Kelty’s great series of recent posting on The Anthropology Of Freedom has spurred some great comments from a variety of people, and I wanted to add my own two cents here. As an occasional collaborator with Kelty and others of his ilk such as Biella “Mad Dog” Coleman, I’ve encountered these recent projects on ‘liberalism’, ‘freedom’, and other such new-fangled ideas through the lens of my own decidedly old-fangled interests in Melanesia and kinship. I have to admit that I’m a little skeptical about these projects, mostly because of the long previous history of “Anthropologies of…” and so I’d like to obliquely comment on them through a quick discussion of what it might mean to do an anthropology “of” something.
Object Domain: Probably the least intellectually satisfying but best choice for your career: delineate and actually-existing object out there and make your discipline the study of it. Rake in big $$$ for large-scale, cross-cultural projects. Give graduate students a clear paradigm and a mode of normal science to do.
For instance: There are things like myths which are self-contained, internally structured, comparable, and cross-cultural. Record five thousand of them to find out what the underlying similarities are. Result: Joseph Campbell! All human beings are plugged into the divine world of transcendence and occasionally it spills out into the mundane world. Do a cross-cultural, historical studies of differential human responses to the same basic phenomenon. Result: Mircea Eliade. People in our colonies are all organized on the basis of real-out there kinship systems whose structure and function can be compared. Result: Radcliffe-Brown.
The interwar period was a time incredible time for the delineation of such object domains in the human sciences, and anthropology was no exception — you could do the anthropology “of law” or “of art” or “of politics” and it all fit together in perfectly. But of course we’ve been doing this for much longer then that — think of earlier Victorian literatures on ‘totemism’ or ‘hysteria’ for instance.
There are two problems with this approach. Ok there are more than that. Any realist epistemology of the human sciences has, historically, been very difficult to advocate if you pay attention to what humans actually do. But really, the two problems are: taking everyday notions and elevating them to analytic status almost always results in you realizing half way through that the notion can’t make sense of the evidence without being stretched so out of shape that it either falls apart (like ‘totemism’) or morphs into something else (as the literature on ‘ritual’ very fruitfully turned into a study of ‘performativity’). The second problem is that most of the time the things that you think of as actually existing don’t actually exist — kinship systems, for instance, are now pretty universally understood not to be ‘out there’ in the sense that Fortes thought they were. So the concept can’t bear the weight, and the phenomena don’t exist. Which can be ok if you are all about the journey, but not if you’re focused on the destination.
I think its pretty clear that Kelty doesn’t seem to be doing this.
Generalizing the concept to broaden the conversation: Another way to approach anthropology ‘of’ something is via a sort of logical positivism manqué. On this approach the goal is to articulate the features of a previously-unarticulated concept (like ‘freedom’) such that it can be incorporated in a broader or more generalized theory of human action. That general theory can then be used to talk to philosophers, or economists, or whatever. This conversation-broadening language can be thought of as a ‘pidgin’ or ‘trading language’ (as Galison does) or else just ‘theory’ in the actual sense of the term.
This is fine if you want to do this, but I don’t think that it’s surprising that anthropologists have, so far, wanted to do this with freedom. Discourses of ‘freedom’ in the United States (where Kelty and I work) are explicitly normative and tied to mainstream discourses. How is this surprising? Anthropology is explicitly opposed to ethnocentrism and was founded at a time when ‘freedom’ meant ‘a state’s right to institute Jim Crow’. Second-generation (read: WASP) anthropologists like Redfield and Linton did think about freedom and progress, etc. but by the time the GI Bill anthropologists institutionalized themselves in the academy, liberalism was the ideology of the bourgeoisie. It’s a sign of the swing to the right of some brands of anthropologists (the kinds who do ‘paraethnography’) that these issues of liberalism come up again. Similar histories could be written for France (where ethnology started socialist) and England (where it began as objective and value free).
Large sections of anthropological theory have focused on emancipation, revolution, equality, and so forth — but they’ve never explicitly taken up the word ‘freedom’. Which doesn’t mean that they weren’t interested in it.
Anthropologists might have a contribution to make towards an understanding of what ‘agency’ is and how macro-orders of determination do or don’t structure action (Paul Kockelman has published on this recently, for instance) and how this relates to moral deliberation. Equally, we could take models from broader theory and try analyzing our ethnographic material with them “the ethics of blogging…. environmentalism as ethical form… etc. etc.”. But most of the work in this area comes from people less squeamish about normativity. Thus while anthropology has Faubion’s anthropological ethics in which Aristotle is inflected with Foucault, in economics they have Capability approaches to development (‘as freedom’) in which Sen and Nussbaum inflect Aristotle with Rawls.
Ethnographic Theorizing: The most promising way to get into an anthropology ‘of’ Freedom is, I think, through particularization not generalization. This means asking: how can we take this concept, understand it as richly as possible, and use this ethnographically specific idea not just as a ‘native’ model but something we can use for our own analysis. This is (I think) the approach described as ‘ethnographic theory’ in the teaser email for the upcoming journal Hau which made the rounds a few months ago. It’s also an approach that I’m familiar with from my own work in the Pacific, where we are trying to encourage a new generation of scholars who are both analysts and Natives (with a capital N) on the one hand and, on the other, experiment with forms of anthropological knowledge which treat indigenous culture as theoretical exegesis. This way, both the people and their ideas get a fair shake.
This direction — more detail, more exploration of variance, ambiguities, historical transformations — is what I feel is too often lacking in ‘anthropologies of’. To a certain extent it’s understandable — taking American discourses of freedom as the subject of a lit review means reading thousands of sermons produced across scores of decades. It means reading books like The Story of American Freedom and Nation of Agents. The other option of studying ‘liberalism’ in Italy and New York and just saying ‘you know, liberalism as a cultural form‘ gives up specifying who, specifically, you are talking to, and what, specifically, you are talking about.
This can be very freeing — cultural studies is blessed by not having to begin every sentence with an ‘among the…’. But ultimately the danger is that discourses of freedom become too free, too untethered from the coordinates from which they were originally beamed up. Soon we begin slipping into liberalism as an object domain, or promise to engage in general theory but never get around to it.
In conclusion, I think that anthropology’s own unique — and by unique I mean ‘weird’ — brand of theorizing might be the best way to do an ‘anthropology of…’. But it would also be a method that would be the most particularizing, not the most generalizing, the one most led by the voices of others rather than extracted out of our preconceptions, the one which sought the most analytic purchase from the most culturally specific forms of thought. Let he who has ears hear.