Edited by Yasmeen Arif The problem of hegemony, flows and equity in world anthropologies Gustavo Lins Ribeiro Emergent Encounters: Towards a politics of epistemology Yasmeen Arif The state and the anthropologies of the state (A political anthropologist’s testimony) Peter Skalník Encountering the field Vasundhara Bhojvaid Dismantling Anthropology’s Domestic and International Peripheries Faye V. Harrison A midwinter afternoon’s dream The utopia of a cosmopolitan anthropology Alcida Rita Ramos Contents Foreword Yasmeen Arif .....................................................................................3 The problem of hegemony, flows and equity in world anthropologies Gustavo Lins Ribeiro ..........................................................................7 Emergent Encounters: Towards a politics of epistemology Yasmeen Arif ...................................................................................2 3 The state and the anthropologies of the state (A political anthropologist’s testimony) Peter Skalník ....................................................................................4 3 Encountering the field Vasundhara Bhojvaid ........................................................................6 9 Dismantling Anthropology’s Domestic and International Peripheries Faye V. Harrison ..............................................................................8 7 A midwinter afternoon’s dream The utopia of a cosmopolitan anthropology Alcida Rita Ramos ........................................................................111 List of Contributors ...................................................................123 Foreword Yasmeen Arif This issue of the WAN journal has been long overdue - however late, I am privileged to present this set of six papers in a forum with which I have associated myself with great pride and greater hope. My interaction with this journal and the WAN has been for almost a decade now, since I was a doctoral student at the Department of Social Anthropology at Delhi University, in India. Allowing myself a few lines at the very beginning, I would like a personal dedication to Arturo Escobar, our colleague, a gifted anthropologist and most of all, the rarest of all breeds – a generous scholar. Arturo and I have not met yet, however my association with him captures a bit of the WAN spirit and I shall not hesitate to express that here. At the time of my first association with WAN, I was struggling to find a disciplinary place for my endeavors which involved an unlikely doctoral project that I ambitiously designed for myself. This project took me from Delhi, India to Beirut, Lebanon for my fieldwork with an intention of understanding what recovery implies in the everyday world of post-war urban conditions. That was not a journey easily transcribed in disciplinary routine as it entailed a fieldwork encounter between two locations that so far could only be thought of as ‘peripheries’ in the ubiquitous paradigm of the ‘center-periphery’; especially when ‘peripheral’ anthropologists were expected, willingly or otherwise, to be studying their own selves. Some of the issues that troubled me at the time found some clumsy expression in an essay that I was advised to send to Arturo. Almost a year later ( it was a difficult year for Arturo), Arturo did not fail to reply and I was surprised and excited to receive, some very sensitive and encouraging comments and an invitation to publish in the second WAN journal issue. I have, with pride and commitment, retained that association. Thank you, Arturo. 4 Yasmeen Arif This issue was intended as a volume that would collect a set of presentations made at a panel organized by Gustavo Ribeiro and myself at the IUAES Inter-Congress held in Antalya, Turkey, October 3-6, 2010. The panel was called “(Re)-Connecting Global and Local Anthropologies. Debating UNESCO’s World Social Science Report 2010 and the World Anthropologies Network” and was held on the 5th of October, 2010, as the closing event of the session “Globalization and Anthropology”. While some of those excellent presentations have found their way into this issue, I am happy to have two other contributors…both of whose work have a special place in the way I imagine the WAN intent to be. Faye Harrison is Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies based at the University of Florida and Vasundhara Bhojvaid is a PhD student of Social Anthropology at the University of Delhi. Both essays, along side the others (as I introduce below), suggest that the struggle for a meaningful re-orientation of anthropological knowledge production practices in inclusive ways does not chart a static map. In fact, the dilemmas, the challenges are yet embedded in the ‘centers’ (Harrison) as much as they are in the changing horizons of the ‘peripheries’ (Bhojvaid). The compelling WAN intent remains – the goal is not about mapping an alternate cartography (or creating dubious labels like the “global – south”); nor is it to pre-empt hegemony to locations of centrality (in other words, recognize struggles both within the centers or peripheries). Rather, the need is to reveal the inequities that any practice of knowledge production, whether disciplinary or bureaucratic, epistemological or loca- tional, support. Further, criticism alone is not sufficient – the force of argument must lie in the innovative potential that can be harvested from understanding the challenge in all its fullness. While each essay speaks for its own engagement with the politics of knowledge production within (and rapidly moving out of) the disciplinary contours of anthropology, I frame them in three pairs. First, the demand for innovation is addressed by Gustavo Lins Ribeiro’s and my own contribution. I note here a valuable practical consideration that Ribeiro channels through his earlier conceptual formulation of ‘cosmopolitics’ (Ribeiro 2006). Following his notion that anthropologists undertake their work, not just in disciplinary terms of inclusiveness, but rather, in more active political work, he urges that difference and diversity be taken beyond its ironic encapsulation in metropo- litan hegemonies of appropriation. His suggestion is to actively build organizational support for WAN (World Anthropologies Network) or the WCAA (World Council of Anthropological Foreword 5 Associations) so as to enable a larger, different and diverse network of anthropologists which may yet provide the forum for a new politics of knowledge production. This, indeed, would be a keener understanding of what diverse does mean in anthro- pological work; how the persistence of English persuades us to re-examine diversity and difference and how we could think of accommodating that diversity in equitable language practices. In so far that anthropological method articulates a disciplinary practice, my own contribution in this issue hopes to suggest a methodological innovation. By attempting ethnographic or empirical encounters between locations that deny any former anthropological cartography, for instance, north vs. south, metropolitan vs. periphery, self vs. other, I propose a way of allowing emergent encounters that enable the empirical meeting of locations through connections of resonance and association. I connect Delhi and Beirut through an exploration of the idea of ‘recovery’ after crises and show how such encounters could entail an epistemological politics. Petr Skalnik and Vasundhara Bhojvaid both deal with resear- ching the state, but from separate anthropological moments that measure the changing terrain of anthropological research on the ‘state’. First, Skalnik explores the question of how the conceptualization of the ‘state’ is so much a product of actual state presence in research activity - wonderfully illustrated by his personal trajectory of studying the state ( in Africa) within and outside communist regimes. This does seem to throw up an interesting ‘dilemma’ about our grounds of doing anthropology - in the collapse between the merging of the conditions of study and the object of study - and its place in the politics of making knowledge. In another way, Skalnik’s sensitive essay tells us about what challenges ‘peripheral’ disciplinary practices hold within themselves, especially when the stake is the formulation of a critique to dominant state theory. Bhojvaid studies the state, but from another moment in anthropological endeavor – the study of Europe by an Indian student of social anthropology – a reversed gaze of sorts. Her work in researching a legal domain that has similar resonances in both India and Denmark, show what hori- zons of practice open up - first, when the classical tradition of field work come to be reversed – How does the object of study come to be formed in this new equation? Second, what do such reversals (India studying Denmark) allow in the understanding of an anthropology of the state? Especially, when the reversal enables a conversation on a common ground (in this case, a law 6 Yasmeen Arif regarding state transparency) between locations that would have otherwise remained separate as incommensurable contexts. Faye Harrison and Alcida Ramos both bring poignantly personal, yet, compellingly relevant experiences to their essays. Harrison writes about the peripheralization, heirarchization and often, the negation and silencing of those (in her emphasis, the AfroDiaspora) whose profound presence in knowledge making was systematically removed from the discipline’s memory. But, Harrison does not call for a mere inclusion of these erased voices as a nod towards the fashionable trend of ethnic inclusions in the metropole. She traces her own work and career to suggest the singular importance of understanding the implications of, in her words – ‘interlocking dimensions of difference, inequality, and power’ – that permeate the business of doing anthropology, however our locations, our bodies, our identities are placed. The last essay by Ramos echoes this theme, but takes us into a literary metaphor – an imagination of a utopia, a dream ‘Cosmanthro- polis’ - that captures in expressive eloquence the pathos that our discipline circumvents in maintaining its authority and power over indigenous knowledge. Through this metaphor, she urges us to look closely at the wily manipulations hiding in the metropole under the alleged inclusions of ‘difference’ and commits herself to paving the path towards the possible anthropological utopia glimmering in the WAN. I thank Marisol de la Cadena, Gustavo Ribeiro, Suzana Narotzky and Sandy Toussaint for their invitation to edit this issue. Without Eduardo Restrepo’s masterful skills in delivering these writings, this journal would remain only an aspiration. Last, but with the deepest of sentiment, I thank all the contributors for their patience in bearing with me the unavoidable delay of this issue. In a continuous struggle to bring those ideas that mainstream academe look upon askance, this WAN issue is another step forward. References cited Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins. 2006. World Anthropologies: Cosmopolitics, Power and Theory in Anthropology. Critique of Anthropology. 26 (4): 363-386. the problem oF hegemony, Flows and equity in world anthropologies Gustavo Lins Ribeiro Hegmony In the year of 1982, the Swedish journal Ethnos published an issue, edited by Thomas Gerholm and Ulf Hannerz, dedicated to debating “national anthropologies.” A critical standpoint about the global anthropological scenario was implicit in a metaphor Gerholm and Hannerz (1982) coined in the introduction to the volume. According to them, world anthropologies were an archipelago in which “national anthropologies” were islands that kept no communication among them but had bridges with “international anthropologies” located in the mainland. In the rare occasions some of the islands communicated with each other, they did so via the mainland. An approach highly concerned with power imbalances was soon to develop. Gerholm himself, in 1995, mentioned the existence of central and peripheral anthropologies and coined the notion of a “world system of anthropology.” Mexican anthro- pologist Esteban Krotz (1997) wrote about “anthropologies of the South” while Brazilian anthropologist, Roberto Cardoso de Oliveira (1999/2000) also discussed peripheral anthropologies and underscored the problem of mutual ignorance among them. Japanese anthropologist Takami Kuwayama, in 2004, argued that the United States, Great Britain and, to a lesser extent, France constituted the core of the world system of anthropology. He wrote: Simply put, the world system of anthropology defines the politics involved in the production, dissemination, and consumption of knowledge about other peoples and cultures. Influential scho- lars in the core countries are in a position to decide what kinds of knowledge should be given authority and merit attention. The peer-review system at 8 Gustavo Lins Ribeiro prestigious journals reinforces this structure. Thus, knowledge produced in the periphery, however significant and valuable, is destined to be buried locally unless it meets the standards and expecta- tions of the core. (2004: 9–10). Indeed, anthropologists are aware that the production and dissemination of the discipline happen within unequal power conditions structured by national and global forces. I want to explore this inequality within the “world system of anthropology” rather than within the nation-state level. Anthropology as a discipline globalized itself in the last 30 years. Whatever the peculiarities of the indigenization of univer- sities and of the disciplines that travelled along with them, the growth of anthropology departments around the world caused a major change of the demographics of the global population of anthropologists. In 1982, Fahim pointed out that anthropologists outside of the core of anthropological production represented a “relatively small portion of the world-wide community of anthropologists” (1982a: 150-151). This is no longer the case. There are more anthropologists working outside the hegemonic centers than the other way around. The growth of the numbers of practitioners in all continents generated interesting and apparently contradictory results. On the one hand, it allowed for an increase in the worldwide consumption of the literature and theories produced by hegemonic anthropo- logies. It also allowed for an increase in the quantity of foreign professors, ironically called “ethnic intellectuals” by Ahmad, who are working for American and British universities as well as a consolidated global academic regime (Chun, 2008). Brain drain notwithstanding, this sort of emergent global academic labor market seems to imply an assessment of the professional quality of the anthropologists involved in which the only imperial center would be the Anglo-Saxon academic world. There is a need to go beyond the usual approach that looks at the institutional disparities within the world system of anthropo- logy in order to try to understand how hegemony is constructed within our discipline. Hegemony is the silent mode of exerting power that counts on the active consent of the dominated. In the academic world, admiration and scholarship play a central role and they may be the basis upon which academic genealogies and myths are built. Many of these genealogies and myths are taken in different countries to constitute the social foundation of what is taught as the anthropological classics. Nothing wrong The problem of hegemony, flows and equity in world anthropologies. 9 with this if most graduate courses in different countries outside of the hegemonic core included among the mandatory classic readings indigenous researchers. Aren’t there Brazilian anthropo- logists who deserve to be read in Brazil (and elsewhere) as great contributors to anthropological knowledge? What I am aiming at is to say that most scholars outside the hegemonic centers accept their hegemony and reproduce it. Hegemony speaks English on the global level. Irina Bokova (2010: iii), Director General of UNESCO, considers, in a foreword of the 2010 World Social Science Report, that “social scientific endeavor is also poorer for its bias towards English and English-speaking developed countries. This is a missed oppor- tunity to explore perspectives and paradigms that are embedded in other cultural and linguistic traditions.” It is clear that those colleagues who are native of the English language and work in an English-speaking country have and advantage over those who are natives of the Japanese or Russian languages, for instance. We can suppose that the relative loss of global importance of French anthropology may be a result of the relative loss of importance of French as a global language. Can we de-“babelize” anthropology? In a sense, and this is true for all academic disciplines, de-babelization is already happening with the role that English plays as the global language. It is a linguistic paradox: to talk about diversity we need to use a same and common language. It is also something that could be dubbed the linguistic pragmatism of global communication which is historically and sociologically structured. Unless, in a futurist vein, we can count on a universal translating machine, we need a single language in order to communicate across all linguistic barriers. Does this mean, on the international level, the end of the importance of all other languages which cannot compete with English as means of academic communication? I don’t think so. Here strong regional languages, such as Spanish, in Latin America, will continue to play an important role. On the national level of integration, major languages, in countries where there are large and consolidated scientific communities, such as in China, Japan, Russia, France, Germany and Brazil, will also continue to play an important role. For each of one of us, all this means that being a polyglot is a most welcome skill, if not a necessary one, to engage in cosmopolitan communities of communication. While the linguistic monotony of the global scientific scenario is increasingly acknowledged as a major problem there are few solutions offered so far. UNESCO itself could think of an