Walter Solon - entry no. 6 - Marcus

Two phenomena of our recent history frame a new problematic for the identity of the anthropologist, to the point of creating a “predicament”, that is, a crisis in the production of meaning and justification for anthropology. The first phenomenon is of intellectual, academic order, and can be put under the big umbrella of postmodern discredit for the metanarratives that had informed scholarship since the XIXth century – also informing the establishment of 20th century branches of anthropology, such as Lévi-Strauss' structuralism, deeply anchored in Neo-Kantism and Saussurian linguistics etc, or the cultural anthropology of Geertz, rooted in semiology and promoting a hermeneutics of gestures and social rites. The second phenomenon is of geopolitical nature and is described as the end of the pretense stability of colonial, post-colonial and Cold War environments. The author argues that the 1990s see at the same time an expansion of American imperial hegemony worldwide, as well as an increase of failed states and social conflicts in former stable regions where anthropologists conducted fieldwork. This last point doesn’t seem convincing. If we take, for instance, Latin America, the 1990s can be considered the historical moment where most of the continent’s examples of political instability (military dictatorships, Leftists revolutionary guerrillas, cartel-controlled regions, civil war) seem like a ghost from the past, which has been wiped away first by neo-Liberalism, then by technocracy. This is not to say that Latin Americans can rejoice about the overall improvement of their lives and rights, still, if on one hand most of the continent’s remaining abysmal numbers in violence is mostly due to economic inequalities (and not political instability), on the other hand, indigenous nations have been granted new rights in Bolivia, while Colombia and Mexico seem to have turned the tide of their wars on drug cartels, or Brazil’s occupation of slums by the military have extended state sovereignty over areas previously outside of the rule of law. Under all these conditions, and deliberately not taking into account  all necessary negative impacts of state action, we may say that it’s never been easier to be an anthropologist in Latin America. What we can’t say is that these are failed, or failing states. On note 4, Marcus recounts that the anthropologists of the past (before contemporary age) would move around symbolic, developing states where they met up with “out-of-time ethnographic subjects”, where all concepts of classical anthropology could be studied in a state of purity because they were, if we advance in our interpretation of this weird but revealing note, unspoiled by modernity, now ubiquitous in the form of intervention. Now, what we have is not developing, but extreme failure. If we don’t buy these ideas, the rest of the article’s discussions seems unjustified. It basically advocates a new identity for a new age anthropologist. He shall not be an expert, for his commitment to academic truth is out of fashion in a post-modern environment of awareness of the prevailing realm of opposing narratives and truth regimes. He shall not be a reporter, for journalists are better trained in travelling to unknown places and writing a quick story to feed the media’s avid, yet superficial readers. He has to be a witness, between the secular witness before the court of history and the religious imperative of preaching for humanism. The anthropologist therefore occupies as liminal position between academia and field experience, between the international regimes of intervention or mobile sovereignty within which he works, and the first-hand experience of traumatized people. He constantly has to justify his discursive authority (who hasn’t?) before (bizarrely, only before) academia. He has to be aware that, when he enters the field, he’s also entering overlapping zones of power-knowledge and representations. He has to know that the “being there”, the imperative of first-hand qualitative experience that originally gave anthropology its appeal over other social sciences is now a “being there with/for Uncle Sam”. As I have argued against the paradigm of American global totalitarianism today in other blog entries, I won’t discuss it here. More alarming is how no word is mentioned about how natives and traumatized people react to white intellectuals travelling to their cities, living together with them, asking them questions: the problematic doesn’t fulfill its promises. The crisis of anthropology doesn’t find an answer: it doesn’t have an exclusive field or object of study; nor does it have a particular method of narration: rather, witness-anthropology shall look up to literature and testimony and write in the name of the victims of history. But, unlike fiction literature (or the Latin American testimonio), it should stand for truth and humanism. It’s a naive notion that fiction literature doesn’t represent truth. Fiction is truth: through displacement, imagination, fantasy. It’s truth that most writers don’t need to travel or experience to be able to write their characters: but they increasingly do. There’s definitely a convergence between contemporary fiction and the witness-identity for anthropologists advocated by Marcus. But fiction literature has the freedom of art, and, when it’s studied by literary critics, it’s also given the academic authority that anthropology claims to have; therefore, why anthropology?