Who defines the new? A plea for ethnographic humility

After ethnos” on the history of anthropologyMy difficulties with Tobias Rees’s approach start with the history of anthropology. In the effort to clearly present what he sees as new in recent anthropology, he defines away most of its traces from established ethnography.Rees’s reconstruction of the history of ethnography and anthropology more or less takes Malinowski’s word for the shortcomings of his predecessors and for the novelty of his own approach—which then becomes typical for anthropology as such. Before the Torres Straits expedition, Rees argues, ethnography came in the form of either expeditions or deskwork; neither can properly be described as fieldwork (pp. 119ff.). Why? Expeditions did not always pass quickly through places, and they were not always content with haphazardly collecting trinkets, bones and vocabularies. Think of travelers like Heinrich Barth, Charles Doughty, Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje—let alone Frank Hamilton Cushing or Werner Munzinger. Think of missionaries, from Sahagún to Lafitau to Krapf and Rebmann.These were not minor figures; their works were central to the formation of modern anthropology. Rees accepts Malinowski’s view as authoritative, a view that excluded everything before him from the science of anthropology. In order to become a hard science, Malinowski argued, anthropology had to study a single society and the interlinkages between its different institutions. Fieldwork then becomes bounded by ethnicity and uninterested in historical change. Rees is very right in attacking this notion of fieldwork, but surprisingly, he takes Malinowski’s self-image seriously and lets it taint everything that came before (p. 127). Malinowskian ethnography is only one form of fieldwork embedded into a deeper history of curiosity, enquiry and human relationships. Throughout this history, anthropology has been interested in the relation between anthropos and ethnos. While older ethnographers took ethnos for granted, their main aim was rarely to describe ethnos. It was to understand humanity

Anthropology of art · Applied anthropology · Art history · Digital anthropology · Ethnography · History of anthropology · Humility · Order (exchange · Sociology · Theology · Anthropology · Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture · History · Philosophy