Ines Hijazi - Entry N°6 (George Marcus)

      George E. Marcus wrote the text we need to read for this week. He is an American anthropologist, founder of the journal Cultural Anthropology. He was increasingly interested in how anthropologists are “made” nowadays. He notes that most of the time, the countries were anthropologists traditionally worked became throughout the time places submitted to “extreme forms of social and political disorder” such as epidemics, ethnic violence, dissolution of state apparatuses. Theses places now are affected by the intervention of several kinds of supranational forms of aid and authority. He pondered the identity of an anthropologist in this kind of context. He surveyed three alternatives: he thinks that an anthropologist can be seen as a consulting expert, as a reporter or as a witness. He was more convinced about the fact that anthropologists see themselves as witnesses because they are use to playing a mediating role between aid workers and refugees. He refuses to see the identity of the anthropologist as one in pursuit of independent, and self-interested knowledge on the scene of traumatic events. For George Marcus, an anthropologist typically frames his thoughts according to his own social, political and literary history and is inclined to study people with less power and status than themselves. He argued that what distinguishes anthropology now from the discipline in the past is that it enters the field through zones of overlapping representations and power. He meant that the anthropologist knowledge could no longer ignore or bracket in establishing its own authority or clear vision. 

                 Nowadays, according to George Marcus, witnessing is the only figure of identity of the three that he indicated that raises the issues of these contemporary challenges of fieldwork and by which the anthropologist retains a modicum of independence, engagement and self-respect.

            To legitimate his conviction, Marcus gave five moments in the emergence of the anthropologist as witness. I think it is important to show, as he did, the impact done by the new way international affairs are led. Indeed, any knowledge can know be considered as impartial or self-interested. Two reasons for me need to be raised: the first one is that so many stakes are followed in the production of knowledge today even if it is oblivious. And the second one is that the point of view of an anthropologist cannot be pulled apart his own origin or history as Marcus said. It reminds us to return to the Claude Levi Strauss work. He was one of the first to speak about the “occidentalo-centrisme” i.e the fact that western people always reflect relatively to their western point. This fact creates a non-partial knowledge that cannot be always right.