George’s
Marcus’ chapter “Expert, reporters and witnesses: The making of anthropologists
in state of emergencies” represents a meta-reflection on the modality of
anthropological research in contemporary interventionist environment and how it
constitutes the social identity of the anthropologist. Marcus argues that the role of the anthropologist
in its challenge to mediate between actors “on the ground” and “detached,
international experts” can be most adequately conceived as witnessing.
Rejecting recourse to Marxist
meta-narratives, Marcus calls for an anthropological framework for immanent
radical criticism that enables the researcher to be detached and disinterested
while not falling into positivist methodology. The paradox consists in accepting
one’s complicity with the interventionist framework, to deliver “critique
without an outside” and still maintain an independence of knowledge
production. This balancing act is reflected
in the role that the anthropologist plays in what Marcus calls the new global
project: “the managing of emergencies”. On the one hand, the anthropologist
represents the local scene, he is one of the actors on the ground. On the other
hand he is accountable to the international academic community and the ones
that are managing the emergency.
Hence, similar to Kosmatopuolus, Marcus focuses
on the middleman, the mediator, and attempts to conceptualize the form of
power/knowledge production that emanates from this role. However, from his meta-perspective,
he chose the anthropologist in his liminal ambiguity as the object of reflection
himself. Likewise, the anthropologist occupies a space in between the dichotomy
of the local and the global, the micro and the macro, between those who are the
source/cause of emergency, the alleged purpose of intervention, and those who
intervene, manage the emergency (the international community) and above all define
the parameters of emergency themselves. Marcus concedes that anthropologist act
in a capacity as experts for the latter. However, he see this as a disguise to
superficially justify its usefulness to the art of government. As the role of a
journalist differs in temporalities and audience Marcus settles for the last of
the three potential identities, the anthropologist as witness. He appeals primarily
to the sacred origin of the witness in the sense that the anthropologist
connects the particularities of every-day life to a transcendent discourse. As
such, he acts as a witness of global processes of change with a humanist
concern for the local subjects of these macro processes which according to
Marcus allows the researcher to maintain independence and resist the constant
pressure to align in an interventionist environment.
Marcus’
assertion raises several questions: Does one have to insist on conceptualizing
the identity of the anthropologist in an already existing framework, such as
the journalist, the expert or the witness? Why does he not offer a
characterization in virtue of the particular micro structures of power in their
own right as Kosmatoupolus suggested. In this respect, is the ethnographic
researcher not similar to the think tank expert, in that they are both caught
in between the global/local dichotomy, academia and journalism, in spite of
different purposes and ambitions in the given environment?
Secondly,
underlying Marcus’ analysis is the assumption of novelty, of a new character of
the international environment that reconstitutes the identity of the
anthropologist. Are interventions by international actors in the domestic
matter of “failed” or “weak” states so entirely new and pervasive that only now
the researcher has to pay attention to the “overlapping representations and
power knowledges” through which she enters the field, as Marcus claims? Indeed,
interventions may be couched in a different rhetoric than before 1989 and its mode
and actors may have changed (e.g. to “emergency” management). However, the
consideration of the pre-existing power/knowledge structures and the
anthropologist’s positions within them has always had to take an intrinsic part
of her reflective research agenda in any kind of environment. In realizing this,
the anthropologist would recognize that detachment and above all disinterest
are not only impossible to achieve but that its assumption can have distorting
effects on research. As the critical theorist Robert Cox has put it “Theory is
always for someone and for some purpose”[1]. Cox and Marcus both face the challenge
to find a role from which to be critical without assuming to be “outside” of
the circumstances that one is investigating. Indeed, Cox argues that the very
essence of critical theory lies in the realization that there is no “outside”.
As a consequence, the critical theorist is to explicitly embrace her
emancipatory agenda to liberate humans from the circumstances that enslave them.
For the anthropologist’s the same logic applies to the transcendent discourse
or argument, to the grander narrative, that the she connects to her everyday observations. In his text, Marcus
himself identifies the underlying agenda of the anthropologist that is incompatible
with the aspired disinterest: A concern for the ordinary human subject and its social
suffering. Marcus’ contradictions
become further apparent when he firstly describes the anthropologist’s
witnessing as “testimony of human suffering but without activism” and in the
end “witnessing as a form of activism” in the interest of detachment.
Moreover,
the role of a witness and detachment do not necessarily go together, as a
witness is potentially as much involved in a situation as a victim. Indeed, the
witness is potentially a victim and vice versa. Rather, Marcus, as he specifies
in the conclusion, seems to see the anthropologist as occupying the role of a
“bystander”. This characterization makes the implications of Marcus
conceptualization strikingly clear: in the role of a bystander the desired
detachment and disinterest would make the anthropologist highly susceptible to
the bystander effect that occurs when the presence of others hinders an
individual from intervening. Yes, in an interventionist environment there are
already many actors intervening. Being complicit in the interventionist
framework already, it is even more important for the anthropologist to take his
humanist concern seriously, take responsibility on conceptual level and rid
herself off the aspiration of disinterest. According to Cox, not only awareness
but embrace of our own attachments, interest, subjectivity and complicity, that
presupposes a healthy amount of self-reflection, will enable researchers to
work in a most honest and truthful way. Trying to maintain one’s independence
by resisting the pressure to take sides in an interventionist society may
already imply taken a side and can be likened to the bystander's act of omission.
theory.
In: Cox, R. W., & Timothy J. S., eds. 1996. Approaches to World
Order.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 85 - 123.
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