Critical Anthropologists Research Articles

REVISITING POSITIONALITY IN CRITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY:

Within the field of critical anthropology, the scope of the reflection goes beyond one’s own society, encompassing a thorough exploration of anthropologists themselves as complex products of their socio-cultural environments. This aspect is becoming increasingly important in today’s critical analysis of the status of anthropology. Drawing on the insights of radical anthropologists, this article explores theeconomic and political context that shapes anthropological practice. While radical critics of the 1970s were confronted with well-defined sources of authority, the rise of neoliberalism disperses power and complicates the pursuit of critical anthropology. The question remains: Can critical anthropology maintain its potency amidst the influences it seeks to challenge? This question resonates as a central introspective point for contemporary critical anthropologists, inviting them to navigate the complex web of power, subjectivity, and socio-political context in their pursuit of transformative scholarship.

Psy Fever/Psycho-Boom: The Mental Picture of a Transforming China

Since the beginning of the 21st century, there is a boom of popular participation in psychotherapy and training in urban China, which has attracted the attention of anthropologists who called this phenomenon a “psycho-boom” or “psy fever.” This article is a review of anthropological studies on this issue and discusses how psychotherapeutic knowledge and practice with western origin has been indigenized by Chinese psychotherapists as well as the emergence of a new form of self in this psycho-boom. Critical anthropologists tend to emphasize the connection between this psy fever and governmentality. This article shows the insights and blind spots of this perspective, calling for attention to the heterogeneity and agency of participants in this psy fever as well as the potentiality of psychotherapy as both expression and intervention for sufferings in the context of drastic social transformation.

Efekt ślepej plamki. Antropologia krytyczna wobec neoliberalizmu

In this article, the authors argue that critical anthropology must inevitably recognize its intrinsic aporia, which can be illustrated by the “blind spot” metaphor. They use the metaphor to point to a cognitive bias that can be described as the tendency to claim one’s own epistemological objectivity and axiological neutrality while ignoring the fact of being entangled in the object of anthropological critique. To illustrate the blind-spot effect they refer to the visible neoliberalization of Polish academia in the last decade. Their aim is to show how critical anthropologists (re)produce the entrepreneurial regimes, power relations, and mechanisms of subjugation that they critique. For the sake of their argument they use theories drawn from studies on governmentality, namely affect theory and the idea of the dispositive.

Questioning our agency inside agencies: rethinking the possibility of scholars’ critical contributions to security agencies

ABSTRACTDuring the months and years following the 11 September 2001 terror attacks in the US, it became axiomatic for American policy makers to speak of a need to more directly connect military and intelligence agencies with academic experts at American universities. Anthropology and other social science disciplines drew renewed attention as politicians, pundits and policy makers claimed regional and disciplinary expertise was lacking in the governmental agencies involved in America’s terror wars. This paper questions the possibility that the US governmental agencies claiming they seek anthropologists and other scholars to bring new ideas to security and defence agencies want the sort of independent ideas that a body of critical anthropologists would bring to this work. I argue that the primary outcome of these efforts will be, not the transformation of governmental agencies; but the transformation of American universities into more-streamlined appendages of expansive national security apparatus. The lack of serious consideration of these possibilities by policy makers or members of intelligence or security agencies the importance of asking such basic questions as clearly as we can. I argue that the broad range of post-9/11 existing and proposed programmes linking American anthropologists and other social scientists’ work with military and intelligence projects will narrow the range of views within intelligence and analyst circles, will damage university systems, and will produce a homogenisation of analysis that will weaken intelligence capabilities.

Du néolibéralisme multiculturel aux mobilisations post-multiculturelles

The notion of « neoliberal multiculturalism » has been adopted by critical anthropologists to characterize the dual movement of acknowledgement of cultural diversity and commodification. Nevertheless, in the Chilean case, it seems more appropriate to designate the multicultural mutation that took place in the 1990s, following the neoliberal revolution carried out during the dictatorship (1973-1989), by the term multicultural neoliberalism. For cultural diversity appears to be nothing more than one of the possible domains for the extension of the new neoliberal order. In this context, Indigenous peoples’ social struggle is reduced to a merely cultural or ethnic set of demands. However we shall see that in recent social and environmental conflicts, where the issue at stake has been the question of common goods (education, health, and natural resources), mobilizations have tended to be unethnic and delineate a new post-multicultural space.

Antropologia no México e a invenção do intelectual indígena

Este artigo analisa de que modo um determinado estilo de antropologia praticada no México, especialmente na década de 1970 e 1980, definiu o intelectual indígena com base nas práticas anteriormente estruturadas pelo indigenismo, mas não somente por elas. Uma nova conjuntura alterou as narrativas de aculturação. Esta conjuntura respondeu às situações nacionais num contexto marcado por lutas de descolonização e focou em temas relacionados à pobreza, mudança e revitalização cultural. Se o indigenismo pode ser concebido como uma espécie de orientalismo, este texto procurou refletir sobre o modo como os intelectuais indígenas foram objeto deste processo de criação, imagística e de utopias antropológicas. Os “antropólogos críticos” politizaram o lugar do intelectual ao estilo de sua época como um sujeito capaz de revelar determinadas verdades e formas de dominação política escondidas, e que poderiam ser descobertas pelos indígenas com ajuda dos antropólogos. O ideal era formar indígenas como antropólogos de seu próprio povo para que eles pudessem descobrir estas verdades sozinhos e, em seguida, ensinar os membros de sua comunidade.

Climate Change and Accusation

By politicizing the last bastion of “untouched nature,” climate change makes blame ubiquitous and therefore infinitely malleable. Onto this moral blank slate, critical anthropologists and political ecologists inscribe industrial/Northern blame rather than universal/pan-human blame. This article queries what our analytical stance ought to be when our field partners—those who seem to best exemplify the inequity of climate change—disagree with this reading of climate change. The Republic of the Marshall Islands contributes minimally to global climate change yet faces nationwide uninhabitability at its hands. Despite awareness of their tiny carbon footprint, grassroots Marshall Islanders (if not their government) have strongly favored a response of guilt and atonement rather than outrage and protest. I argue that various delegitimizing explanations of this perception—ignorance, denial, performance, false consciousness—are ethnographically untenable or unsatisfying. Instead, Marshallese self-blame should be understood as the local appropriation of global warming discourse in terms of a preexisting narrative of seductive modernity and cultural decline. Such an analysis allows us to appreciate how indigenous climate change self-blame, while undoubtedly problematic in many of its implications, may also carry empowering, postcolonial, counterhegemonic potentialities that should not be discounted by those searching for radical counternarratives of climate change.

The Influence of Johannes Fabian on Claude Lévi-Strauss

In his explicitly theoretical works, Johannes Fabian, one of the key intradisciplinary "affinities" of the author-founder of postmodern anthropology, constructed a specific view of Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralism, which, as reinterpreted by critical anthropologists, was to fundamentally shape the history of anthropological post-structuralism. In order to explain that the constitution of the subject of research through research itself – i.e. "the invention of the subject of anthropology" – should be accorded the status of the crucial problem of anthropological methodology, Fabian imputed to Lévi-Strauss a rigid and amateurish preconception of research in the natural sciences as inherently positivist. The opposition structuralism/poststructuralism = positivism/postpositivism thus implied was to permanently reshape discussions on realism in critical anthropology, with absurd consequences. The most important of these was the supposedly "antirealist" character of postmodern anthropology, as a direct derivative of critical anthroplogy, which, being aware that reality is created by research, was now seen to play a somehow more ethical and less repressive part in knowledge/power games. The delight at the discovery of this methodological commonplace – that the subject of research is constituted by research itself – might have been but a matter of passing interest, being itself a common enough phenomenon, had not this particular intradisciplinary exchange led to the discrediting of the entire methodological package associated with structuralism. Paradoxically, the retaining of a realistic, radically antipositivist structural method would have made possible the achievement of the cultural-critical ambitions of postmodern anthropology's research program, had not the method been ineptly contaminated by this chain of activist reinterpretation which eventually frustrated the aims it had set out to accomplish.

Introduction: Jewish Conceptions and Practices of Space

his issue of Jewish Social Studies presents a collection of articles centering on general theme of space in Jewish culture. In recent years, connection between spatial practices and identity formations has come to play a prominent role in various fields in humanities, such as in anthropology and its various subfields, which together establish what could more broadly be called critical cultural studies. Thus, anthropologists have begun to interrogate their own spatial practices and constitutive role these play for representing cultures, as for instance ethnographic practice of going into the field. Accordingly, traditional conceptions of the have been criticized as a taken-for-granted space in which an 'other' culture or society lies waiting to be observed and written,1 a space therefore that one supposedly enters and then leaves to return to one's own culture. As critical anthropologists now recognize, very distinction between home and field tends to minimize, if not make invisible, multiple ways in which these conceptual spaces are bound together, namely travel, colonialism and imperialism, and global cultural flows.2 But it is perhaps in anthropology that issues arising from dynamics of economic and cultural globalization have been dis-

Globalization and Alternative Localities

The mobility of capital, manufacture and labour and the increasing influence of technology and mass communications worldwide foregrounds globalization as arguably the dominant theme across the critical social sciences and humanities. However, while there is little disagreement concerning the importance of globalization to social change, scholars often disagree as to how we should make sense of influential global processes. Eric Wolf (1982,1999) suggests, for example, that globalization is the latest phase in capitalist development. He emphasizes, therefore, continuities in capitalist development and the tendency of capitalism worldwide to produce similar social and economic transformations through the capitalist appropriation of social labour. Arjun Appadurai (2002: 50-51) regards globalization, on the other hand, as a more novel process involving disjuncture and thus considerable social, cultural and economic differentiation within the capitalist world system (see also Knauft, 2002).I argue in what follows that the current dichotomy between homogeneity and diversity that typifies globalization discourse in the human sciences can be bridged through engaging dialectically the relations between culture as relatively autonomous, praxis or agency, and the positioning of human subjects historically in differentiated fields of practice and power. Such a theoretical move or option preserves Appadurai's emphasis on diversity while incorporating Wolf's emphasis on global politicaleconomy. This is, moreover, a theoretical option that is consistent with recent efforts among critical anthropologists (see, for example, Comaroff and Comaroff, 1992) to integrate political-economy as a global process with cultural theory articulated on the local level as formative human agency.Homogeneity and DiversityWolf bases his argument on globalization upon what he claims to be historical continuities in capitalist development that date from the formative period of European empires of the 14th and 15th centuries. In his celebrated Europe and the People without History, Wolf maintains that Europe in 1400 was weakly organized and not politically powerful until the ascendancy of Genoa and Venice as important mercantile centres. Trade through these two important northern Italian cities funded the warfare carried on by European monarchs and provided the capital for European expansion abroad. Wolf emphasizes though that it is not the circulation of commodities alone that launched Europe's new political destiny but rather transformations in the social relations of production. He distinguishes, moreover, the alternative paths of development between tribute-taking Portugal and Spain, dependent on foreign capital, from those of France and England. Wolf's historical narrative tacks back and forth between international political-economy and the local dynamics of small-scale populations. He thus presents a view of globalization that emphasizes the increasing importance of global markets, wage labour and the process of proletarianization that have similar but not identical effects in diverse world areas. However, as we shall see with respect to world systems theory, Wolf's emphasis on the uniform nature of capitalism has been criticized (Taussig, 1987) for ignoring human agency on the local level and thus acquiescing to the overdetermination of culture on the part of political-economy. While Wolf's (1999) final work addresses the above criticism by arguing for the relative autonomy of local culture with respect to the determinations of the world system of political-economy, in the end, it is social labour that endures as dominant in determining the articulations of both culture and power in social life.Appadurai follows, on the other hand, Lash and Urry (1987) in supporting a vision of capitalism as a disorganized process and thus maintains that we should view globalization from autonomous ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, fmancescapes and ideoscapes. …

Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society.

How can we account for the power of ritual? This is the guiding question of Black Critics and Kings, which examines how Yoruba forms of ritual and knowledge shape politics, history, and resistance against the state. Focusing on deep knowledge in Yoruba cosmology as an interpretive space for configuring difference, Andrew Apter analyzes ritual empowerment as an essentially critical practice, one that revises authoritative discourses of space, time, gender, and sovereignty to promote political--and even violent--change. Documenting the development of a Yoruba kingdom from its nineteenth-century genesis to Nigeria's 1983 elections and subsequent military coup, Apter identifies the central role of ritual in reconfiguring power relations both internally and in relation to wider political arenas. What emerges is an ethnography of an interpretive vision that has broadened the horizons of local knowledge to embrace Christianity, colonialism, class formation, and the contemporary Nigerian state. In this capacity, Yoruba orisa worship remains a critical site of response to hegemonic interventions. With sustained theoretical argument and empirical rigor, Apter answers critical anthropologists who interrogate the possibility of ethnography. He reveals how an indigenous hermeneutics of power is put into ritual practice--with multiple voices, self-reflexive awareness, and concrete political results. Black Critics and Kings eloquently illustrates the ethnographic value of listening to the voice of the other, with implications extending beyond anthropology to engage leading debates in black critical theory.

Sheldon Jackson as Preserver of Alaska's Native Culture

A MONG THE OLDEST negative stereotypes connected with the conquest of the Americas and Oceania is one which is identified with Christian priest and parson. It views them as both parochial and impractical: God's servant served neither God nor man. Worst of all, purports the stereotype, these men were so aflame with inquisitional or Calvinistic hell-fire that they felt compelled to burn everything identified with the native's way of life. In recent years this wild generalization has been abandoned by more reasoned and comprehensive studies. Even the most critical anthropologists and historians are now usually willing to admit that the Christian missionary, more than any other single shield, manfully struggled to protect the native peoples from the crushing repercussions of the white avalanche.'