Dark Anthropology and Its Others: Theory Since the Eighties

Abstract

The article observes several emergent trends in anthropology since the 1980s against a backdrop of the rise of neoliberalism as both an economic and a governmental formation. Those trends are presented as a cluster of three interrelated areas of work: the first area involves the emergence of what the author calls “dark anthropology,” including both theory and ethnography; the second area has to do with the dialectically related emergence of what has been called “anthropologies of ‘the good’”; the third area embraces the re-emergence of the study of “resistance,” which the author treats as an umbrella term for a range of new critical ethnographic and theoretical work. Considering the first area, i.e. “dark anthropology”, the author explains that this is anthropology that focuses on the harsh dimensions of social life (power, domination, inequality, and oppression), as well as on the subjective experience of these dimensions in the form of depression and hopelessness. In doing so, she discerns two main types of “dark anthropologists”: researchers that study neoliberalism as an economical system and those who see it as a specific form of governmentality. The second area, i.e. “anthropologies of ‘the good’”, includes studies of “the good life” and “happiness,” as well as studies of morality and ethics. Researchers involved in this area try to find out how communities of people can lead a meaningful existence and create projects of a better life in dark conditions of neoliberalism. Finally, the author considers what may be thought of as a different kind of anthropology of the good, namely new directions in the anthropology of critique, resistance, and activism. Among those works, author pays special attention to the projects necessitating researcher involvement, i.e. “activist anthropology.”