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The End of Anthropology?

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The End of Anthropology? Decolonisation, modernisation, globalisation, the crisis of Karl-Heinz Kohl Holger Jebens & representation, and the ‘cultural turn’ in neighbouring disciplines have unsettled anthropology to such an extent that the field’s The end of foundations, the subjects of its study as well as its methods and concepts, appear to be eroded. anthropology? It is now time to take stock and either abandon anthropology as a fundamentally untenable or superfluous project, or to set it on more solid foundations. In this volume some of the edited by Holger Jebens & Karl-Heinz Kohl world’s leading anthropologists – including Vincent Crapanzano, Maurice Godelier, Ulf Hannerz and Adam Kuper – do just that. Reflecting on how to meet the manifold institutional, theoretical, methodological, and epistemological challenges to the field, The End of Anthropology? as well as on the continued, if not heightened, importance of anthropology in a world where diversity and cultural difference are becoming ever more important economically, politically, and legally, they set upon the task of reconstructing anthropology’s foundations and firming up its stance vis-à-vis these challenges. ‘With a backward glance at earlier predictions of the demise of anthropology, the essays present a confident account of the future of the discipline. Defining in clear terms what it is that anthropologists do, a well-chosen group of distinguished contributors confront the diversity and internal distinctions that characterize the field, weigh the seriousness of the trend toward interdisciplinary studies in the human sciences, and redefine the strengths of the anthropological mode of knowledge production’. (Shirley Lindenbaum, Professor Emerita, City University of New York) Holger Jebens is Senior Research Fellow at the Frobenius Institute and Managing Editor of Paideuma. Karl-Heinz Kohl holds the chair of Cultural Anthropology at the Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main and is Director of the Frobenius Institute. Contributors: John Comaroff, Vincent Crapanzano, Andre Gingrich, Maurice Godelier, Ulf Hannerz, Signe Howell, Holger Jebens, Karl-Heinz Kohl, Adam Kuper, Mark Münzel, and Patricia Spyer The end of anthropology? Sean Kingston Publishing www.seankingston.co.uk Canon Pyon © 2011 Holger Jebens and Karl-Heinz Kohl All rights reserved. The contributions by John Comaroff, Andre Gingrich and Ulf Hannerz are reproduced by permission of the American Anthropological Association from American Anthropologist 112(4):524–562 (2010). No part of them may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission of the American Anthropological Association. The other contributions have first been published in Paideuma 56 (2010) and are reproduced by permission of the Frobenius Institute. No part of them may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission of the Frobenius Institute. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The moral rights of the authors have been asserted. Ebook ISBN 978-1-907774-65-2 The end of anthropology? edited by Holger Jebens & Karl-Heinz Kohl Sean Kingston Publishing www.seankingston.co.uk Canon Pyon C ONTENTS Introduction 1 Karl-Heinz Kohl 1 The crisis of anthropology 13 Holger Jebens 2 The original sin of anthropology 37 Adam Kuper 3 What ends with the end of anthropology? 61 Patricia Spyer 4 The end of anthropology, again: on the future of an in/discipline 81 John Comaroff 5 The end – the ends – of anthropology 113 Vincent Crapanzano 6 Whatever happened to the spirit of adventure 139 Signe Howell 7 Transitions: notes on sociocultural anthropology’s present and 155 its transnational potential Andre Gingrich 8 Diversity is our business 177 Ulf Hannerz 9 In today’s world, anthropology is more important than ever 203 Maurice Godelier 10 The end 219 Mark Münzel Contributors 241 Index 245 INTRODUCTION * Karl-Heinz Kohl My first encounter with peoples who at the time were regarded as the classical ‘object’ of anthropological studies dates back more than thirty years. It was in 1975 when my later wife and I landed on the airstrip of Wamena, the major settlement of the Baliem valley in the part of the highlands of New Guinea under Indonesian control. When we disembarked from our airplane, an old and rusty DC 3 from the time of the Second World War, we saw ourselves surrounded by a group of Dani men their hair greased with pig fat and strings of white cowry shells about around their necks, and wearing nothing but long yellow gourds to hide their genitals. They stared at us no less curiously than we were about them. The contrast could not have been sharper: modern Western technology on the one hand, and almost completely naked human beings on the other. A few years earlier, not more than a hundred miles from the Baliem valley, the Eipomek a population of approximately 600 people who lived in their valley without having had any contact with so-called white civilisation had been ‘discovered’ by a missionary air patrol. One week previously in Jayapura, the one-time capital of the former colony of Dutch New Guinea, we had met a German cameraman who was a member of a research team of more than thirty geographers, botanists, medical scientists, human ethologists, linguists, and, of course, also a number of anthropologists, who had settled down among the Eipomek to study them and their natural habitat with all their scientific toolkits, a horrible sight when looked at from the vantage point of our present-day ethical concerns. However, this may have been one of the last research endeavours of its kind. Today, at least, there is no spot on the globe where a population may still be found living in such complete isolation from all the influences of global culture as the Eipomek did at that time. Since then the autochthonous populations of the West New Guinea highlands have been subject to considerable changes. The Indonesian government, which has only been occupying this part of the former Dutch East Indies since 1963, has done its best to ‘civilise’ them. Schools have been built in the remotest corners of their territories to teach them the language of their new nation. The transmigrasi * The contributions by John Comaroff, Andr Gingrich and Ulf Hannerz, referred to in this intro- duction, were first published inAmerican Anthropologist 112(4): 524–562 (2010). I wish to thank Katja Rieck for her editorial assistance in the preparation of this volume. 2 Karl-Heinz Kohl programme of the Indonesian government has enticed settlers from Java, Bali and Sumatra into the fertile fields of the New Guinea highlands. The resistance with which some Dani and other ethnic groups have opposed this kind of interior colonisation, especially after the neighbouring former Trust Territory of Papua and New Guinea had become an independent state, was suppressed with crude violence. The Javanese policemen persecuted those who still went naked in the larger settlements and put them into detention camps. Along the same policy lines, they did everything to abolish the big pig feasts and other traditional ceremonies that Indonesian government officials regarded as an obstacle to economic progress. Nevertheless, if I had the opportunity to revisit the Baliem valley today, the first visual impression might well be much the same as it was when I first went there. Of course, Wamena is now a flourishing town with more than 12,000 inhabitants, government houses, restaurants and hotels. But the Dani men who welcome the foreigners at the large airport that has replaced the old small landing strip still look much the same having freed themselves from trousers and T-shirts to dress again in their yellow penis gourds and traditional body ornaments. And now the policemen no longer intervene. The tourist industry has become an important source of income to the Baliem valley’s inhabitants, to both the ‘natives’ and the newcomers from Java. Tourists want to see the exotic, and the government officials have to abide by their wishes. I doubt that even the new anti-pornography law, which was passed by the Indonesian parliament in October 2008 and aims to suppress the ‘indecent’ habit of ‘going naked’ in some of the country’s remote regions, will be able to force the ‘natives’ back into pants and shirts. Commercial interests are stronger than Muslim lawmakers in the Indonesian capital, some 2,500 miles away from West New Guinea. For revitalising old customs, tourism seems to be the best possible ally. Yet to revitalise something suggests that it must have died previously. While the visible surface may be the same, in being reinstated, the traditional dress has altered its meaning. The nakedness of these alleged primitives has become an attraction for tourists. Contemporary Dani have become citations, disguising themselves as what they supposedly once were. Talk of the decline of the classical object of anthropological studies is nothing new. Holger Jebens has put together an impressive list of quotations from leading representatives of the discipline, such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Margaret Mead and Claude Lévi-Strauss, who were haunted by the notion that the last ‘primitive peoples’ were dying out right in front of their eyes. This nightmare is in fact older than academic anthropology itself. A similar statement can be found in the work of one of its most important predecessors, the Jesuit Pater Joseph François Lafitau, who between 1712 and 1717 spent almost five years among the Mohawk in the former French colony of Nou velle France. As he wrote in the introduction to his “Mœurs des sauvages amériquains, comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps” (1724), through their contact with Europeans they had lost so many of their old habits and customs that he INTRODUCTION 3 decided to describe them as they should have been from the time of their ancestors and as they were before all these changes took place (Lafitau 1724:25f.).
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