The Question of Audience

In her keynote for the 2019 IUAES conference in Poznań, Poland, former AAA president Alisse Waterston spoke to the conference theme, “Imagining World Solidarities.” She noted that while it is easy to issue a panoply of critiques about the current state of the world, what is urgently needed, in fact, is engagement. It is engagement, she argued, that can confront the “radical evil” of our time and that can bring into being the better world we imagine together. Of course, many of us engage in different ways, some very publicly and others less so, but Alisse reminded us that, as anthropologists, we have particular skills that we may take for granted but that might be uniquely suited to problem solving both within and beyond our research and teaching. We know how to gather data relevant to solving the particular problems we face, we know how to think through the kinds of evidence that might be useful to resolving one or another issue, and we know how to present research results in a compelling way. As an example, Alisse outlined an initiative she and a number of others undertook in her community of New Rochelle that was ultimately successful in countering a plan to post armed police officers in public schools. They found out where the initiative was really coming from and who it would ultimately benefit. They scoured available studies assessing the effects of police presence in schools, one of which was to increase racial profiling. They presented their findings at a public community meeting, during which parents ultimately voted against the ramped-up security measures. A small victory, perhaps, but a meaningful one for the children in that school district. What Alisse was ultimately arguing was that while we have more than enough reason to complain about the world as it is, we must get over our sense of impotence and recognize that we have real skills that we can share to remake the world as we want it to be. It was a call to broaden our audiences. Because I had boarded the plane to Poland with Charles King's new book, Gods of the Upper Air, I was of course thinking about the extent to which Alisse's call to renewed engagement was part of a broader legacy of Boasian anthropology. King's book limns the career of antiracism in early twentieth-century anthropology as it was expressed through the research and public engagement of Franz Boas and his students. King chronicles their efforts to counter the racial science of the time with a scientific method of their own, one that took seriously the provisionality of science itself, and one that would encourage an approach to culture that emphasized its plurality rather than its universal evolution. “Boas was coming to see his profession not just as a science but also as a state of mind,” King (2019, 104) writes, “even a prescription for a good life. Properly practiced, it could cultivate a disposition that pointed toward ‘a higher tolerance’—one that would leave even the pitying smile behind.”1 King emphasizes Boas's public engagement and the ways it was received over time. As an example, he shows that US imperialist expansion toward the end of the nineteenth century and the country's entry into World War I led members of Columbia University's administration to advise Boas to curtail his antiracist activity. When he did not, King notes, “the trustees cut his salary, denied him access to research funds, and openly criticized his propensity for teaching ‘anthropology, as construed from the German viewpoint’” (110).2 Despite this censoring, Boas proclaimed his anti-evolutionary, non-universalistic, anti-imperialist viewpoints in front of many audiences, including his students. The more radical idea—that African Americans had devised for themselves coherent folk cultures that were worth studying on their own terms, not simply as an echo of a silenced past—was much harder to imagine. In the white-dominated human sciences, enlightened anthropologists commonly approached the behaviors and beliefs of Samoans and Admiralty Islanders as puzzles to be understood, not as social diseases that needed curing. Doing the same thing in the American South, or even north of Central Park, was close to unthinkable. (210) [Hurston] knew that no one on Joe Clarke's porch thought of himself as speaking a bastardized version of English. None of those people imagined themselves to be in the dim twilight of African greatness. In Mules and Men she had tried to show, in plangent prose and revved-up storytelling, that there was a distinct there to be studied in the swampy southeastern landscape she knew from childhood—not a holdover from Africa, or a social blight to be eliminated, or a corrupted version of whiteness in need or correction, but something vibrantly, chaotically, brilliantly alive. (King 2019, 214). Similarly, in his discussion of Ella Deloria, King notes that her reworking of the Sioux materials collected by physician and amateur anthropologist James Walker led her to argue that “Walker seemed to have made things up ... or at least reported things as fact that no one she encountered had ever heard of” (237). Though this assertion irritated Boas, Deloria held her ground: “The Sioux were a living people, she stressed, not some disembodied culture preserved in amber” (238). While Deloria is the only student with whom Boas shared a byline (in their handbook of Native languages, Dakota Grammar), King also indicates that “Boas's ideas were often ahead of his practice” (2019, 219). Boas would not be alone in this contradiction, one that we might argue—as Mark Anderson does in his new book From Boas to Black Power—is the result of his commitment to liberalism. Anderson (2019, 12) builds on work done by scholars like Lee Baker, Audrey Smedley, and Leith Mullings to argue that “cultural anthropology in the Boasian tradition was an Americanist liberal project that contributed to key paradoxes of liberal discourses on race and racism in the United States.” He shows that their key question had to do with how white Americans could fully recognize nonwhites as individuals and that they therefore were preoccupied with prejudice rather than with the historically rooted structural inequalities that concerned Alain Locke, for example, or St. Clair Drake and Allison Davis. By placing Boas, Mead, and Benedict in dialogue with these contemporaries, as well as with later materialists like Leslie White, Julian Steward, Eric Wolf, Charles Wagley, and Marvin Harris, and with lesser-known African American anthropologists of the 1960s generation, like William Willis and Diane Lewis, Anderson demonstrates how “Boasian anti-racist thought worked differently in relation to whites and non-whites and how Boasian anthropology in general was produced primarily for a white audience” (180). If we are to take seriously later calls to decolonize anthropology (Harrison 1991), and to investigate not only racial prejudice but also racism (Mullings 2005), then the attention to audience is key. Alisse Waterston's IUAES keynote encouraged those present to take the analytic and methodological tools of anthropology on the road, so to speak, to use them to build and grow the solidarities that are necessary in the current moment, and to speak with the audiences for whom these solidarities make a difference. This is, absolutely, an urgent task. Who is our research for? For whom, and with whom, do we speak, write, make films, and so on? Alisse was asking us to consider these questions anew in order to influence public conversations on the issues that matter most to us. I would also encourage us to interrogate these questions in relation to our own scholarship. Who are the audiences we have in mind as we write? What are the assumptions we make about what knowledge is shared, and what must be explained? What do these assumptions reflect about our placement within particular political discourses and communities? In “Consumption, Temporality, and Celebration in Contemporary Santiago de Cuba,” Hanna Garth draws our attention to the ways temporality is co-constituted through both day-to-day struggle and moments of celebration. She argues that the relation between annual cycles of festivals like Carnival as well as birthday parties and a weekly street dance, on the one hand, and the daily “lucha,” on the other, define the moral vectors of post-Soviet socialist experience in Santiago de Cuba. In Garth's article, popular rituals provide the means for people to “be themselves” even as they navigate political and economic uncertainty. In Elina Inkeri Hartikainen's article, the ritual practices of Candomblé provide a means to political recognition by the state. “Candomblé and the Academic's Tools: Religious Expertise and the Binds of Recognition in Brazil” encourages us to think through the ways immaterial cultural knowledge and the epistemological field constituted through Afro-Brazilian cultural practices like Candomblé and capoeira have been part of a knowledge-based recognition project of the state. She shows that while these processes have been exceptionally important, they have not resolved the “double binds” produced by state recognition because, as elsewhere, they are rooted in the ethos of multicultural inclusion rather than transformation. Paying attention to how activists sought to reframe the terms of debate regarding religious practitioners’ expertise and knowledge, Hartikainen argues, can help us to see how they both reproduce aspects of the exclusions they're seeking to repair and how they generate new political epistemological possibilities. Michael Schnegg's “The Life of Winds: Knowing the Namibian Weather from Someplace and from Noplace” also asks us to reimagine our epistemological frames, this time in relation to indigenous and scientific environmental knowledge. Comparing Damara pastoralists’ and scientists’ understanding of the relationships between winds and rain, Schnegg shows that where pastoralists conceive of weather as being enmeshed in everyday activity (therefore understanding weather in relation to particular places and skills), scientists understand weather in relation to technology (and therefore not rooted in any particular place or social world). These two conceptions, Schnegg argues, generate vastly different, though not necessarily mutually exclusive, worldviews. In “White Parents, Black Care: Entanglements of Race and Kinship in American Transracial Adoption,” Kathryn Mariner explores the ways blackness upsets anthropological attempts to understand kinship as socially, rather than biologically, constructed. She argues that claims to kinship are mediated through the child's racialized body and are continually asserted through a focus on hair and haircare (and white parents’ purported inability to take care of “black” hair properly). Transracial adoption, while itself part of a practice dislodging the biological underpinnings of kinship, nevertheless re-inscribes them as the result of understandings of race that privilege its embodiment. Tsipy Ivry and Elly Teman direct our attention to the ways rabbis and medical specialists work together to lessen the burden faced by religiously observant pregnant women faced with diagnoses of fetal anomalies. In “Shouldering Moral Responsibility: The Division of Moral Labor among Pregnant Women, Rabbis, and Doctors,” they show that rabbis “outsource” moral decisions regarding potential termination through their accumulation of expert opinions, thereby allowing families facing these difficult decisions to place the burden of the decisions on rabbis and to maintain a sense of themselves as moral actors. Outsourcing the moral responsibility in this way allows both the families and the rabbis, in their words, “to be liberated from the burden of unbearable ethical choices.” In “Detection, Deception, and Migrant Illegality in the India-Bangladesh Borderlands,” Sahana Ghosh investigates the paradoxes of what she calls “documentary citizenship.” In a context in which identity documents are often suspect due to high rates of forgery, new modes of policing have emerged. Ghosh ethnographically investigates three—the interceptive, the judicial-determinative, and the certificatory—to rethink the political economy of migrant illegality and to understand detectability as a new way the state fetishizes documents while also constantly imagining the person carrying them as an imposter. For Ghosh, what emerges is a sense that documents and narratives must be legible but within a constantly shifting security apparatus that continuously produces suspicion. Ina Zharkevich also investigates transnational mobility but draws our attention to how transnational Nepalese families maintain cohesiveness in the face of mobility. In “Money and Blood: Remittances as a Substance of Relatedness in Transnational Families in Nepal,” Zharkevich argues that remittances constitute affective relationships and are seen to contribute to the “thickness” of blood ties in rural Nepal. Tracking remittances in this context provides a way to see which kinship ties are prioritized and which are not, to reformulate conventional ideologies and practices regarding gender, and to think through how money (and its circulation) constitutes relatedness, loyalty, and interdependence. David Palmer, Martin Tse, and Chip Colwell continue the focus on how material substances also come to constitute social worlds by considering the relationships between material culture and humans in “Guanyin's Limbo: Icons as Demi-Persons and Dividuating Objects.” They examine discarded deity statues of Guanyin, the bodhisattva of compassion, in Hong Kong to think through how the statues relationally produce personhood among those worshippers who care for them after their abandonment. By following the life course of these Guanyin statues, they are able to argue that the statues constitute dividuating and agential objects that mediate and constitute personhood through their circulation. In “Laughing about Corruption in Ethiopian-Chinese Encounters,” Miriam Driessen uses corruption as a lens through which to understand moral evaluations within the context of intensified Chinese investment in Ethiopia and the suspicions this has generated. Driessen argues that corruption narratives and jokes do not draw a strict line between what are and are not corrupt practices but instead elaborate the many nuances that allow both Ethiopian and Chinese actors to be critical of each other while also enabling forms of intimacy, complicity, cross-cultural understanding, and, potentially, solidarity vis-à-vis their relationship to an (imagined) immoral West. Our World Anthropologies section this issue features an essay by Aleksandar Bošković (University of Belgrade) that interrogates the relationships among anthropology, nationalism, and world anthropologies. Comments by Thomas Reuter, Ricardo A. Fagoaga Hernández, and Michał Buchowski, our host for this year's IUAES conference in Poland, follow Bošković’s essay. This discussion about the relationships among national anthropological traditions continues in the interview with Vesna Vučinić Nešković, also based at the University of Belgrade. In the interview, Vesna focuses our attention on the World Council of Anthropological Associations and its recent institutional reunion with the IUAES to form the World Anthropological Union (WAU). In the Multimodal Anthropologies this issue, we present reviews of three films: Travels in Congo, Around India with a Movie Camera, and A Snake Gives Birth to a Snake. Don't forget to visit our website (www.americananthropologist.org) for new posts from Public Anthropologies and to hear new episodes of the podcast Anthropological Airwaves. The most recent is a discussion with Laura Kunreuther about the relationships between voice and sound and political processes in Kathmandu. This issue concludes with twelve book reviews and three obituaries (Charles Goodwin, Sydel Silverman, and Deanna Trakas

Media studies · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society

• Staying at Home

  Open Access•Katherine T Mccaffrey•Anthropologica•2021

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• Archaeology under the Blinding Light of Race

  M L Blakey•Current Anthropology•2020

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• From Boas to Black Power

  Mark Anderson•From Boas to Black Power•2020

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• Before Boas

  Han F Vermeulen•Before Boas•2015

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• Interrogating Racism

  Leith Mullings•Annual Review of Anthropology•2005

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