Disciplinary Futures and Reorienting Research

The discipline of anthropology faces significant challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The trajectories of our research have shifted tectonically as access to our fieldsites has been transformed by quarantines, travel restrictions, and social-distancing measures. These conditions—among many other pressing concerns—have raised questions about the relevance of our work, about the significance of our inquiries, and around our disciplinary ethics (Rutherford 2020). Our field is a “high touch” endeavor, requiring the formation of relations, building trust, negotiation—no matter how you spin it, anthropology is not a six-feet-apart scenario (Agbe Davies 2020). It is impossible to do anthropological fieldwork absent close contact with others, whether through participant observation, excavation, collection of biological samples, or laboratory analysis. “The field” matters for all the subdisciplines, as it is a site of enculturation, a place where stories are passed down, and the locus of the relations out of which our disciplinary knowledge emerges (Agbe Davies 2020). Current conditions mean that many anthropologists cannot study the location, the site, the community, or the collection that they intended to, engendering soul-searching reflections on our work (Di Fiore 2020). In a time when our ability to enter “the field” is interrupted, when our disciplinary modus operandi has been disrupted, there are few better questions to ask than: Why do we do research? Should we be doing research at all? Where do we conduct this research, and why? (Mkhwanazi 2020). If nothing else, COVID-19 has revealed anthropology's slowness to transform itself even prior to the pandemic. The discipline has a long history of unbalanced relations between its practitioners and its research subjects—it is not news to anyone that the former group is often seen as taking from the latter and giving little in return (Ndlovu 2020). The pandemic has thrown broader social inequalities into stark relief, and this is certainly true within our discipline. For example, the ability to “restart” or “pivot” a project will be a privilege available to only a few; current conditions are likely to exacerbate structural inequities related to the colonial history of the discipline and its current conditions of social reproduction. Indeed, the risks and costs of the pandemic are and will continue to be unequally distributed, with early-career researchers, the precariously employed, members of historically marginalized populations, and academic parents bearing the greatest burdens (Di Fiore 2020) Perhaps now is the opening that we need to transform our mode of knowledge production, the unfolding of our projects, and the afterlives of our research (Mkhwanazi 2020; Ndlovu 2020). This will by necessity require more than redirecting ethnographic research into online spaces, for example (Navaro 2020). No aspect of any society will be left untransformed by the pandemic; our research must respond to and address the fundamental changes in our own lives and those of our interlocutors. Naturally, this will be easier said than done. This will extend beyond the adoption of new tool kits, of workarounds, of creative strategies for gaining access (contra Miller 2020). New methods will be required, yes, but more than the identification and deployment of new means of data collection, we must consider how the pandemic has and will continue to reorient the kinds of projects that anthropologists pursue (Agbe Davies 2020). Here, I respond to two of last year's year-in-review pieces in this journal that have highlighted ongoing disciplinary reorientations in light of: (1) selections from the Wenner-Gren's online fora on the future of anthropology under pandemic conditions, and (2) my own experience of pivoting my research trajectory under externally imposed restrictions on access to my fieldsite pre-COVID. Much has been said about Ryan Cecil Jobson's year-in-review piece (e.g., Al-Bulushi, Ghosh, and Tahir 2020; Dua 2020; Mondesire 2020; Welcome 2020), which argued that the sociocultural anthropological zeitgeist in 2019 “suggests that there is a case for letting anthropology burn” (Jobson 2020). Identifying several insufficient fixes—technological, state-form, virtual, Boasian, and decolonial—Jobson proposes new forms of anthropology: a patchy, witnessing, abolitionist anthropology. But as Jobson recognizes, letting anthropology burn is no simple fix of its own. Indeed, university administrators would be all too happy to cancel faculty lines, defund graduate programs, and even close anthropology departments, all justified by the need for austerity measures in troubled times. Furthermore, Jobson highlights how the condition of the field is structured by existing inequalities in disciplinary reproduction in the American academy, where a small number of doctoral-granting departments dominate the tenured and tenure-track positions at other PhD-granting programs—that is, the “star system.” Moreover, the tenure-and-promotion incentive structure has created a gatekeeping habitus that hinges on “possessive investment in authorship that values dissension above agreement, individualism above collaboration, and the sequestration of knowledge above its open circulation,” thus reproducing inequalities in our research practice and our engagements with our interlocutors in the field (9). The patch, the duograph, and collaborative ethnography might represent possible solutions, but as long as the solitary ethnographer is considered the “paragon of expertise,” the discipline's structural problems will continue. Just as the techno-utopian and state fixes are insufficient to address political and ecological crises beyond anthropology, so too epistemological, methodological, and rhetorical fixes will not save our field. Needed though these moves are, we must stretch beyond revisions to the disciplinary canon and diversification of the professoriate. To reorganize anthropological practice, we must do more than incorporate the insights of the “decolonizing generation” into an already and obdurately unequal professional enterprise (Jobson 2020, 9). As Leniqueca Welcome (2020) writes, the only anthropology that is appropriate for our times is an abolitionist anthropology, which seeks to dismantle “white supremacist, imperialist, hetero-patriarchal, ableist, and capitalist formations” toward a discipline aimed at “material transformation.” I concur with her conclusion: “any other way of doing anthropology we can let burn.” In her year-in-review piece, “Confronting the Present,” Melissa S. Rosenzweig (2020) also addresses the transformation of anthropological practice, through the lens of archaeology. She argues that 2019 saw two major trends. First, archaeologists increasingly reckoned with the field's present-day conditions, and second, major shifts in disciplinary practice have occurred with respect to the field's orientation toward its stakeholders and audiences. Archaeology in 2019 concerned itself with the effects of capitalism, neoliberalism, inequality, climate change, food insecurity, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and colonialism and seriously engaged in imagining, inspiring, and building more just and sustainable futures (297). Among the most pressing questions archaeologists asked in 2019 were: (1) how can archaeological knowledge production escape the “logistical and epistemological bounds” of the hollowed-out husk of the neoliberal polity and the moribund market-logics of late capitalism, and (2) how can archaeology contribute to the future by making the past matter (but also, to whom and for what) (284)? There is no way of doing archaeology anywhere other than the present; whether archaeologists confront that reality or not, that reality confronts us. Rosenzweig argues that in the face of the challenges confronting archaeology as a middle-class profession of knowledge workers, there are radical changes to the discipline to be made that can confront inequalities in academic labor and disciplinary reproduction: stop producing so many PhDs, self-publish and publish open access, advocate restructuring tenure standards to reflect and support emancipatory research practices, replace competition with collaboration, and partner with nonarchaeologists within and beyond the academy (pace Wurst 2019). Short of these changes, Rosenzweig argues, archaeology might not be worth saving. To wit, if the field continues along the path set for it by institutional imperatives and traditional ways of doing things, archaeology will—whatever else it accomplishes—perpetuate elitist institutional and intellectual cultures of privilege at the expense of contributing to anticapitalist and liberatory futures (Rosenzweig 2020, 288). Rosenzweig therefore calls on archaeologists to activate archaeology in the world. Traditional practice must be retrofitted to engage the present. This means partnering with interdisciplinary scholars, citizen scientists, the interested lay public, and, above all, Indigenous peoples. This means more than making the results of our research more accessible, online or otherwise. It means engaging audiences on topics of broader relevance and bringing traditionally excluded groups into the mainstream of disciplinary discourse. We've seen examples of this in 2020, with the organizers of the well-attended webinars of the Society of Black Archaeologists (SBA) taking a leading role in addressing the contemporary moment during and after the protests in response to the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among many others. The SBA's sustained attention to the significance of the moment and to the pressing debates in the public sphere sparked by the events of the summer of 2020 is welcome. But even more so is the SBA's uncompromising insistence upon the required transformations that the discipline of archaeology will have to undergo, demographically and praxiologically. The SBA's emphasis on accountability, remuneration, recruitment, responsibility, safety, care, service, coalitions, and capacity-building as cornerstones of all research projects, curricula, and community-building prefigures exactly the kind of present-focused, future-oriented, radical, and antiracist archaeological praxis that is needed in these times (Franklin et al. 2020). In this way, the SBA echoes Deborah Thomas (2020a) on the problems of future-thinking: we must rethink “business-as-usual,” and reject the notion that there is a point at which “things” will “go back to normal.” Instead, in harmony with Rosenzweig, Thomas calls on us to question that very normalcy and to take seriously our responsibilities vis-à-vis contemporary realities. Thus, as we stand at the threshold of the Anthropocene, how might we reimagine cultural, linguistic, archaeological, and biological anthropology through critical interrogations of the discipline itself? It is, of course, not enough to critique. What I take from Jobson and Rosenzweig is: the task of our time is to forward a vision of what we want anthropology to be and how we might get there (e.g., Lempert 2018, 210). If nothing else, COVID-19 has increased the urgency of this concern. This envisioning falls heavily upon graduate students, who have been particularly affected by the pandemic, forced to shift their methods, questions, and materials in response to circumstances wildly differing from those expected at the outset of their projects. Ana Ramos-Zayas (2020) notes that some student researchers, rather than focusing on interviewing people via Zoom or analyzing social media, have chosen to turn to the archive. Knowing that they will eventually be able to conduct ethnographic research in the field, students have taken this moment to gain “historical insight into spaces or the communities where they will be conducting fieldwork.” Archaeology graduate students are similarly adapting their methods, questions, and ethical engagements, but the notable shift has been toward remote analyses, computational modeling, and big-data approaches. These developments are in keeping with ongoing changes in archaeological practice, but they run the risk of “widening ever more the gap between the centers of production of knowledge in the global north and south” (Neves 2020). The colonialist history of the discipline has never been more apparent than it is today, calling into question the goal of “knowing the past for its own sake,” especially in contexts where archaeologists work among subaltern communities (Neves 2020). Archaeology must find a way to address these problems. Neves proposes several needed—albeit admittedly partial—solutions, including increased funding for collaborative projects and special support for students from the Global South to participate in training during these times of remote research. The high costs involved in funding archaeology were already a major issue in perpetuating global inequalities within the discipline, which have only been exacerbated by the pandemic. This prompts Neves to pose some of the same quandaries as Rosenzweig: Why are we doing this, and who benefits from our research? These questions should be at the top of our agendas, and the answers cannot be only scientific or academic (Neves 2020). While Neves maintains that fieldwork will continue to be a pillar of archaeological research for decades to come, now might be a propitious moment for archaeologists to make a similar move to that of Ramos-Zayas's students to turn to the archive. The trouble is: What to focus on when you're there? The archive is no substitute for participant observation, nor for excavation. Moreover, the archive has its own temporality, its own organization, its own ways of knowing, its own excesses, absences, elisions, and silences (Stoler 2010; Trouillot [1995] 2015). The archival encounter can, however, push us beyond the narrow confines of our original research projects and open new critical horizons for present and future anthropologies. Archives are not just repositories of historical information but are also the outcome of historical processes themselves (Brusius and Singh 2018, 7). This is true of museums as well, requiring a similar critical approach toward museum storage as a fieldsite as has been developed toward the archive. Fieldwork not only can but in fact must take place within the museum itself and come to grips with what has been collected, and why, and the implications of these histories (e.g., Bruchac 2018). Whether critical research in museums means interrogating collection strategies, questioning the salvage and preservation imperatives, changing exhibition paradigms, or increasing remote access, one of the most important lines of questioning asks: How can we better understand what it has meant to “[preserve] things for the future” (Stevenson 2018, 234–35)? In light of the “curation crisis” (e.g., Kersel 2015) and the impending “end of archaeological discovery” (e.g., Surovell et al. 2017), the question of what to do with museum collections has never been more important. Naturally, it will be important to manage the materials already assembled. But beyond putting artifacts into properly labeled boxes and updating museum databases, at the core of this work will be people, collaboration, and inspired thinking. The future of archaeology is “beyond the trowel's edge,” in excavation of stored collections, particularly in the case of legacy collections and long-abandoned artifacts sitting in repositories all over the world (Kersel 2018, 273–74). I agree, but what I want to emphasize is that collections themselves are only half of the story. As I discovered in the process of conducting my dissertation “fieldwork,” interrogating how and why collections came to be assembled and stored in museums is just as productive and illuminating as any information that can be gleaned from assemblages of objects. In 2016, buoyed by the “Nuclear Deal” of the previous summer, I proposed to do my dissertation fieldwork at a Bronze Age mound site in northeastern Iran. I knew this was going to be a risky endeavor, even under the best of circumstances. Indeed, before I could even complete a grant application, Donald Trump's executive orders (i.e., the infamous “Muslim Ban”) foreclosed the possibility of conducting such a project. I pivoted to my plan B, turning to the collections at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology that had provided the original impetus for the project. One day in early 2018, while I was in the archive scanning object catalog cards, the museum archivist approached me with a box, saying that they had found some correspondence between the then-director of the museum and the excavator of the site I was studying, and that I might find their letters interesting. I did. This box contained the other half of a set of letters that I had long-since known about but that more fully fleshed out the story by which the very first American archaeological project took place in Iran, at Tureng Tepe in 1931. As it turns out, the excavator—Frederick R. Wulsin—had been instrumental in negotiating the drafting of the Law for the Protection of National Vestiges (i.e., the Iranian Antiquities Bill of 1930), which regulated the conduct of foreign archaeological missions to Iran. I began following this lead and eventually tapped into a rich vein of documents that revealed the history of heritage diplomacy between the United States and Iran from the perspective of its participants, stretching from 1929 to 1978. I have continued to pursue this line of inquiry ever since. In the end, I finished my stones-and-bones dissertation based on the archaeological records, but my current research focuses more directly on this history of relations between American archaeologists, diplomats, and their Iranian counterparts. My critical project seeks to understand archaeological expeditions abroad as a component of American power projection, which has raised broad questions about access, extractivism, development, foreign aid, disciplinary reproduction, and the relationship between science and statecraft more generally. In keeping with the themes introduced above, however, this historical project has spurred the development of yet another program of research, which is, I believe, the warrant for understanding this history at all. To be blunt: it is not enough to travel around to the museums in America that hold artifacts exported from Iran and to understand the personal and institutional histories that led to the creation of these collections. In an era in which American archaeologists have (mostly) not been able to access the field in Iran for the better part of four decades, and in which Iranian archaeologists face extreme difficulties in accessing these collections stored in North America, more must be done. Indeed, one of the most important areas of museum-based research today concerns collections access (Dominguez and Wali 2018). Given the cost and difficulty of access to museum collections for Indigenous and other “source” communities around the world under the conditions of (settler-)colonial infrastructure, museums must make their collections and archives more accessible. Whether this takes the form of improved databases or 3D imaging and printing, alongside the usual system of visits, loans, and transfers, making these collections available to the communities from which they originate ought to be an ethical imperative (Krmpotich et al. 2014; Weiss, Wali, and Dominguez 2018, 811–12). Thus, in addition to publishing my own work with collections and archives and applying for grants and jobs, a top priority of mine going forward is to develop a collaborative project with my Iranian colleagues to catalog and document all of the collections of Iranian antiquities in the United States to make the stored information available for use by researchers and students who cannot travel to North America. Who would have thought all of this would have come from an archivist's stray find shared with me Ramos-Zayas (2020) another point in her on ethics and in anthropology beyond COVID-19 that with my own experience with collections and archival research. As writes, “the current era be a moment to rethink how we and our research, to what is rather than and to focus on what is In my research, I began with a personal in of questions related to and political that research, as as the that it, led me to develop a critical perspective on the history of anthropology and how this history has and been by the of the United States as a global Much as when a group of students and in so too today, American museums hold Iranian antiquities in their and in their While some of these collections were to the United States in with Iranian antiquities (i.e., under the of were from Iranian through the of and Given the current in relations between the two it more to how archaeology was a of and between at and to ask what could be taken to make it so yet and on more This work to me to be as important if not more at long last and related to fieldwork decades needed though that work certainly In response to these conditions, and inspired by Deborah I have an advocate of In my work, I now to the historical that have led us to the present moment and to to do about in focuses on and an of Moreover, is not a but an I do not where my proposed collaborative research project will yet but I what will The broader point I would to make is conditions, lead us in we could not have at the outset of our research. This was but it is especially in this the time these will in many will be the better part of a into their it took about that long for me to my new after the and to fully develop it into a an that is admittedly For graduate students but for all what is needed now is an to the within What is needed now is and But in these times of and what is needed above all is a and critical attention to our disciplinary of our and of our anthropological I that our work will be and to the that we address the highlighted by Jobson and and concur with Welcome and the forms of anthropology that do not to and just as

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