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:

Human rights is not a static concept. Our understanding of human rights is constantly evolving as we come to know more about the human condition.

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

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

Thought I’d circulate the info for a conference I’m very excited about attending next week, being sponsored by the University of Cologne, Germany.  You can check out the flyer as a pdf here, or you can see the full schedule below. I’d love to say a bit more about it now, but I’m furiously reworking my own talk after re-reading Security, Territory, Population.  I’ll try to report back on the conference later, though, as I’m sure it will be of curr … Read More

via Anthropoliteia: the anthropology of policing

Conference Schedule

Thursday, July 15th 2010

2.00 pm Welcome and Introduction

Alf Lüdtke & Herbert Reinke

Jens Jäger & Ralph Jessen

2.30 pm, Panel I: Policing the Colonies

Chair: Alf Lüdtke

Nitin Varma:

Privatisation of Arrest and the Construction of the Exceptional: Authority, Discipline and Labour in the 19th Century Colonial Plantations of North East India

Marieke Bloembergen:

The Late Colonial State and the Good Policeman. Policing, Intelligence and Change in the Netherlands-Indies

4.00 pm – 4.30 pm Coffee Break

4.30 pm Open Panel

Jürgen Krasser:

Have Austrians Become Allergic to their Police since the 1950s? Dimensions of Widening Circles of Identification and their Contribution to an Understanding of the Questioning of Authority

7.00 pm Reception

Friday, July 16th 2010

9.30 am, Panel II: Erosion of Power

Chair: Ralph Jessen

Herbert Reinke:

„Partners for Order?“. Observations on theHistory of Policing ‘Order’ in Germany

John C. Wood:

Police Powers and their Limits in 1920s Britain

11.00 am – 11.15 am Coffee Break

Kevin Karpiak:

Police/State: What French Police Reform can tell us About Contemporary State Re-Figurations

Gerd Sälter:

Ermittlungen in Kriminalfällen in der Vormoderne. Private Initiative und polizeiliche Tätigkeit vor der allgemeinen Durchsetzung des Gewaltmonopols

12.45 pm – 2.30 pm Lunch

2.30 pm Open Panel

Chair: Jens Jäger

Sebastian Rojek:

The Construction of the “Hoch-stapler” (Impostor) in German Criminology and Literature: 1880-1930

Catherine Denys:

Circulation and Construction of Police Knowledge in Europe. A Report on the CIRSAP (Construction and Circulation of European Policing Knowledge)-Network

4.00 pm – 4.30 pm Coffee Break

Imanuel Baumann & Andrej, Stephan:

Reflecting its own History – A Project Concerning the Development

of the German Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt) 1952-1981

Andreas Mix:

Police and the Nazi Regime. A Project of the German Historical Museum and the German Police College

7.30 pm Conference Dinner

Saturday, July 17th 2010

9.30 am, Panel III: Conflicting Policing

Chair: Klaus Weinhauer

Jeannette Gabriel:

“If we can can’t run the work relief projects without the militia then we better stop”: Shifting Degrees of Violence in Response to Public Support for the U.S. Unemployed Workers Movement – 1929 – 1939

Margo de Koster:

Between Myth and Tool: The Forms and Uses of the State Monopoly on Violence in Street Level Policing, 1880-1940

11.00 am – 11.15 am Coffee Break

Thomas Welskopp:

Mission Impossible. Enforcing National Prohibition in the United States,1920-1933

12.00 – 12.30 pm Final Discussion

via Conference: XIst Colloquium for Police History (University of Cologne, July 14th-17th, 2010) « Anthropoliteia: the anthropology of policing.

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

via A fan poses as police officers control the entrance of Green Point Stadium in Cape Town (Picture-9087530).

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: 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.

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!

If you look back on the entanglement of liberalism and socialism in modern European social theory and political philosophy, it makes no sense whatsoever to talk about the one without the other. If we think there’s something neoliberal out there then by goodness (!) there’s bound to be something neosocialist loose in the world as well. I admit that this is counterintuitive. We’ve all been schooled (not least by liberal and socialist theorists) to assume that liberalism and socialism are antithetical to one another. And, at some level, of course, there’s oppositionality there. But I’d argue there is also a strong relationship of complementarity between the two.

via Why not neosocialism? | Savage Minds.

Now this is an interesting enough kind of argument, and one I definitely agree with, but the discussion has also been particularly interesting, with Chris Kelty suggesting that perhaps the greatest example of the strength of this neosocialism might in fact be Walmart and (with a little provocation from your truly) Boyer making the claim that Bruno Latour, author of Reassembling the Social, is not in fact a social theorist (I’m still trying to wrap my head around that one to figure out if I agree or disagree).

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