A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times by Anand Pandian

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times by Anand Pandian Adam Fleischmann Anand Pandian, A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 168 pp. A Possible Anthropology is a collection of essays about the anthropological at work in the world. Noting the discipline's "ambiguous history," the book opens with a lingering but hopeful feeling: "I couldn't shake the sense of anthropology's radical promise" (2). Situated within Pandian's research on media, ecology, and the anthropological, this book is a prudent analysis of the practice of anthropology, its past and present disciplinary demons and, ultimately, a vision of a relatively open-ended future for it. Anand Pandian's latest follows recent trends in academic publishing toward the concise, essayistic, and aesthetically pleasing. This short book is appropriate for graduate and advanced undergraduate seminars. At the same time, many of its articulations could form the basis for discussion about the elusive problem of what, exactly, anthropology is and does. This makes the book equally appropriate for lower-level anthropology or ethnographic methods courses interested in discussing the potential of the discipline beyond lackluster textbook definitions. The book takes up Pandian's sense of anthropology's expansive possibility in order to "meet the challenge of uneasy times" (4), namely ecological crises, rising economic inequality, and racialized violence. In this regard, Pandian argues, "the discipline has essential resources to contribute" (3). Fundamentally, his is a vision of anthropology as an endeavor to nurture a "humanity yet to come." Anthropology is, and to some degree always has been, Pandian argues, an effort to seek out, unsettle, and [End Page 157] remake a common humanity. At stake here is a (both progressive and traditionalist) critique of the present, a yearning for a more just future, which anthropology can help conjure. Chapter 1 is a meditation on anthropology's empirical engagement with the world. Tracing the discipline's traffic between the scientific and the literary, it juxtaposes two important, seemingly disparate figures in early anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski and Zora Neale Hurston. Making use of textual analysis and biographical details, Pandian affirms how the two attend anthropologically to the matter and magic of "the world at hand"—revealing something of the stakes of anthropological inquiry. Both writers are receptive to the happenings of the world, ideas gained through experiences. Both employ the generative power and imaginative magic of "being there" in order to grasp at something more than what is ostensibly there. The world-making powers of storytelling, whether novelistic or strictly ethnographic, are "techniques of writing and persuasion" (37) as much as "resources for the reinvention of reality itself" (29).1 For Pandian's vision of the discipline, however, empiricism is key to anthropology's world-remaking possibility. Chapter 2 asks, "What dispositions toward the world does an anthropologist cultivate and carry between office and field site, library and classroom?" (48). Spanning these four domains of anthropological labor, Pandian finds common ground in experience: the method wherein anthropologists' knowledge-making tasks of reading, writing, teaching, and researching are united. Experience, he claims, is both the mercurial process and object of anthropological method. We collect our "data" empirically through experience, and the experiences of others constitute these data. The chapter follows this method of experience at work in the world in reading, writing, teaching, and field working. We begin in Claude Lévi-Strauss' fortress of a library-office in Paris, tracing anthropology-as-reading as a passage in space as much as time, a literal circle etched by cyclical labor into the French structuralist's floorboards between desk and notes and bookshelf. We are led to the desk of anthropologist and poet Michael Jackson, following the amoebic movement of writing on a mirrored computer monitor; then Jane Guyer's Johns Hopkins classroom, spontaneous and open to the unexpected; and finally, to experimental fieldwork in a Toronto black oak savanna with Natasha Myers. Experience in each of these domains of anthropological practice is "process and endpoint, method and object, means and ends" (74). [End Page 158] The third essay seeks out the anthropological at work in the world, rather than the work of anthropologists out in the world. It...