Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

What We Reap

2018; Wiley; Volume: 120; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/aman.13051

1548-1433

Deborah A. Thomas,

It seems fitting that in the issue in which we publish the 2017 year-in-review essays, we might take stock of what it is we're doing in and contributing to the world of ideas and practice. If an anthropological lens on sociopolitical, cultural, evolutionary, historical, and semiotic processes teaches us anything, it is that we are all connected in myriad and complex ways. Archaeologists working on issues related to land-use and irrigation systems in prehistoric India, for example, might tell us something about global patterns of climate change today. Epigeneticists thinking through changing patterns of gene expression in relation to environmental stressors (including racism, sexism, and xenophobia) can show us how we embody our cultural worlds. In so doing, they demonstrate how policies, wars, and various forms of insecurity enacted by particular people in particular places and times can create biological shifts among other people in other places and times. Many anthropologists have been interested in thinking through the legacies of historical processes for contemporary communities in relation to health, social movements, violence, markets, spirituality, and other forms of meaning-making, and in how these various elements of existence have been related. If we are all complexly connected, then it stands to reason that we are all, to one degree or another, and whether we acknowledge it or not, accountable to each other, and therefore responsible for each other. What would it mean to apply an anthropological practice fully committed to this ethical principle to the social and political worlds that we inhabit? How would it change our students or others with whom we interact, and how would it change us? Of course, many of us already have this in mind when we teach, conduct research, and write or otherwise present our research findings. But I wonder whether a full commitment to the kinds of “bearing witness” that communications scholars like Barbie Zelizer have advocated for (1998, 2002), one grounded in the moral practice of assuming responsibility for contemporary events—what Avery Gordon has called “response-ability” (2008)—is sustainable across time and space. Or are the best things we can hope for fleeting moments of recognition, intermittent solidarities, and the occasional flash of insight into our common condition? Instead of the practice of responsibility I've described above, we've often embraced various principles of isolationism—not just in US foreign policy, but more generally as principles that shape the relationships among self-possessing, advantage-seeking individuals. And these principles have made it possible for some to imagine that the past has no impact on the present, that injury and trauma don't linger, that we have nothing to do with the lives of others around the world who are negatively touched by US policy decisions. The Oxford English Dictionary defines isolationism as “a policy of remaining apart from the affairs or interests of other groups, especially the political affairs of other countries.” Within the realm of foreign relations, isolationism trumped other approaches to international affairs from the founding of the republic to the post-World War II era, even as the US government has regularly and consistently intervened politically, militarily, and ideologically in order to protect economic interests overseas. Current strands of isolationist thinking purportedly have to do with a commitment to honor national borders with the aim of strengthening the position of those inside them. A nationalism organized according to this perspective would not see that raising tariffs on certain material resources (such as steel or aluminum) would not only disadvantage those in other countries that depend on exporting that resource (such as Jamaica, whose bauxite industry is a substantial contributor to the annual GDP) but also those domestic workers whose industries rely on the ability to obtain the resource at a fair price. Border walls are, of course, another example of shortsighted isolationist thinking, but we also build borders around ideas. We have not fully eschewed the binaristic thinking that undergirds category-making, that separates historical or evolutionary periods from each other, that cordons off disciplines and subfields from each other, and that allows scholars to imagine that we are not implicated within the processes we study. The key insight of feminist intersectionality across the disciplines has been that we cannot understand the multiplicity of factors affecting a person's experience without analytically bringing together attention to the various forms of discrimination, erasure, and/or privilege that affect them based on the historical context that shapes the particularities of their embodiment, their relationships, and their practices, past and present. This seems, by now, to be more or less a commonplace, a taken-for-granted part of our intellectual landscape and research process. However, it seems to me that if we are to practice a nonisolationist anthropology, a collaborative anthropology beyond borders, then we must grapple a bit more with how and why we come to ask the questions we ask, and what the expectations are that shape our engagements with our students and with our interlocutors. By arguing this, I am not advocating a simple form of reflexivity, whereby anthropologists identify the various ways in which dimensions of our positionality vis-à-vis those with whom we conduct research might influence responses to our presence, questions, observations, and participation. Instead, I am thinking of something more profound, a productive questioning of the knowledge project itself, an interrogation of where we stand in relation to the processes we examine. How might we all—biological anthropologists, archaeologists, cultural, linguistic, and medical anthropologists, multimodal and public anthropologists—define the stakes of the anthropological project in the current era? How does the US academic iteration of this project dovetail with or diverge from anthropological practices elsewhere, and in nonacademic settings? What kinds of productive alliances and solidarities might we (continue to) build and in what ways do these alliances demand that we inhabit the world somewhat differently? What would it look like to be each other's keepers, and what broader forms of care might this generate? In “Building Beyond the Bypass Road: Urban Migration, Ritual Eating, and the Fate of the Joint Family in Patna, India,” Hayden Kantor invites us to think through the effects of intensified rural-to-urban migration in north India, particular in terms of reconfiguration of kinship relations and consumption patterns. He addresses how members of middle-class families are migrating to cities in order to pursue economic mobility while also attempting to maintain a family foothold in the rural spheres whence they came. Through a focus on Hindu house-consecration ceremonies and feasts (and through the forms of excess these instantiate, such as serving enormous quantities of ice cream), Kantor demonstrates that migrants assert and solidify ties to their villages while also enacting cosmopolitan identities and upwardly mobile aspirations. These exceptional events also draw our attention to the quotidian labor and food practices that undergird the broader issues related to urbanization, and to how these practices work to produce new class identities. David Griffith, Kerry Preibisch, and Ricardo Contreras's article, “The Value of Reproductive Labor,” explores the contexts within which people value their labor positively, even within situations observers might evaluate as exploitative, and even when experiencing poor working conditions. Their research on reproductive and wage labor among Mexican and Guatemalan guest workers in Canada and the US leads them to argue that reproductive and wage labor add value to one another and can serve as sources of dignity and satisfaction for workers themselves. By focusing on reproductive labor and its relationship to foreign contract labor, they seek to cast a new light on the (positive) affective dimensions of reproductive labor as they are experienced by their interlocutors. In so doing, they argue that reproductive labor generates social legitimacy and feelings of happiness, especially in cases where reproductive and productive labor enhance each other. It thus endows productive labor with value. We are also pleased to feature a roundtable discussion. David Wengrow and David Graeber's article, “‘Many Seasons Ago’: Slavery and Its Rejection among Foragers on the Pacific Coast of North America,” appears here, followed by comments by Les Field, Ben Fitzhugh, and Colin Grier, and a response by the authors. In the article, Wengrow and Graeber question the common anthropological distinctions that have been made between Indigenous groups in California and the Pacific Northwest based on their different cultivation and consumption practices, as well as the similarities that have been asserted based on their common status as foragers. By focusing on the Northwest Coast practice of intergroup raiding and chattel slavery (and the Californian avoidance of such), they seek to unpack assumptions about foraging societies and their evolutionary significance vis-à-vis the emergence of agriculture. Wengrow and Graeber are particularly interested in thinking through the relations that may have existed between these two areas, and they develop the concept of schizmogenesis to frame their assertion that institutions within particular groups form through interaction between them (rather than through internal evolution) and that internal social contradictions are resolved through engagement with others’ value norms. Ultimately, Wengrow and Graeber draw from ethnographic and archaeological evidence to suggest that by eliding the significant political differences between the two groups they examine, anthropologists have perpetuated a view of social change that remains endogenous in its perspective and have reproduced Western teleologies of capitalist ethics and progressive developmentalism. The frame of schizmogenesis, on the other hand, allows us to see interaction as a strategy for cultural refusal and political action. Field, Fitzhugh, and Grier all point out areas where Wengrow and Graeber's points might be more nuanced, ask questions about their outright rejection of behavioral ecology, and suggest that greater attention to variability over time would make their argument stronger, but they generally appreciate the intervention the authors seek to make. Alisse Waterston's Presidential Address, “Four Stories, a Lament, and an Affirmation,” follows this roundtable. At the 116th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Waterston spoke about the “dark times” of the current moment, suggesting that while dire, they are not necessarily new. Waterston encouraged us to be responsible actors in the world of ideas and to contribute to the imagination of a new world on the ground. Drawing inspiration from Hannah Arendt, she reminded us to operate in the world as it exists, to illuminate that which is obscured, to call out public deceptions and distractions, and to make time to envision liberation. We are also excited to present our four year-in-review essays. Omer Gokcumen traces the year in biological anthropology with a specific focus on genetic anthropology; Erika Hoffmann-Dilloway's review of the year of linguistic anthropology centers the various ways semiotic processes help us to illuminate and imagine alternative worlds; Krista Lewis suggests that a central question confronting archaeologists this year had to do with the current shape and purpose of the field; and, similarly, Noah Tamarkin reflects on the question of timeliness within cultural anthropology, framing his review in relation to temporality, mobility, sovereignty, subjectivity, and mediation. Our World Anthropologies section this issue features a special section of four short essays about the practice of genomics research in relation to Indigenous communities. We are also happy to publish two interviews, one with Maria Cátira Bortolini, an anthropological geneticist based at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, and the other with Christiana L. Scheib, a genomics researcher at Cambridge University and the Estonian Biocentre. On our website, we share a survey of anthropological work in Portugal, conducted by the Portuguese Anthropological Association and written by Marina Pignatelli; an essay by an Argentinean doctoral student now studying in Belgium; an essay on ethno-anthropological traditions in Europe by Čarna Brković; and a reflection by Goh Beng Lan, an anthropologist based at the National University of Singapore, on the effect of American anthropologist Joel Kahn on her work. These will appear over the next few months. Our Public Anthropologies section, as always, can be found on our website, and highlights new installments in our exploration of anthropological analyses of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, “De-Provincializing Development.” Catherine Fennell addresses SDG #9, which has to do with building resilient infrastructures, discussing issues related to the disposal of infrastructures, especially in US cities, and the ways people are affected by infrastructural decay. Gustav Peebles examines SDG #12, eradicating poverty, and argues that we need to use anthropological models to generate more sustainable practices of consumption and production. And Amanda Johnson addresses SDG #4, on inclusive education, criticizing US notions of “liberty” and “choice” in education. Charlotte Hollands, whose work appears on the cover, discusses her drawing process as a form of anthropological truth-telling in our Multimodal Anthropologies section. She discusses her work in Anthropology News (profiles of the careers of several professional anthropologists) and her rendition of Alisse Waterston's Presidential Address as a way of sketching meaning. During the AAA meetings, Hollands visually documented about twenty panels and papers with the aim of artistically condensing the discussions underway. In “A Hand-Drawn Conference Review,” she discusses her decision-making process as well as her intellectual and affective engagements with the speakers and their materials. Alisse Waterston also responds to Hollands's work—in particular, Hollands's rendition of her address—approaching it as part of a broader collaborative “dance” of anthropological expression. Also in our Multimodal Anthropologies section is a set of reflections about AnthropologyCon 2017, a game-hacking conference held during the AAA meetings in a variety of sites in which participants addressed issues of game design and its relevance for anthropological teaching and research. We also present two film reviews: China Remix (directed by Dorian Carli-Jones and Melissa Lefkowitz and reviewed by Tami Blumenfield) and I am the People (directed by Anna Roussillon and reviewed by Martin Gruber). As always, we round out our offerings this issue with fourteen book reviews and three obituaries. We feature the careers of Jean Briggs (by Pamela Stern), David Warwick Brokensha (by A. Peter Castro and Miriam S. Chaiken), and Nancy Oestreich Lurie (by Grant Arndt).