Anthropology's World
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Anthropology’s World Hannerz 00 pre 1 25/05/2010 14:35 Anthropology, Culture and Society Series Editors: Professor Vered Amit, Concordia University and Dr Jon P. Mitchell, University of Sussex Published titles include: Home Spaces, Street Styles: Culture and Well-Being: Contesting Power and Identity Anthropological Approaches to in a South African City Freedom and Political Ethics LesLie J. Bank eDiteD By aLBerto Corsin Jiménez On the Game: Cultures of Fear: Women and Sex Work A Critical Reader sophie Day eDiteD By uLi Linke anD DanieLLe taana smith Slave of Allah: Zacarias Moussaoui vs the USA Fair Trade and a Global Commodity: katherine C. Donahue Coffee in Costa Rica peter LuetChForD A World of Insecurity: Anthropological Perspectives The Will of the Many: on Human Security How the Alterglobalisation Movement eDiteD By thomas eriksen, is Changing the Face of Democracy eLLen BaL anD osCar saLemink marianne maeCkeLBerGh A History of Anthropology The Aid Effect: thomas hyLLanD eriksen Giving and Governing in anD Finn sivert nieLsen International Development eDiteD By DaviD mosse anD DaviD Lewis Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives Cultivating Development: Third Edition An Ethnography of Aid Policy thomas hyLLanD eriksen and Practice DaviD mosse Globalisation: Studies in Anthropology Anthropology, Art and Cultural eDiteD By thomas hyLLanD eriksen Production maruška svašek Small Places, Large Issues: An Introduction to Social Race and Ethnicity in Latin America and Cultural Anthropology Second edition Third Edition peter waDe thomas hyLLanD eriksen Race and Sex in Latin America What is Anthropology? peter waDe thomas hyLLanD eriksen Anthropology at the Dawn Anthropology, Development and of the Cold War: the Post-Modern Challenge The Influence of Foundations, katy GarDner anD DaviD Lewis McCarthyism and the CIA eDiteD By Dustin m. wax Corruption: Anthropological Perspectives Learning Politics from Sivaram: eDiteD By Dieter haLLer The Life and Death of a Revolutionary anD Cris shore Tamil Journalist in Sri Lanka mark p. whitaker Hannerz 00 pre 2 25/05/2010 14:35 Anthropology’s World life in a twenty-First-Century discipline Ulf Hannerz Hannerz 00 pre 3 25/05/2010 14:35 First published 2010 by pluto press 345 Archway road, london n6 5AA and 175 Fifth Avenue, new york, ny 10010 www.plutobooks.com distributed in the United states of America exclusively by palgrave Macmillan, a division of st. Martin’s press llC, 175 Fifth Avenue, new york, ny 10010 Copyright © Ulf hannerz 2010 the right of Ulf hannerz to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, designs and patents Act 1988. British library Cataloguing in publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British library IsBn 978 0 7453 3048 8 Hardback IsBn 978 0 7453 3047 1 Paperback library of Congress Cataloging in publication data applied for this book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 designed and produced for pluto press by Chase publishing services ltd, 33 livonia road, sidmouth, EX10 9JB, England typeset from disk by stanford DTP services, northampton, England printed and bound in the European Union by CpI Antony rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne Hannerz 00 pre 4 25/05/2010 14:35 Contents Acknowledgments vi Series Preface vii 1. Introduction: In the World, and a World in Itself 1 2. Editing Anthropology: Two Experiences in Space and Time 13 3. Diversity Is Our Business 38 4. Field Worries: Studying Down, Up, Sideways, Through, Backward, Forward, Early or Later, Away and at Home 59 5. Making the World Transparent 87 6. Flat World and the Tower of Babel: Linguistic Practices in a Global Discipline 113 7. Before and After: Exploring the Usable Past 131 8. And Next, Briefly: Toward 2050 161 Notes 167 References 184 Index 199 Hannerz 00 pre 5 25/05/2010 14:35 Acknowledgments Most of the chapters in this book were not originally written to form an integrated and comprehensive treatise on what anthropology is now, or is not, or could be; in their first versions, they came into being as papers for conferences, or lecture series, or other edited volumes. These versions are identified in the endnotes for the particular chapters. As they appear here, however, the chapters have been extensively revised in order to fit better together, and to avoid repetition. Most of them have also been extended. Let me take the opportunity here, however, to thank the members of those audiences who listened to early versions, and offered useful and generous comments: in Bayreuth, Berkeley, Budapest, Durham, Frankfurt am Main, Istanbul, Ljubljana, Poznan and Vienna. Furthermore, I have been discussing the matters dealt with in this book, over the years, with a great many friends and colleagues, in many places. It would be impossible to remember all these conversations, and very difficult to draw a line around some smaller number of those conversation partners to be identified by name. It is at least a bit more manageable to thank collectively those circles of colleagues whose friendship, hospitality and intellectual company I have enjoyed in places to which I have had the pleasure of longer- standing links: in Stockholm, Vienna, Tokyo, Oslo, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, New York and Oxford. Finally, one close colleague deserves special mention, so let me do something probably seldom done in acknowledgments—I will quote myself: “In particular I am indebted to my wife and colleague, Helena Wulff Hannerz … for her constant thoughtfulness, support, and willingness to listen, read, respond and ask for more” (Hannerz 1992a: ix). True some twenty years ago, and still true. Ulf Hannerz Stockholm, February 2010 vi Hannerz 00 pre 6 25/05/2010 14:35 series preface Anthropology is a discipline based upon in-depth ethnographic works that deal with wider theoretical issues in the context of particular, local conditions—to paraphrase an important volume from the series: large issues explored in small places. This series has a particular mission: to publish work that moves away from an old-style descriptive ethnography that is strongly area-studies oriented, and offer genuine theoretical arguments that are of interest to a much wider readership, but which are nevertheless located and grounded in solid ethnographic research. If anthropology is to argue itself a place in the contemporary intellectual world, then it must surely be through such research. We start from the question: “What can this ethnographic material tell us about the bigger theoretical issues that concern the social sciences?” rather than “What can these theoretical ideas tell us about the ethnographic context?” Put this way round, such work becomes about large issues, set in a (relatively) small place, rather than detailed description of a small place for its own sake. As Clifford Geertz once said, “Anthropologists don’t study villages; they study in villages.” By place, we mean not only geographical locale, but also other types of “place”—within political, economic, religious or other social systems. We therefore publish work based on ethnography within political and religious movements, occupational or class groups, among youth, development agencies, and nationalist movements; but also work that is more thematically based—on kinship, landscape, the state, violence, corruption, the self. The series publishes four kinds of volume: ethnographic monographs; comparative texts; edited collections; and shorter, polemical essays. We publish work from all traditions of anthropology, and all parts of the world, which combines theoretical debate with empirical evidence to demonstrate anthropology’s unique position in contemporary scholarship and the contemporary world. Professor Vered Amit Dr Jon P. Mitchell vii Hannerz 00 pre 7 25/05/2010 14:35 Hannerz 00 pre 8 25/05/2010 14:35 1 Introduction: In the World, and a World in Itself Anthropology’s World, as in the title of this book, can mean at least two things. On the one hand it is anthropology as a social world in itself—the community of a discipline, with its internal social relationships, its ideas and practices. On the other hand, anthro- pology’s world is the wider outside world to which the discipline must relate in various ways. For anthropology, which more than any other discipline may have a constant ambition to be global in its scope, this involves humanity everywhere, and the attempt to understand its variety of ways of life and thought and its conditions of existence. It is a world anthropologists are inclined to think of as made up of a multitude of “fields”: research sites, actual or potential. In a more close-up sense, however, that outside world also includes people and structures which demand attention on a more everyday, often practical level: wider academic environments, student populations, local or national publics, the media. In both these senses—or perhaps I should say all these senses—the world of anthropology keeps changing. This book is about some aspects of contemporary life in this world. Anthropology is now a global discipline both through engaging in research everywhere (at least in principle) and in having local practitioners everywhere. Yet within that worldwide community there are variations in scholarly interests and in working circumstances. In what follows I will draw continuously on my own experiences, taking my own path through anthropology’s world. My enduring perspective is from one corner of Europe, but looking out. Over the years, I have developed close ties with anthropologists in this part of the world, but I have also had, and continue to have, some of my own formative experiences in American anthropology.