ANTHROPOLOGY

by Hugh M. Lewis

Anthropology is by definition the holistic study of humankind. The drawing of disciplinary and sub-disciplinary boundaries in its specializations and territorial demarcations of professional interest is antithetical to the general and synthetic basis of the whole field.

There is something wrong with such a field when its professional members no longer identify themselves primarily as anthropologists with the implication of disciplinary holism and breadth of interest, involvement and intellectual understanding, and instead become identified as being primarily one sort of specialist or another. This has been neither a necessary nor a desirable state of affairs, though wholly understandable from the standpoint of its structural relationship with its domain host society.

Professional anthropologists would do well to remember their lessons in introductory anthropology.

I have been pursuing the study of professional anthropology for almost ten years now and honestly feel little further ahead that when I began, even though my understanding of the world has increased enormously. I have never been in any anthropology class in which any other student has ever out performed me or shown more or better knowledge of the field than myself, and yet I have over the years consistently seen other, younger students getting ahead with their careers while I seem to be running in place. Many people ask me why I keep investing my time, energy and money in the pursuit of a profession that has given so little compensation in return. With a wife and a child to worry about, I can no longer give them any honest excuses. In this matter I can only ultimately blame myself, though I do not thereby condone the values of American society, the politics of Academia or the professional prerogatives of the anthropological elite who are for the most part conservative, classicist and ego-centric in orientation. If there is great hypocrisy with the world, then it begins with the basic lack of honesty with the self. Honesty begets humility and makes us immune to the disease of hypocrisy.

My minor contributions to the field and my devotion, authenticity and sincerity of commitment to the pursuit of anthropological understanding in the world no longer requires the legitimization of the professional in group or the justification of the power elite. I would continue to pursue my own anthropological interests, via my writing, as both a scientist and a humanist, whether anyone else calls me an anthropologist or not.

I figure I will be deemed capable of teaching my first Anthropology course by the age of my retirement. 

The most pressing problem in the world today are primarily human problems, and the most intellectually challenging puzzles and paradoxes that confront human understanding today are basically and irreducibly problems of human reality. On this anthropological ground, I stake my claim as an anthropologist.

After making A’s in four field methods courses, several general theory classes, and two or three history of anthropology seminars, not to mention the host of other, interrelated topics, I seem to still not have gotten it all right. I’m beginning to wonder whether I ever will, or even if there really is a right way of going about being an anthropologist.

The most important thing I have learned from my anthropological studies has been to recognize amongst all the differences of humankind the same basic common ground and sense of identity and dignity of each human being. Professionals within the field hardly impress me at all anymore, with their long list of publications, their self-centered sense of smugness and self-importance, and their academic party lines and their sea stories. It is the common person, in whichever cultural corner of the world, with their basic dilemmas and interests and involvements, that I find most interesting. These things are not found in a book or in photography—they are to be found only in other people. How much basic equality can an anthropologist establish with other people of the world if they do not confront or resolve those structural asymmetries in their own lives?

If you want to get rich fast, go to law school and become a lawyer. The world can always use another lawyer. But if you want to remain poor and persecuted, then become an anthropologist. Though anthropologists have always desperately needed the world, the world has seldom the need for an anthropologist.

I’ve met many professional anthropologists who think they are perfect, at least in private, and who would like to believe they are God’s gift to humankind. They can become quite frustrated when they come to realize that hardly anyone around is paying much attention to them, and that they are probably are not, after all, God’s chosen on earth. I used to be a true believer—a committed anthropologist—until I passed through its back door one too many times. The view from the rear does not look as pure and sacred as the perspective from the front. The biggest career disappointment of a professional anthropologist is not that they have failed to solve any of the world’s problems, but that the world has failed to solve any of their problems.

The nemesis of Anthropology will be weighed not in terms of its failure to provide any important answers or solutions to the problem of human reality, but in its failure to ask nontrivial and interesting questions about that reality.

As to the anthropological question of whether there are really any significant barriers of difference separating one person from another, or cultures, or nations, or different periods of time, I must say that there are few if any that are not made by humankind itself. The most important lesson to be learned from social anthropology are that rules were always made to be broken. No human- made rule would be worthy of be obeyed if it could not be honored in its breach. But the paradox of anthropological knowledge does not end here—this is where it begins.

Yuppie anthropology has become the pursuit of anthropology for other ends. While it may have the virtue of lacking the commitment of ‘authentic’ anthropology as an end in itself, it suffers the shortcoming of prostituting the study of anthropology to whatever circumstance or convenience that comes along. What used to be a well regarded neutrality of anthropological science is quickly becoming a vested interest of ascientific territoriality.

Between biology and technology little remains leftover for plain humanity. Between the brain and the computer, there is little room for the mind and its culture. For the true scientist bent upon closing the gap between nature’s secrets and technology's power, the interests and problems of the human being cannot but be seen as an obstacle interfering with progress. The interests of the human science of anthropology will not be well served if all of human nature and culture is reduced to a severe logic of genetic determination, or if the mind and its social history are merely mimicked by computers and systems of structural explanations. While biology and technology may be nothing but a matter of machines and genes, human anthropology has always been something more.

Anthropological science is not based upon literary criticism.

Show me an anthropologist who has all the answers and I will show you a veritable menace to the profession. Anthropological administration adds nothing to the stock of anthropological knowledge but takes away a great deal of human freedom. The net consequences of anthropological administration is academic mediocrity.

The mind of anthropology and the anthropological mentality are not the same—the former is the collective genius and understanding of the common problems and paradoxes of human reality, while the latter represents the simple solutions of a rabid intellectual extremist who foams at the mouth at the thought of her/his own ego in the world. The mind of anthropology is to be found in the field among the peoples of the world, while the anthropological mentality can be found dwelling securely in the departmental forums among all the professionals, hypocrites and pseudo-intellectuals, vying to get some media time and a few scant funds.

Professors of anthropology no longer bother with me because I no longer supplicate their egos. Students no longer talk to me because they are too preoccupied with supplicating their professors’ egos. Though I remain marginally attached to anthropology, I am no longer strictly identified either as a ‘student’ or as a professional. I don’t know when the transition actually happened. It was when I lost faith and trust in the authority of all too human anthropologists and in what too frequently passes for ‘friendship’ between students. It has struck me as a double paradox to become a stranger among professional strangers who are supposed to have as their primary objective getting to know other people in the world.

I can no longer identify myself as one particular kind of anthropologist or another, nor even as strictly an anthropologist. The general domain of anthropology has itself become too confining for my breadth of intellectual interests. The mind is inherently interdisciplinary and humankind is inherently cross-cultural.

It is not too long before one outgrows even the generality of anthropology, feeling some of the frustrations of its intrinsic and extrinsic limitations. One eventually begins to wonder whether there is not possible a more general, embracing and realistic point of view to be adopted beyond the merely anthropological.

The principal anthropological fallacy seems to me to be the paradox of inferring a probable presence from a definite absence. Statistics seems to come to the rescue in this problem, but its concreteness of numerical quantification always conceals the initial and final arbitrariness of its qualitative and normative evaluation. All areas of anthropology founder upon the problem of bridging this critical difference between what is and what isn’t but may possibly be. Whole anthropological mansions are built and entire intellectual and anthropological empires are carved out from the world upon the basis of what amounts to the ‘astonishment’ of the anthropological imagination which must always fill in the gulf between the fact and its fiction, the datum and its idea, empirical reality and rational truth. Whatever the relative distance between the known and the unknown, it cannot be but spanned by at least one leap of faith. Between the said and the done there is always a virtual infinitude of anthropological possibility. If anthropologists took no risks, they would achieve no gains.

The more I learn about anthropology the less I know about the human world. The net outcome of an anthropological education can only be a tremendous appreciation for the variety and versatility of humankind, and a correspondingly tremendous intellectual humility towards the always encompassed but never encompassing horizons of one’s own ignorance and prejudices. In this regard it is striking how anecdotal so much of the evidence in anthropological discourse really is, and how cliché and trite many of its paradigmatic exemplars. Humankind would do well to be spared the intellectual hubris and arrogance of the anthropological know-it-all.

I am more and more astonished by the analogous parallels between the culture of anthropology and the anthropology of culture. One must have lived and worked as an anthropologist for at least a year in some departmental setting to come to fully understand and appreciate how like other human beings anthropologists really are, and how tribal-like and petty such settings can become in terms of their factionalisms over limited resources, their status hierarchies and cliques, their gossip networks and background machinations, and their rituals and myths. The student of anthropology becomes twice born as an adult child in a strange and alienating cultural world—once in the field and once again in the department. This is so often so much the case that it is to be legitimately asked if the ‘escape to the field’ that is so much the source of anthropological romance and reality, does not also become sometimes an ‘escape from the escape.' Becoming a life-long professional stranger in different world is possibly an adaptive response to the failure to become very familiar with one’s own world. Anthropology has always been an acceptable and alternative avenue for the strange and unfamiliar.

If this is sometimes so, then it may also be legitimately asked whether the emphatic desire of some anthropologist’s to make the strange familiar and to bring the whole of anthropological enterprise into the more familiar regions of science in our own society, do not really represent the unconscious wish to become more normal and familiar with the world. As such it is possibly a wish to return to the repressed by the repressed.

The history of anthropology has always been constituted by an academic question and answer dialectic between the thesis of collectivizing tendencies of science to see the human world organized upon a common set of universal laws and the antithetical and contraposed relativizing tendencies to emphasis the many differences between people and to play down all the similarities. It has been the basis of this rational dialectic that has led anthropology to develop as a coherent and relevant field of human understanding. It has long been unfortunate that so many professional commitments and involvements for the advancement of mutually egoistic and egotistic interests has tended to popularize the profession to one extreme position or the other, instead of cultivating the kind of attitude and ability to step outside of the entire dialectic itself while keeping one foot each on both sides of the dividing line. It is the fact of the dialectic itself, and not the involvement in either of its extremes that makes anthropology interesting and authentic in the world and which links it critically to other general intellectual paradigms like philosophy, science, art and religion.

The biggest threat to the anthropologist’s sense of professional objectivity is her/his own most personal sense of human subjectiveness. Maintaining the veil of anthropological authority in the world depends upon the illusion of such objectiveness achieved by implicit denying and explicitly controlling the subjectivity of those people whom the anthropologist studies and upon whom the anthropologist is supposed to be an expert authority. Cultivating such an illusion and maintaining the anthropological veil is much simpler if the only evidence is material artifacts and biological traits and if the people represented are not allowed to speak for themselves and talk back to the anthropologist. It sometimes seems to me a much wiser course to simply make a science of subjectivity instead of trying to transform subjectivity into an objective science. For so many people who seek simple solutions and pat answers to the complexities inherent to understanding human reality, this would render anthropology seemingly too soft, to loose and too much like a humanity rather than a science. Such a threat of subjectivity is a threat to their sense of authority in the world and a threat to the kind of physical science upon which such a sense of authority is based.

I personally have never once doubted the profound relevance that the study of anthropology constitutes for the world, though I may have always misunderstood the relevance. The question of its possible irrelevance in the world has never once vexed me. It is paradoxical that so many professional anthropologists who seem bent upon demonstrating that anthropology is in fact a hard and respectable science, so often strike me as unconsciously doubting the intrinsic relevance of anthropology and thus in their chronic insecurity are searching for some pat formula, some model, some structure, some law of discovery, that renders the anthropological profession as predictable, paradigmatic, and puzzle-solving as what the profession of physics has come to epitomize in the world. They are engaged upon a never ending quest for an anthropological El Dorado or QED, some elemental touchstone that will demonstrate unequivocally to themselves and to the rest of the world their authority as a science and thus their profitability from that science. They seek some solution to the perennial and common human problem of selling themselves and their profession to the world in a way that the world wants and is willing to pay for. It is a grand paradox that those who would seek to render anthropology most certain, secure and scientific in the world are those who may hold the belief in its ultimate irrelevance closest to their hearts.

Beware the rise of an anthropological aristocracy. These are the few who seek to turn their profession into a guild or a union and to prescribe for everyone the rules of conformity and the price of admission. They are elitist, hypocritical, pseudo-intellectual status mongers who would do virtually anything to get ahead and who remain hung up on the horns of their own authority complex. None of us can but help spill over into the authoritarianism and asymmetries of the field, or end up distorting practically anything and everything that comes back from the field as an authentic article of anthropological faith.

Otherness is a condition of not knowing ourselves well enough.

There is a way of seeing others—of looking squarely into their faces. It is as Vincent Van Gogh must have seen others—every line, every feature, the very character and soul. One does not come by this way of seeing easily. It takes strength to penetrate the veil, courage to face the darkness, especially when the face is in the mirror.

First impressions often prove to be the final impressions, but usually for reasons converse than might at first seem. Knowledge may be power. It may be power to create or destroy, to exploit or to make equality, to constrain or to liberate. The paradox of anthropology is that it offers both these sets of possibilities in the world. To promote anthropological wisdom in the world is to promote greater realism of worldview by which to temper our ideological precepts and prejudices. It promises a better understanding of our world such that it will become increasingly difficult to promulgate illusions that profit only the few, while it may facilitate the advancement of more optimistic values that will increasingly benefit the many.