraad & Pedersen 2017). But Wagner has never cited Deleuze, and while Strathern has at times acknowledged Deleuze’s work, it has been more along the lines of noting a commonality than acknowledging intellectual descent.

[9] When I make this claim, I am sometimes met with protestations that Paul Rabinow has a more nuanced concept of the assemblage that is closer to that of Deleuze’s own understanding; particularly, Rabinow’s assemblage is presented as a more enduring form. However, as Rabinow himself asserts, his assemblages are ‘comparatively effervescent’, operating on a time scale of ‘years or decades’ which is much shorter than the other conceptual objects Rabinow relates them to (2003: 56). The comparative life spans of social objects can be seen by tracing what appears to be a Rabinowian great chain of social-ontological being, in which ‘problematizations’ (which are thematic, open ended, and sometimes millennia-old running grand challenges, such as ‘discipline’ or ‘sexuality’) trigger the emergence of assemblages, which will in turn either ‘disaggregate’ or mature in an ‘apparatus’. Sandwiched between human conundrums and long running social formations, the assemblage is, like most other anthropological assemblages, again just a short-lived, emergent form.

[10] This should not be read as a critique of Robbins take on Biehl’s 2005 book Vita, nor as an endorsement of it; rather, it is an observation that an anthropology of suffering and an anthropology of the good may have a more intimate connection with one another than appears on the surface (see Bialecki 2014).

[11] See footnote four, infra.

[12] This already overly long entry does not have space to discuss Deleuze’s extensive writings on cinema, which have been used not just to think through the production of film as a creative enterprise (see, e.g., Baxstrom & Meyers 2016; Pandian 2015) but also analogically to think through other social phenomena (see, e.g., Baxstrom 2008; Bialecki & Bielo 2016; Kapferer 2013). We have also not addressed the role of Deleuze in ethnographies of science, multi-species relations, or infectious disease, which have their own engagement with Deleuzian concepts such as assemblage, becoming, or rhizomes (see., e.g., Lowe 2010). Nor have we addressed what a Deleuzian politically engaged and applied anthropology look like.

Tourism

Felix Stein — Thu, 30 Nov 2017 14:57:29 +0000

Rupert Stasch

University of Cambridge

Initially published 30 Nov 2017

http://doi.org/10.29164/17tourism

Abstract:

Tourism is a new phenomenon in world history, but today more people travel long distances for this purpose than for any other. This entry traces some main contributions anthropologists have made to understanding tourism interactions since starting to study them in the 1970s. One common theme of much of this work has been that tourism often involves the extension of tourists’ home-society ideas and systems into times and spaces of the trip, even though the activity is conceived of as an escape from regular life. The pleasure and value that tourists find in their trips can be explained by an anthropological model of ritual as the embodied, microcosmic enactment of a larger macrocosmic concept. Staging, commodification, and spectatorship are some of the more specific processes that anthropologists have studied, by which tourists’ home systems are projected outward into other spaces. In the 2000s, however, some anthropological work has focused on how tourism encounters generate new structures of experience and social involvement not determined by the orientations of any one set of participants. This work emphasises how actions and experiences of different participants are interdependent, in ways not well-grasped by a stark dichotomy of ‘tourists’ versus ‘hosts’ as whole blocs. This work also emphasises the psychological complexity of all persons' experiences in the encounters.

Introduction: contexts and contradictions

If tourism is defined as leisure travel carried out by broad sectors of a society, it has only existed since the mid-nineteenth century. Yet total international leisure trips have surpassed a billion per year since around 2010, and international and domestic tourism together account for a great portion of global economic activity.^[1] Tourism’s rapid rise from nonexistent to the largest travel practice on earth is closely tied to other new social conditions that arose in Europe across the nineteenth century and now define modern life worldwide. Outlining tourism’s links to these processes is one way to grasp basic features of what tourism even is. These links also give a useful entrée into anthropologists’ specific contribution to the academic study of tourism.

The idea of ‘leisure’ itself came into existence as a shadow or inverted mirror of wage labour, business enterprise, and the structuring of society around market- or state-organised industrial production. In the British Industrial Revolution and its successors elsewhere, societies went from being organised around agriculture to being organised around factories, workers’ sale of their labour, and the purchase of mass-produced commodities. Meanwhile, the French Revolution and other political ruptures demoted the interests of hereditary aristocrats in favor of the interests of businessmen, partly through the spread of ideas about individual freedom innovated by Enlightenment philosophers. These modern revolutions offered people a dream of freedom that was contradicted by their lives’ actual organization around clock-regimented wage labour and the management of enterprises. One early expression of this contradiction was the rise in the late-eighteenth century of the artistic and literary movement of Romanticism, which emphasised the artist’s self-isolating turn away from society, toward his own interior ideas and feelings or toward a sublime and wild nature. Romanticism’s highest good is the exercise of the individual creative will in a personal quest outside of the bonds of established order, as in William Blake’s assertion that ‘I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s’. Ideas initially pioneered by Romantic intellectual and artistic elites later became the mass practice of tourists: the purpose of leisure travel is to get out of regular routines.

In tourism, people thus rather paradoxically seek to flee realities that they have created and that have created them. Many types of tourism are explicitly motivated by desire to escape from work, or even from market-mediated forms of social experience more broadly. Yet tourism is itself an intrinsically industrialised activity, dependent on market-organised infrastructures of transport and hospitality. That tourism has these kind of tensions at its heart is readily visible in basic features of its commercial structure, and in the divided consciousness of tourists themselves. A perception that tourists take their society with them in the act of seeking to escape it is summed up, for example, in popular ideas of the ‘tourist bubble’ or wishing to travel ‘off the beaten track’. So too, tourism professionals and tourists themselves constantly innovate new tourism destinations, trips, or whole tourism subgenres, the value of which is defined by their distinction of being less ‘touristic’ than other alternatives. The category of ‘tourist’ is intrinsically stigmatic, in tourists’ own consciousness. The figure of the tourist circulates widely in many societies, as an image of a bad actor who engages superficially and insensitively with objects of his or her travel (even though special experience of those objects is the travel’s purpose). Tourism is slightly at war with itself. The same motivating logic that makes the activity worth pursuing, and gives people ideas about pursuing it better, also gives people shame and regret.

A trickle of pioneering anthropological works on tourism began to appear in the 1970s (e.g. Smith 1977). This grew to a flood in the 2000s, and the more recent phase of work has been distinctive in including many full-length books by fieldworkers who had focused on tourism as the main subject of their long-term research (Causey 2003, Tucker 2003). Anthropologists’ slow start in studying tourists may have reflected our special investment in distancing ourselves from this popularly stigmatised other with whom we uncomfortably share a defining focus on travel and sociocultural displacement. The more recent routinization of tourism as a research topic has been supported by anthropology’s wider complete shift, toward the end of the twentieth century, from defining its core subject matter as human life outside of institutions of sociocultural modernity, to putting those institutions at the center of its concerns.

Anthropological work on tourism is now so diverse as to defy summary. One frame for seeing unity across this work, though, is the already-noted pattern that while tourism’s goal is the experience of something outside tourists’ own system, in practice it tends to unfold as the imposition of tourists’ systems into places they engage with. In the next two sections of this entry, I sketch some ways that anthropologists have found this pattern to occur across even more levels than is openly acknowledged by tourists themselves. Across the entire entry, I draw many of my illustrations from studies of cultural tourism, in which the way of life of residents of a certain place is itself the focus of the tourists’ attention and desire in making their trips. A more complete survey of the anthropology of tourism would consider a much broader range of tourism varieties (see, for example, Leite & Graburn 2009; Leite & Swain 2015).

Tourism as ritual: directly experiencing a macrocosm

One way anthropology was pre-adapted to the study of tourism is that anthropologists have long specialised in studying social deviations and inversions that relate systematically to structures of normal life. Ritual is a classic topic in this area, and anthropological thought about ritual offers special promise for elucidating tourists’ paradoxical double-movement of both loosening and intensifying their relation to their society’s dominant structures.

Nelson Graburn (1977) described tourism as a ‘secular ritual’ specifically on the grounds that travelers’ activities invert or suspend norms of the rest of life. Trips to a destination like Las Vegas, for example, involve a dramatic scrambling of regular norms of dress, eroticism, architecture, sleeping, and the interdependence of consumption and labour. This pattern of a break with visitors’ normal practices and experiences at home is partly emphasised, for example, in the highly successful tourism marketing slogan, ‘What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’. To visit this city as a tourist is to enter a time and space of money’s hyper-circulation and hyper-expenditure, in activities of looking, eating, drinking, shopping, touching, and gambling, all separated from the paid jobs through which most visitors earn money for consumption-based living in their normal places.

There is something more specific to tourism and ritual, though, than the bare element of an inversion or break. Rituals are further set apart from the rest of life by how immediately and vividly they make ideas of a general macrocosm seem present in the microcosm of embodied sensory experience (Stasch 2011). Any given leisure trip, like any given ritual, raises an interpretive question of what broader concept is emphasised through the specific break with normal life that participants undergo in it. For example, the concept of a trip to Las Vegas is one of heightened involvement with core structures of the whole capitalist social world of the mediation of sensation by money. In this heightening, some features of life in such a system are specially revealed or intensified, such as the chanciness of financial success or ruin, the routine purchase of bodily pleasures using money, and the idea of turning money into more money. Other features of life in capitalism are specially hidden or distorted, such as the dependence of consumption and wealth on processes of someone actually making the food and other articles people buy.

Another example of the importance of an overarching macrocosmic story to the spatiotemporal structure of tours is described in a classic article by Edward Bruner and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1994), about the Kenyan destination of Mayers Ranch, a homestead and garden complex owned by a British-descended family who, in the colonial era, had run cattle on a larger bloc of surrounding land. When the ranch operated as a tour destination in the 1980s, package travellers would arrive by bus each afternoon from Nairobi, mingle on a lawn near the Mayers’ house, then descend to a performance space in a nearby village occupied seasonally by Maasai and Samburu on paid retainer from the owners. The tourists would watch and photograph these Maasai and Samburu perform dances, buy their handicrafts, then ascend again to the Mayers’ lawn for tea and biscuits, walk around the surrounding English garden complex, and chat with the owners. Finally, the visitors boarded buses to continue on their wider Kenya itinerary.

The macrocosmic story experienced by visitors was thus one of division of the world into two imagined whole ways of human being: savage or pastoral tribal people on the one hand, and cultivated British colonial landowners on the other. The pleasure of a visit flowed from the site’s close juxtaposition of spaces of Maasai dance and English gardening, respectively embodying qualities of wildness and orderly control. Each space threw the other into relief. Relations of colonial difference and domination across world history—and all the ways humans have ever been different from each other and mutually involved—are complex, ambiguous, and difficult to know. Mayers Ranch, though, gave visitors a clear experience of two contrasting types. Visitors experienced this simplified drama not mainly through explicit statements of its terms but through concrete sensations of sight, touch, hearing, and taste, and through their own bodily movements between different physical areas of the ritual site. This pattern of travelers experiencing large cosmological stories in a dense array of coordinated bodily, personal sensations is a main insight that emerges from comparing tourism with ritual.

Big concepts realised concretely in a leisure trip generally come from the society of the tourists. A macrocosmic story experienced on the personal scale of a tourist’s own bodily perceptions might feel like it flows toward the visitor from the visited destination, but usually travelers have acquired their desires and expectations about that destination from literature, mass media representations, and traditions of photographic imagery circulating densely in their home social networks (e.g. the case of Tahiti, discussed by Kahn 2010). Anthropologists have used diverse analytic terms for discussing these patterns of how destinations are linked to stereotyped qualities and concepts, and have looked at diverse practical processes by which the concept of a specific destination is built up and reproduced. One influential category, for example, is that of ‘place-images’ (introduced by geographer Rob Shields, 1991), while a more recent prominent terminology is that of ‘imaginaries’ (e.g. Salazar & Graburn 2014). Whatever the chosen vocabulary, much anthropological work centrally involves putting tourists’ ideas about a destination under scrutiny, as features of the tourists’ own consciousness and own ideological world.

Staging, commodification, and spectatorship

Many factors contribute to a trip’s effect of giving tourists pleasurable, emotionally or morally moving experiences of a macrocosmic story in embodied form. So far, I have emphasised the ideas that tourists carry with them and project onto what they see. But there are also effects fostered by spatial and social displacement itself. When people pass into new places for short periods of time, they are often in a state of simultaneous hyper-ignorance and hyper-knowing. They understand little about what is around them, by comparison to people who live in the place, or by comparison to the tourists’ knowledge of their own normal living environments. But for the same reasons, tourists perceive what is around them with feelings of sensory freshness and heightened potential meaningfulness. Under such conditions, the models, concepts, or macrocosmic stories held by tourists themselves may enjoy a kind of persuasiveness that is less available to a person more deeply familiar with a place.

Additionally, destinations are actively shaped by host communities and professional mediators to match visitors’ expectations and desires. A tourism destination that I have studied is the home place of Korowai people of Indonesian Papua, who are widely celebrated for their ‘treehouse’ architecture and for the other ways that they are thought to embody an archaic condition of tribal, ‘Stone Age’ humanity, characterised by close integration with the surrounding rainforest environment and isolation from global consumer culture. From prior exposure to vast bodies of amateur and professional photographic imagery, tourists have been trained into knowing the concept of tribal humanity by a certain visual look, centered especially on absence of manufactured clothing. In their trips to the Korowai area, this is what tourists most scan for, and are most affected by. Predictably, tour guides and Korowai themselves have conventionalised a practice of staging nudity and traditional dress just for tourists’ benefit, and of clearing out imported articles from houses when tourists are known to be coming. Sometimes tourists know about or explicitly request this staging of appearances, or come to infer that it might be taking place. More often, the visitors are unaware of the special arrangements in place around them, or they ‘do not want to know’ (as one guide described to me the psychology of some clients).

The idea that hosts and destinations are remade in the image of what tourists want is probably the most frequent turn of interpretation developed by anthropologists specifically studying cultural tourism. An early theoretical account of processes of ‘staging’ was given by Dean MacCannell (1976). He posited that the core macrocosmic concept cutting across all tourism was the extreme differentiation of consciousness and activity characteristic of modern society. This differentiation is reflected in people’s pervasive sense that they do not actually know the conditions of their own lives. They expect that any given experience they are having is a ‘frontstage’ appearance, underpinned by ‘backstage’ realities that are hidden from them. MacCannell identifies sightseeing as ‘a ritual performed to the differentiations of society…a kind of collective striving for a transcendence of the modern totality, a way of attempting to overcome the discontinuity of modernity, of incorporating its fragments into unified experience’ (1976: 13). The practical social pattern that results is routine organization of tourism destinations to give visitors an experience of ‘staged authenticity’, by which MacCannell means a systematically produced feeling of passing from a frontstage appearance to a more authentic condition of knowing backstage realities. Tours of commodity production sites like airplane factories, movie studios, or wineries are one kind of match to MacCannell’s template. But an idea of ‘authenticity’ does seem to be a defining preoccupation of human consciousness in modern societies generally (Trilling 1972). This idea was elaborated with special intensity by the Romantic movement, and is often a good descriptive match to tourists’ motives in visiting a variety of destination types. For example, tourists’ visits to Korowai under the sign of experiencing a timeless, anachronistically unchanged ‘Stone Age’ society could be described, in MacCannell’s terms, as following a dream of access to the ‘backstage’ of all of humanity.

Since ‘authenticity’ is tourists’ own problem, practical patterns of staging of authenticity are another example of tourists’ cultural condition extending outward to shape most aspects of actual tourism interactions. The main point of MacCannell’s account is not a game of the academic analyst smugly puncturing the tourists’ illusions, but just a realistic description of the social, communicative organization of the tourism process, in which the most active and knowing roles are often held by participants other than the tourists themselves. Patterns of tourists experiencing a general macrocosmic concept in their immediate sensory experiences of a destination depend on a great deal of socially distributed work. Visited people and mediating specialists co-construct this experience with and for the visitors. ‘One person’s leisure becomes another person’s labor’, as Jenny Chio says about ethnic minority villagers in China, for whom hosting urban Han visitors is now central to their livelihoods and to the physical appearances of their settlements (2014: 9).

Two related themes that anthropologists often document when studying tourism are commodification and visual spectatorship. Destinations and the people or attractions there are often valued because they seem to stand outside systems of commoditised social relating and material provisioning central to the tourists’ home worlds. The tourists are interested in people who produce their material livelihoods directly from their surrounding environment; they are interested in the sublime aesthetics of the natural environment, or the sublime bodily feelings of athletic acts in that environment; they are interested in visited people’s spirituality, their family relations, or their direct embodiment of an ethnic heritage. At the same time, visited people and specialist mediators in tourism encounters are often strongly focused on tourists’ wealth, and the payments or other economic benefits that flow from tourist visits. Greenwood (1989), Bunten (2008), Comaroff and Comaroff (2009), and many others have analyzed tourism as leading to the invention or standardization of local tradition in forms that did not exist independently of tourism itself, and as leading to the commodification of formerly noncommoditised areas of cultural life (as in the new market value of Korowai nudity). These authors have also described how visited people navigate difficult fractures of consciousness and practical tradeoffs between alternative definitions of what is good in life, under the structural conditions of the tourism system.

On the subject of visual spectatorship, consider the documentary film Cannibal Tours (O'Rourke 1988), which is anthropologists’ most widely shared reference point about tourism, due to its frequent use in teaching. The film depicts German, Italian, and American shipboard tourists visiting Sepik River villages in Papua New Guinea. Part of what makes the film painful to watch is how committed the tourists are to interacting with their hosts mainly in a frame of spectatorship and photography. They look at the visited people as objects, from a position of voyeuristic separation. This commitment to a certain frame of visual interaction blocks tourists from perceiving the hosts’ actual ideas, feelings, and ambivalences around tourism, which the film also depicts and which are quite different from what the tourists project onto those hosts.

The prominence of photography and spectatorship in Cannibal Tours is typical of many other tourism interactions. Almost all tourism involves an expanded emphasis on activities of looking, with tourists tending to be positioned as lookers and visited persons or sites as looked upon. The expression ‘the tourist gaze’ was coined by sociologist John Urry (1990) in part to refer to this pattern. Many anthropological studies of specific tourism destinations have dwelt in detail on the importance of certain patterns of sight in the encounters. There are many reasons that spectatorship and photography expand in this way. As has been already noted, ideas of destinations are acquired in advance through the circulation of visual images. So too, in the time of their visits, tourists often think of how their experiences can later be communicated and used socially in their home locations, and photography is suited to those goals. Tourism arose historically in close relation to the nineteenth-century rise of world fairs, public museums, department stores, and other institutions of ‘the exhibitionary complex’ influentially described by Bennett (1988). These institutions turned on a separation of seeing subject from seen object, and on an idea of this ‘spectatorial’ seeing as immediate knowing. The ongoing strength of the link between tourism and looking seems to flow from a basic compatibility between tourism’s grounding in a Romantic model of breaking out of normal experience in order to be affected by a sacred other order, and a widespread modern cultural understanding of sight as a channel of knowing by which the knower has a frictionless or ‘free’ experience of the seen object. There is a match between the feelings of perfection and purity surrounding a photograph’s realistic representation of what it depicts, and the ideal of visited places or people as themselves perfect, pure, and uplifting.

One common anthropological contribution has been to make practices of sight at the center of tourist activity stand out as culturally and socially peculiar, by documenting visited people’s responses to tourists’ visual orientations. Maasai and Samburu people who worked at Mayers Ranch referred to the end of each year’s tourism season as ‘clos[ing] the picture’ (Bruner & Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994: 461). This is an indication of how aware they were that their own bodily presence and actions on the site were already a picture, organised for the visitors’ anticipated spectatorship, before any specific photograph was taken of them. People of Sumba in Indonesia, in a symbolic echo of their experience of tourists’ photography, repeat fearful rumors of ‘long-haired foreigners’ who hang local children upside down in order to drain their blood into ‘metal boxes’, then take the blood home to their electronics factories to wash the radios, televisions, and other devices made there, giving them their superior quality (Hoskins 2002). Miao and Zhuang villagers studied by Chio (2013; 2014) methodically if cautiously follow the Chinese state’s exhortation to make a spectacle of themselves, such as by covering concrete buildings with rustic wood. They are reflexive about the primacy of vision as their meeting ground with tourists, and about the gaps or articulations between visual appearances and other levels of their overall embodied lives, such as economic goals.

The themes of staging, commodification, and spectatorship connect closely with each other and can be seen as alternate faces of a single complex. Even from my brief outline of these themes, we can appreciate the following broad characteristics of that complex. Tourism itself is a kind of system or culture. It is a system that sets up a frame of difference and separation, as well as relating and engagement, between tourists and the people, places, or objects on which their travel is focused. The position of tourists themselves tends to exert more power than other positions, in setting the terms of relation. Complexly, though, visited people and tourism professionals sometimes have more active and knowing roles than tourists, in the processes of staging, commodification, and spectatorship by which tourists experience a personal ritual enactment of a macrocosmic story.

Host-guest interdependence and the creation of new social systems

I noted earlier that tourists tend to be aware of tourism’s paradox of imposing into the world the very structures they seek to escape through their travel. So too with respect to the more specific analytic themes just discussed: not just academics, but publics at large are sensitive to the likelihood of tourism interactions being voyeuristic, tourism performances being artificially staged to match tourists’ desires, and tourism deepening the commodification of social life in visited destinations. The fact that tourists themselves are often aware of these possible patterns suggests not only that the patterns are true, but that other things could be true as well. If part of the culture of tourists is critical disgust toward the figure of the ‘ugly tourist’—who projects his or her assumptions and habits into visited settings, through the processes of staging, commodification, and spectatorship—then there is more to the culture of tourists than the unreflexive projection of their assumptions and habits into visited settings.

While staging, commodification, spectatorship, and ritual realization of tourists’ own macrocosmic stories are major patterns of how tourism is organised, the overall anthropological status of these patterns is that they are questions. Researchers have asked whether and how much these patterns actually occur, and what else occurs as well. My initial statement, that tourists take their social system with them when they travel, should likewise be turned into a question, or a series of linked questions. Can a person leave his or her social system, and in what ways? How much and in what ways is a framework of categories something that people live their lives within? How do categorising frameworks deal with, suppress, or otherwise relate to forms of life that are foreign to them? To what extent does physical location in a given place mean being ‘inside’ a certain social system, framework of categories, or macrocosmic story? Or, conversely, to what extent does being inside a framework of categories mean being in a physical location? In what ways is movement between places something a person does from a stable ongoing position ‘inside’ social systems, categorising frameworks, and stories? In what ways is such movement something that breaks apart existing forms of life and assembles fundamentally different ones? These are questions that tourists themselves investigate practically in their travel, as do hosts and mediators who work with the visitors. They are also questions addressed analytically in anthropological studies.

One illustration of these issues is the shift in interactional relations between tourists and hosts that was regularly fostered by a specific Aboriginal tour guide’s telling of an autobiographical story while working at an indigenous-owned tourism enterprise in northern Australia, during Anke Tonnaer’s fieldwork there from 2004 to 2006. Referring to this guide as ‘Jimmy’, Tonnaer describes how he led groups of non-Aboriginal day visitors on a two-hour ‘bush walk’ (2016). This walk was focused on traditional foods and medicines that could be gathered from the land. In this way, the walk gave tourists a vivid embodied experience of the main macrocosmic model orienting their trips, namely an idea of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people as separated by a temporal chasm of the archaic versus the modern, symbolised by the intimate links between Aboriginal people and wild nature (this is similar to the model we have already seen to be broadly experienced by tourists visiting Mayers Ranch). However, at a certain point on the walk, Jimmy would often point out to guests the remnants of a stone oven, and explain that it dated to a period when the area was part of a ranch. This in turn would trigger his narration of the personal memory of how his own sister had been the offspring of a white ranch worker and Aboriginal mother, and at a young age was removed from her Aboriginal mother into church custody, never to return. This removal was carried out under the wider Australian policy that the tourists would have associated with the history of the ‘Stolen Generations’ (though Jimmy did not reference these categories in relating his personal memory). When Jimmy would tell this story of loss, each tour group would fall into a pronounced silence. Tonnaer perceives the story to have been very moving to them, provoking not only feelings of compassion for Jimmy’s experience (which they would sometimes put into words), but also a more general transformation of ‘the temporal rift between the tourist self and cultural other on which the cultural touristic experience was largely based’ into a relation of ‘coevalness’, or joint involvement in a common and difficult past (180). Tonnaer also considers that the visiting tourists ‘often wanted to listen’ to Jimmy’s story (182, emphasis in original). Being told this story did not make their visit less valuable, but rather was a fulfillment of their tourism’s goals, albeit not goals that had been known or scripted in advance in a specific form. The pattern of interactions between Jimmy and participants in the walk ‘points to a more complex makeup and diverse set of perhaps inchoate motivations of tourists in their desire to meet an Aboriginal person that cannot be captured entirely by the longing for an experience of cultural ancientness’ (Tonnaer 2016: 182).

One tendency of anthropological work on tourism in the 2000s has been skepticism about the dichotomy of ‘tourist’ versus ‘visited people’ as whole blocs, of a kind that informed my discussion in earlier sections. Instead, researchers have focused on differences among tourists, and among visited people, that are also centrally important to tourism interactions; on the complexity of tourists’ own consciousness and actions if these are studied ‘in the round’ rather than as if the tourists were ‘part persons’ (Graburn & Barthel-Bouchier 2001); on the elaborate systems of mediating roles and institutions on which encounters between hosts and guests or destination objects actually depend (Salazar 2010; Satsuka 2015); and on the forms of cosmopolitanism and self-awareness regularly found in the lives of visited ‘local’ people, contrary to stereotypes of tourists as mobile and hosts as immobile and whole (e.g. Causey 2007; Notar 2008; Chio 2014; Swain 2014). Stark divides between visitors and visited are often prominent in the discourse of tourism participants themselves, and the contrasts in economic or political freedom of movement between them should not be downplayed. But it is also important to understand how the identity categories on either ‘side’ of an encounter—and the further identity categories differentiated within those sides or at their edges—are produced through tourism interactions, and do not only preexist them (Meiu 2017).

Bruner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett at one point state that ‘we might say that a new Maasai-and-Samburu-dancing-for-tourists-at-Mayers culture has evolved from the interaction of the Maasai with the Mayers and the tourists, tour agents, film crews, travel writers, and anthropologists’ (1994: 447). This type of insight has been explored with increased subtlety in recent scholarship. Consider an unanticipated outcome of international Jewish tourism to Portugal as described by Naomi Leite (2017). The tourists’ goal was to visit and learn about the famed isolated communities of ongoing underground Jewish practice that had been discovered by folklorists in outlying rural locations in the early 1900s, many centuries after the forced conversion of all Iberian Jews to Catholicism. For certain international tourists, though, what turned out to be the most moving aspect of their visits to Portugal were their encounters with new self-formed communities of urban Jewish-identified persons. The people in these urban networks had not been raised as practicing Jews, nor in many cases even told by anyone they were Jewish. But as adults, they independently came to the conviction that they are Jews by descent, and formed an intense desire for religious knowledge and belonging in this inferred identity. For the tourists, meanwhile, Portuguese historical patterns of Jewish rupture or perseverance were resonantly metaphoric of their own complex relations to Jewishness. The tourists were in a position to help the young urban Portuguese self-identifying Jews, and of wanting to help them. They could offer knowledge, institutional standing, and connections to actual Jewish religious practice. The tourists made repeat visits, set up organizational support networks, and facilitated the urban Jewish-identified individuals’ international passages to Jewish legal recognition as co-religionists.

While this case is an extreme example of forging new ties (and it involves historical processes much larger than tourism), it is increasingly common for anthropological work to focus on tourism participants’ complex mutual involvement, and on the new systems of ideas and social relations they create together, alongside documenting patterns of the kind I discussed earlier of tourists dominantly projecting their home systems of buying and knowing into new settings.

Yet while in many cases a space of tourism encounter is best described as a new and systematic reality of its own, still the participants in this novel system often have different understandings of their relations. Returning to issues of voyeurism and photography, for example, a striking case of disparity of understandings is described by Alex Gillespie (2006). In this study of interactions between foreign tourists and Ladakhis in northern India, Gillespie shows that while tourists routinely say Ladakhis dislike being photographed because it objectifies them, Ladakhis themselves actually approve of tourist photography, as an appropriate celebration of the value of Ladakhi life. The tourists are actually oriented to the views of other tourists about photography, even though they attribute those views to Ladakhis. In a similar structure of mutual misunderstanding, Korowai of Indonesian Papua often say that tourists’ motive in coming to visit them is that they know Korowai are ‘people without articles’, and because of this feel love or longing for Korowai and a desire to come give to them the articles they lack. It is actually true of tourists that they love Korowai because of their separateness from global consumer culture. But the idea that this leads the tourists to want to give Korowai articles is not accurate. Instead it is something Korowai infer from tourists’ payment behavior, against the background of Korowai people’s own norms of regularly sharing with relatives who lack something. It is a widespread irony of structures of working misunderstanding between tourism participants that the tourists desire to be more like the people they visit – in having a close relation to something like ‘nature’ or ‘tradition’ – while visited people desire to be more like the tourists, in having a close relation to wealth and other aspects of urban modernity.

Conclusion: the psychological complexity of images of others

Anthropologists’ commitment to long-term fieldwork is particularly well-suited to the documentation of the marked disparities of understanding held by different tourism participants. The experience of visited people was hardly taken into account in scholarship on tourism in any empirically-grounded manner until the recent wave of new ethnographic studies. The documentation of hosts’ experience has been the deepest contribution of anthropological work on tourism to date.

Because of the transience of encounters between tourism participants, and the force that is thus exerted by stereotypes, images, and speculative reasoning in shaping participants’ experience of each other and their actions, anthropology’s rich theoretical tradition of the study of symbolic representations has been an underlying foundation of anthropology’s contributions. I would suggest in closing, though, that there is a psychological complexity to all people’s relations to the images guiding their knowledge and action that has been difficult for scholars to give its due. This psychological complexity is illustrated by tourists to Ladakh who project onto Ladakhis their fellow tourists’ feelings of the shamefulness of photo-taking; tourists who see Portugal’s urban ‘Marranos’ as a collective embodiment of the macrocosmic story of Jewish destruction and survival (and so do not probe too deeply into any one individual’s upbringing); and tourists to northern Australia, who mainly think of Aboriginal persons as archaic people of nature, but also bear a half-formed desire to understand histories of colonial connection and domination. This layering of what people think or know—the ways in which they could be said to know more than they think they know, or less than they think they know—seem important to the smooth unfolding of tourism meetings, and the unfolding of similar transient encounters across major social gaps in general. Perhaps more nuanced understandings of this issue will be something else that grows out of anthropological work on tourism in the future.

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Note on contributor

Rupert Stasch teaches in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and is the author of Society of others: kinship and mourning in a West Papuan place (2009).

Dr Rupert Stasch, Department of Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, United Kingdom. rs839@cam.ac.uk

[1] Promotional organizations like the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) and the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) regularly issue online reports describing tourism as accounting for between 3% and 10% of global GDP, as being the world’s largest service sector industry (compare Lew 2008, Williams & Lew 2015: 3), and as almost exceeding in size the world’s largest goods-focused industries other than fossil fuels.