豪 | Joel・Robbins——超越受苦的主体：迈向善的人类学
The following article is from 进击的世间师 Author Joel・Robbins
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摘要
正文
有一个时刻，气氛发生了变化。未被反思利用的观点的意义变得不确定，道路在暮色中迷失。伟大的文化问题之光继续前行。然后，科学也准备改变自己的立场和分析仪器，从思想的高度来看待事件的流变。而正是在这些高度上，我们才意识到，正是我们的价值观照耀着世界的光芒，才使我们能够捕捉到世界的有意义的一瞥（Weber1949：112）。
从野蛮人到受苦者
提醒我们：(a)作为学者、知识分子和诠释者，我们需要在其规模前保持谦逊；(b)作为人类，我们需要唤起我们所有的警觉，以便永远不会偏离它，为它的漩涡所吞噬，进入其无法说明的深渊(1996: 372, original emphasis)。
迈向善的人类学
附注
I took the first steps toward working out the argument of this article in one long and very helpful conversation with Tanya Luhrmann, another with Jukka Siikala and Harri Siikala, and a third with Holger Jebens. Many conversations along the way with Rupert Stasch have also been critical to its development. I thank them all for their help in getting this argument off the ground. A discussion of Trouillot’s work with Joe Hankins, David Pedersen, and Rupert Stasch also helped me to launch into the writing, and a discussion of an early draft with these colleagues as well as Nancy Postero and Guillermo Algaze was likewise crucial in the writing process, as was a discussion with the TPO group at the University of California, San Diego. I have also been lucky enough to present the article to a number of audiences along the way. It was first given as a Plenary Lecture at the Society for Psychological Anthropology Biennial Meeting in 2011, and then later that year as a Munro Lecture at the University of Edinburgh and a Keynote Lecture at the Finnish Anthropological Society Annual Meeting. Vigorous responses in all those venues were crucial to the development of the argument, and I thank Doug Hollan, Magnus Course and Maya Mayblin, and Timo Kaartinen for their respective invitations to give these lectures. Responses from groups at Scripps College, the Culture Medicine and Psychiatry group at Stanford, Reed College, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Copenhagen also contributed significantly to the final form of the article and I thank in particular those who arranged for those talks: Anthony Shenodah, Tanya Luhrmann, Courtney Handman, James Laidlaw, and Morten Pedersen and Lotte Buch Segal. Finally, I thank JRAI editor Matthew Engelke and four anonymous reviewers for their very helpful critical comments. Having had so much help with this article, I feel even more compelled than one usually does to note that not everyone mentioned agrees with all the points I make here, and any outright errors are of course my own responsibility.
1 Even as the terrain I hope to cover is a large one, I should make it clear that I do not mean to suggest that it encompasses all of anthropology over roughly the last thirty years. My remarks aim at an exploration of what I think is a very important stream of the discipline over that time, but there is no effort or claim to take note of every significant development during that period. Having said this, I should also mention that a majority of the peer reviewers of this article felt that the history of the anthropology of suffering it traces is primarily a North American one. In some respects this is a valid reading. But I have decided against modifying ‘anthropology’ with ‘North American’ throughout the piece for two reasons. The first is that I think that the deepest issues the essay treats – for example the tension between universalism and difference in contemporary anthropology – are broadly relevant in the discipline, and that they have arisen outside of North America as well, though perhaps sometimes in different forms in different places. The second reason is that even as I can accept that my account can be read at least in some respects as a North American one, I am not sure it is only that. If one takes a broad view of the nature of suffering, I think the focus on it has been more widespread. Thus, for example, Henrietta Moore (2011: 68-71), in a wide ranging discussion of contemporary theoretical developments in anthropology, and the human sciences more generally, has worried over the ways studies of ‘modernity/globalization/neoliberalism’ evidence an ‘overwhelming analytic focus on participation through exclusion, alienation and abjection’ (2011: 71). Furthermore, it is possible that the issues treated here have become important outside of North America, but at least initially in different scholarly settings. Fassin makes an argument along these lines, noting that the boom in discussions of ‘suffering, trauma, misfortune, poverty, and exclusion’ during the 1990s took off in the United States in ‘literary criticism and medical anthropology’ but in France in ‘sociology and psychology’ (2012a:5). His point would lend support both to the claim that my own account has a North American inflection and to one that holds that it deals with issues that are none the less very prominently in play in many other places as well.
2 To avoid any misunderstanding on this point, I should stress that I am writing about a time before the study of Christianity became mainstream in anthropology. From the vantage-point of the present, as responses to my argument have sometimes indicated, it can be hard to recognize how difficult anthropologists once found it to treat a group of people such as the Urapmin as at once meaningfully Papua New Guinean (or, in the terms of my argument here, meaningfully occupying the savage slot) and meaningfully Christian (see Bialecki, Haynes & Robbins 2008; Cannell 2006; Robbins 2003).
3 I use pseudonyms for my informants to preserve anonymity.
4 Two works that have decisively shaped my own understanding of the wider cultural history I cannot explore in detail here are Samuel Moyn’s The last utopia: human rights in history (2010) and Didier Fassin’s Humanitarian reason: a moral history of the present (2012a). Both books would be good starting-points for the development of a more extensive argument along the lines I have quickly set down in this paragraph.
5 Throughout this concluding section, references are meant only to point to a few representative selections of growing bodies of literature. They are not meant to be exhaustive in the style of a review article.
I took the first steps toward working out the argument of this article in one long and very helpful conversation with Tanya Luhrmann, another with Jukka Siikala and Harri Siikala, and a third with Holger Jebens. Many conversations along the way with Rupert Stasch have also been critical to its development. I thank them all for their help in getting this argument off the ground. A discussion of Trouillot’s work with Joe Hankins, David Pedersen, and Rupert Stasch also helped me to launch into the writing, and a discussion of an early draft with these colleagues as well as Nancy Postero and Guillermo Algaze was likewise crucial in the writing process, as was a discussion with the TPO group at the University of California, San Diego. I have also been lucky enough to present the article to a number of audiences along the way. It was first given as a Plenary Lecture at the Society for Psychological Anthropology Biennial Meeting in 2011, and then later that year as a Munro Lecture at the University of Edinburgh and a Keynote Lecture at the Finnish Anthropological Society Annual Meeting. Vigorous responses in all those venues were crucial to the development of the argument, and I thank Doug Hollan, Magnus Course and Maya Mayblin, and Timo Kaartinen for their respective invitations to give these lectures. Responses from groups at Scripps College, the Culture Medicine and Psychiatry group at Stanford, Reed College, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Copenhagen also contributed significantly to the final form of the article and I thank in particular those who arranged for those talks: Anthony Shenodah, Tanya Luhrmann, Courtney Handman, James Laidlaw, and Morten Pedersen and Lotte Buch Segal. Finally, I thank JRAI editor Matthew Engelke and four anonymous reviewers for their very helpful critical comments. Having had so much help with this article, I feel even more compelled than one usually does to note that not everyone mentioned agrees with all the points I make here, and any outright errors are of course my own responsibility.
1 Even as the terrain I hope to cover is a large one, I should make it clear that I do not mean to suggest that it encompasses all of anthropology over roughly the last thirty years. My remarks aim at an exploration of what I think is a very important stream of the discipline over that time, but there is no effort or claim to take note of every significant development during that period. Having said this, I should also mention that a majority of the peer reviewers of this article felt that the history of the anthropology of suffering it traces is primarily a North American one. In some respects this is a valid reading. But I have decided against modifying ‘anthropology’ with ‘North American’ throughout the piece for two reasons. The first is that I think that the deepest issues the essay treats – for example the tension between universalism and difference in contemporary anthropology – are broadly relevant in the discipline, and that they have arisen outside of North America as well, though perhaps sometimes in different forms in different places. The second reason is that even as I can accept that my account can be read at least in some respects as a North American one, I am not sure it is only that. If one takes a broad view of the nature of suffering, I think the focus on it has been more widespread. Thus, for example, Henrietta Moore (2011: 68-71), in a wide ranging discussion of contemporary theoretical developments in anthropology, and the human sciences more generally, has worried over the ways studies of ‘modernity/globalization/neoliberalism’ evidence an ‘overwhelming analytic focus on participation through exclusion, alienation and abjection’ (2011: 71). Furthermore, it is possible that the issues treated here have become important outside of North America, but at least initially in different scholarly settings. Fassin makes an argument along these lines, noting that the boom in discussions of ‘suffering, trauma, misfortune, poverty, and exclusion’ during the 1990s took off in the United States in ‘literary criticism and medical anthropology’ but in France in ‘sociology and psychology’ (2012a:5). His point would lend support both to the claim that my own account has a North American inflection and to one that holds that it deals with issues that are none the less very prominently in play in many other places as well.
2 To avoid any misunderstanding on this point, I should stress that I am writing about a time before the study of Christianity became mainstream in anthropology. From the vantage-point of the present, as responses to my argument have sometimes indicated, it can be hard to recognize how difficult anthropologists once found it to treat a group of people such as the Urapmin as at once meaningfully Papua New Guinean (or, in the terms of my argument here, meaningfully occupying the savage slot) and meaningfully Christian (see Bialecki, Haynes & Robbins 2008; Cannell 2006; Robbins 2003).
3 I use pseudonyms for my informants to preserve anonymity.
4 Two works that have decisively shaped my own understanding of the wider cultural history I cannot explore in detail here are Samuel Moyn’s The last utopia: human rights in history (2010) and Didier Fassin’s Humanitarian reason: a moral history of the present (2012a). Both books would be good starting-points for the development of a more extensive argument along the lines I have quickly set down in this paragraph.
5 Throughout this concluding section, references are meant only to point to a few representative selections of growing bodies of literature. They are not meant to be exhaustive in the style of a review article.