【焦点】《美国人类学家》主编：历史与记忆的焦虑
Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1992) once wrote that the Caribbean is an “open frontier” characterized by heterogeneity, coloniality, and historicity. By this, he meant that there was no way to conduct research in the region without an eye attuned to the historical legacies of its founding: the deep political and economic ties to imperial Europe (and later the United States), the cultural creolization forged within power arrangements facilitating monocrop plantation production for export, and the sturdy imprint of slavery upon thought and action not only within the region but also throughout Enlightenment-era Western political philosophy. Anthropologists working outside the Caribbean, of course, have also long explored the relationships between history and anthropology. However, these relationships have not infrequently been contentious.
Where evolutionary and paleoanthropologists have sought to track the physical and behavioral transformations in the species across time and space, there have been disagreements regarding directionality and the relative weight of biology, environment, and practice. Archaeologists have perhaps most self-evidently and explicitly been the keepers of human history not only in relation to interpretations of ancient material culture but also of contemporary cultural heritage concerns.
Nevertheless, debates rage regarding how to think about correspondence and association as well as the place of historical archaeology in the Americas vis-à-vis other subspecialties. Of course, within sociocultural and linguistic anthropology, there have been many arguments regarding the place of history in our analytic frames. Some have advocated an approach drawing from one or another version of world-systems theory (Mintz 1985; Wolf 1982), famously critiqued by Michael Taussig (1989) as making a commodity of history itself, while others have attempted to merge structuralist and historical paradigms (Sahlins 1981).
At issue have been the following concerns: What is the extent to which humans have made history (whether or not of their own choosing)? In other words, how do we imagine ourselves (and others) as historical actors? How might we think historically without thinking causally or teleologically, allowing instead for multiple, and often conflicting, contingencies? When does history begin, or how do we choose the starting points for our analyses of phenomena that inevitably have many points of inauguration and entanglement? Importantly, what are the uses of history?
This last question has been a crucial one for those working on cultural heritage and social movements. It is also related to the question of whose histories matter, which is at the center of many nationalist, nativist, and xenophobic initiatives, as is clear from some of the essays in this issue's World Anthropologies section. Let me add one more, a question that has been debated ad nauseam by historians and literary critics since the 1980s psychoanalytic/linguistic “turn”: What is the relationship between history and memory?
Why all this anxiety about history? Let us assume that it is driven, at least in part, by two ultimately related things: a fear of facing it and a fear of repeating it. That the history of our discipline reflects the issues, questions, and practices of the particular historical moments in which they emerged should by now be a truism. Whether or not we intentionally engage these moments, we are always implicated within them in complex ways. We cannot outrun this and might as well face it head on, as it has to do not only with how we configure the field but also with who participates in it and at what level.
Take, as an easy example, the question of acculturation and adaptation. It was one of Boas's original insights, based on research with Eastern European migrants to the United States, that skeletal morphology transforms according to environment and is therefore not indicative of innate differences in intelligence or potential, as early scientific racists like Samuel Morton and Carleton Coon argued. This kind of classic reformulation laid the groundwork for the important biocultural research being conducted today and for contemporary investigations of the relationships between material and human worlds.
Now for a more complicated example: our museums of anthropology and archaeology. Every day I walk through the Penn Museum to my office, I am simultaneously awed by the enormity and importance of its resources—both the small percentage on display and the vast stores available to researchers—and appalled by the mentality underlying the manner in which some of these resources came to live here.
I am often reminded of the Mu'tafika in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo (1972), that radical group of disaffected art history students whose mission was to steal historical artifacts from Western museums (Centers for Art Detention, in the novel) and to return them to their place of origin. I sometimes joke with graduate students that we should turn all museums of anthropology into museums of imperialism and colonialism, and adjust our exhibition and display practices accordingly. But this is perhaps too simplistic an approach, and of course we have a brilliant cadre of curators who are committed to reimagining how we present the materials we do exhibit as well as the ways we engage the various publics that surround us. Nevertheless, these practices of collecting and display are part of our complex history. They must be addressed if we are to truly decolonize anthropology (Allen and Jobson 2016; Harrison 1991) and uphold a broad kinship among anthropological practitioners worldwide.
The articles in this issue productively engage questions of history and memory in diverse ways. We begin with two different approaches to health disparities and their relation to ethnic, national, and racial difference. Molly Fox, Zaneta Thayer, and Pathik Wadhwa are concerned to develop a conceptual model that would support methodological interventions into the study of migration, acculturation, and health disparities. They are interested in the various ways sociocultural contexts affect the ways these processes are related and argue that thinking this through also gives us a window into the relationships among individuals, communities, and cultural practices.
Examining a range of variables (including neighborhood, discrepancies between heritage and host culture, attitudes toward assimilation, experiences of discrimination, heterogeneity of host culture, and public policy and resources), the authors argue that the relationship between acculturation and health is conditional. It is not automatic but rather a function of many complexly imbricating variables. In exploring the various ways people experience discrimination, and their strategies for working around it, they also include some attention to social media (though they call for more research in this area).
This is also a strategy mobilized by Jayne Ifekwunigwe et al., who draw from a survey of anthropologists’ and geneticists’ understanding of race to more formally address: (1) how anthropologists articulate the social constructedness of race; and (2) what this means for its ideological and biological consequences, including health disparities.
Their central question is as follows: “Are anthropologists still trying to eschew the notion of biological races while at the same time acknowledging the biological consequences of the social construction of race?” In exploring this, they are interested in the ways biology continues to be mobilized within ideas of race and the effects of this for health care and health outcomes. The authors develop a broad spectrum of positions—“constructors,” “shifters,” and “reconcilers”—that represent a range of interpretations of the relevance and consequences of genes, biology, and culture. They conclude with a call to confront disparities within the discipline as well as in the world around us, something that will be raised again in Tami Navarro's essay. Because institutionalized racism persists on college campuses in a variety of ways, they argue, we must exploit the technological resources we have to confront and undermine it, especially social media.
Mindy Morgan is interested in how Native Americans and anthropologists used another technology, the periodical Indians at Work, to present often-disparate views of the goals of anthropology, the effects of government policy on Native communities, and the desired relationship between anthropologists and policymakers.
Morgan mines this publication—which emerged at the important juncture of the 1920s and 1930s, when anthropology was also undergoing significant theoretical and institutional transformations (the growing influence of British social anthropology as well as of psychological and applied versions of anthropological practice)—for what it can tell us about the ways anthropologists generated a particular vision of Indigeneity and the effects this vision had on their ability to think through the contemporary relationship between American Indian communities and the US nation-state. She shows that while tribal members engaged anthropologists in the pages of the periodical, the discipline as a whole tended to fail to account for tribal members’ perspectives on the changes they were facing during the New Deal era. Morgan argues that this was due to a modernist perspective on Native American communities, one that upheld them as timeless, on the one hand, and as disappearing and therefore in need of particular forms of cultural preservation, on the other. Ultimately, she weaves the desires and positions of anthropologists and Native Americans, as well as those of foundations, research institutions, and government representatives, into a complex story about the inability to recognize the ways Native representatives voiced their political and social agency, questioned the authority of experts, and created their own representations.
The recognition of Indigenous perspectives is also central to the essay by Dana Lepofsky et al. This article, which explores “cultural keystone places” in British Columbia as archives of Indigenous histories, is also a methodological intervention concerned to think through the relationships between people and the biological and material worlds they inhabit. The authors use historical-ecological and participatory/collaborative approaches. They blend Western scientific and Indigenous perspectives, methods, and knowledge to explore the eco-cultural history of these landscapes through conducting ethno-ecological surveys; archaeologically investigating fish traps and clam gardens, among other features; and investigating eco-cultural signatures that signal human–landscape interactions (like the cultivation of orchards and other trees).
They are concerned with the question of how we document human–environment relations among Indigenous groups when these are ongoing and how we engage descendant communities. Through interviews, memories, and video recordings, and through discussions of historic and potential relationships to the government (for example, through language revitalization programs and land-rights movements), they are partners in the investigation of human–environment interactions across time.
John Chenoweth is also interested in human–environment interactions across time and space, especially in relation to what they can tell us about the boundaries that have been constructed between “nature” and “culture.” Arguing that elements of material culture blur the boundaries between these constructions, he draws from archaeology of the contemporary frameworks to think through how people interact with “natural” worlds in Detroit and Yosemite National Park, and what these interactions can tell us about issues related to memory, identity, and race.
Chenoweth is especially concerned to trouble the distinctions made between human action in places considered natural wilderness (Yosemite) and those in places considered blighted wilderness (Detroit). Here, he juxtaposes National Park visitors’ efforts to make a mark on nature, even as they position Indigenous persons as part of this nature, with city dwellers’ efforts to assert Detroit as culture by keeping the nature that threatens to overrun abandoned houses and communities at bay. Ultimately, Chenoweth demonstrates how the concept of nature is used to generate notions of belonging, ownership, and community.
Alex Nading's article attends to the crafting of bureaucratic encounters. He discusses the ways food safety inspectors (hygienistas) monitor and certify foodservice workers, thinking through issues related to bureaucracy and governance. He demonstrates that hygienistas’ portrayal of their work as “orientation” rather than surveillance reinforces social norms within the context of Nicaragua's revolutionary history and its contemporary integration into global food economies. Nading asks: What are the relationships between dignity and bureaucracy?
How do people experience their interactions with the state bureaucracies that regulate their work lives, and how do they understand themselves as dignified humans in the workplace? What does this have to do with broader issues related to governance and the histories that produce its particular manifestations? For Nading, “orientation” is not coping nor is it an apology for state-driven structural violence. It is, instead, a way for street-level bureaucrats to encourage those they are attending to work together toward particular standards within a framework that affirms shared sociocultural values. His account also suggests that while many have framed bureaucrats as antithetical to efficient social and political processes, they can also generate more expansive and ethical governance practices.
Bilinda Straight draws from ethnographic and psychological research among a pastoralist community in northern Kenya to argue that war-zone mercy results from uniquely human cognitive processes. She draws from a number of historical examples to situate her own context, concluding that notions of mercy cut across cultural boundaries, though individuals engaging in mercy may draw upon particular cultural norms. Empathy, for Straight, can not only create the conditions for someone to spare an enemy but for sustained altruism as well, even in the face of sustained training to kill.
Finally, Tami Navarro's essay confronts the massive disparities that characterize the institutionalization of academic practice. She discusses the ways neoliberal shifts have led to intensified inequalities among professors, showing how women of color are disproportionately affected by these shifts. Navarro explores the various divides separating forms of academic labor (tenure track vs. nontenure track, secure vs. contract, etc.), and shows how these have been exacerbated by the privileging of market forces, the prioritization of the view of students as consumers, and the discouraging of coalition building among faculty and graduate student on campuses. Her concern is with contingent faculty, among whom women of color are overrepresented, and how they bear the burden of these changes. Navarro urges us, therefore, to anthropologize our own labor practices, to realize our complicity with the broader processes she is discussing, and to overcome the structural barriers to solidarity and work together to change this reality.
Our World Anthropologies section this issue focuses on the proliferation of nativism, nationalism, xenophobia, and protectionism in a variety of sites. Contributors are thinking through diverse contexts, such as the intensification of Islamophobia even in the absence of a substantial Muslim presence (Buchowski) and the various ways histories of European imperialism have been erased (De Koning and Modest; see also Césaire 1950). In doing so, these authors encourage us to move beyond economic explanations for the contemporary rightward swing and to rethink how anthropologists’ work is taken up, both by those it engages and by broader academic and political publics (Ganguly).
All the contributors urge greater public engagement, with some demonstrating the ways anthropology has always been engaged in the political sphere (Silvia de Moraes Rial and Pillar Grossi) and some arguing for greater cooperation among the subfields in order to identify and make visible the forms of racism that are otherwise invisible (Takezawa; Perelman). In all cases, they see anthropologists as uniquely positioned to both explore the histories undergirding these contemporary movements in different locations and to illuminate the ways separatisms are expressed—and therefore, mobilized—differently within the same location (Green). Clearly, these are also challenges with which anthropologists working in the United States also struggle.
Within the Multimodal Anthropologies section, we feature two film reviews and one response to the section editors’ original call (Collins, Durington, and Gill 2017). With regard to the latter, Elizabeth Chin, an anthropologist working within a Department of Design, encourages us to embrace design thinking and methods in our anthropological practice. She argues that the multimodal turn provides tools to further decolonize the discipline, given the questioning of the privileged place of language, text, and—she adds—the visual. Chin argues that embracing technology—its use and misuse, its hacking and remaking—alongside performance, experimentation, and play both values the work our interlocutors do with technology and opens new avenues for knowledge production.
On our website, www.americananthropologist.org, the Public Anthropologies section features two interviews, one regarding environmental justice with Barbara Rose Johnston and the other with Sarah B. Horton discussing her book about the toll immigrant labor takes on their bodies. We also launched a new series called “De-Provincializing Development,” which is designed to assess the progress of the United States on the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) developed by the United Nations, thereby attempting to diminish the conceptual and practical divide related to “development” between North and South. The first post features Emily K. Brunson and Jessica Mulligan on the extent to which the United States has been successful in providing equitable access to health care.
Finally, we complete the issue with sixteen book reviews and three obituaries (Pauline Kolenda, Vera Radaslava Dyson-Hudson, and Rubén Elías Reina). As usual, many thanks are due to the journal's associate editors and to the editorial board as a whole, as well as to managing editor Sean Mallin and editorial assistant Negar Razavi, for their role in keeping the journal running smoothly.
American Anthropologist,Volume 119, Issue 3,September 2017
人类学之滇