Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Ulf Hannerz

2013; Duke University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08992363-2346295

1527-8018

Dominic Boyer,

Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture

Dominic Boyer (DB): More so than most of us, Ulf, you are truly an “anthropologist of the world.” And it so happens that these are very challenging times, but also in some ways very inspiring times, for the world. The Washington Consensus, for example, seems more fragile than ever before, and an anthropologist is set to lead the World Bank for the first time. Yet austerity reigns, and the eurozone is in turmoil. Latin America is blossoming with new social and political experiments. Yet the United States seems in the grip of a slow and possibly very ugly decline. I wanted to ask you to reflect on anthropology’s role in today’s world. Or, not to be so parochial, what the ethnographic and conceptual work of transnationally oriented human scientists (forgive the German conceit!) could contribute to the navigation of times like these. Is this a good time to resurrect the 1980s image of anthropology as cultural critique, for example?Ulf Hannerz (UH): I will certainly follow the activities of the World Bank with renewed interest (although the alternative, which would have been a Nigerian woman economist heading it, would have been appealing as well).I think “cultural critique” remains one of the uses of anthropology — and, of course, although it was revived in the 1980s, it goes way back, to Margaret Mead and Bronislaw Malinowski. But overall, I would want to see more experimentation with diverse styles and genres in anthropological writing — particularly in reaching out to audiences outside the discipline, in or outside academia. At present, anthropologists, not least in the United States, seem to be writing almost entirely for each other. It is striking that a number of historians seem to do so much better in writing for wider readerships — I am thinking of people like Timothy Garton Ash, Simon Schama, the late Tony Judt, or Niall Ferguson (whatever one may think of some of the latter’s political stances). But, then, it is also notable that these are all British immigrants, or commuters, to the American academic scene.Thank you for describing me as an “anthropologist of the world.” I really do think that anthropology as a truly worldwide discipline in its research interests has a particular public role. I just read Amin Maalouf’s Disordered World, a book on various troubles now facing humanity — Maalouf is a Lebanese writer, long in the Paris diaspora, so the book has an emphasis on the changing Arab world. Anyway, he sees coping with cultural differences as perhaps the major challenge, globally and locally, and suggests that if everyone were to become enduringly passionate about one culture other than his or her own, the result would be “a closely woven cultural web covering the whole planet” (Maalouf 2011: 161). Now that is obviously a utopian idea, but it struck me that anthropologists with their commitments to widespread fields could be seen as a kind of avant-garde here. But then they have to find ways of disseminating their understandings effectively, in an information landscape which is now very different from that of the classic anthropology of “other cultures.” On the one hand, knowledge (or misunderstandings) can now flow through so many parallel or competing channels; on the other hand, I am afraid the result of current media saturation is often more narcissism, rather than more cosmopolitanism. Will such efforts at informing the public about the world elsewhere take the form of cultural critique? Sometimes, no doubt. But I am reminded of Marshall Sahlins’s comment somewhere that we should not make it seem as if other people have constructed their lives for our purposes, in answer to the evils of Western society. This could turn into only a higher form of narcissism.DB: Ulf, let’s talk a bit more about reaching out to wider audiences through our writing. Two questions come immediately to mind given your career: the first is whether you feel there are particular experimental lessons to be learned from Scandinavian anthropology, where, perhaps especially in Norway and Sweden, anthropology has shown a remarkable capacity to participate in public debate. The second question is what, if anything, you think we can learn from news journalists today about communicating our forms of expertise to wider publics. One tends to hear lamentation that news media are not more interested in what we have to say or in how we say it. But, of course, this way of thinking amounts at some point to its own alibi.UH: I think our Norwegian colleagues have been particularly successful here, but to what extent there are “experimental lessons” I am not quite sure. In part I think they have simply tried harder. One of them had a regular newspaper column for quite some time, in the 1970s and 1980s or so, and then in the next generation there were several who took an interest in reaching a wider public and who may also have stimulated each other. This has been true not only of anthropologists; I think a number of other Norwegian social scientists have been noticeable as public commentators as well.Now, for one thing, one should note that even these anthropologists have in large part offered views on Norwegian affairs, not so much on matters relating to other countries or cultures (although immigration and minority issues have been an important theme). But I think one should also keep in mind that in terms of population size, the Scandinavian countries are all rather small. So I believe there is a kind of familiarity, accessibility, transparency that helps. Journalists have some sense of who is who in academia and vice versa. It is far from perfect, but scholars who want to cultivate media contacts have a better chance to do so.There is another factor which I think I should emphasize. These are countries with strong national languages, which are weak internationally. My friend Abram de Swaan, a Dutch sociologist, has described the “world language system” as one of three tiers: English, now far above anything else; then languages like French, Spanish, German, Arabic, Chinese, and a few others; then the third tier of languages which have few people using them as a second language. That obviously is where Scandinavian languages (as well as Dutch and a great many others) belong. This means that Scandinavian academics who want to participate in international academic life must write in a foreign language, most likely English, and some get very good at this. The other side of the coin may be that they can then become fairly invisible at home, among audiences who do not habitually read English and do not see those publications, in foreign journals or from foreign publishing houses, anyway. That may not worry these scholars — but if they care to reach home audiences, writing in the national language may become more of a conscious choice where one knows that one is very likely writing for another audience, outside the discipline, perhaps outside academic life altogether. I think there is a kind of informal division of labor here. Some people are more focused on their more or less global community of colleagues; others are more intent on contributing to public knowledge at home.But then I see a current complication. Academic institutions, and politicians of higher education, in Europe and various other regions, now seem much more obsessed with streamlined research assessment exercises, publication rankings — what is sometimes referred to as the academic “audit culture” — than I believe is yet the case in the more pluralistic American academic world. I think it is in large part a matter of these institutions being state institutions, so you can impose rules on them very effectively from the top. And the way these measurements work, you climb in the rankings with articles in what are considered the leading international journals, which will be mostly in English (and published or at least distributed by a handful of commercial publishing houses, but that is to a degree another matter). The ranking procedure obviously in large part has its origins in the natural sciences and medicine, so not much thought is given to the built-in logics of different disciplines, especially those in the humanities and social sciences. This means that books are undervalued, and so are writings in other languages, for other audiences. There is, for one thing, a contradiction here. At least our Scandinavian national academic systems tend officially to celebrate the “three tasks” of universities: research, teaching, but also reaching out with [their] knowledge to the public. Now the first of these may at least seem rather easily measurable — that is, at least, the assumption behind those auditing procedures. There is some preoccupation, too, with ways of evaluating teaching quality. In contrast, there seems to be very little systematic attention to that third task: contributing to public knowledge. Unless the agents of audit culture get serious about this, the reasonable response, from university presidents all the way down to young faculty struggling to get tenure, will be not to bother much with that scholarly public service. So that could actually decline, and public culture would be further impoverished. I know of universities in countries with severe societal problems — no names mentioned — where some more input into public debate from the human sciences would seem desirable, but when you point this out to a university’s leadership with its eyes on global ranking lists, you may not find good listeners.Forgive me for dwelling on this, but I think it is a tendency we must really be concerned with. Your second question: What, if anything, can we learn from journalists? Now there is certainly a lot of variety in journalism. Some of it is dreadful, some very good. Academics and journalists may have a kind of habitual aversion to one another; for anthropologists that aversion easily comes to focus on foreign correspondents. Forgive me again, but when I engaged in a research project on the work of foreign correspondents some years ago (mostly those writing for print media of higher quality), I quite often found that they were doing very good work, considering the practical circumstances. And they could know much more than they had a chance to show. Especially in their feature stories, I think they were sometimes quite impressive in getting mini-ethnographies into one thousand words or so, in ways that could attract readers. So if we want to reach wider audiences ourselves with some of our work, I think we may do well to read at least some foreign correspondents, and some other investigative reporters, with some care. Not least would I think we should try to develop a sense of the “big picture,” if we can credibly find one. Ethnographers still tend to handle miniatures well, but techniques of zooming may be a bit neglected.DB: I’d like to come back to the issue of audit culture in a moment. But while we’re on the subject of publics and publicity (again in the German sense of Öffentlichkeit), do you see conditions changing, or new opportunities opening, with new media and social media? For example, there are now probably hundreds of anthropologists engaged in blogging of some form, and this format could be one way of offering the thousand-word mini-ethnographies that you just mentioned. On the other hand, blogs, like other new and social media, tend to operate through networks rather than address broad (anonymous) publics in the traditional sense. Another example: I enjoy Keith Hart’s Facebook posts, and he seems to take this work very seriously. But again, he may be posting only to an immediate audience of a few hundred people, many of whom already belong to his professional networks. But that’s rather symptomatic of our media environment today, no? The broadcast publicity that you and I grew up with is being hollowed out by these new meshes of lateral connectivity. Do we need to rethink our modes of public outreach accordingly? Or should the objective still be to write more oped pieces for newspapers or to find ways to get ourselves on TV?UH: Perhaps we should be doing all these things — perhaps the one format I am really doubtful about is the kind of TV talk show where the entire idea seems to be to get people to shout at each other. But I do not think I am really technologically up-to-date on all new possibilities.Keith is an old friend of mine — we first ran into each other in the Cayman Islands over forty years ago and have been in touch ever since. I think he has continued to be one of the original minds, the gadflies, of our field. But I believe it is true that his ongoing electronic networking effort is another instance of anthropologists talking mostly to each other. And I am afraid much blogging, in and out of anthropology, is more a matter of self-expression than of communication.Now I am not sure why the Mumbai Theatre Guide and the Circassian World Newsletter appear regularly in my e-mail in-box. I never asked for them, and I certainly do not always, or even often, open these messages, but at least they are there, without my having to make the effort to seek them out. I think if we are really interested in contributing to public knowledge, we cannot sit and wait for audiences to come to us. I would see more potential in collaborative enterprises, regularly feeding knowledge and opinion about particular themes, rather than some undifferentiated “public anthropology,” to audiences who really define their interests in other ways than a curiosity about our discipline as such.I see a need for a greater organizing effort here. In my most recent English-language book, Anthropology’s World (2010), I devote a chapter to pointing to some “usable past” that we could still do well to think about again — contemporary anthropology seems to me too much inclined to amnesia. And there I devote some passages to the efforts of the “modernologist” Kon Wajiro in Japan and the Mass-Observation movement in Great Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Both of these basically recruited teams of amateur observers to do ethnographic observations in varied contexts, on current issues. I would not suggest we would want to return precisely to this, but the fact that there are now professional anthropologists everywhere might make possible a kind of collaborative “world watch” drawing on local knowledge, continued access, and informed interpretation, which hardly any news organization could match. In early 2011, during the Arab Spring, I found in my e-mail a flow of messages organized by the lively media anthropology section of EASA, the European Association of Social Anthropologists. Some of them were from people who had been right there, on Tahrir Square and other sites. Especially if we could develop a genre of “rapid ethnography,” drawing probably on local anthropologists rather than parachutists, we might find new interested audiences.DB: I like this “collaborative world watch” idea very much and agree with you that there is an important opportunity for anthropology here parallel to the work of parachutists but also to networks of stringers. I’m deeply committed to the importance of long-form, “slow ethnography,” as well, but just because we do that doesn’t mean that we cannot also do rapid ethnography. These are different modes of writing for different venues. But to accomplish something on the scale of a collaborative world watch would require significant coordination and sponsorship, I think. Could this be a project for our professional associations like AAA [American Anthropological Association] and EASA? In general, I’d be interested to know how you, as a former chair of EASA and longtime participant in AAA, feel that professional associations can best contribute to the intellectual vitality of the field. Could they be doing more than they are?UH: Certainly, as with so many things, this is not an “either-or” but a “both-and” matter: trying, if we can, to do both slow and rapid ethnography. I am sure both AAA and EASA, as major regional organizations, can play a part in supporting this sort of world watch endeavor. But I think it is very important to get African, Asian, and Latin American colleagues involved as well. My friend Virginia Dominguez, a former AAA president, tells me of a new outfit that she has played a part in initiating, an Anthropologists without Borders, at present with a base in Brazil. Perhaps that could play a part in stimulating and coordinating rapid public ethnographic reporting as well.DB: You wisely caution in Anthropology’s World that “the ideal of building intelligibility in the world . . . does not seem to be fully realizable as long as opportunities for observation, reflection and reporting remain very unevenly distributed, and unevenly controlled” (Hannerz 2010: 112). Perhaps this gets us back to the less than optimal institutional conditions under which academic and nonacademic anthropology is practiced in many parts of the world. How can one strive for the kind of global “world-building anthropology” you have in mind in a world still defined by uneven opportunities?UH: That is a difficult question. Again, perhaps that new head of the World Bank can do something to support capacity building in more places, in those social sciences which are most relevant to the purposes of his institution. I do hear of scholars in the more prosperous parts of the world seeking research grants which would also cover the collaboration with local colleagues in their fields in countries where there is little or no funding available. Yet there is the risk in such arrangements that the research agenda is set by the more affluent partner, and so it could become, to put it bluntly, another variety of “academic colonialism.” And in the current situation, I doubt that much funding of this kind is readily available anyway.One might also hope that in some of those countries that are now rising in the world, some of the new resources can go to a broad support for research institutions and institutions cultivating public knowledge. That could at least diversify scholarly interests and perspectives. It is true, for one thing, that several of the BRICS [Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa] countries already have strong anthropological traditions; it would be good if these could also expand to be a little less preoccupied with “anthropology at home,” to contribute more to the “closely woven cultural web” about which I quoted Amin Maalouf before — that global cross-cutting of points of view.Then certainly there is also a question of what we can do perhaps on a slightly more everyday basis, on this side of more utopian schemes. This involves things like scrutinizing our reading habits — which journals do we read, where do our books come from? — and using invitations, for example, to visiting scholars and to conferences in such a way that they do not always routinely strengthen existing center-periphery structures.DB: Do you also share the worry that the cosmopolitan aspirations of anthropology are being undermined by the rise of what Marilyn Strathern and others have termed “audit culture” in universities across the world? In your experience, how have “new public management” – style regimes impacted the way anthropology is practiced?UH: I would not claim to have a good overview of how all that actually works out. Audit culture has indeed spread widely, but the forms may vary. I remember that in the early 2000s, when my own department was undergoing the first Swedish assessment exercise, and I was involved in that at the ground-floor level, it all ended with a brief meeting of representatives of departments with the director general of the national universities board, and I told her that I had thought it had all turned out rather better than I had feared, after listening to the lamentations of British academic friends about their earlier experiences. And she smiled and said, “The first thing we decided was not to do it the British way.” So there have been differences between places and over time. Moreover, I would not be sure about how policies actually work their way through structures in different national and other contexts. I suspect that in some places the auditing is performed, measures are taken and reported — and then nothing happens, except that the administrative workload has increased. “New public management” shades into old public mismanagement.But that said, to get to the specific impact on anthropology, I do not believe it is a good influence. To consider first its implications for graduate training, the imposition of standard time schedules for the completion of a doctorate, regardless of discipline, which is often part of the audit culture package, does not go well with a kind of professional cosmopolitanism which involves going to live in another country (even among those proverbial exotic Bongo-Bongo), learning a new language, and what have you. I think this is one factor — there are certainly others — which now pushes in the direction of more “anthropology at home.” Some years ago, when I was invited to examine a PhD candidate at a British university, I found that she looked strikingly young (and found that she was indeed younger than I had been when I got my doctorate — I have not been so used to that). It was a very good thesis, and she had completed it well before the deadline, but she had done her fieldwork pretty much across the street.As I said before, I still think audit culture has struck more uniformly across Europe, and in some other places, than it has in the United States. But then, curiously, some of the decision makers in higher education do not seem very well informed about the facts of American academic life, although they find that American universities tend to rank highly on those ranking lists which they take very seriously and must therefore be taken as models. So, for one thing, they apparently often believe that those standard times for graduate degrees come from there. When, on the other hand, I ask my American friends in major departments if their students actually do their graduate training and finish their theses in four years, they all seem to shake their heads.I also remember one prominent American (but British-trained) colleague, when we were at the same conference in Australia, warning local colleagues there that if their universities dutifully started turning out PhDs with only a few years’ training, these young scholars would be unable to compete for academic jobs in their own country; these jobs would go to Americans coming in with better qualifications.Well, what about later career stages? It is sometimes said that at least after you have tenure, or whatever is its nearest equivalent, you can afford to do the research you want, change your research interests — perhaps go to other places for research than where you have been before. But things like research assessment exercises may impose peculiar rhythms on academic work at such levels as well. I hear of pressures to get things published, by whatever journal or press, even when they might have benefited from being allowed a little more time. I doubt that extensive retooling, such as reading up on a new area, taking on another language, and other such activities, would be warmly welcomed by the captains of auditing either.I certainly have no trouble with the principle that we must be accountable for the work we do, whether in teaching, research, or contributions to public knowledge. It is okay, too, if people at academic management levels get better informed about who does what, how much, and how well, on the shop floor. Neither am I in favor of PhD theses taking forever. But assessment procedures need to be better attuned to the pluralism of scholarship and its disciplines. Clearly, there is now a fairly widespread understanding of that at least in the human sciences, although it is not so certain how receptive policy makers will be to this understanding.DB: Cosmopolitanism has been a conceptual or theoretical interest of yours for some time as well as a problem of ethics and practice. At the risk of framing this too dualistically, is there a broader lesson to be drawn here as to how Ulf Hannerz navigates the relationship between anthropological theory and practice? What are the theoretical and practical issues of greatest concern to you today?UH: My engagement with cosmopolitanism really began rather accidentally. In the mid-1980s, when I gave a talk at Berkeley on my growing interest in globalization, Paul Rabinow, who was in the audience, asked if I had thought about cosmopolitanism. I had to reply that I had not (it later turned out that he had). But that irritated me, and I realized that I should. So a little later, for a rather unusual academic get-together called the “First International Conference on the Olympics and East/West and South/North Cultural Exchanges in the World System” in Seoul in 1987, I pulled together my thoughts in a paper which was really a sort of stream-of-consciousness piece. Then that paper made its way into one high-visibility publication, and hitting the first wave of revived interest in cosmopolitanism in several disciplines, it became one of my most cited publications. I want to mention that history of the paper partly to show that it was done for a gathering engaged with cultural issues, but especially because it was done in what was still the Cold War era. (There was a Soviet sport sociologist among the participants in the Seoul conference, and he was followed around by South Korean plainclothes detectives with walkie-talkies.) Then, in the 1990s, that rapid growth of interest in cosmopolitan theory and practice occurred, with more of an emphasis on the ethics and politics of it all, in a period of optimism about what the world could do together. I am afraid in the early 2000s, Vladimir Putin, George W. Bush, and Osama bin Laden together dampened that optimism. Anyway, so when I came back to cosmopolitanism, a main question seemed to be how the more cultural-experiential-esthetic dimension of the concept that I had been dealing with related to the more ethical-civic- political dimension. When I gave a talk on this to a cultural studies group in Tokyo, my colleagues there said there was no native term in Japanese that really covered both dimensions. So is this just a sort of disease of Western languages, to conflate the two? I think they can, at times, exist quite separately, and potentially there can even be a certain tension between them, but I would also think they are often mutually supportive.Okay, that got to be quite long. What am I trying to do now? I have a long-term interest in another post – Cold War development, the genre of global future scenarios that began with people like Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington, on the academic side, and Thomas Friedman and Robert Kaplan, on the journalist side, and which has continued to grow ever since. This is an interest not just in these as texts, to be critiqued as such, but also in their significance in forming a global public consciousness — mostly American in origin but translated into many languages, ubiquitously available in airport book stalls, remembered through those seductive one-liners and sound-bites: “the end of history,” “the clash of civilizations,” “the world is flat.” A blurb for the German edition of Huntington’s book [The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order] describes its thesis rather pithily as “Kulturknalltheorie” — I think that suggests something about why an anthropologist might be provoked by the kind of culturespeak you find in many of these scenarios.Then, as another current interest, which I have been developing particularly in a collaboration with Andre Gingrich in Vienna, I am exploring the anthropology of “small countries” (like the Scandinavian ones and Austria). We had a small conference recently in Landskrona, a southern Swedish town which is close to my summer home but also conveniently close to the Copenhagen airport, so colleagues could fly in from places like New Zealand, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates to participate — we do not want this exercise to become too Eurocentric. We are certainly not aiming to identify some essence of smallness, but there are interesting family resemblances. At best, I think one may find a certain ease of access in networks internally (see what I said about Norway before), and some cosmopolitan inclinations in external relations. But, certainly, there may be some recurrent, less attractive qualities as well.Well, that may be mostly over on a theoretical side. But I think you can see that those, too, fit into my general concern with the way the world comes together, in academia and elsewhere — and the part anthropology can have in that. It would be nice if the world was flat, a more level playing field, but we are not there now. Even the order of production and circulation of those global future scenarios, and the debate over them, shows that.DB: It seems to me as though there is an attractive symmetry between these two projects. On the one hand, you are looking at the epistemic work of envisioning “the global” and, on the other hand, recognizing the enduring plurality of smallness in the world today. Does this balancing of large and small scales perhaps say something about the state of anthropology’s own scenario building and “culturespeak” today? As one of anthropology’s first analysts of the dynamics of globalization, would you comment on the status of “the global” as an analytic category for anthropology today? Where is it still useful, where less so?UH: I remember that in an afterword I wrote for a book on “globalization and identity” in the late 1990s, I suggested that the time was quickly coming when globalization as such might not be a focal research interest any longer. Whatever it may stand for would be normalized as a part of the significant context of a variety of kinds of studies. But it was never really a favorite term of mine. I have used global ecumene some number of times, to indicate a more wide-reaching sociocultural openness, drawing on a notion that has deep historical roots. But apart from that, I have often preferred the term transnational to refer to phenomena that cross national boundaries — which certainly still does not mean that they are truly “global.” That, then, has been a way of breaking out of the straitjacket of methodological nationalism which I think is still quite strong in many disciplines, although perhaps less so in anthropology. I think once anthropology broke out of its own commitment to “the local,” its ethnographic discovery procedures helped it follow linkages wherever they took it.It is true that I have had a certain interest in small-scale things and in scale generally. I took an early interest in symbolic interactionism in more or less classic sociology, for insights into cultural process, and I tend to follow writings on micro-macro issues in social theory. But our “small countries” are not really small-scale in that sense. A country with 10 million inhabitants is still relatively small, compared to China or the United States or Germany. We are concerned with scale in a comparative sense, but then we also want to explore what “country” stands for now, socially and culturally. If many other disciplines may have been overly committed to a national framework, anthropology has done remarkably little at this level, and with that attractive contrast of “the global and the local,” too many intermediate levels have tended to be disregarded. Perhaps the main organized effort to do an anthropology of “the national” is still that of the national character studies of the 1940s. But that was in large part a war effort, during World War II, with Americans using unconventional ethnographic methods (and questionable theories) to understand adversaries, or more or less problematic allies. So then “countries” become obvious units, and in large part, fairly naturally, this was about “large countries”: Japan, Russia, and to an extent Britain.What should we do about “the global” now? I am not sure it was ever that much of an analytical term in any strict sense. It may cover too many things — and at the same time it is unfortunate that in some minds it is so strongly tied only to expanding markets. But I think we should understand the value of having some number of words which sensitize in a general and preliminary way to types of phenomena, qualities, problems, issues. The global will probably remain among those. And so will culture and civilization and no doubt a great many others. Many of them will remain in wide public use, and if we want to be in contact with wider publics and their concerns, as commentators or for that matter as whistleblowers (in relation to some culturespeak, for one thing), avoiding their keywords may not be a wise strategy. Dominic, I think that takes us back to where we started this conversation.