The Status of the Social Fact

What does it mean to do interpretive social science research in today's changed reality? How can anthropological investigations of the social institutions; the cognitive, psychological, and philosophical processes; and the physiological phenomena that have long concerned us be brought to bear upon a world in which there is simultaneously limited consensus regarding what constitutes facts and seemingly little impetus to observe and recognize each other's truths? Philosophers have long grappled with the difference between fact and truth. Fact is said to be something that is arrived at through objective observation of concrete realities; this, of course, does not mean facts can't change (we now acknowledge that the world is not flat), but it is also the case that we are not always in agreement about how these ontological changes happen. Truth, on the other hand, is arrived at through perspective and experience. Truth is not merely individual but is also collective, and therefore it is contextualized within a set of identifiable historical and social relations. What seems critical about this difference is that the basis for fact tends to be seeing. We are able to know the world because we visually apprehend it, a regime of knowledge that became epistemologically hegemonic during the Enlightenment era and the colonial exploration and exploitation that both produced and was produced by it. Truth, on the other hand, depends on a different way of knowing, on affect, which necessitates attention to context—historical and otherwise—and to the forms of intersubjectivity through which we identify it. Truth unequivocally relies upon interpretation, which is our business, where fact wants to resist it. It is true that anthropologists have made great advances by challenging facts. Sometimes, we have done this by laying bare the modernist assumptions that undergirded them and sometimes by drawing attention to societies in which the facts don't hold true (often “non-Western,” itself a laden term, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot [1991] taught us so long ago). A few examples of these assumptions: All people make decisions by weighing options and rationally maximizing their gain, families are organized through male descent lines, people of African descent have smaller brains but better musical facility, capitalism distributes wealth more equally than other economic arrangements, the direction of all evolutionary change is toward improvement. Durkheim defined social facts as the norms and structures that exercise social control over individuals. In the world of social facts, society (in the guise of social institutions like kinship, language, and political organization, or of value systems like racism and misogyny) exerts force, constrains possibilities, molds, shapes, and influences—often without our explicit realization. The point of a science of society, for Durkheim, was therefore not to study individuals, but to identify these social facts, and to understand something about how they operate. We are no longer all the kind of positivists Durkheim might have imagined in the early twentieth century, of course. Nevertheless, our ability to identify and challenge dominant worldviews framed as fact has been the result of our constant examination of our interpretive apparatuses. In other words, we have been willing to create knowledge inductively rather than by applying existing theoretical frames or methodological structures to material we collect “in the field” or in the lab. We are, one might argue, the most creative of the social sciences, following the lead of our data. Although this creativity has certainly generated facts, it has also helped to move us toward a deeper understanding of the truths of others (and ourselves). This brings me to our place in the university, and where we stand in relation to our allied fields, including biology, history, sociology, cultural studies, linguistics, Africana studies, gender studies (the list goes on). This is something tackled by Richard Handler in his opening gambit for the new “Anthropology in the Classroom” section on our website (www.americananthropologist.org). The essay encourages us to think about how the insights of anthropology can be situated more squarely within the educational careers of students and in relation to our own research trajectories. It also challenges us to ask how we penetrate the new climate of uncertainty by simultaneously emphasizing the interpretive dimensions of our science and the reality of having deconstructed a number of truths currently being pushed as fact. In his essays responding to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Slavoj Zizek (2002) argued that whereas the nineteenth century was characterized by a proliferation of interest in the prophetic, and the twentieth century elicited a subsequent “passion for the Real,” the early twenty-first century should be seen to privilege the virtual. Here, virtualization leads us to “begin to experience ‘real reality’ itself as a virtual entity” (11), one in which the affective dimensions of truth are not rendered through relational experience but instead through the virtual reliving of that experience, often over and over again. For psychologists, this would indicate a kind of trauma, and it could result in various forms of paralysis. But I am more optimistic. Before we declare truth as dead (see the Time magazine cover for April 3, 2017), let us remember the strength of inductive, interpretive analysis and the creativity of our approach. The essays in this issue certainly do this. We begin with a trio of essays that together, and from different intradisciplinary vantage points, offer new directions for thinking about migration and its effects. In “Temporal Patterns of Mexican Migrant Genetic Ancestry,” Cris Hughes et al. mobilize biological and ethnographic methods to think about the forensic identification process for migrant deaths on the US–Mexico border. They document a bias, through forensic genetic markers, in DNA-based identification of migrant remains, a bias that accompanies a demographic shift in patterns of migrant origin from predominantly northern to central and southern Mexico, home to the majority of Mexico's indigenous population. Based on genetic markers of Native and European ancestry, they argue that migrants with a greater proportion of European ancestry are more likely to be identified forensically than migrants with primarily indigenous ancestry. This leads them to assert that the structural vulnerabilities faced by indigenous Mexicans not only attend to life but also haunt death and that any attempt to improve forensic identification protocols requires a more robust consideration of social and historical context. Iván Sandoval-Cervantes's “Uncertain Futures” urges us to see, in unfinished houses, the aspirational trajectories of undocumented migrants from Oaxaca, Mexico. Drawing from both sociocultural anthropological and archaeological approaches to materiality, he asks us to look through the lens of affect to understand something about the kinship norms and familial responsibilities that bind together “home” and “host” as spatial locales, the precarity suffusing both the materiality and practice of building a house, and the quotidian experiences of waiting, preparation, and disappointment. He is interested in how violence and uncertainty become part of the built environment, shedding light on both past and present efforts toward social mobility and familial unification, and on the future potential of these processes (sometimes seemingly endlessly deferred). Hilary Dick's “Una Gabacha Sinvergüenza (A Shameless White-Trash Woman),” asks us to consider the following questions: What kinds of moral lives do people forge in the spaces of migratory circulation? How do people negotiate the competing visions of ethico-moral personhood they encounter? Through the linguistic anthropological lens of interdiscursivity, Dick explores how family members of those who have migrated from Uriangato, Mexico, to the United States enact forms of ethical personhood—forms that, in this case, define “proper Mexicanness” in relation to the racialized, gendered, and classed popular cultural traffic from the United States. Using an encounter about a Britney Spears doll as a foil, she shows also how women negotiate the desires of their children with their own sensibilities of proper womanhood and family life in the interstices between sending and receiving countries, and in relation to her own presence as a white, female, American ethnographer. All three of these essays, in different ways, speak to that which remains, thereby tempering an often-dominant focus in migration studies on mobility. In doing so, they also build upon the transnational perspective that was developed in the 1980s and elaborated in the 1990s (Basch, Glick Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1994; Glick Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992; Sutton and Chaney 1985), especially in terms of the assertion that the space of analysis of migration should be the “transnational sociocultural sphere” that develops in its wake. By focusing on what and who is left behind, these essays help us to more clearly see what exactly circulates as people move—forms of structural and symbolic violence, affects and aspirations related to family and mobility, notions of propriety, and the complex material, biological, and sociopolitical production of the social formation of the nation-state. We are asked to analyze the boundaries of citizenship and the boundaries of personhood, and to think anew about the relations that produce these as nonequivalences, a phenomenon that is most obviously visible in today's United States. We also feature two archaeological essays, both of which proved somewhat controversial in the review process, in part because they suggest that we think differently about our methodological approaches and about how we build theory. Grounded in very different contexts, both ask us to imagine anew the relationships between space, temporality, and the forms of social relationships that emerge within this nexus. More traditional practitioners might find these essays too speculative, insufficiently grounded in more conventional forms of data, but I believe the dialogues they have already provoked on methods and on the relationships between data and theoretical interventions are productive ones for the discipline as a whole. Shannon Novak's “Corporeal Congregations and Asynchronous Lives” uses the assemblage of skeletal remains at Spring Street Presbyterian Church in Manhattan (in use from 1820 to 1850) to think through what they might tell us about contemporaneity and noncontemporaneity. She wants us to overcome the “temptations of conflation”—the sometimes unconscious collapsing of diverse individuals, moments, and positions within an assemblage—and instead urges us to engage the complex relationships that might have obtained among people who would not necessarily have experienced themselves as part of the same community. Her broader concern is with how a bioarchaeology of urban landscapes can destabilize assumptions about the “demographic bundles” and processes of categorization she sees as prevalent in bioarchaeological research as well as in anthropology more broadly. By engaging social theory outside anthropology, extensive archival research, and recent work on temporality within archaeology and sociocultural anthropology, she outlines what these burial-ground remains tell us about social life in New York City during the thirty-year period of the cemetery's operation. Dante Angelo's “Histories of a Burnt House” similarly asks us to think through the ways one domicile can tell us something about the various population waves that moved through Arica, Chile, and thus about changes in the region as a whole. He combines historical, archaeological, and ethnographic methods to conduct an archaeology of the contemporary past, bringing the story of the “blue house” alive as a case that can illuminate the materiality of wave after wave of displacement and dispossession, as well as broader processes of gentrification and heritage making. As such, Angelo advocates a view of material structures as always in processes of becoming, and therefore social and dynamic. Our last research article, Daromir Rudnyckyj's “Subjects of Debt,” examines what neoliberalism looks like outside the North Atlantic. By investigating shifts in Islamic finance in Malaysia—specifically, the move from a “debt-based” model that was geared toward integrating the disadvantaged Muslim majority into the national economy through affirmative action mechanisms to an “equity-based” model designed to encourage entrepreneurialism and risk sharing—he explores the dynamics through which neoliberal knowledge and practices are applied toward alternative financial projects. As the equity model is seen as being more tethered to Islamic traditions, Rudnyckyj argues that the shift he has identified produces an Islamic entrepreneurial, risk-calculating subject that is, nevertheless, a refusal of the rationally self-interested Western subject. Here, we see that the development of financial instruments can theoretically include a focus on equality and social justice. We also feature our four Year-in-Review essays, charting trends and emphases across the subfields for 2016. In our World Anthropologies section, we present a dialogue regarding the new South-South relations that have emerged as a result of growing investment, aid, and technology transfer to Africa on the part of China, India, and Brazil. What does it mean to speak of South-South partnerships to describe a relationship that has typically been characterized as imperialist humanitarianism or development when a Western power is involved? Letícia Cesarino is interested in how contemporary conditions differ from earlier manifestations of these “trade and aid” relationships and in what this has to do with anthropology (both the field as a whole and its Brazilian instantiation). She offers an analysis of “culture-talk”—when and where it happens, and who engages in it—as that which has enabled new forms of cooperation within the context of Brazilian engagement with African countries. She argues that the focus on “culture” can reproduce familiar elisions with respect to Afro-Brazilian cultural practice and heritage, even when “culture” is mobilized to serve postcolonial nation building rather than the consolidation of empire. She calls this a “postcolonial kind of Orientalism.” Cesarino's essay, which ultimately calls for more ethnographic scholarship by Brazilian anthropologists in Africa, is followed by four commentaries that question some of her premises. Ultimately, they suggest that we interrogate the ways discursive frames such as North-South and South-South simplify scenarios that are much more complex in terms of the kinds of hierarchies and inequalities they index. In other words, we cannot assume that a South-South cooperation is necessarily less imperialist in spirit and practice than a North-South one, and we must be attentive to the ways these complexities are also intrinsic to the concept of “world anthropologies.” We require, therefore, not only a more robust Brazilian anthropology of Lusophone Africa but also one that is grounded in an understanding of the colonial field in which Portugal, Brazil, and Africa are—unequally—located. Also in World Anthropologies, we feature two interviews by Vinicius Kauê Ferreira, one with Chandana Mathur of the National University of Ireland, and the other with Soumendra Patnaik from the University of Delhi. These interviews focus on how anthropology responds to and is shaped by contemporary challenges and on what this looks like from different institutional vantage points. They address questions regarding anthropological hegemonies and the ways organizations like the WCAA and Anthropology Without Borders can intervene by bringing anthropological truths (or insights) to bear on current events, particularly in relation to emergent political conservatisms, both in the United States and abroad. Within our Multimodal Anthropologies section, PhD candidate Richard Powis offers a response to Collins, Durington, and Gill's March 2017 invitation regarding multimodality. Powis describes how his own multiplatform work engages social media as a way to engage with colleagues and ethnographic interlocutors about research topics and design. He calls for us to integrate social media platforms into every aspect of research—from design to the sharing of field notes and public dissemination of findings—and argues that this integration is a critical part of inductive theorizing. In addition to a review of Krista Thompson's book Shine and a review of the film Let There Be Light, the Multimodal Anthropologies section also features a nonlinear visual essay by Paolo Favero titled “Tainted Frictions,” which explores the relationships between photographs/images and text/captions, as well as between content/form. These relationships are analyzed and visually excerpted in these pages; the full multimodal dimensions of the piece can be explored on our website (www.americananthropologist.org). We conclude this issue with sixteen book reviews and two obituaries (Paul Friedrich and Douglas Schwartz). I hope you find much to chew on

Sociology · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · History

• Patriarchy for Profit

  Open Access•B Ortner, Sherry B Ortner•American Anthropologist•2019

  Add to list

• Nations Unbound

  Linda G Basch, Cristina Szanton Blanc et al.•Nations unbound•1993

  Add to list

• Welcome to the Desert of the Real

  Slavoj Žižek•South Atlantic Quarterly•2002

  Add to list

• Multimodality

  Open Access•Samuel Gerald Collins, Matthew Durington et al.•American Anthropologist•2017

  Add to list