Activist Anthropology Research Articles

Poetry in Pursuit of Activist Anthropology

Poetry in Pursuit of Activist Anthropology

Editors' note: Activist anthropology, public engagement, and invasive species

In the Editors' note, we present the texts of this issue, which consists of individual article and research report submissions sent to us. Once again,by fortunate happenstance, the various articles, research reports and essays discuss related topics, lending the issue a sense of internal coherence. The texts discuss common topics such as migration and border violence, activist anthropology and the anthropology of activism, rootedness and displacement. In addition, the essay and conference report engage in debates over public anthropology and contesting hegemonies within the discipline.

Dilemmas of anthropological activism, solidarity, and human rights: Lessons from Haiti

AbstractBuilding on a growing anthropological engagement with and interrogation of the multiple forms and meanings of activism, this article—based on over 20 years of activist engagement and ethnographic interviews spanning 11 years—offers ethnographically grounded understandings of solidarity activism. The rich and at times messy (auto)ethnographic data suggest that contradictions inherent to liberal humanism can increase hierarchies and social distance between groups across national boundaries. Further, new social media technologies notwithstanding, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) remain hegemonic vehicles for this transnational exchange. The experience in Haiti, dubbed the “Republic of NGOs,” highlights contradictions within solidarity activism, generating a useful set of questions for other activist anthropologists and solidarity activists who work elsewhere. Moving beyond the discussion of what anthropology brings to activism, or the reverse, this article offers insights from ethnographic analyses of NGOs, or NGOgraphy, to critically understand and assess anthropological activism. Specifically, building off insights of “NGOing” as a verb, this article interrogates the (micro)politics, structures, and consequences of intervention. Further, international solidarity activism often operates on logics of projects and deliverables, and therefore NGOing can eclipse other “metrics,” disrupting and dividing local communities. Like NGOs, anthropologists function within a hierarchical transnational political economy and division of labor. [activist anthropology, Haiti, NGOs, solidarity, autoethnography]

COVID-19, Affect, and Activist Anthropology

Abstract: Anthropologists have long grappled with how and to what extent researchers should disentangle personal emotions from their analysis of their interlocutors. For scholar-activists, this complexity is enriched if/when researchers are directly engaging in social movements or activist organizing. How does a researcher navigate the blurred boundaries between participating in a social movement—planning, organizing, campaigning—and analyzing the intricate human relationships, theories, and actions that comprise a movement, and what is an anthropologist’s role in these processes? While a multitude of scholars have sought to answer these questions (Hale 2006; Sanford and Angel-Ajani 2006), during my fieldwork an additional layer of contention was added with the emergence of COVID-19. This article provides a descriptive account of my personal experience completing fieldwork among US-Latin American solidarity activists from 2019 to 2021 during the most intense phases of COVID-19 lockdowns in the United States. Throughout this article I illustrate how COVID-19 impacted my research and relationships with my interlocutors, often leading to an array of circumstantial affects that both complicated and enriched my analytical process. I demonstrate the emotional navigation that takes place amid fieldwork with friends and organizers during a global pandemic. In doing so, I re-examine the role of both affect and social crisis in directing the positioning of activist anthropologists.

Labours of Representation: A Bosnian Workers’ Movement and the Possibilities of Collaborative Graphic Ethnography

Collaborative graphic ethnography can generate new ways of identifying, materializing, and documenting political possibility in what otherwise seems like an overdetermined world, and in doing so, offers a model for practicing anthropology differently. We come to these insights through our work in the embattled Bosnian detergent factory “Dita,” located on the outskirts of the post-industrial city of Tuzla, whose workers scored an unprecedented victory when they managed to preserve their factory and restart production despite the threat of bankruptcy and liquidation. In researching and telling the story of their struggle and victory through this innovative format, we build upon the historical popularity of comics in former Yugoslavia, as well as contemporary experimentation with the form among anti-corruption activists in Bosnia-Herzegovina. We explore ethnographic and political affordances of sequential art and the graphic form for an engaged or activist anthropology, including its capacity to visualize and materialize the immaterial and overlooked aspects of politics, mitigate anthropology’s extractivist tendencies, enlist the imagination and participation of readers in directions both hoped for and unanticipated, and engage and animate multiple local and international publics.

Voyages in Applied and Activist Anthropology

Voyages in Applied and Activist Anthropology

Dark Anthropology and Its Others: Theory Since the Eighties

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.”

Situating Iraq in Oxford: Reflections on identity, place, and justice

In this essay, I explore the relevance of Eve Tuck’s theorization of damage-centered research and Scheper-Hughes’ activist anthropology to my positionality in my research on displaced Iraqis’ navigational access to education. The work of Tuck (2009) and Scheper-Hughes (1995) shows us that our assumptions regarding our research participants influence the way we research, which in turn have real life impacts. As an Iraqi person, issues of representation through research and subsequent responses to social ills are rooted in family history and thus are deeply personal and urgent. The historical marginalization of Iraqi voices, both those of researchers and the researched, can be redressed by foregrounding qualitative studies in lived experiences which acknowledge Iraqis’ dignity and agency. I call for a decolonized methodology and ethics which surpasses traditional expectations of academic work and moves towards a proactive, human-centered ethos.

ICE Offices and Immigration Courts: Accompaniment in Zones of Illegality

In this article, I examine two sites of the contemporary illegality industry in the United States: the ICE Field Office and the Immigration Court. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic engagement, including accompaniment and observations in a regional Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Field Office and an Executive Office of Immigration Reform (EOIR) Court, I trace how human interactions and social relations in each of these bureaucratic sites structure and reinforce conditions of precarity, insecurity, and marginality among undocumented and asylum seeking people in the United States. In both sites, the enforcement power of the state is visible through the configurations of bureaucratic processes and the structures of interactions between migrants and federal government officials. Examining these two sites from the vantage point of engaged ethnography, I illustrate how routine, bureaucratic encounters (re)produce illegality and exclusion by enacting violence against migrants through the powers of surveillance and administrative monitoring, and the threat of deportation and family separation. I also reflect on the political potential that emerges through activist anthropology and accompaniment with migrants in sites of state violence.

Why anthropology? An evaluation on activist anthropology

2020 yılının başından itibaren tüm dünyayı etkisi altına alan COVID-19 salgını ve salgın yöntemi ekolojik yıkım, iklim krizi, yoksulluk ile yerleşik eşitsizlik gibi mevcut birçok sorunu daha da görünür hale getirdi. Bu yazı da antropolojinin bu mevcut sorunların çözümüne nasıl katkı sağlayabileceği üzerine düşünerek, aktivist antropoloji yaklaşımını konu edinmektedir. Bu bağlamda yazı konuyu üç aşamada ele almaktadır. İlk olarak disiplinin sınırlarına ilişkin genel bir değerlendirme yapılmaktadır. Bu değerlendirme aktivizm ile antropoloji arasındaki keskin ayrımdan hareket etmektedir. İkinci olarak ise toplumsal sorunların çözümüne yönelik antropoloji yaklaşımını ifade eden uygulamalı antropoloji yaklaşımı ele alınmaktadır. Uygulamalı antropolojinin ele alınmasındaki amaç, aralarındaki benzerlik ve farklılıkları yoluyla aktivist antropolojinin analizine zemin hazırlamaktadır. Nihayet, aktivist antropoloji incelenerek antropolojiyi kamusal bir ses ve sorumluluğa, dahası bir mücadele alanı haline dönüştürme imkânın ortaya konması hedeflenmektedir.

Taking sides

This think piece argues for a ‘partisan anthropology’. Building on lessons learned through my research about the practices of postmastectomy breast reconstruction in France and Italy, I reflect on the role of the researcher in fieldwork. In my own research, I acted as neither a militant nor an activist in the field, that is, I did not actively participate in the initiatives I observed. However, in the analysis stage, I decided to side with the patients I had met: my aim was to understand their experience of the illness and the therapies available, as well as their sometimes difficult relationship with the medical system. Having decided to take the patients’ side, I conducted a ‘partisan anthropology’. These reflections are intended as an effort to fully recognize the legitimacy and the scientific character of a partisan anthropology, building on previous arguments for militant and activist anthropology.

Capacitating care: Activist anthropology in ethnographies of gender‐based violence

AbstractIn ethnographic analyses of gender‐based violence (GBV), anthropologists working on the front‐lines of advocacy and service delivery have increasingly adopted dual roles as activists and researchers. While these positionings have allowed for alternative fields of vision in the ethnographic process, less attention has been dedicated to what these roles do ethnographically, and the kinds of skills and core competencies advocacy roles teach us as feminist anthropologists. If front‐line work has become a tacit best practice of ethnographies in contexts of GBV, then we must ask what kinds of training and preparation is necessary for contemporary anthropologists who want to pursue research among survivors or care providers responding to conditions of violence. I propose that we need to develop capacity‐building strategies that more transparently address these implicit best practices as part of our feminist ethics of care. This investment in capacitating care would acknowledge the moral compulsion to research the experiences and needs of survivor populations, while also considering how we equip ourselves to respond to the specialized needs of survivors, and the forms of care work with survivors necessitates.

From cartonera publishing practices to trans-formal methods for qualitative research

Interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity and counter-disciplinarity are the hallmark of cultural studies and qualitative research, as scholars over the past three decades have discussed through extensive self-reflexive inquiry into their own unstable and ever-shifting methods (Denzin and Lincoln, 2018; Dicks et al., 2006: 78; Grossberg, 2010). Building on the interdisciplinary thought of Jacques Rancière and Caroline Levine on the one hand and traditions of participatory action research and activist anthropology on the other, we bring the methods conversation forward by shifting the focus from disciplines to forms and by making a case for aesthetic practice as qualitative research process. In this paper, the question of methods is approached through the action-based Cartonera Publishing Project with editoriales cartoneras in Latin America – community publishers who make low-cost books out of materials recovered from the street in the attempt to democratise and decolonise literary/artistic production – and specifically through our process-oriented, collaborative work with four cartonera publishers in Brazil and Mexico. Guided by the multiple forms of cartonera knowledge production, which are rooted not in academic research but rather in aesthetic practice and community relations, we offer an innovative ‘trans-formal’ methodological framework, which opens up new pathways for practitioners and researchers to work, think and act across social, cultural and aesthetic forms.

Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain

Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain

Review of Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain by Mohan Ambikaipaker (University of Pennsylvania Press)

Mohan Ambikaipaker’s "Political Blackness in Multiracial Britain" is distinctive both for its setting and for its personal engagement. Ambikaipaker practiced "activist anthropology" by carrying out "observant participation" as a caseworker for the Newham Monitoring Project, a community activism organization, over the course of two years. The book alternates between anecdotal accounts of racism and the author’s theoretical and historical framing of those accounts. Ambikaipaker’s writing is compelling, his theoretical grounding is thorough, his empathy is apparent, and the fieldwork underpinning it is considerable and consequential.

Re-membering missiology: An invitation to an activist agenda

In this article, I will argue that US mission practitioners, more than at anytime in the last century, need missiologists to bring research, writing, and teaching to bear on mission as practiced by US Christians, local parishes and congregations, and mission agencies, in part because of the profound changes in the nature and composition of what constitutes mission leadership today and the methodologies employed by those leaders. This need is rendered all the more urgent by what I will describe as the crisis in US mission practice which I will outline in detail. To respond to this sobering description of our engagement with God’s mission, I will propose the adoption of an “activist missiology,” along the lines of the growing school of activist anthropology pioneered by Charles Hale, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and others.

Activist Anthropology with the Haudenosaunee

AbstractAs participants in the Two Row Wampum Renewal Campaign, we explore our experiences as allies and activist anthropologists in a collaborative venture that involved participants from Native nations, academia and local communities. The campaign included local, regional and international events aimed at re-enlivening a 400-year-old treaty espousing mutual respect and balance between Europeans and the Haudenosaunee. The highlight of the symbolic renewing of the treaty culminated in a journey down the Hudson River with Native and non-Native paddlers embodying an ally relationship as they paddled side by side and were followed by ground crews, the media and thousands of onlookers. The campaign, challenged by some anthropologists as being based on a ‘fake’ treaty, demonstrated the successful and dynamic components of a multicultural movement. It inspired us to reflect on the current state of activist anthropology and see the intersections with decolonisation theories, indigenous anthropology and pedagogies of engagement.

Toward a Fugitive Anthropology: Gender, Race, and Violence in the Field

In this essay, we point to the ways in which activist research methodologies have been complicit with the dominant logics of traditional research methods, including notions of fieldwork as a masculinist rite of passage. Paradoxically, while activist research narrates the experiences of violence enacted on racialized, gendered (queer and gender-nonconforming) bodies, the complexities of doing anthropology with those same bodies have tended to be erased in the politics of the research. Thus, our analysis is twofold: we reaffirm activist anthropology’s critiques against the putatively objective character of the discipline, which effaces questions of race, gender, and class in the research process and asserts a neutral stance that replicates colonial and extractivist forms of knowledge production. At the same time, we critically examine how activist research replicates that which it critiques by not addressing the racialized, gendered researcher’s embodied experience and by presuming that rapport or intimacy with those with whom we are aligned necessarily results in more horizontal power relations. Drawing on fieldwork in El Salvador, Cuba, Palestine, Mexico, and Guyana, we examine how our gendered racial positionalities inflect the research process and consider how we can push activist methods to be accountable to the embodied aspects of conducting research in conflict zones, colonial contexts, and/or conditions of gendered and racialized terror. Ultimately, we call for a fugitive anthropology, a methodological praxis that centers an embodied feminist ethos, advancing the path toward decolonizing anthropology.

Applied Anthropology in the Mexico-United States Borderlands: Comparative Perspectives on Transborder Process

This issue of Human Organization is the result of the transborder conference Cultura y Comunidad held in Ensenada, Mexico (2014). Stemming from the “world-wide” incentive and trajectory of the SfAA, and the growing interest in “Applied Anthropology” in Mexico, Mexican and United States institutions joined with the SfAA in a collaborative conference to explore transborder themes affecting individuals and communities, social process, and social justice from the perspectives of transborder anthropologies. Applied vs. Activist anthropology and differences in Mexican and United States anthropology are explored. The conference proposed acknowledging the regional, transnational/transborder—the Southwest North America and Northern Mexico as a geographic and fluid human entity. Gender, indigeneity, education, health and cancer treatment, monetary exchange, violence, and ethnic representation are discussed from both Mexican and United States transborder perspectives. A principal goal is to engage “world anthropolog...

Free seeds and food sovereignty: anthropology and grassroots agrobiodiversity conservation strategies in the US South

Neoliberal economic frameworks threaten the ability of marginalized people worldwide to grow, harvest, and access sufficient healthy food because they deny traditional collective seed ownership and preclude subsistence as a viable livelihood. Many internationally-oriented counter-responses work to reframe intellectual property law in favor of traditional farmers. In the United States, various grassroots agricultural biodiversity conservation projects designed to re-establish the control of open-pollinated seeds within communities have emerged with similar intent. This article situates and explores the role of open-pollinated seeds and agricultural biodiversity conservation strategies in local food sovereignty. The authors direct applied research projects that collaboratively document and disseminate open-pollinated seed varieties throughout the Southeastern United States with a specific focus on the Ozark Highlands and Appalachian Mountains. The research methods represent an activist anthropology—participant observation and ethnographic interviewing while collaboratively growing and sharing seed varieties with local farmers, gardeners, seed-savers, and activists—with the explicit purpose of forging more sustainable, integrated, and sovereign local food systems.Keywords: agricultural anthropology, agrobiodiversity, grassroots strategies, in situ conservation, seed saving