- [Susanna] Everybody,I think
we are going to get started.
This is an invited roundtable,
and it's sponsored by
the Committee for World
Anthropologies and the WCAA.
And the idea of the roundtable
is to try to address
these trends of internalization
and the conversations
among different traditions
of anthropological knowledge
that has been going on for awhile already,
in the last 10 years.
Basically, our invited
speakers here in the roundtable
represent on the one
hand, drive towards the
institutionalization of
these kinds of connections
among different anthropologies.
On the other hand, we have other
speakers who represent the,
let's say national
traditions of anthropology
in different areas of the world.
And our more situated in the,
let's say grassroots aspect
of the internationalization
of anthropological knowledge.
So, basically, my idea when I
thought about this roundtable
was to address a series of issues.
On the one hand, the issue
around the kind of tension
that arises between
grassroots mobilizations
towards the internationalization and
towards the conversation
among different anthropologies
and I would have the
example of the original,
let's say, movement of the WAN,
the World Anthropological
network or the (speaks Spanish)
is that Arturo Escobar
and Gustavo Linzivedo,
started quite a few years ago.
And this was a very informal
kind of gathering of
different anthropologists doing
work on really the theories
of anthropology in different
parts of the world.
So, that would be the
grassroots, let's say,
mobilization and there were others
in other parts of the world.
On the other hand, there is
this institutionalization drive
that has been going on.
For example, the World Council of
Anthropological Associations,
or the revitalization of the IUAES.
Or the internationalization
of the AAA itself.
So, we have tension between
these grassroots moments
and these institutionalization moments.
And I would also like the
speakers to address this,
from the point of view
of their own experience.
The other issue I would
like the speakers to address
is the position of the
actual individuals who
acquire a brokerage position.
So, the people who make
it happen, so to speak,
who are really putting a lot
of effort in this conversation.
How are they being
conceptualized by their own peers
in their own countries, in
their own local environments
of anthropological science?
Because I think that in some
cases, they are viewed as
facilitators of something
that is really important,
which is this new worldwide
anthropological environment.
In other cases, they are
seen as opportunist people
who are really furthering
their own individual careers
through these means.
And in some other cases,
they retain an ambiguous kind of position,
a kind of trickster
position in a certain way.
Finally, I think that the question that
we all need to address is what difference
has it made to anthropological knowledge,
this experience of at least 10
years of trying to establish
an ongoing and a stable conversation
between different kinds of anthropology.
So, I would present now the
speakers are going to be
talking in the order that
we have in the program.
One of our speakers who is in the program,
(speaks foreign language), could not come.
And he very kindly, Antonio
Carlos de Souza Lima,
who is the president of
the Brazilian Association
of Anthropology has agreed to come to
the roundtable in his place.
So, we will have first
Faye Harrison speaking
from the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
And Faye has been the
president of the IUAES,
or is the president of the IUAES.
- Good afternoon.
And thank you for the
invitation to participate.
(sniffs) I've been a member
of the IUAES since 1993.
And since that time,
I've been mostly active
at the level of commissions.
Within the last, I guess, 10, 12 years,
I was elected to the executive committee.
And two years ago I was elected president,
so, I have 22 years of experience
at different levels of the IUAES.
And I'm going to be talking about why
I became involved with the IUAES,
because it was very much
influenced by my membership
and my active participation in the AAA.
All right, which I joind in 1979.
And since then, since
as a graduate student,
assistant professor and on,
I was very active in the Association
of Black Anthropologists, another ABA,
becoming, after doing whatever
needed to be done, president.
At two different junctures,
I served on the board of the AAA.
So, I've seen and witnessed
and been a part of,
a participant observer of
the AAA through several
restructurings of
governance through shifts
in our intellectual
discourses and what have you.
So, my remarks are influenced by
that double role that I have played.
For much of its history, the IUAES was
the principal organization
charged with the mandate
of internationalizing the
discipline of anthropology.
Today, there are newer
networks and organizations,
such as the WCAA, whose missions are to
contribute significantly to that work,
while more established, national
and regional associations,
among them the AAA, have
grown more transnational
in their orientations,
activities, and memberships.
In some of my US colleagues' eyes,
the AAA is no longer simply
a national organization.
And when they attend AAA meetings,
they see them as
international conferences,
organized under the
aegis of an association
with considerable academic capital
that yields career-building dividends.
As a consequence of these developments,
the IUAES faces a much more
complex terrain to navigate
as it attempts to secure
its footing in the epistemic
and institutional ecology
of world anthropologies.
Its potential efficacy in
this endeavor depends on
different kinds of strategic
relationships, partnerships,
alliances, and modes of
brokerage and mediation.
Then, what was the case in the era of,
say, Sol Tax?
I've been a member of the AAA,
as I said, since November 1979.
At that time, I had a passionate
sense that anthropology
could be much more than
it was, and had been.
As a field of largely
Eurocentric studies of humankind
across time and space,
particularly focused on
non-Western colonial and
later, post-colonial subjects.
I had a notion then, and I still do now,
that what anthropology can become
if pushed in new directions
away from its Eurocentrism
and Northern Hemispheric centeredness.
Away from its Androcentrism, and away from
other salient "isms" that
work against the professions
becoming a more democratized
and decolonized space
for facilitating and
framing pluri-cultural
and multinational conversations
about the commonalities
and variations that characterize
human societies and human beings.
Over the years, I've
found kindred-thinking
colleagues in the AAA,
where I was part of a network
that launched what I called
"An Intervention for
Decolonizing Anthropology
"in the Late 1980's and Early 1990's."
So, I've devoted considerable
amount of my career
working with my colleagues
to transform anthropology,
and particularly, US anthropology,
which is the center of the hegemonic
of North Atlantic epistomologies that
we're often talking
against, organizing against.
I've been working with
my colleagues to impel
US anthropology to
realize that just because
US anthropologists work
all over the world,
doesn't make them exemplars of
progressive multiculturalism,
or proponents of what we now recognize
as world anthropologies.
I've been part of an
ongoing struggle to get
more of my colleagues to acknowledge that
the structural and
epistemic terrain upon which
we performed the labors of
our anthropological work
is configured in ways
that permits some of us
in the profession to
enjoy unearned privileges
and unfair advantages related to domestic
and global white supremacy.
White supremacy is understood
not simply in terms of
phenotypic reductionism,
but, in terms that
Arturo Escobar delineates when he writes
of white privilege being at
the crux of global coloniality,
in its defense of a
Eurocentric way of life
that worldwide has historically
privileged white peoples,
and particularly since the
1950's, those elitles and
middle classes around the
world who abide by this outlook
at the expense of the
masses of non-European
and colored peoples.
Perhaps, unwittingly, many anthropologists
are guilty of this.
My interest in building
alliances led me to the IEAUS,
a logical direction to follow
after having the experience
of decolonizing anthropology stateside.
And my experiences over
the last, what did I say?
Like, 22 years in the
IUAES have been mixed.
Overall, very positive.
I can say that from my vantage point,
working with colleagues
from all over the world
in the Commission of the
Anthropology of Women,
and on the executive board is affected
my thinking as an anthropologist.
It affects how I go
about doing my research
and my scholarly writing.
And I'd like to think that
those close colleagues
from around the world who have
22 years experience with me
de-essentialize their
notion of US anthropology,
to realize that the
hegemonic model very often
is guilty of erasing a
lot of the differences,
the disparities that exist in anthropology
as represented in the AAA.
So much of my struggle and my work
has been to reclaim, to
bring from the margins
to the center, varieties
of anthropological voices,
theoretical perspectives,
experiences that make up
the totality of what we
call "US anthropology."
And the AAA has been
the site and the forum
for as many of those debates,
whose outcomes are
reflected in the program,
in the proliferation of
sections and the fact that
small sections now can be represented
on the board of directors.
Because I remember years
ago, that was not possible.
And so, a section like the
ABA did not have a voice
or representation on the board.
And when that shifted,
you know, we were there.
And very often, in
situations where we develop
alliances with other
associations, oh, my God.
All right, so, for me
personally and my smaller circle
of colleagues in the IUAES, I think that
this multinational,
intercultural experiment perhaps,
has been positive, but,
let me say in terms of
the other side and the
questions and misgivings
I have about this project
and its ability to produce
enduring, as opposed
to ephemeral, cosmetic,
tokenistic changes, is
that basically, as I said,
the dividends for building
careers with academic capital
that the AAA embodies, the IUAES
and most other associations
cannot compete.
And even though in the WCAA,
everyone has one voice.
I think in the broader
structures of the neo-liberalized
and corporatized academia in this country
and internationally, it
is an uneven playing field
structurally, all right?
And so, we have to figure out
how to go beyond the rituals
of democratization in order to
get to penetrate more deeply,
so that, those of us who play
mediation or broker roles,
do not fall into the trap
unwittingly of becoming tokens,
or becoming part of a buffer zone,
rather than facilitators
of the types of epistemic
and organizational
structural transformation
that I think World
Anthropologies and the earlier
decolonizing anthropology discourse
and project highlighted.
So, thank you.
(applause)
- [Susanna] So, thank you very much, Faye.
So, now we will have Sandra Lopez Varela
from the Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México.
- [Sandra] Thank you very much for
inviting me to be part
of this great group.
In an upcoming article in
"American Anthropologist,"
I address the challenges
behind the process
of internationalization
of the academic profession
in emerging economies.
In contextualizing my
analysis, I would like to offer
an explanation as to why are
we gathered today to discuss
this large-scale phenomena
named "internationalization."
Internationalization is a knowledge-driven
economic growth strategy admitting that
higher education is of
paramount importance
for poverty reduction.
According to the World Bank's
policy-constructing knowledge societies,
higher education, launched by
a highly skilled workforce,
leads to innovation and new technologies,
indirectly building human capital
and increasing national income.
This scenario requires
high-level scientists,
professionals and technicians trained
in world-class universities.
For emerging and developed
economies, it isn't so easy,
and I'll let you know why:
Internationalization
has been predominantly
developed and designed from
US and European perspectives.
Where the teaching, research dynamics,
and infrastructure are very different from
those that prevail in emerging economies.
Even if the idea of
internationalization implies growing
and building on local academic practices,
when we look closely,
we have ended up with
a dominant system of higher education,
homogenizing international
and intercultural
knowledge, skills, and values,
impacting the international
ranking of our own universities.
Rankings, privilege,
academic institutions in
Western and Central Europe and
our neighbors to the north,
making the global playing
field far from equal.
In one of his many writings,
Philip Albrecht discusses that
in the absence of necessary
fonts and infrastructure,
internationalization is not possible
in developing countries.
In response, these
countries have opted for
the financial support of
the World Bank or the OECD
to improve the quality
of higher education.
And therefore adopted their knowledge
economic growth strategies.
For example, the tuning
model that has introduced
significant changes to the
academic setting as it recognizes
a set of 12 disciplines contributing to
the Knowledge Society in which
anthropology is not included.
Mexican state universities find themselves
changing their internal
structural organization
in order to upgrade their programs
and prepare students
for global citizenship.
The anthropology program at
the University of Morelos,
where I used to work, has been modified
at least twice since 2010.
Since the tuning model is
already placed in the US,
you shouldn't be surprised
that government officials
and Forbes magazine consider
anthropology simply irrelevant,
despite the highest employment
growth rate finding itself
within our fields of
studies in both countries.
After practicing internationalization
for more than a decade now,
Mexico has not improved its GDP.
The explanation is very simple.
According to the OECD, aspiring
to a world class research
and education environment,
requires an investment of $39 trillion US,
when Mexico's current GDP
amounts to $1 trillion US.
This is the amount needed
for Mexico to reach
the high level performance of Finland,
the piece of world benchmark
for excellence in education.
Even if full-fledged
internationalization is
an inconceivable goal for Mexico,
its universities are under
great pressure to attract
highly qualified faculty
and talented students.
Let's explore whom they are
hiring and what are they facing.
The knowledge economy
has created the demand
for internationally linked high-quality
research and professionals.
At the center of the term
"highly-qualified faculty"
is a measure called "internationality,"
a worldwide movement in higher education
requiring specific competences.
For example, international students,
from some parts of the
world more than others,
being part of international
research networks,
again, valuing some
networks more than others.
Establishing international progress,
and even studying or
doing research abroad.
For the first time, the
AAA has reached to the
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and
the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst
in this venue to promote among you
research opportunities in Germany.
Measures of quality research
and productivity include
a research profile
demonstrating active publication
in strictly peer-reviewed journals,
national and international recognition,
invitations to professional
meetings, awards,
among other meeting criteria.
The sum total of this
criteria implies that
Mexico's researchers ought to be
fluent in the English language.
Publishing in international journals,
specifically those included
in the Science Citation Index
entails publishing in English.
Therefore, publishing in English
enhances the chance of
being cited by others,
a needed assessment of one's influence
in the world of science.
It is a problem for all of
us writing our local journals
that too many colleagues in
English-speaking countries
do not read or cite such journals
because they lack Spanish language skills.
And so meeting my article
to American anthropologists,
I was first asked to translate all my
foreign references into
English, and I refused.
I followed Patty Peterson and Robin Helms
in wondering whether the
US government is really
committed to the broader ramifications
of internationalization,
and also if the AAA is ready to face them.
Even if papers in Spanish are welcomed,
what would have happened if I had
delivered the discussion en Español?
Would you have attended?
When I was a member of
the AAA executive board,
I had my students prepare a
report on gender participation
at the 2012 annual meeting.
In drawing a geographic map of the 5,000
registered participants from 67 countries,
they found out that most came from
English-speaking countries,
4,000 located in the US alone.
And only 73 scholars
came from Latin America;
half of them were Mexicans
Why so few people from
Latin America attended AAA?
Beyond limited resources,
attending the AAA
requires competence in English,
a language not everybody
embraces fluently,
even professional scholars.
When I represented
Mexico's 120 top scientists
and alumni of Germany's
Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung,
among them, Nobel Prize
winner Dr. Mario Molina,
I found that many fellows in the
social sciences and humanities
had limited knowledge of English.
Their recognition, however,
was tied to their speaking of German,
the second language of
science, according to Nesco.
Most of us non-English-speaking
members of the AAA
are part of an elite,
trained with great efforts
at prestigious, multilingual schools
and universities around the world.
Or at least come from
a background in which
our families could afford to pay for
English language courses
outside public schools.
It is an illusion to think our speaking of
other non-Latin languages
empowers us back home
or that I represent Mexican
anthropology at this roundtable
based only on my nationality.
Along my own professional career,
I have embraced the enrichment brought by
international networking with scholars
from other cultures and
working environments.
But, it comes with a price.
Those of us trained in an
English-speaking environment
face a generation back home
with arguably different values.
We have accommodated internationalization
in a networked world
developing skills and styles
of collaboration that
have made us different.
Many leaders of Mexican
scientific institutions
and universities belong
to a generation that
embraced socialist ideas in the 1960's,
opposing anything dealing
with the Anglophone world,
and have reproduced those
values among their students.
In following Mexican institutions,
frequently contradictory
rhetoric and practice,
that is promoting internationality
and internationalization,
this generation is welcoming
the ideas we acquire abroad
and it is now ready to accept
the new research fronts
we have been trained for.
The Secretary-General of the
Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung
has said it openly that in the absence of
a welcoming culture in our own countries,
much is wasted, financially
and in terms of human capital.
Without a welcoming culture, most likely,
the generation trained
abroad will leave the country
physically or intellectually
to work in an environment
where their talents are more appreciated
as has been my own experience.
There, such scholars would achieve
high research standards,
and the higher those standards
and international recognition,
the less likely it is
that these colleagues would find
suitable cooperation partners back home.
This scenario compromises
any desired macro-economic
effect of promoting economic
growth in any country,
as its proxies and the
work that we do may only
augment the GDP of that
welcoming country. Thank you.
(applause)
- [Susanna] Thank you, Sandra.
So, now we will have Antonio
Carlos de Souza Lima,
who is the president of the
Asociacion Brazileda Anthropologia.
- [Antonio] Well, I would
like to thank the committee
from World Anthropology,
the American Anthropological Association,
the World Council for
Anthropological Associations,
and particularly, Susanna
Norotsky for the invitation
to participate in this
roundtable discussion,
as well as Bella Feldman
Bianku for suggesting my name.
My training has been in Brazil and almost
the entirety of my research has been
conducted in my home country.
So, I'm not exactly that kind of mediator
that Susanna was talking about.
Like many other researchers, however,
I have long had my
contacts with colleagues
in other countries and
indeed throughout Brazil
which is in and of itself
a very diverse place.
I began studying the
anthropology of the states
in the early 80's, intersecting
anthropology, history,
sociology and political
science and focusing
in general of state politics
for indigenous peoples
and on Brazil's own internal processes
of colonialism and imperialism.
I am quite conscious of the fact, however,
that my work has had
little, if no impact in the
discipline international
circles for a series of reasons.
Some of these have to do
with linguistic issues
and costs of translation.
Others involve the costs
and time and resources
of attending international events.
And still others are
related to the hierarchies
of legitimacy within each
national anthropological
context and tradition with regards to
adequate objects of investigation.
In truth, few Brazilian
anthropologists have their work
widely recognized within
the discipline's mainstream,
although many of us also
maintain relationships
with a variety of colleagues and attend
many international congresses.
I believe that these were
some of the conditions
that the World Anthropology's
(speaks foreign language)
network, sought to confront
through association and through exploring
the political
epistemological possibilities
and impacts of the network's proposals.
This movement has gained the strength
through the leadership of researchers
situated outside the United
States, but who were often
trained as doctors of
anthropology within the US.
A key moment in the
formation of this tendency
and this institutionalization
was the Constitution of
the World Council of Anthropological
Associations in 2004,
during the meeting of the Brazilian
Anthropological
Association, ABA in Jesife,
under the presidency of
Gustavo (unintelligible),
the WCAA's first facilitator.
I was then ABA's vice president,
and you can say that
together with the creation of
the "Virtual Brazilian
Anthropology," vibrant journal,
this action anticipated what
funding agencies in Brazil
would later demand giving
Brazilian anthropology
a good leg up on much of the rest of
the country's academic scene, so to speak.
I am speaking here of what
has since come to be called
"internationalization,"
whatever that means.
By taking these steps, Brazilian
anthropologists stretch it
beyond its participation in international
congresses and events,
and begin establishing
more frequent contacts outside of Brazil.
And indeed begin to engage more frequently
in research outside the country as well.
The WCAA was added to this
generous scenario as was
more recently greater Brazilian
participation in the IUAES.
The Brazilian anthropologists who have
become active in these
circles have generally
been trained outside of Brazil.
Most of them, but not
exclusively, in the US.
And they have sought to present Brazilian
anthropology production within this
transnational space's typical forums.
In some cases, this is done
through a stereotypical
reading that seeks to
facilitate understanding.
An example of this can be seen in the
frequently encountered idea
that Brazilian anthropologists
are generally listened to by
the powers that be in our country,
which is not exactly the case.
It is true that we
anthropologists in ABA in general
are positioned to
contribute to many different
public debates in that we
have had a long tradition
of activity within the
public and political sphere.
Often in strict cooperation or dialogue
with many Brazilian social
movements and collectivities
that are our primary interlocutors.
The situation should not be understood
as a general rule, however.
Nor is it necessarily something engaged in
by those Brazilian anthropologists who
propagate these stereotypes
in international forums.
In the case of Brazil, I
believe that it has been
through the presidency
of ABA either through
the direct involvement
of that organization
or through that of its presidents that
Brazilian anthropology
has managed to become
institutionally engaging in these spaces.
Our professional
association's evaluation of
Brazilian situations are
certainly not cohesive
and often fall into what we may call
the "mediator's dilemma."
They tried to respect both
sides of debates at once.
They are also sometimes
perceived by certain people
as favoring international
connections and issues
and detriment to National WAN.
Often, however, this view is flipped
according to the exigencies of the actors
in the scenario of a given situation.
And we are accused of being excessively
parochial in our views.
When we turn to evaluating
the repercussions
of these processes in the global scenario,
I believe that the movement launched by
World Anthropology's
network, together with WCAA,
which has helped to
lead to the creation of
the Committee of World Anthropologists,
has been very important.
What it has not done, however,
it is let defective changes
in epistemological or
in the balance of power
within its members' national contacts,
at least speaking from Brazil.
Thinking about the situation
from Brazilian perspective,
I am under the impression
that one was intellectually
quite potent and its beginnings,
but, has since run around
on a certain rising
retonization of charisma
within the WCAA within the last few years.
It would be interesting to compare these
with IUAES's long history.
That organization that had
little impact in Brazil,
although many of my colleagues have
participated in the congresses of IUAES.
I believe that in order for us to obtain
the objectives laid out,
this is in a second group of questions,
it will be necessary for us to go beyond
the standard reflections,
and begin working
with common research agendas.
We need to engage and integrate
students and professionals
of every level of formation
and from multiple...
(mumbles)
(laughter)
Okay. (laughs)
And begin working with
common research agendas.
We need to engage and integrate
students and professionals
of every level of formation and from
multiple nations in these projects.
And so, this engagement and corporation
should not only take in the selection
an investigation of research objects,
but, should also involve
the intersection of
critiques and dialogues of activism.
I think that only by
interweaving in this manner,
various academic (unintelligible)
which engaged with
and cross-fertilize each other
we'll be able to slowly and
gradually create deep and
effective change in all national contexts.
Whether these are understood to be
hegemonic producers of (unintelligible),
or peripheral producers
of regional ethnographics
towards these ends to
create experiences for study
in other countries, no
hegemonic countries,
With the students coming
from hegemonic countries,
tostudy, taking classes,
knowing the scholarship of the country
will doubtless open many new possibilities
for our discipline.
Speaking again from my
Brazilian point of view,
we've often seen much
excellent work produced by
foreigners who have been much more than
a fraternal and symmetric presence
in Brazilian anthropology.
However, we have also often
seen young researchers
who are only interested in engaging with
local intellectual prediction
by treating this as if it were
native discourse and who do
not seek to deeply understand
the traditions of academic
discourses in contexts
other than their own.
To put it bluntly, we see
many young foreign researchers
who do not seem to
understand nor care about
what they're Brazilians
or Mexicans, whatever,
colleagues think as anthropologists.
If ethnography is the main force
for changing our discipline,
maybe these new movements
will be important for the
development of a pluri-national
and collaborative ethnography.
Maybe in the context of
large projects undertaken
within the European Union,
we can see some of these mechanisms.
This is a question for Susanna.
Already functioning, and thus,
project future possibilities
for these on a more global scale.
But, for all this to work
out, we must first address
a key question which
seems to me, to be one of
the most of the real obstacles
to all these general
perspectives: Financing.
- [Susanna] Thank you.
(applause)
So, now we will have Gordon
Matthews from the Chinese
University of Hong Kong.
- I'm going to talk about
between World Anthropology
and world anthropologies,
an American anthropologist
in East Asia, as interpreter
and as gatekeeper.
The globalization of
anthropology is no longer
simply a desirable future,
but, rather a present reality.
It used to be the case that
anthropology consisted of
Americans and Western Europeans studying
tribal peoples within their colonies.
More recently, it has
largely remained the case
and does so today that
anthropology consists of people
from rich countries studying
people from poor countries.
The World Council of
Anthropological Associations, WCAA,
founded in 2004, now has 52 members,
consisting of presidents of
the anthropological societies
across the globe, ranging from
the United States to
Japan to China to India
to Chile to Mexico to
Tunisia to the Philippines.
It holds regular yearly meetings
and fosters numerous research initiatives
to explore how anthropology
may exert global influence.
The international Union of Anthropological
and Ethnological Scientists, the IUAES,
at its most recent full
meeting in Manchester in 2013,
had anthropologists from 69 countries.
The "American
Anthropologist" now publishes
a regular article every
issue on World Anthropology.
Editorial boards of
major journals published
in the United States and Western Europe
increasingly consist of anthropologists
from around the world.
All of this testifies to a
recent explosion of interest
in World Anthropology, and more than this,
the globalization of
anthropology as a discipline.
In 1996, Wolf Hunters defines
the global acumen as a world
in which we are increasingly engaging
with one another a common forum.
Increasingly, this is
the case of anthropology.
This globalization is
inevitably eroding the power
of what has heretofore been
the intellectual hegemon.
The more anthropology is
global, the less it is American.
The leaders of the American
Anthropological Association,
its presidents, officers,
and administrators
over the past decade had been
extraordinarily welcoming
towards the emergence
of global anthropology.
However, the rank and file
of American anthropologists
have not been interested.
Panels concerning global anthropology
offered by AAA have generally
been fairly sparsely attended
over the years as compared, for example,
to similar panels offered at IUAES.
You know, there are 20 people
in the audience right now
and you have the president of AAA,
and the president of IUAES.
Americans don't care, bluntly put.
This is entirely understandable.
Your average American student
or assistant professor
probably has more immediate concerns
than global anthropology.
Namely, finding and keeping
a job within the profession.
Who can blame them?
But, this may be based
on a misunderstanding
of current market realities.
As the United States sheds
anthropological positions,
East Asia adds them.
I know of several dozen
American or British-trained
anthropologists who have
been able to find jobs
as anthropologists in
East Asia in recent years,
having been unable or unwilling
to be employed at home.
Global anthropology is not
only an intellectual movement,
but, an economic movement as well,
as other parts of the
world, such as East Asia,
increasingly begin to supersede
the Western world economically.
I have been an American anthropologist
obtaining a PhD in the US
and teaching in Hong Kong
for the past 20 years.
And thus, I am in an ambiguous position.
My ambivalence is rooted
in my simultaneous role
as interpreter of East Asian
and American anthropologies
to one another, but, also as gatekeeper.
This gatekeeper role
includes grading students
and evaluating their research proposals,
evaluating the research
proposals and tenure applications
of professional anthropologists,
and, as an editor of Asian anthropology,
evaluating submitted
articles through referees
as to their possible publication.
All these activities involve me as an
American-trained anthropologist
evaluating the work
of anthropologists from other
intellectual traditions,
as to their quality.
If anthropology is indeed one,
if there is a single global anthropology,
then, my judgment may be apt.
However, if there are multiple
global anthropologies,
then, my judgment and my capacity
for judgment is questionable.
When, for example, as editor
for "Asian Anthropology,"
I demand that a Chinese or Indian
or Pakistani anthropologist
rewrite a paper.
This may represent my
effort to make this paper
meet global standards for
anthropological publication.
Or, on the other hand, it
may represent my imposition
of American standards
on other anthropologies,
my exercise of American hegemony.
When I tell a mainland
Chinese graduate student in
my university that her research
proposal is not interesting,
and she needs to rethink
it, this may represent
the universal training of anthropology
graduate students everywhere.
Or, it may represent my role
as an American gatekeeper
telling students from a
different intellectual
tradition of anthropology
that they had better
conform to my American
standards or they're out.
Obviously, both of these
are, to some extent, valid.
There is a common global anthropology,
or at least aspects of
a global anthropology.
This is why I can teach with
some degree of confidence.
I've never yet had a
student or colleague say,
"You can't understand what I'm doing
"because you're American-trained,
"but, I was trained elsewhere."
On the other hand, there are indeed
significant differences
in national traditions.
I've written about the referee system
as a barrier to global anthropology.
And indeed it is, in the sense that
referees and teachers too are gatekeepers,
enforcing to at least
some extent, hegemony,
whether it's American
hegemony or other hegemony.
Both of these views,
both of these aspects of
World Anthropology on the one hand,
and the world anthropologies on the other,
have their legitimacy.
The problem is how in particular
situations and circumstances,
these two perspectives
can be disentangled.
World Anthropology, based on the idea of
a single global anthropology,
necessarily involves
a singular vision of what
anthropology is and should be.
And this tends, given the world today,
to be Western anthropology,
and particularly, American anthropology.
Different anthropologies around the world
continue to more or less take their cues
from the theories of
American anthropology.
Now, this is unpleasant to
think of, but, it's true.
I look at Japanese anthropology,
I look at Chinese anthropology,
Indian anthropology,
Latin American anthropology, I think,
although I know less clearly,
what theories do they use?
Go back to the core, go back to America,
they're the people who are always cited.
Why? Why can't you cite
people from your own country?
Why can't you cite people from elsewhere?
This is what we see.
However, there are ongoing features of
American anthropology today that make it
distinctly unsuitable to
be the world gatekeeper
and hegemon of anthropology.
The trend in anthropology over
the past 50 years since Gertz
and the postmodern wave that followed him,
has been to write in a more and more
complex and literary way.
One that in its complexity privileges
native writers and speakers of English.
This has made American
anthropology less comprehensible
to non-native speakers of English,
and thus, more provincial.
Earlier American anthropologists
like Ruth Benedict,
Margaret Mead, and Marvin Harris
write for a larger audience.
But, this is generally no longer the case,
with the great exception of David Graeber.
American cultural
anthropology is generally
distinctly harder then in earlier eras
for non-native speakers
of English to understand.
This is due partly to trends within
American anthropology
itself, but, also to some
other larger structural features.
The tenure system, requiring
"advances" in theory
every few years for a new
generation of junior academics,
as is not the case in a
number of other societies.
It's also due to the publishing system
in the United States,
whereby academic publishers
and university presses have enough readers
within the anthropological world itself
to make it largely unnecessary
to reach an audience
beyond the anthropological world.
This is not the case elsewhere.
In a number of other countries,
you've got to reach a larger audience,
but, not in America.
So, American anthropologists do not
generally try to reach outside
the anthropological world,
they write almost entirely for themselves
and their students.
As I earlier discussed, I
am in the middle between
World Anthropology and
world anthropologies.
Nonetheless, in a globalizing world
of globalizing universities,
we are moving away from
world anthropologies
towards a single global
World Anthropology.
This is absolutely inevitable
in the coming decades,
I think.
But, will also bring into
increasingly sharp relief,
the conflicts of evaluation
that I earlier described.
One can only hope for the emergence
of a global anthropology based not in
native-speaker English,
but in a universal English
or in multiple languages,
or in computer language,
computer translated languages,
enabling more and more of
the world's anthropologists
to communicate with one another.
One can also hope that world standards of
anthropological citation
will become ever broader,
leading citation indexes like SSCI
to increasingly represent not
just the West, but the world,
as is resoundingly not the case
in present as was discussed,
as you discussed.
I am convinced because of Western relative
economic decline leading
gradually and indirectly,
but, inescapably to
the relative decline of
American and Western anthropology as well,
that other anthropologies,
particularly those of East Asia,
but, a range of other societies as well,
will increasingly contest American
anthropological world hegemony.
We now live in a multipolar
world of political power.
Increasingly, we will
live in a multipolar world
of anthropological power and
anthropological influence.
This will involve World Anthropology
more than world anthropologies.
But, it will involve a range of
competing anthropological centers.
An anthropological world
that will allow for
far more diversity than does
the anthropological world today.
This, I think, will be a far better
anthropological world then that of today,
and I very much look forward to
seeing its ongoing emergence.
Thank you.
(applause)
- [Susanna] Thank you.
So, now we will have Yasmin Narif
from the University of Delhi.
- [Yasmin] All right, that was hopefully,
going to keep you distracted
from what I'm going to say.
I've never been part of any
professional association.
And my engagement with the
World Anthropology group
is specifically in
relations to questions of
theory and philosophy,
epistemology and method in anthropology.
And in my profile, which I
think is kind of important
to lay out right up
front, and I hope it's not
too disorienting to the group here.
I am educated in India, I teach in India
in a department of
sociology that uses both
sociological as well as
anthropological approaches.
This is a department which was established
right after the
independence of our country.
And therefore, came with
all that you know about,
our post-independence departments.
In that department, I apparently,
have been one of the first
or the first person who's
gone out of the country
to study another region in the South.
I went from Delhi to Beirut in Lebanon
for my first research work,
which is my doctorate work.
And now, I work on the politics of life,
and violence covers
India, Africa and Lebanon,
so, that's the confusing
place that I come from,
and I thank Susanna for
making the part of this panel,
and making things even more confusing
for world anthropology.
But, in spite of this confusing situation,
for more than a decade
now, I have been part of
the World Anthropologist network,
and I've been a proud
member, I have to say.
And that I hope it
qualifies my presence here.
Now, in response to the
brief that Susanna gave us,
let me engage with both questions.
But, in one frame I think,
and that frame I will borrow from Derrida.
or rather what I say
is a typical Derridian
turn of kneeling for a
very commonly known phrase
that would imply a world of meaning
and literally for us,
in World Anthropology.
The words that I''m going
to try and pay attention to
is testimony and evidence.
So, before I explain what
they mean for us today,
let me start with the first question that
Susanna posed for us, which is
what brokers' positions as this enterprise
of world and professional
anthropology endorse
within and outside the AAA?
We have heard of the various
groups that we do have.
For this, I'll take your attention to
the World Anthropology section
that was started in 2014 in
the "American Anthropologist"
that Sandra has spoken about.
I cannot, of course, summarize adequately
the wealth of information, the views,
the perspectives, the
passions, the powers,
and the politics that
has been written about
by many anthropologists
covering a potentially
infinite range of positions.
Bringing them under one
cover is an achievement,
a signal of world
anthropology coming-of-age.
Yet, I cannot feel a
slight sense of déjà vu.
When I placed these essays
in front of the truth mirror,
the reflection, or I might say the shadow
that I find reflected is once again
the area studies paradigm.
There is an undeniable residence
of a classification system.
We discussed country, Ireland, Mexico;
these are the places that
have been mentioned there.
We recognize regions,
South Asia, Latin America,
East Asia and so on.
In that, we understand a range
of topics of research from
folklore to colonialism to globalization,
and of course to hegemony,
dominance, and the Metropole.
I know that this is an undue
reduction, but, however,
to make my point, let me
suggest that the relationship
has not taken us too
far away from the center
of the dichotomies that the area
studies paradigm has formed,
but, now the gloss takes
on a different sheen.
We are now imagining a
global theater of staging
where many of us are called upon
to play our character roles.
But, neither the characters nor
the script has really changed.
This is where I go back
to testimony and evidence,
and I'd just like you to pay
a little bit of attention
to the slide there.
This is Derrida from a
very little-known book
called "Otobiographies."
And he says that a
testimony has never been
or should never be mistaken for evidence.
Testimony in the strict
sense of the term is advanced
in the first person by
someone who says, "I swear,"
who pledges to tell the
truth, gives his word,
and asks to be taken at
his word in a situation
where nothing has been proven,
where nothing will ever be
proven for structural reasons,
for reasons that are
essential and not contingent.
It is possible for testimony
to be corroborated by evidence,
but, the process of evidence
is absolutely heterogenous
to that of testimony which
implies faith, beliefs,
sworn faith, the pledge to tell the truth,
the "I swear to tell the
truth, the whole truth,
"and nothing but the truth."
Consequently, where there is evidence,
there was no testimony.
The theoretical order, that
is the order of evidence,
must be foreign to the
element of credit, faith,
or belief implied by
the testimonial pledge.
A little apology to Gordon,
these are slightly postmodern words.
But, nonetheless, what
connection do I find
between these words and
a range of relationships
that the World Anthropology
initiative sponsors?
One idea that I will suggest
is that the evidence as to
what anthropology is, it's
correctness and truth value,
who speaks the discipline,
and who does not,
literally the "I," the
first person is centered.
Which roles are to be cast and played
are still decided from a
position of centrality.
The power of this evidence
is about how the others
are to be recognized and
given their rightful place,
offered in good faith.
It almost feels like the
debates of the 1980's,
where you place and find a
place for the various cultures,
and they are expected to play that role.
Now, in that sense, this evidence gives us
the technically correct
sense of anthropology,
to which the other world anthropologists
post their testimonials.
The constant dawn of negotiations,
if you go through the essays in the
World Anthropology section in
the "American Anthropologist,"
it's like that of offering
testimonials with faith,
with truth telling appeals to credibility.
To keep this brief, I am
suggesting a clean look
at the kinds of subject positions
that are being caused when
World Anthropology mirrors area studies.
I'm asking for another glance
at what identity stereotypes
we are continuing to sustain
and what are we going to create.
Though, they emerge out
of the (unintelligible)
of wounded peripheries, we might want to
think of here not to
quickly being co-opted into
a roster of stereotypes
in the scramble for
citizenship in World Anthropology.
The question for me is
not so much a world map
of contiguous but separate territories,
but, more about sharing
a common discipline.
What I'm really asking for, therefore,
is that we need to think hard
about what we really mean
by saying that we want
to do World Anthropology
in both theory and in practice.
Now, in that intent and
using the same ideas
of testimony and evidence, I
turned to the second question,
which is knowledge and power in the
internationalization process,
and I want to give you a very
simple sort of take on that.
While we try and find our
places on the global map,
how do we bring the world
into our classrooms?
If you can imagine with me a classroom
in an American or a northern university,
it's a roomful of students
from across the world
and from within, listening
to and learning from the
comprehensive syllabi on
Anthropology with a capital "A,"
That's what you were talking about.
And this is the evidence
that I'm talking about.
And then, the students will
proceed outwards to the world.
Some return to their own territories,
others travel far from their own.
Americans or northern students usually
go far out to the poorer countries,
and they're all profiled,
they're fitted with
appropriate language training,
area focus research proposals,
reading lists, etc.,
all to contribute towards
Anthropology with a capital "A."
While I, in my classroom,
and I expect I will speak to
some of us in this global
map of World Anthropology,
I speak to many students,
but, they're almost always
from the region of South
Asia, moving on to India,
who will only stay,
study, and work in India.
What is my syllabus when I'm teaching?
Do I treat Anthropology with
a capital "A" as evidence
and provide local knowledge as
testimonies to anthropology,
or should be the other way around?
Will I be a local hero if
I Gandhi, (unintelligible)
or an indigenous anthropologist?
I usually combine, but,
I suppose like most of us
in my position do.
But, this is really in
context to of what he was
just talking about, Gordon,
in terms of refereeing.
I tried unsuccessfully to
publish a long time ago,
an essay around these issues
in the (unintelligible) anthropology.
And the reviewer told me that if you...
It wasn't directed at
me, but said anonymously,
that if the writer wants
to talk about these issues,
why is she using Dennis?
I use Derrida, etc., so there you go.
So, this is really much
truer than you think.
But, while, as I said,
I do try and combine
Anthropology with a
capital "A" and all the
anthropologies with
accents as best as we can.
But, even then I cannot help
but hear the insistence,
and this is the last little
set of words from Derrida
that I want to use again.
That I do not wish to
transform myself into
a diaphanous mouthpiece
of eternal pedagogy.
Now, again, I really don't want to take
much more time than I
should, but, I rather want to
draw attention to the question
of pedagogy in anthropology,
combined with what we are
really intending to do
with this thing that we are
calling "World Anthropology,"
and to understand it
reflexively and generously
to how we can sustain an inclusive,
integrated discipline
and not a fragmented,
disintegrated intent.
In my classroom, I would
want to think about
and also convey what place
method and epistemology
play in creating the knowledge,
the theories that I speak
about, and that I aspire towards
in the making of what we can all call
"anthropological knowledge."
I do not want to be just another utterance
in a cacophony of voices and languages.
I do not want a dilution of integrity
in the name of multiplicity.
Nor do I want to be a
diaphanous mouthpiece
of eternal pedagogy.
In other words, my
aspiration today has been
to express my sincerest
appreciation for world anthropology,
but, at the same time, to ask for
an anthropology of the world.
And in the spirit of the team
here at this conference today,
where the relationship
of familiar to strange
is not a slash, but, a hyphen;
not a separation, but, an example.
Thank you.
(applause)
- [Susanna] Thank you very much, Yasmin.
So, now, our last
speaker is Monica Heller,
president of the American
Anthropological Association.
- [Monica] Yes, you're going
to be secretary on Monday,
you better get that right.
So, I feel in some ways,
I'm a good bookend to Faye,
insofar as we both embarked on journeys.
Faye is from the US to the IUAES.
Mine, as a Canadian working in Canada
working on Canadian issues
to president of the AAA.
In that sense, perhaps, kind of...
There are times when I feel like
I'm the embodiment of
familiar-strange, actually.
The journeys that I think
are both journeys that are
framed by decolonization in different ways
and I'll come back to that in a moment.
So, yes, the AAA as hegemon,
I'm going to actually try
to undo my academic habitis
and not talk for very long.
Because one of the things that I think
hegemons have to do is shut up and listen
most of the time and not talk.
And so, I'll try to be brief.
So, everybody here has
mentioned the various ways
in which we have the AAA as hegemon,
US-centric in its theoretical
and methodological frames
in the substantive questions it asks
focuses on either the
political engagements,
this is not been mentioned yet,
the ways in which North
American anthropology
and here, Canada works
pretty much the same way
as a four or five-field, depending on
how we count anthropology, as opposed to
the way it's organized
elsewhere in the world.
Sandra's mentioned the problem
of the English language.
(speaks French)
And so, we have a number of
different problems of hegemony.
These are, you know, particular issues,
but, ones that I think
we need to take a look at
in terms of what we want
to retain and what we can
possibly work with and what
really needs to be worked at.
I tend to think of the
problems of hegemony generally
and how to work through what this means
for the AAA as hegemon in two forms.
One is one we usually talk about,
which is the access to knowledge
produces anthropological knowledge,
but, there is also, to
my mind more importantly,
the problem of access to the position of
producer of anthropological knowledge,
legitimate producer of
anthropological knowledge.
And to the position of
definer of what counts,
what has value as
anthropological knowledge.
So, we get this embodied in
moments such as the one that
Gordon referred to when we
referee articles, for example.
So, these are the problems
we're struggling with.
This meeting is a space where
both of these things happen,
and that we have to think about.
But, I think also, I mean I know
that as a space of knowledge production
of attribution of value and
meaning to that knowledge,
we encounter two different kinds of,
let's call them "problems," issues maybe,
things we have to deal with.
So, the first is the one that Yasmin,
I think just referred
to, which is the problems
that we all struggle with
of the nationstate frame
or maybe the area studies
frame as really constraining.
This is maybe a version
of what Antonio Carlos
was talking about is the
financing problem, right?
This really constrains
in very practical ways
the production and circulation
of anthropological knowledge.
And I'm often in conversations
where people say,
"Well, it's the American
Anthropological Association."
I'm like, yeah, but that was 1902,
and so, what do we do with that now,
recognizing that that
nationstate frame is in many ways
less about opportunities
and more about obstacles
in all kinds of different directions?
But, there's also the
problems of contradiction
with the anthropological
enterprise, and here again,
my colleagues have referred
to the questions of
the encounter with anthropology's
engagement with colonialism,
complicity with colonialism
past and present,
and the way in which that's triggered,
I think in some productive ways,
processes of reflexivity and
attempts at least, at decolonization.
And we can argue about whether those
have been done well or badly,
but, I think we can see them as there.
And in that respect, I share, if you like,
Gordon's surprise and possibly dismay that
these are issues that we talk
about a lot in this space.
And yet, the connection between what
we're trying to do here
and how that is being
declined elsewhere in this space now,
those connections are
not being made and so,
those are connections
that I think we have to
work at making more explicitly,
probably with a bit less
meta-talk and a bit more
actual engagement with substantive issues.
So, these are issues of
power and how it works
and how we use anthropology well
to do things in the
world that we want to do.
So clearly, for the
AAA as an organization,
this has led to some
very deliberate efforts
to engage with being the hegemon and with
trying to understand what it means to
decolonize ourselves
and to be good citizens
in global efforts at decolonization,
which are not just...
And I appreciate Faye's use
of the word "transnational,"
as opposed to "international."
I think that's actually really important.
But, also within the
frame of the nationstate,
there's all kinds of ways
in which there are issues
that just don't line up with
the nationstate frame at all.
And so, these are of course,
as Gordon pointed out,
connected to being
overtaken by the facts of
changing relations of power
in global geopolitics.
And so, that's part of how we are...
We have to actually think
through what that means for us
and what it means to take up
a speaking position in this
particular moment of major
transition, of major change.
And so, one of the ways
in which we've seen that
done deliberately has been
through the institutionalization
of an attempt to try to
grapple with these issues
through, for example, our
committee in world anthropologies,
despite Sandra's or maybe Sandra's
horrible experience with
"American Anthropologist,"
actual attempts to try to
deal with multilingualism
and to try to understand what it means
for English to be, not
just here, but elsewhere,
a global language, a dominant language of
anthropological knowledge production.
And we've also tried to do
it through various kinds of
forms of collaboration
with sister associations.
I worked with Bella and with
Susanna on a virtual webinar,
so, what I call "baby
steps," but, some ways of
kind of taking our place
alongside our sister associations,
which like us, remain constrained by
the nationstate what area studies frame.
But, these are things we
can work with and through;
through multilingualism,
but, also through moments
when we need to say to ourselves,
or we do try to say to ourselves,
"Okay," as I was saying earlier,
"time to shut up and listen."
So, these are struggles.
But, I think that the way forward
is to try to struggle well.
Susanna asks what difference
might all of this make
to what counts as anthropology,
what counts as anthropological knowledge.
And my response to that is actually,
"Who knows? But, let's find out."
Thank you.
(applause)
- [Susanna] Well, thank you all very much.
I think these presentations
have been really very diverse
and at the same time,
convergent in many ways.
So, I would now want to ask the audience
to engage with the speakers here.
Yes?
(audience member speaks)
Excuse me, do we have a mike?
Yeah, you should please
use the mike, thank you.
- [Voiceover] Thanks very
much. (clears throat)
Can you hear me okay now?
I have a very low voice.
I'm just curious, too.
I really appreciate the
different perspective,
but, I'm wondering too that in
addition to the area focused
and in addition to our training,
especially in the United States,
we're trained to be
lonely anthropologists,
we don't do much collaboration.
There are two things
that I'm wondering about.
One is, and this is for the entire panel,
how do you see in addition
to educating anthropologists,
the collaboration of anthropologists
with the communities with which they work?
In particular, thinking about
more activist kind of work
and especially applied
areas of anthropology.
I know that in Mexico, most
Mexican anthropologists
work in Mexico and look at issues that
revolve around the people in Mexico,
which is very different
than in the United States.
So, I'm just curious about two things.
One about the whole notion of
collaboration given more of
an activist strain rather than looking at
the institutional
building of anthropology,
but, looking also at the
problem-solving that I think
we all are aiming for in a
world anthropology. Thanks.
- Thank you. So, do you want to answer?
- I hope I understood the question.
I'm very sorry that I can't address you
because I have the lights on.
So, I'm just going to look this way.
It is true that Mexican anthropology
or Mexican anthropologists
have always worked in Mexico.
I'm one of the few examples
that has worked out in Belize,
that is also worked in Arizona
as part of my training.
But, I belong to a very
different generation.
And the problem right now is that many
Mexican anthropologists
and science in general,
I mean this is not only
happening within anthropology.
Because internationalization,
it's a global policy
that is being directed from
the World Bank and the OECD.
There's basically no escape.
So now, all those
established and well known
Mexican anthropologists
are being forced to be
part of this dynamic that for
me, I'm already used to it,
because I'm a younger generation. (laughs)
And so, it is inevitable,
to me it is very painful
to see some of my professors,
that they're about to retire,
and they're still forced to
produce 10 articles per year,
demonstrate citations, attend conferences.
And the reason why they're doing it,
it's because internationalization
has an effect on our salary.
So, this time, within
the economic dynamics
that are happening around the world,
it was really hard for
me to be at this meeting.
So, I really thank the AAA for having me
granted the possibility of being here.
But, not everybody can
afford, and I'm just wondering
if this continues, whether
or not I'm going to
be able to continue coming,
and if I don't come,
then, I will see
repercussions in my salary,
and the status that I
have to have in order to
prove that I'm working in Mexico.
- [Susanna] Yes, I don't
know, Yasmin or Antonio,
do you want to...
- I can stand up.
Again, I can't look at that
side because of the lights.
But, very quickly, even
though your question
was much about Mexico, like Sandra,
even I'm the only person
who's moved out of India
to work in another region.
One thing I think we do go on a lot about
in a certain sense, attacking the hegemon
of the American anthropologists,
part of the problem,
and I'll come to Sandra's point later,
part of the problem is
that in our area studies,
there isn't that much effort.
And part of it is also because
of the financing issue.
We don't have the money
to get out of the country.
We have to work in India.
Our students never get any
fellow to live or going abroad.
We don't have money to sustain them
through their doctoral programs.
So, the issue is far more
complicated than that.
But, the internationalization
issue is actually
a very dangerous trend that we even have
which is a little different from you,
but, we have the same
issue in India right now.
The problem is so schizophrenic,
which is that on one hand, we
have to have what is called
an "auditing system" of
how many conferences,
how many articles, etc.
But, I am not going to
be given leave to come to
this conference because
it's outside India.
So, there is a lot of
schizophrenia in our institutions.
It's not a very simple question-answer
way of dealing with the problems,
it's a far bigger issue.
But, at the core of what I
thought you were asking is
I think we certainly
need to spend more time
thinking about what we intend the produce
of World Anthropology to be.
Is it collaboration?
Just because that's
already been happening.
But, what is really at stake is something
far different I think,
which is the worldwide way
in which the map of education is changing.
And that is something that I guess
we need to pay attention to.
- I think that Brazil
has a very interesting
experience that it's not part of
the internationalization core,
the core idea of of internationalization.
It is the relationship with Portugal
and the relationship with Argentina
and with other countries in Latin America,
particularly Columbia.
Now, we have a wave of
Colombians in Brazil.
That's the way we started
listening much more
to our fellow Latin Americans.
And skipping the position
of being Latin American.
And I think that what I was trying to say
is that in general,
it's not the rule also.
Brazilian anthropology tries to establish
a symmetrical relation,
Brazilian anthropologists,
not all of them, try to establish
symmetrical relationships regarding
other traditions of anthropology,
and tried to understand what is
at stake for anthropologists,
and not as data of area studies.
And I can say that I learned
a lot about Argentina,
and I knew nothing when I
started advising Argentinians
and had advised various students.
And also I'm now trying
to understand Columbia
by means of my students' work
and trying to read Colombian anthropology.
In order to understand the
questions they bring to us,
well, it's not a rule,
we have anthropologists
going to Africa and applying very
globalized tendencies
that come from Brazil,
and with no discussion of
scholarship about Africa,
applying ideas, (unintelligible),
that have no relation with that context.
It can be something interesting,
but, trying to apply as we
applied "hegemonic anthropology"
is just reproducing the same position.
And so, I wouldn't say that everything
is marvelous in Brazil.
We have "imperialists" also,
and more symmetrical references.
And symmetrical doesn't
necessarily mean that
reverse anthropologies,
and things like this.
- Okay, yeah, so now, maybe
Monica, Gordon and Faye,
you want to...
Okay, so what about you?
- Very quickly, in East
Asia, but, many other places,
there's a direct contradiction between
activism and internationalization.
For this reason, anthropologists are
increasingly encouraged to
publish in SSCI journals,
Social Sciences Citation Index journals.
Those are overwhelmingly
Anglo-American journals.
What that means is you have
to present your argument
not for locals, but, for that
distant foreign audience.
That means that
anthropologists are, in effect,
rendered politically unable to speak out
within their own societies,
because all their time
has to be devoted to
writing for the distant hegemon.
- But, I'd like to say that,
I didn't get to say that my
role as a broker liaison,
I said is a mixed bag.
But, basically I feel totally ineffective
because my colleagues in
the AAA and in the USA
are totally indifferent
to internationalization.
But, in part because
of the transformations
that have occurred within US anthropology,
the trans-nationalization.
And the fact that, I guess the
World Anthropology model of
and paradigm for rewards
in career-building
and validation sort of emanate from that.
So, in a sense, they're
disincentives for them to
go beyond and transcend
those hegemonic boundaries.
And the global political economy
has affected the North as well.
So, rank-and-file
academics in this country
cannot afford to go to
IUAES meetings, etc.
And it's unlikely that their universities
or their departments of anthropology
are going to lobby for
them to make a priority
to go to domestic conferences
and have those conversations and whatever
as well as these conferences
outside of the United States
so that they can
de-center US anthropology.
I see some of the applied work or
actually the activist work,
the truly collaborative,
not collaboration that
really masks the sort of
coloniality of power relations.
And you know, as basically
a critique and a way to
work against the grain
of the hegemon at home.
because I came from two
other sessions today
and we were addressing from
different points of view, this.
But, a lot of the activists
are not necessarily addressing
the 50 people at the
hegemon who want to read
the abstruse, dense, French-driven
theoretical analyses.
These are people who are writing
in publicly accessible ways.
They're including in their audiences
members of the populations
where they have worked.
For instance, Gina Ulysse, a
Haitian-American anthropologist
has published a book in a
triptych, in three languages,
in one bound copy; English,
French, and Haitian Creole.
Because she recognizes that even though
English is the global language,
that doesn't mean that
even people who have some competence in it
can really engage texts and ideas
comfortably in that language.
And of course, she includes
Haitians at home and everywhere
as a principal segment of this
multinational global audience.
And so, that's affected how
she publishes, for whom.
The language you talk in even if
you're publishing in English,
to speak in a way that
code-switches into accessible
language, so that...
So much of the name dropping and
the abstruse stuff we do
is to claim elite status.
And so, we're preoccupied with that.
But, there are anthropologists, I think,
who align themselves with
struggles on the ground,
and I think that has reverberations
and ramifications at home.
And so, I think a number
of fascinating precedents
have been set within.
In a sense, these are members of the AAA,
or the SFAA that basically,
there are people who should
be your kindred spirits and
allies and brainstormers
with the World Anthropology proponents.
And so, that's my point,
within the domestically
and internationally or transnationally,
some of us for years, have
been making parallel arguments,
but, we don't know each other,
we don't read each other, and so forth.
And so, a "divide and rule" tactic means
that we're going to fail.
- Just in conversation with this,
there's someone just
used a French theorist.
Part of the problem is that if
you're a World Anthropologist
outside the center, then,
we must be doing something
which has to be politically correct,
and has to be done with
the air of activism.
I think some of us wish to do theory,
wish to do epistemology,
which has to be on par with
French theorists or any
other theorists in the world.
I think that distinction
between what is correct
and what is not so correct has to be
rethought a little bit in this endeavor.
- Yes, so I think now we
still have like ¼ of an hour,
and we could take a few
questions from the floor,
and then, our speakers
will engage with them.
So, please.
Yeah, okay, so please
go to the microphone.
Reach, reach, okay. It's the same.
- [Voiceover] Okay, sorry, hello?
Well, I come from a country
in South America, Ecuador,
whose knowledge production
has been very, very few.
And now I am here trying to
do that paradigm shift.
(laughs) But, when I arrived,
the first thing I heard,
I am doing my PhD here,
and the first thing I heard
is that I have to publish or perish.
So, I said, "Okay."
I have done little things,
little publications
in not-so-cited journals.
But, I said, "Okay, I
can do it, I can write,"
but, suddenly I said,
"Okay, It's not enough,"
my English writing skills,
but, I have found here
that it is also English
writing perspective.
And I have that struggle at this moment.
I write, but suddenly, people
who have to review my work
has another extremely
different perspective.
So, that's my question:
Okay, we can't write in English,
we can express ourselves in English,
but, how can we publish in English?
And also one day I asked myself
is this publishing
apparatus is a capitalist
hegemony also?
It's still so much that we have to do
because it's not so easy to publish.
I think that maybe
Latin American journals,
need to improve, or I
don't know what can I do,
I'm just doing my PhD, but, I
think that that's a problem.
We can write in English, but,
how can our work be reviewed
without that hegemonic
perspective in English writing?
- Yes, so, can we have another question?
Yeah, reach it?
- [Voiceover] It's really
a comparative question:
To what extent do you think
that this is a worse problem
in anthropology than it
is other social sciences?
Because although I'm certainly
not an expert in economics,
but I read the "Economist."
Now, I constantly see
South Asian economists
(clears throat) being quoted
at quite a high level.
Equally in history, any
self-respecting historian
(clears throat) who is writing
about South America or Asia,
will automatically be quoting
local South American sources,
South American historians.
So, I'm not saying it's not a problem
in other social sciences,
but, it seems to be
much more of a problem in anthropology
than it has in some of the others.
Is that a correct reading or
have I got it completely wrong?
- Thank you.
So, maybe you want to answer?
- So, I just want to make
a couple of quick comments.
First, to the first speaker.
Here, I'm going to speak because
I represent the hegemon.
(laughter)
With 22 journals in anthropology.
So, this is where I think it actually
is really important to struggle.
When Faye was talking about this book,
Gina Ulysse's book in three languages.
Where did you find a publisher to do that?
I have been spending my entire career
banging my head against a wall,
mainly in vain on that one.
So, here we have an
association with 22 journals
in the midst of a deep reflection about
the wildly changing publications market
political economy, if you'd like.
This can be scary, but it's
also a moment of opportunity.
And so, if we try to look at
what those opportunities are,
I think this is a moment when sometimes
there are historical moments
when we have to struggle.
It's not going to be handed to us,
it's not going to be done for us.
We're not even going to
be able to figure out
where exactly we want to
go until we get there.
But, this is a moment
when the door is opening.
And I would encourage
anybody who wants to push
at the English-language
domination door to do that
and to do it in the context
of what it means to publish.
Yes, you have "publish or perish,"
but, what it means to publish
is no longer all that clear.
It entails fights with your department.
It entails fights with
your granting agency.
It entails making things
hyper-explicit and clear,
but, sometimes that works.
So, two very small examples:
About 20 years ago, a colleague of mine,
originally from France and
I, decided we were going to
submit an article to the
hegemon in our field,
to (speaks French) published in Paris.
And we got it back with,
"Oh, your French is terrible."
(laughter)
And, "Why are you busy
spending all of this time
"telling us about your stupid
methodology? We don't care."
So, we wrote back and we said,
"You know what? (speaks French),
"you don't get to make the rules anymore."
In North America, we think talking about
methodology is important because...
And we won that fight, okay?
- How do you win? Did
they just agree with you?
- We made them feel
really, really bad about
being imperialist, you
know, fill in the blank.
(laughter)
So, to get an article
from Canada in France,
and then, to have us say,
"Yeah, we've had enough
of this colonization,
"thank you very much."
(laughter)
Although, there is settler colonial...
I won't go into that.
So, it's possible, and you
have to choose your fights,
and it's exhausting, but,
that's what we have to do.
To just try to quickly
address the second question,
I like to think that my
experience with other disciplines
is more with disciplines like
linguistics, for example,
that because of what we do,
we're hitting this wave first, maybe.
Or I think maybe historians
are also in a similar position.
So, we're encountering it
first, and that's a good thing.
And we should use that,
and we should use it well.
- But, the 2010 UNESCO and International
Social Science Council
published a world report,
called "Knowledge Devise."
And it deals with the
social sciences completely,
and anthropology is represented.
But, it shows that a lot of the structural
epistemological questions
that world anthropologies
raises really do prevail
across the social sciences,
except they're more perhaps
frightened amongst us
because of the nature of our discipline
and its position in the historically deep
international division of labor
among the social sciences.
Studying all human beings, but,
as I said in my presentation,
particularly non-Western.
I mean we have baggage about that.
And we are talking back to ourselves,
being self-critical about
that, and you don't find
necessarily political scientists,
economists doing that.
But, it turns out that
this hegemonic structure
and this political economy,
it affects all the social sciences.
So, you're going to find
in Africa or whatever,
that those social scientists,
perhaps with anthropologists
bearing the brunt, that they are stuck
in a peripheral sight
of knowledge production,
analysis and theorization,
I think for the sort of
understood reasons, and that
legacy is being reproduced by
what I call the "recolonization
through contemporary
"neo-liberal globalization,"
which has affected academe worldwide.
- One very quick comment
on the referee system:
This is very close to the ground
in answer to your question.
Most journal editors
pick people they know.
And they pick people roughly within
the circle of their acquaintances,
and in an American
setting, that tends to mean
people who unwittingly serve
as American gatekeepers.
Nobody intends that,
that's entirely unwitting,
but, referees will say things like,
"Well, this paper really
doesn't deal with anthropology
"in the way I understand it,"
which means often "American."
Now, the increasing
internationalization of anthropology
does mean a broader pool of referees.
It is changing, but, unfortunately,
since you need to publish now,
you may still be a victim of this ongoing
national gatekeeper function
of the referee system
in the way that
anthropology is now set up.
- Regarding also the first question,
I can relate to your problem
because I went through it.
In fact, whenever I was sending articles
to prestigious journals,
they would say that
my English was not good enough,
so, I'd better find a
translator or an editor
so I could publish the article,
so, that has always been on the table.
But, now that I have helped translate
some of the abstracts that
people have to write in Spanish,
for them to publish in
a journal that requires
a Spanish abstract.
I mean I'm very surprised
that most of my colleagues
are using Google Translate to do that,
So, every time that I
receive a Google Translate
abstract in Spanish, I send it back.
And I said, "If you are
requesting me to write,"
because it's very different
to speak in English
and to go outside and
grab a cup of coffee.
Really writing in English
requires a very different skill.
And when I'm reviewing
those articles in English,
I'm also very surprised that many people
that are native speakers, they don't know
how to write in English.
So, it's something to think about.
I don't even think that it's a matter
just of knowing a language,
it's like even knowing your own.
And in regards to the second question,
I just wanted to insist that because
this is a global policy, it
is affecting all sciences,
from physics to chemistry to history
to the social sciences and the humanities.
The pressure that we're having in Mexico,
it is beyond belief because
there are two options.
And I know many people that have
decided already not to be part of this.
But, usually, they don't have families.
So, it is a lot of pressure
for us that have families
not to be part of the system.
So, I mean I just remember
that I'm going to be
now teaching for Chinese students,
and I might be sent by
my university to China
because of the agreements.
The more agreements you have,
the more international
networking you have,
there is a higher possibility that
we would impact our GDP's.
So, Mexico's National University,
it's the highest ranked
university in Mexico.
I think only with Brazil sometimes
we're just struggling who's
university comes first.
But, we're in the same dynamics.
We to prove that we have
international students,
that we're publishing in
international journals,
that we're developing
international networking,
we're working with
international colleagues.
Right now, most of the agencies that are
financing my research are from Germany,
not even from the US.
So, that even gives me
a little possibility.
I mean I enjoy the work, but (laughs),
but, it's a lot of pressure.
And I do appreciate that
good side of internationality
because to me it has been a
very fulfilling experience,
but, I also recognize the pressures
and the horrors it brings.
- Just going against
the grain one more time,
I think we would have to think through
the idea of language a
little more carefully.
It's because of English that
we're even sitting in this room
and talking to each other.
Having accepted that, I would also try and
draw your attention to
a country like India,
where we have more than 2,000 languages,
and if people were to start
writing in their own languages,
you wouldn't know which
to translate to what.
So, while I do understand
the absolute problem
of having English as a hegemonic language,
and the intent of World Anthropology,
I think part of the problem is that we are
once again looking at it
only from our own area.
If it is to be World Anthropology,
however negative certain
language issues are,
we have to be able to communicate
to other regions and this is what I think
I wanted to go with the
comment made earlier.
I think it is absolutely important that
we need to understand what
is this project about.
Is it about providing a sense
of anthropology which is about
conceiving of this thing
called "World Anthropology,"
or is it about really mapping out a space
for each one of these identities?
It is a complex question
and I would really
go on and on and on
about building up method,
building up a sense of epistemology,
and before thinking.
Because our relationships have
always been with the hegemon.
Once you start thinking laterally,
the language issue also
becomes very complicated.
I don't know Spanish, I
never will, I suppose.
I use Italian philosophy,
I don't know Italian.
So, where do I stand?
I can only read English translations.
I know four other languages in India.
Means nothing to you in this room.
So, we have to think through
that problem a little bit more.
- Yes, well, we've run
out of time I'm afraid.
But, thank you very much
to all our speakers,
and thank you also to the
anthropologists who have been
willing to sit with us and
share with us this session.
Thank you.
(applause)
(light, upbeat music)
