Kevin Karpiak’s Blog
a blog about post-social policing, anthropology, science studies and moreThe Progressive Roots of American Anthropology (versus the Tea Party last time)
Two seemingly unrelated evens have occurred in my life the last two days which have caused me to think. I spent the day yesterday helping out with the campaigns of some of the local candidates here in Southeastern Michigan. Obviously the overall effect was not as successful as I would have liked. I can’t say, really, how much the election results had to do with the “Tea Party” phenomenon–compared with some of my experiences last year in Central Massachusetts I have to say I ran into relatively few of those types. What I have run into, though, is the idea that, especially in America, things do not get better; and, usually voiced as a more general principle, that any attempt to make things better on the general level (versus on the level of individuals or nuclear families) is impossible. The immediate effect of these ideas on political will, for example, is that projects like building bridges, formulating a system of universal health care, or, you know, creating and protecting agencies that might help regulate food, education, safety or financial standards for the collective good–all of these are seen as at best misguided fantasies spouting phony accomplishments, at worst infringements of individual liberties.
The other thing that happened was that I sat down, perhaps for the first time, to really read (as opppossed to do the grad seminar preparation for) Lewis Henry Morgan‘s Ancient Society. I had no real reason why, besides it was the first book on my iBook shelf (so thank my iPad and The Gutenberg Project, or was it Google Books?). Now, I’ve taught LHM several times in my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology courses, usually using him as a foil that sets up Boasian Anthropology and, later Malinowskian fieldwork. But what I don’t think I ever fully appreciatted was both the context in which Morgan’s work was written, and specifically what it was written against.
The first part, the context, is made explicit in the very first words:
The great antiquity of mankind upon the earth has been conclusively established. It seems singular that the proofs should have been discovered as recently as within the last thirty years, and that the present generation should be the first called upon to recognize so important a fact.
Wrap your head around that. What must have it been like to understand oneself as among the first generation to realize the enormous antiquity of homo sapiens? There are at least two directions one can move out of that fundamental fact: either you could view that long history as one of gradual decline–a Biblical Fall–or you can take the tack that Morgan believed was supported by the evidence. In fact, Morgan frames his preface with two epigrams, the first from Whitney’s Oriental and Linguistic Studies:
“Modern science claims to be proving, by the most careful and exhaustive study of man and his works, that our race began its existence on earth at the bottom of the scale, Instead of at the top, and has been gradually working upward; that human powers have had a history of development; that all the elements of culture—as the arts of life, art, science, language, religion, philosophy—have been wrought out by slow and painful efforts, in the conflict between the soul and the mind of man on the one hand, and external nature on the other.”
The second from Kaines’ Antkropciogia:
“These communities reflect the spiritual conduct of our ancestors thousands of times removed… Our wondrous civilization Is the result of the silent efforts of millions of unknown men, as the chalk cliffs of England are formed of the contributions of myriads of foraminifera.”
The point here, and of Morgan’s anthropology, is a certain optimistic vision of humanity, of what makes us human: that bit by bit, generation after generation, together, humans can, and do, inevitably (if only eventually and through purposive human action), make the world better for themselves. He is, in other words, a Progressive.
Now, there are of course many things wrong with Morgan’s approach (which any graduate student in anthropology, or attentive undergraduate, will be able to tell you): the surety and singularity of his vision of what is “good” turns out to be both ethnocentric myopia and racist exclusion; his faith in the inevitability of unilateral progress over the long term seems questionable at best (although I’m beginning to wonder how much of that was rhetorical fireworks, marking out his position vis-a-vis the opposite). But what I appreciate is his fervent insistence on its possibility.
And that’s why when I said earlier that I never fully “appreciated” what Morgan was writing against, I chose that word carefully. “Known” would too strong a word here–I would have been able to recite most of those theoretical and political nuances before– but now I appreciate it. And that suggests to me also, a potential place to quarry for answers to to our current Progressive perplexities: what now?
Some further readings:
Hersey, M. (1993). Lewis Henry Morgan and the anthropological critique of civilization Dialectical Anthropology, 18 (1), 53-70 DOI: 10.1007/BF01301671
White, L. (1960). : Lewis Henry Morgan: American Scholar . Carl Resek. American Anthropologist, 62 (6), 1073-1074 DOI: 10.1525/aa.1960.62.6.02a00220
Michael A. Elliott, . (2008). Other Times: Herman Melville, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Ethnographic Writing in the Antebellum United States Criticism, 49 (4), 481-503 DOI: 10.1353/crt.0.0041
Service, E. (1988). : Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship . Thomas R. Trautmann. American Anthropologist, 90 (2), 443-444 DOI: 10.1525/aa.1988.90.2.02a00410
Conference: XIst Colloquium for Police History (University of Cologne, July 14th-17th, 2010) (via Anthropoliteia: the anthropology of policing)
Next week I’ll be heading off to Germany for a conference on Police History at the University of Cologne. You can read more about it over at Anthropoliteia…
Conference: XIst Colloquium for Police History (University of Cologne, July 14th-17th, 2010)
Next week I’ll be heading off to Germany for a conference on Police History at the University of Cologne. You can read more about it over at Anthropoliteia, or through the clipped segment below
Image of the day
A fan poses as police officers control the entrance of Green Point Stadium in Cape Town
Police officer screens a fan at the entrance of the Green Point stadium in Cape Town
A fan poses as police officers control the entrance of Green Point Stadium in Cape Town June 11, 2010, ahead of the 2010 World Cup soccer match between Uruguay and France. REUTERS/Oleg Popov (SOUTH AFRICA – Tags: SPORT SOCCER WORLD CUP)
French municipal police demonstrate during a protest march in Marseille
A fan poses as police officers control the entrance of Green Point Stadium in Cape Town
Ne touche pas à mon moto!
One of Le parisien.com‘s affiliated blogs has a cute story about trying to compare the motorcycles of French versus American police… but he can’t get the permission Frenchside to look at one, for no good reason other than “non”. I feel that
Flic Story…
Quelle différence peut -il y avoir entre une moto de la police nationale et celle d’un flic américain ? Réponse ci-dessous…
HD Police
via Flic Story… – Roues Libres – Le blog 2 ROUES par Jean Marc Navarro – leParisien.fr.
UC system libraries vs. Nature Publishing Group
Savage Minds has a nice blow-by-blow of the standoff between the University of California Library System and the Nature Publishing Group, which merits an extended clip:
UC system libraries vs. Nature Publishing Group: The big news in academia this week was the University of California making a stand against journal price increases demanded by NPG, which publishes the uber-prestigious journal Nature as well as many noted scientific and medical journals. UC, like all of California, is under tremendous pressure to make budget cuts and claims that NPG is jacking up the price of its journals by 400%. Baring a return to the lower price, the entire UC system is threatening to drop the journal from their libraries and ask all faculty to boycott NPG by abstaining from submitting publications, resigning from editorial positions on NPG journals, and refusing to conduct peer review for NPG.
* UC throws down the gauntlet: Faculty do all the work for you for free and then you sell it back to us at ridiculous prices.
* Nature’s retort: You can’t mess with us, your faculty needs our prestige.
* Cal responds to Nature: No, our faculty totally got our backs on this one.
* “The bigger, if duller, story here is not that a university library has stood up to the big arrogant publishing house, but that the world’s leading public research university is imploding via budget cuts.”
* TheScientist.com finds that Nature has few friends among academic librarians and faculty.
* Even on Nature’s own blog readers are leaving unflattering comments directed at the publisher.
* Coverage from Science is also followed by posts wholly in sympathy with the UC libraries.
* Jason Baird Jackson shares links to insightful blogs and commentary here and here.
via Savage Minds | Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog.
Ypsilanti, Here I Come!
I just thought I’d let readers of this blog know, and perhaps warn the denizens of the greater Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti-area, that I will officially be assuming a tenure-track position in the Fall as Assistant Professor of Criminology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology at Eastern Michigan University.
I’m excited by the opportunity to join such a thriving and dynamic department. I’m especially looking forward to being in an interdisciplinary and theoretically rigorous research and teaching environment that should push my work in new directions and for which, hopefully, I’ll be able to contribute my own combination of interests and expertise.
In any case, I’m sure I’ll be blogging more about the move to a new city and institution… so stay tuned!
Jane Guyer “on possibility”: another “How Is Anthropology Going” redux
Some of you might remember a panel I organized, along with Chris Vasantkumar and Mattais Viktorin, at the 2008 annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association called “How Is Anthropology Going? An Inquiry into Movement, Mode and Method in the Contemporary World” (if not, you can read a bit more about it in an earlier post).
We were lucky enough to have a stellar lineup of people agree to be a part and, slowly, that luck is bearing fruit: this last Spring one of the panel’s participants, Nadezhda Dimitrova Savova, published a version of her paper in the journal Anthropological Quarterly. Now another participant, Jane Guyer of Johns Hopkins, has gone on to publish a revised version of her own commentary.
Guyer’s article appears in the current issue of Anthropological Theory, and uses the questions we raised in the panel to try to think through the use of “possibility” in anthropological theory and ethnographic representation. Good stuff.
Bonus: for all of you in Berkeley, Dr. Guyer will be coming through some time this semester and is looking for an opportunity to discuss the article… more details as they become available
Articles Referenced
Guyer, J. (2010). On ‘possibility’: A response to ‘How Is Anthropology Going?’ Anthropological Theory, 9 (4), 355-370 DOI: 10.1177/1463499609358143
Nadezhda Dimitrova Savova, . (2009). Heritage Kinaesthetics: Local Constructivism and UNESCO’s Intangible-Tangible Politics at a Favela Museum Anthropological Quarterly, 82 (2), 547-585 DOI: 10.1353/anq.0.0066



Universal Moral Grammar?
June 7, 2011 at 11:55 am · Filed under Analysis, Commentary, In the News, Scholarship of note and tagged: Alasdair MacIntyre, Annelise Riles, anthropology of ethics, anthropology of humanitarianism, anthropology of morality, anthropology of religion, Daromir Rudnyckyj, Didier Fassin, Human Rights, John Mikhail, Lynn Hunt, Michael Lambek, Michel Foucault, Moral Philosophy, Noam Chomsky, Philosophy Bites, Saba Mahmood, Thomas J. Csordas, universal moral grammar
It featured a scholar named John Mikhail who, modeling his approach after Chomsky’s work on universal grammar (because, you know, it was so successful) suggests that there’s a sort of pre-political, innate moral grammar that all humans share.
Now, the “chaffed” part comes from all the work that he does not discuss in making this claim: Foucault’s work on the emergence of “the human” out of a very particular political formulation, Alasdair MacIntyre’s work on the history of moral philosophy, Lynn Hunt’s (among many many others) work on the history of human rights, in fact most anthropologists‘ work on human rights discourse that I’m aware of–most of which illustrates not only the degree to which such notions depend on particular conceptions of what it means to be human, but also the ways in which these notions of human-ness are themselves tied to particular discursive and economic structures that are quite clearly “political” and less than “universal”.
Fine. Scholars rely on different bodies of knowledge. That’s part of what make contemporary universities so interesting. But the flabbergasted part comes from what he does discuss as evidence: namely, the fact that “everybody seems to agree more or less agree on human rights” (again, what can this truth claim even mean in the era of Guantanamo Bay?! What mode of life and thought makes it even utterable?) as well as “growing anthropological evidence”. What is he talking about here? I literally have no clue. I would be surprised if someone could point out to be any member of the American Anthropological Association whose work would support the existence of a universal human grammar. I will offer a free dinner to anyone who can show me even one domain where the preponderance of anthropological evidence would support the idea. In fact the American Anthropological Association’s Committee for Human Rights issued an official proclamation in 1999 which reads:
So there’s that, for what it’s worth. I actually think that’s it’s probably a more fruitful question to ask just what in the heck he means by “anthropological” because, whatever he does mean by it doesn’t seem to include, you know, the work of anthropologists.
Again, I just found out about this guy, so I haven’t yet been able to see what he cites for such a claim (or if, for that matter). I suppose if I were a real scholar that’s what I’d do next…
A List of Scholarly Citations Linked To in this Post (really, this is only the tip of the iceberg)
Thomas J. Csordas (2009). Growing up Charismatic: Morality and Spirituality among Children in a Religious Community Ethos, 37 (4), 414-440 D
Michael Dunn,, Simon J. Greenhill,, Stephen C. Levinson, & Russell D. Gray (2011). Evolved structure of language shows lineage-specific trends in word-order universals Nature, 473, 79-82 DOI: 10.1038/nature09923
Didier Fassin (2008). Beyond good and evil? Questioning the anthropological discomfort with morals Anthropological Theory, 8 (4), 333-344 DOI: 10.1177/1463499608096642
MARK GOODALE (2006). Ethical Theory as Social Practice American Anthropologist, 108 (1), 25-37 DOI: 10.1525/aa.2006.108.1.25
Sally Engle Merry (2003). Human Rights Law and the Demonization of Culture (And Anthropology Along the Way) PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 26 (1), 55-76 DOI: 10.1525/pol.2003.26.1.55
Michael Lambek (2008). Value and virtue Anthropological Theory, 8 (2) DOI: 10.1177/1463499608090788
Saba Mahmood (2001). Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival Cultural Anthropology, 16 (2), 202-236 DOI: 10.1525/can.2001.16.2.202
ANNELISE RILES (2006). Anthropology, Human Rights, and Legal Knowledge: Culture in the Iron Cage American Anthropologist, 108 (1), 52-65 DOI: 10.1525/aa.2006.108.1.52
DAROMIR RUDNYCKYJ (2009). SPIRITUAL ECONOMIES: Islam and Neoliberalism in Contemporary Indonesia Cultural Anthropology, 24 (1), 104-141 DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2009.00028.x
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