Edited by

SINDRE BANGSTAD

Anthropology of Our TimesAn Edited Anthology in Public Anthropology

Anthropology of Our Times

House of Literature, Oslo. Photo courtesy of Andreas Liebe Delsett

Sindre Bangstad Editor

Anthropology of Our Times

An Edited Anthology in Public Anthropology

Foreword byThomas Hylland Eriksen

EditorSindre BangstadKIFO, Institute For Church,

Religion and Worldview ResearchVinderen, Norway

ISBN 978-1-137-53848-2 ISBN 978-1-137-53849-9 (eBook)DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53849-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017936702

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Nature America Inc. The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.

For Thomas, whose work taught me what public anthropology could be.For Marianne G. for lessons in personal and professional integrity.

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Foreword

In this Foreword, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oslo Thomas Hylland Eriksen reflects on the ebbs and flows of the relation-ship of anthropology to the wider public sphere since the last turn of the century. Starting with Bronislaw Malinowski, Marcel Mauss, Franz Boas and Margaret Mead, Eriksen argues that public anthropology is not something new, and that there has not been any straightforward move-ment from openness to closure with increasing professionalisation of anthropology as an academic discipline.

The relationship of anthropology to the wider public sphere has gone through a series of ebbs and flows. In the nineteenth century, anthro-pology scarcely existed as an independent intellectual endeavour, but was largely a gentlemanly pursuit or an unintended, but not unwelcome side-effect of exploration and colonisation. Those who contributed to the emergence of anthropology as a distinctive field of scientific knowl-edge, from Lewis Henry Morgan in the USA to Henry Maine and E.B. Tylor in England, positioned themselves in a broader ecology of ideas and the pursuit of knowledge. The professionalisation of anthropology as an academic discipline began in earnest around the last turn of the cen-tury, enabling later practitioners to withdraw increasingly from political concerns and other scientific approaches to human culture and society. While many nineteenth-century anthropologists were not public anthro-pologists in the contemporary sense, they communicated with a broader

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public in their writings—from lay readers to policy-makers—than most academic anthropologists of the early twenty-first century.

In addition, many early anthropologists, especially in the USA, were involved in what would today be called radical advocacy or action anthropology. Luke Lassiter notes that

[l]ong before Bronislaw Malinowski insisted that anthropologists move ‘off the verandah’ and into the everyday lives of the natives … many BAE [Bureau of American Ethnology] ethnologists had moved into Native communities and were participating in people’s everyday lives, doing fieldwork in collaboration with Indian informants, and, in some cases, following in the tradition of Morgan, acting on behalf of their ‘subjects’. (Lassiter 2005: 86)

The increasing institutionalisation of anthropology as an academic dis-cipline in the twentieth century enabled many anthropologists to effec-tively withdraw from the surrounding society (Eriksen 2006, Low and Merry 2010). Concerns voiced by some, such as A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, to make anthropology a ‘real science’ modelled on physics and biology, encouraged this kind of retreat into the ivory tower, and as the internal demographics of anthropology soared after the Second World War, the professional community grew large enough to begin to spin a cocoon around itself. Like a growing empire, it increasingly became self-con-tained, self-reproducing and self-sufficient, until the sheer demographic growth, decades later, again led to porous boundaries and defections.

There has been no straightforward movement from openness to clo-sure. Important anthropologists who contributed to the institutionalisa-tion of the subject were engaged in broader societal issues, and Franz Boas himself was an important public critic of racist pseudoscience. Among his students, Margaret Mead, the author of forty-four books and more than a thousand articles, keeping the steam up until her death in 1978, was the public anthropologist par excellence in the twenti-eth century. There were also many others whose work was read outside the academy, and who engaged in various ways with the world at large. Bronislaw Malinowski gave lectures on primitive economics to anyone who would care to listen; Marcel Mauss was engaged in French politics as a moderate socialist; and one could go on.

Moreover, applied anthropology has been a subfield—often unjustly disparaged by those involved in ‘pure research’—since well before the

FOREWORD ix

war. As noted by David Mills (2006: 56–57), anthropologists had, since the early twentieth century, tried to ‘convince the Imperial govern-ment that anthropology served a useful purpose and deserved funding’. Although applied research was funded by the Colonial Social Science Research Council until 1961 (Pink 2006), little basic anthropological research received such funding (Goody 1995). Anthropological meth-ods and anthropological knowledge have nevertheless, at various times, been deemed useful by governments and business leaders, most recently in the Human Terrain System of the US military forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, where practitioners from anthropology (and other subjects) were drawn upon to enhance knowledge of local circumstances in war areas. Deeply controversial among American anthropologists, studied and criticised thoroughly by one of the anthropologists interviewed by Sindre Bangstad in this book (Price 2011), the HTS was denounced in a statement issued by the American Anthropological Association in 2007. The fundamental ethics of anthropological research is not compatible with legitimation of wars, nor are the ethics of fieldwork compatible with spying.

In a sense, anthropologists have always engaged with publics outside of anthropology. Sometimes, this has led to their academic marginalisa-tion—one could easily be written off as intellectually lightweight if one got involved in advocacy or applied work, say, for development agen-cies—and there has, as noted by many (e.g. Pels and Salemink 1999, Borofsky 2011), been a clear, and arguably unproductive, tendency to rank pure research above applied research. Similarly, the hierarchy rank-ing tough academic writing for people in the know above lucid writing for the general public, is also debatable. Most of the anthropologists who are widely read by students may have put most of their intellec-tual energy into basic research and theory, but they have coexisted with other, no less important anthropologists, who either went out of their way to establish a broader dialogue about the human condition, or who actively sought to mitigate suffering and contribute to social change.

Public anthropology as such is, in other words, not something new. Nevertheless, the problematisation of distinctions that were formerly taken for granted, notably between ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ work, and the development of a reflexive and critical discourse about the ways in which anthropology can be made relevant outside the academy, has been on the rise in recent years. This development cannot be attributed to isolated initiatives such as Borofsky’s Public Anthropology project, but must

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be understood as a broader structural tendency. Already in the 1980s, anthropologists working in the Global South noted that many of the people they came into contact with had highly articulated and reflex-ive views of their own history, culture and identity. They certainly did not feel the need for anthropologists to identify who they were; in many parts of the world, local intellectuals had indeed read some anthropology and were familiar with its concepts. They were able to identify themselves and use some of the tools offered by anthropology to develop their own existential and political agendas, and did not see why they should need foreigners to do the job for them.

In our world of multiple transnational networks and global flows, the fiction of ‘us, the knowers’ and ‘they, the objects of study’, which was always objectionable, has now become untenable, and anthropologists now venture into fields, and delineate their topics of inquiry, in ways that were unheard of only a generation ago (see MacClancy 2002 for a sample). As Sam Beck and Carl Maida (2013) put it, the contemporary world is in every sense borderless. The consequences of the destabilisation of boundaries for the anthropological endeavour are many, and some of the most important consequences become evident in the debates around public anthropology: Who can legitimately say what, and on whose behalf can they say it? What are the benchmark criteria for good ethnography? What can anthropologists offer to the societies they study? And—in a very general sense—what is the exact relationship between anthropological research and the social and cultural worlds under study? These questions, which were always relevant, have become inevitable, and increasingly dif-ficult to answer, in the borderless world of the twenty-first century.

This is not a time for complacency. Anthropology has, in the past, suc-ceeded spectacularly in combating racial prejudices and biological deter-minism, accounting for—and, at least in the case of Margaret Mead, contributing to—cultural change, and throwing unexpected analogies and thought-provoking contrasts into the world, sometimes succeed-ing in ‘making the exotic familiar and the familiar exotic’. Our failure to define a single public agenda over the last decades—and I am using the word public loosely, to include the media, politics, students and gen-eral intellectual debate—is actually quite serious. It does not mean that anthropologists are, generally, working with useless and irrelevant top-ics, that they are engaged in a self-enclosed activity of high sophistication akin to the ‘glass bead game’ described in Herman Hesse’s last and most important novel, Das Glasperlenspiel, translated into English variously

FOREWORD xi

as The Glass Bead Game and as Magister Ludi. The glass bead game has no ulterior point beyond that of allowing its players to display their daz-zling skill and intellectual dexterity, and as the novel shows so clearly, the single-minded commitment to the game demanded of its players make them unfit for living in the world. Among other things, Hesse’s novel was clearly a comment on self-enclosed, self-congratulatory academic pursuits with little relevance beyond the academy. Novelists and poets have been known to regard literary studies, not least in their poststruc-turalist versions, in such terms. But anthropology? Well, clearly no. What attracted many of us to anthropology in the first place—the possibility to raise fundamental philosophical questions while simultaneously engaging with the world of real existing people—is still there.

It is on this background that Sindre Bangstad’s public conversations with renowned anthropologists, which are presented in this volume, rep-resent such an important intervention. The people encountered in this book, all of them highly regarded for their purely academic production, have in common an explicit existential engagement, something which is at stake beyond knowledge production for its own sake. Perhaps it is true that all good research has an existential dimension; in the case of the contributors to Bangstad’s book, it is not only driven by curiosity, but by a wish to use knowledge to make the world a slightly better place. When Eric Wolf famously, but ambiguously, spoke of anthropology ‘as the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities’, he may well have had this aspect of the anthropological endeavour in mind. The nature of ethnographic research presupposes an attitude in the researcher which goes beyond scientific curiosity, but rather entails and indeed requires personal investment into and moral commitment to the lives of the people with whom the ethnographer engages. It is this moral dimension, usually understated in published work, that provides anthro-pology with its privileged position as a tool for interpreting and acting upon the injustices of the world. This book demonstrates the breadth and depth of moral engagement in anthropology, but in doing so, it also shows that the value of views and opinions is rather limited unless backed by knowledge, and that the kind of high-octane knowledge anthropol-ogy offers at its best, is unbeatable when coupled with a strong humanis-tic moral engagement.

Thomas Hylland EriksenOslo, Norway

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reFerences

Beck, Sam, and Carl A. Maida, (eds.). 2013. Toward Engaged Anthropology. New York: Berghahn.

Borofsky, Robert. 2011. Why a Public Anthropology? Kindle Book, Center for Public Anthropology.

Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2006. Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence. Oxford: Berg.

Goody, Jack. 1995. The Expansive Moment: Anthropology in Britain and Africa 1918–1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lassiter, Luke Eric. 2005. Collaborative Ethnography and Public Anthropology. Current Anthropology 46 (1): 83–116.

Low, Setha, and Sally Engle Merry. 2010. Engaged Anthropology: Diversity and Dilemmas. Current Anthropology 51(2): 203–226.

MacClancy, Jeremy (ed.). 2002. Exotic No More: Anthropology on the Front Lines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mills, David. 2006. Dinner at Claridges? Anthropology and the ‘Captains of Industry’, 1947–1955. In Applications of Anthropology: Professional Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Sarah Pink, 55–72. Oxford: Berghahn.

Pels, Peter, and Oscar Salemink (eds.). 1999. Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practice of Anthropology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Pink, Sarah. 2006. Introduction: Applications of Anthropology. In Applications of Anthropology: Professional Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Sarah Pink, 3–26. Oxford: Berghahn.

Price, David. 2011. Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State. Oakland: AK Press.

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Acknowledgements

This anthology is the result of extensive collaboration between a wide range of scholars from various fields and disciplines based at a great num-ber of institutions and departments in Norway and affiliated with vari-ous civil society organisations. Among these institutions are the Centre For Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities (the HL-Centre) in Oslo, the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo (SAI), the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, the Fafo Institute For Applied Social Research in Oslo, the Norwegian Centre For Human Rights in Oslo, the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oslo, the Norwegian Institute For International Affairs (NUPI), the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), the Centre For Development and The Environment (SUM) at the University of Oslo and Oslo and Akershus University College (HiOA), Minotenk, NorLarNet (Norwegian Latin-American Research Network), the Norwegian Council For Africa and the Norwegian Centre Against Racism (ARS). My first thanks go to former senior editor Mireille Yanow at Palgrave MacMillan New York for taking this monograph on in the first place, and for her successor Alexis Nelson for steering the ship towards completion. The Fritt Ord Foundation, which provided the core funding for the series in public anthropology on which this anthology is based from 2009 through to 2014, deserves to be acknowledged, as does the House of Literature in Oslo, which hosted the series. It was Thomas Hylland Eriksen—or rather the energetic public image of Thomas Hylland Eriksen on Norwegian television—who spurred my

xiv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

interest in pursuing a career in anthropology. He deserves to be singled out for special praise for not only providing an excellent preface to this edited volume on short notice, but also for providing an untiring and unsparing embodiment of and commitment to public anthropology not only in Norway but also internationally over the years. Like so many other Norwegian social anthropologists, I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to Thomas for providing a bright, original and playful example of what public anthropology can be over many years.

In developing this series as well as the resulting anthology, I have had the immense privilege of working with a tremendously dedicated and distinguished group of scholars. My thanks go to Matti Bunzl, John L. and Jean Comaroff, Magnus Marsden, Salwa Ismail, John R. Bowen, Arzoo Osanloo, Richard Ashby Wilson, Claudio Lomnitz, David H. Price, Didier Fassin, Ruben Andersson, Angelique Haugerud and Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi.

I am also extremely grateful to Didier Fassin, Ruben Andersson, Angelique Haugerud and Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi for agreeing to the time-consuming work of responding to my extensive questions on e-mail on relatively short notice.

Among my co-operating ‘partners in crime’ in Norway have been, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Kristian Berg Harpviken, Oddbjørn Leirvik, Sevda Clarke, Knut G. Nustad, Marit M. Melhuus, Benedicte Bull, Bjørn E. Bertelsen, Paul Wenzel Geissler and Karin Kapadia.

For their extensive co-operation and support, I also wish to thank Cora Alexa Døving, Rune Flikke, Linda Noor, the late Amin El Farri, Michael R. Seltzer, Bjørn Olav Utvik, Morten Bøås and Halvor Berggrav.

Special thanks are due to Cato Fossum and Eric McKinley for diligent work on transcripts.

Last but not least, thanks to my wife and daughters for light and laughter in dark times.

Due to copyright issues, three articles in these series meant to have been included in this volume had to be left out. These were published as:

Sindre Bangstad and Matti Bunzl (2010) ‘Anthropologists Are Talking About Islamophobia and Antisemitism in the New Europe’, Ethnos 75 (2): 213–228;

Sindre Bangstad, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, John L. and Jean Comaroff (2012) ‘Anthropologists Are Talking About Anthropology and Post-Apartheid South Africa’, Ethnos 77 (1): 115–36;

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xv

Sindre Bangstad, Oddbjørn Leirvik and John R. Bowen (2013) ‘Anthropologists Are Talking About Islam, Muslims and Law in Contemporary Europe’, Ethnos 79 (1): 138–157.

In addition, this series created the impetus for an interview published as:Sindre Bangstad and Lila Abu-Lughod (2016) ‘Ten questions about

anthropology, feminism, Middle East politics, and publics’, American Ethnologist (Online), Nov 22, 2016. Available as: http://americaneth-nologist.org/2016/lila-abu-lughod-interview/.

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contents

1 Anthropological Publics, Public Anthropology: An Introduction 1Sindre Bangstad

2 In Conversation with Sindre Bangstad and Kristian Berg Harpviken About Lived Islam in the Frontier Regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. House of Literature, April 28, 2011 29Magnus Marsden

3 In Conversation with Sindre Bangstad and Knut G. Nustad About Anthropology, Hate Speech and Incitement to Commit Genocide. House of Literature, May 14, 2013 51Richard Ashby Wilson

4 In Conversation with Marit Melhuus and Benedicte Bull About Life and Death in Mexico. House of Literature, September 26, 2013 73Claudio Lomnitz

xviii CONTENTS

5 In Conversation with Sindre Bangstad and Bjørn E. Bertelsen About Anthropology, the Cold War and the “War on Terror”. House of Literature, May 20, 2014 93David H. Price

6 In Conversation with Sindre Bangstad and Paul Wenzel Geissler About Anthropology’s Great Expectations. Conducted via E-Mail Correspondence in October/November 2016. 109Didier Fassin

7 In Conversation with Sindre Bangstad About Migrants, Illegality and the Bordering of Europe. Conducted via E-Mail Correspondence in September 2016. 131Ruben Andersson

8 In Conversation with Sindre Bangstad and Karin Kapadia. Conducted via E-Mail Correspondence in October/November 2016 149Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi

9 In Conversation with Sindre Bangstad About the Anthropology of Politics, Neoliberalism and Satire. Conducted via E-Mail Correspondence, November/December 2016 183Angelique Haugerud

Index 209

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About the editor

Sindre Bangstad holds a cand. polit. degree in social anthropology from the University of Bergen, Norway, and a Ph.D. from Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He has undertaken eth-nographic research on Muslims in Cape Town, South Africa, and on Muslims in Norway. He has published six monographs, edited and co-authored volumes—including (in Norwegian) Sekularismens ansikter (2009), Hva er rasisme (with Cora Alexa Døving, 2015), Global Flows, Local Appropriations: Facets of Secularisation and Re-Islamisation Among Contemporary Cape Muslims (2007), Anders Breivik and The Rise of Islamophobia (2014), The Politics of Mediated Presence: Exploring The Voices of Muslims in Norway’s Mediated Public Spheres (2015). His cur-rent research interests are in the field of racism, Islamophobia and hate speech. He is a researcher at KIFO (Institute For Church, Religion and Worldview Research) in Oslo, Norway.

CHAPTER 1

Anthropological Publics, Public Anthropology: An Introduction

Sindre Bangstad

A legAcy oF Ashes? the rise And decline oF Public AnthroPology

In surveying the “future of anthropology” in a presidential address to the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA’s) 94th Annual Meeting in Washington DC in November 1995, Prof. James L. Peacock declared that “society needs anthropology” and that if anthropologists “did not exist, we would be invented.” (Peacock 1997: 9). But Peacock also argued that anthropology is “still the invisible discipline” and “not known to be cru-cial to society.” (Peacock op. cit.: 10). “Anthropology’s role is limited to the extent to which we choose to make it relevant and noticed,” he con-cluded, and issued a call for “a flourishing redirection of our field into a prominent position in society” (Peacock op. cit.: 10, 9). The answer, for Peacock as for many other anthropologists in recent years, has seemed to reside in what is commonly described as public anthropology. And so every second year seems to see the publication of some passionate new call for

© The Author(s) 2017 S. Bangstad (ed.), Anthropology of Our Times, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-53849-9_1

1

S. Bangstad (*) KIFO, Institute For Church, Religion And Worldview Research, Oslo, Norway

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more public anthropology. But what, if anything, is public anthropology? As noted by Prof. Thomas Hylland Eriksen (2015: 719), the very term “is slightly odd” in that it implies the existence of a “private anthropol-ogy” when “in a certain sense, all anthropology is public, as it entails com-munication of many kinds and in a variety of settings” (ibid.) and “there is probably no anthropologist who does not wish to have an audience for his or her ideas” (ibidem.). For Hylland Eriksen, then, the term pub-lic anthropology “as it is now being used, refers to a specific set of prac-tices and positions within the discipline that aim to reach out beyond the confines of the academy” (ibid.). The “common denominator of these practices” of public anthropology, is in Hylland Eriksen’s view, “the con-viction that anthropology should matter not just as an academic pursuit of knowledge but also as a tool to engage with the world in a practical, if not political way” (ibidem.). But recent anthropological publications on pub-lic anthropology have read more than anything like a counsel of despair. From the very first paragraph in Hylland Eriksen’s Engaging Anthropology: The Case For A Public Presence (Eriksen 2006, 2013), we learn that “anthropology, the study of human cultures and societies, is exception-ally relevant as a tool for understanding the contemporary world, yet it is absent from nearly every important public debate in the Anglophone world. Its lack of visibility is an embarrassment and a challenge” (Eriksen 2006: ix). From Prof. Jeremy A. Sabloff’s (2011) article in American Anthropologist, “Where Have You Gone, Margaret Mead? Anthropology and Public Intellectuals,” we learn that “anthropologists have impor-tant, practical knowledge, but the mainstream, public and policy maker alike, generally does not understand or appreciate our insights” (Sabloff 2011: 408). If the proverbial Owl Of Minerva flies at dusk, anthropolo-gists in our time generally got up too late to catch it by its wings—or so it seems. Public anthropology has been defined by Besteman (2013: 4) as “purposefully oriented toward a non-academic public, toward promot-ing anthropological knowledge in public arenas…[…]…and heightening anthropology’s public image.” For Eriksen (2013: 16), the term pub-lic anthropology refers to “a specific set of practices and positions within the discipline that aim to reach out beyond the confines of the academy.” Lassiter (2005: 96) rightly notes that “engaging the publics with which we work in our ethnographic research and writing necessarily casts ethnog-raphy as a public act.” The tale told by both Sabloff and Eriksen appear to be that of a Gibbonesque “Rise And Decline of Public Anthropology” in which the golden years of public anthropology can and should be

1 ANTHROPOLOGICAL PUBLICS, PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY … 3

recuperated. With Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, we might then want to ask why “the notion of publicness itself” has “become such a high value for some” and “practically synonymous with benevolence, as if to attach ‘public’ to the name of a discipline grants it a special dignity” (Wurgaft 2016). On closer inspection, the picture painted by anthropological schol-ars who identify with a long and honored tradition of public anthropol-ogy going back to legendary yet often controversial figures such as Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Ashley Montague, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Clifford Geertz, is not all that bleak: Eriksen (2013) and Howell (2010) hold up the role of anthropologists in their native Norway as an exception to what is offered up as an Anglo-Saxon marginalization and irrelevance of anthro-pology to wider publics, whereas Fassin (2013) holds his native France to constitute the exception. Eriksen has, however, in recent years come to acknowledge and to recognize that “the structural position of anthropolo-gists in the Norwegian public sphere…[…]…has changed” and that he himself has recently “increasingly found it difficult to contribute meaning-fully to the public discourse on these matters.” The increasing irrelevance to Norwegian public discourse of the public anthropology that Hylland Eriksen has for over 25 years come to represent and embody in Norway, he relates to “the broader change in the terms of discourse about migra-tion and national identity” in Norway. “It is clear that the current ecology of ideas in the Norwegian public sphere is less conducive to playfulness, experiments of thought and an optimistic outlook than what was the case in the 1990s” (Eriksen 2016a). As for the attempts to analyze the factors that have contributed to what many anthropological scholars seem to hold is an increasing marginalization and irrelevance for anthropology to wider publics in recent years—regardless of national context—these vary. Sabloff points to the lack of credit and merit in doing public anthropology in aca-demic promotion and tenure processes as well as anthropologists being particularly ill-suited to provide the public with the certainties from schol-ars that they and the media crave for (Sabloff op. cit.: 410, 412). Nancy Scheper-Hughes has long been a passionate advocate of both public and engaged anthropology, but cautions that those choosing to do public anthropology should not “expect to be rewarded for it,” but should rather consider doing it “a precious right and a privilege” (Scheper-Hughes 2009: 1). For Borofsky (2000) public anthropology is part of the social and ethical commitment of anthropologists, in that it “affirms our respon-sibility, as scholars and citizens, to meaningfully contribute to communi-ties beyond the academy—both local and global—that make the study

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of anthropology possible.” Eriksen points to a professional reluctance to share anthropological readership with a wider public, and an ability to communicate efficiently with a non-anthropological public (Eriksen op. cit.: ix, x). Driessen (2013: 391) contends that it is “hard to communicate anthropological knowledge in clear, understandable and compelling ways” in the “crowded arena” of increasingly “dense and complex” “media land-scape and global information flows,” but that “too much anthropology is boring, unattractive, and unapproachable for wider audiences” (ibid.). Fassin for his part argues that not only anthropology, but the social sci-ences in general, have always been ambivalent about public engagement due to the risk of “an epistemological blur between a rigorous approach and a normative drift” (Fassin op. cit.: 625).

whAt is the “Public” in “Public AnthroPology”?However, the extent to which anthropologists involved in writing about public anthropology are more concerned about the “anthropology” than the “public” part of the equation, is often striking. We need to histori-cize not only anthropology, but also the concept of the “public” as a modern phenomenon. So a small detour into the vast and expanding non-anthropological literature on “publics” and “counterpublics” is here required. Jürgen Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Habermas 1991 [1962]), which has of course been absolutely cen-tral to the scholarly literature on public spheres ever since, was of course a Gibbonesque narrative about the rise and decline of the bourgeois and liberal public sphere in Europe. As Peters (1993: 543) has pointed out, Habermas’ thesis concerns the structural transformation of the public sphere from “critical participation to consumerist manipulation” (ibid.). Fraser (2007: 10–11) has rightly noted that the Habermasian concept of the public sphere is linked to a particular social imaginary, namely that of a deliberative democracy for a territorially bounded polity and, more specifically, the modern post-Westphalian nation-state. It is furthermore “inscribed in a discourse of modernity” (Mah 2000: 180). Central to Habermas’ notion of the public sphere was his emphasis on the potential of the public sphere to function as the arena for the articulation of a cri-tique or a corrective to the power of the state (Bangstad 2015: 109). The modern public sphere was in Charles Taylor’s words, “a space of discussion which is self-consciously seen as being outside power” (Taylor 1992: 232). It is extrapolitical “as a discourse on and to power, rather than by power”

1 ANTHROPOLOGICAL PUBLICS, PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY … 5

(ibid.). But to think of modern public spheres as separate and distinct from state power, risks idealizing and essentializing them. Calhoun (1992) has argued that the final sections of Habermas’ Structural Transformation foreshadow Habermas’ later and more pessimistic work on the public sphere, by describing the late modern public spheres as “a setting for states and corporate interests to develop legitimacy not by responding appropri-ately to an independent and critical public but by seeking to instill in social actors motivations that conform to the needs of the overall system domi-nated by…[…]…states and corporate actors” (ibid.).

If the term “public” needs to be historicized, so has the term “public intellectual,” which has more than a few conceptual affinities to the term “public anthropology.” The term “intellectual” is of course of French, rather than Anglo-Saxon origins, and came into usage at the time of the Dreyfus affair in France (Wurgaft 2016). It “carried a sense of public address” (ibid.) and “implicit assumptions about the role of reason itself in modern social life” (ibidem.). But the term was in the US context first popularized by the intellectual historian Russel Jacoby as late as in 1987 (Jacoby 1987). And in a still prevalent conception of what public intellec-tualism is essentially about, the idealistic, aspirational and didactic elements in the role of a public intellectual are central. Robin (2016) argues that the public intellectual “wants his writing to do something in the world”:

“The public intellectual is not simply interested in a wide audi-ence of readers, in shopping her ideas on the op-ed page to sell more books. She’s not looking for markets or hungry for a brand. She’s not an explainer or a popularizer. She is instead the literary equivalent of the epic political actor, who sees her writing as a transformative mode of action, a thought-deed in the world. The transformation she seeks may be a far-reaching change of policy, an education of manners and morals, or a renovation of the human estate. Her watch many be wound for tomor-row or today. But whatever her aim or time frame, the public intellectual wants her writing to have an effect, to have all the power of power itself” (Robin 2016). It is central to Robin’s conception here that the imagined reader and imaginary publics of the public intellectual be aspirational: “She never speaks to the reader as he is; she speaks to the reader as he might be. Her common reader is an uncommon reader.” For publics, for Robin as for Dewey, “never simply exist; they are always created” (ibid.). And for Robin, as for Mark Greif, being a public intellectual in our time means being oppositional and challenging predominant modes of power and conceptions in favor of a democratic public egalitarianism:

6 S. BANGSTAD

Public intellect is most valuable if you don’t accept the construction of the public handed to us by current media. Intellectuals: You – we – are the public. It’s us now, us when we were children, before the orgy of learning, or us when we will be retired; you can choose the exemplary moment you like. But the public must not be anyone less smart and striving than you are, right now. It’s probably best that the imagined public even resemble the person you would like to be rather than what you are. (Greif 2015)

AnthroPologists And the Problem oF the mediA

Hugh Gusterson, noting that any number of anthropological colleagues routinely complain about the media coverage of the discipline and the typecasting of anthropologists, opines that the problem is “not just that most academic anthropologists are not very good at communicating with the public, but also that anthropologists are constructed in the public sphere as having little to say about some of the most urgent and press-ing political and economic controversies of the day (Gusterson 2013)”. Similarly, Driessen (2013: 392) notes that for anthropologists, “media exposure may be a risky activity; misrepresentations are a genuine issue” in as much as “going public with anthropological knowledge is often related to politics, has ethical implication, and is contested.” And granted, who of us have not as practitioners of anthropology to our exasperation come up against the hard wall of media reporters typecasting anthropologists as defenders of the quaint and exotic and of normative cultural relativism? In a situation in which the media landscape is increasingly fragmented, owners’ unyielding demands for corporate profit from media profession-als faced with a rapidly declining print readership have only expanded, and in which concerns over media revenue and corporate profits all too often express itself in providing privileged media platforms to the loudest and shrillest voices in the room (think Donald Trump in the USA, Marine Le Pen in France or Geert Wilders in the Netherlands), we should perhaps be unsurprised and thankful that anthropologists do not occupy the center stage. In the prevailing political economy of the media in our times, a pre-dominant conception of the mediated public sphere as an arena for con-frontation rather than dialogue has long since taken hold (Hervik 2008: 74). As Lila Abu-Lughod notes in a recent essay on the “Cross-publics of ethnography,” “anthropologists are increasingly concerned about the eth-ics, politics and potentials of ethnography’s travels across fractured global