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I was ready to “let Anthropology burn,” but I will not let them dismantle it.
The latest wave of the well-funded, high-status attack on the humanities and humanistic social sciences arrived this summer, calling them intellectually bankrupt and “politicized” while attempting, once again, to make a mocking example of a Black woman in leadership. This attack reminded me why the practice of anthropology matters, why I trained in it, and why the machine now working to dismantle it—funded, coordinated, and older than this summer’s outrage—must not be permitted to pass itself off as a defense of rigor. Remember that the most “rigorous” peer-reviewed race science of 1910, with its calipers and cranial indices manufacturing the racial hierarchy it claimed to discover, perfectly met its era’s white supremacist standards. That science was overturned, over time, by exposing whose interests the old ones served and building better standards.
I chose anthropology because, at its best, it champions human diversity as no other humanistic social science does. Anthropology shows that the things we are told are fixed and beyond argument are nothing of the kind. Sidney Mintz reminded us that it was anthropologists, working from ethnographic evidence, who first demonstrated that there is no such thing as a commercial instinct; war is not our fate; monogamy is only one of the many arrangements human beings have invented and no more natural than the rest; and “human nature” is far too slippery a phrase to lean on. This emerges from methodologies designed to reach past the elicited one-off answer, to the practice or materiality underneath it: engaged long-term participation and observation, triangulation across different kinds of evidence, attention to historical particularity, and time. “Over time,” Mintz said, “what anthropology made understandable by means of ethnography was nothing less than a wholly different conception of humankind.”
Fascism finds a formidable enemy in ethnography. Beyond social-cultural anthropology, the four-field discipline exists, in large part, because there is a documented, persistent gap between what people say, what they mean, what they know, and what they do. Findings like those seed useful and needful doubt about how weread the world. It is anthropology’s gift for denaturalizing whatever the powerful insist is natural, that both indicts the discipline that reserved the knowing “we” for some and made everyone else its object of study; and calls those of us it was not built to include to make something better from what this discipline gave us. This is what I will say when I join colleagues on the keynote panel at the American Anthropological Association conference in November—returning to the discipline for the first time in ten years, to meditate with them on the conference theme “On the Verge.”
My own formation and understanding of remaking anthropology is better represented as a rhizome than a tree or kin diagram. Dell Hymes called the work “reinventing” the field in 1972—its uses, he wrote, “critical, political, personal.” Richard Fox called it “recapturing” in 1991. Sherry Ortner, who trained me, mapped the field’s theory since the sixties, then its “dark anthropology” since the eighties. She and scholars of Recapturing Anthropology worked to recover the progressive charge in a word like culture. Of course, I was formed most by the Decolonizing Anthropology generation, who held that the discipline must be turned toward liberation or was not worth keeping. And letting it burn is among the newer phrases in this family grammar—one of my own students, Ryan Cecil Jobson, made the case for burning the enclosure to free the practice. But it presumes the existence of stable ground on which the new can be rebuilt. This is no longer a warning. What has come for us seeks to dispossess the guild, wholesale; dismantle the house; and seize the ground on which it stands (perhaps to build a data center? I am not sure. I know that the ground will be salted and unfit for intellectual or democratic cultivation).
In June, a committee chaired by the New York University philosopher Paul Boghossian submitted the generically titled Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. Addressed to “university chancellors and presidents,” it was commissioned by two university chancellors—Daniel Diermeier of Vanderbilt and Andrew Martin of Washington University. The chancellors’ charge named as central to their motivation “the dramatic erosion of support for the humanities and humanistic social sciences amongst students, parents, and government officials.” This is the constituency whose confidence the Report was meant to restore—especially the latter audience. The philosophy underneath the Report is not new. It is Boghossian’s 2006 book Fear of Knowledge—a polemic against relativism—applied to the disciplines, with the conclusion built into the method. This Report is not a scholarly intervention. It is an alibi, deployed so that the people who sign the budgets can invoke the cover of “eminent scholars” while they restructure, merge, and defund.
The Report does an uneven survey of several fields, reserving its harshest verdict for anthropology—what it calls “the most extreme case.” As evidence it offers, for example, a cancelled panel, an old presidential address, and some quotations. But when a committee sets out to prove (using AI tools to scan vast bodies of assigned text) that the humanities have failed a standard of objectivity that it presents as neutral and eternal, and discovers precisely what its own philosopher-chair has already spent a career insisting (that the humanities are under siege by progressive forces), we cannot take its Report seriously as intellectual inquiry. Still, indignation is a luxury we can no longer afford. This calls for turning to the intellectual traditions that anticipated this moment and left us the tools to read it and stand up against it. The backbone to act is entirely up to us.
When I wrote my (admittedly dramatic) exit from anthropology in Margot Weiss’s Unsettling Queer Anthropology four years ago, I did not imagine the current nadir of academic freedom and civil rights in this country that has forced this affirmation of the discipline. I had followed Firmin and the decolonizing generation by arguing with anthropology from the inside for my entire career. I finally concluded that the guild—the credentialing four-field abstraction we call “anthropology”—was too slow to transform for me to keep faith with it. The intellectual habit of mind I keep closest was named by the filmmaker Marlon Riggs. In Tongues Untied, he christened the work he and other Black gay creatives were doing as “anthropology… the unending search for what is utterly precious.” That search—embodied, historical, Black, feminist, queer, and disciplined by long and deep systematic attention to actual people in actual places—is the practice I have never left. This is, therefore, not another self-examination retreading what needs to change in anthropology. This is, as sincerely and urgently as I can muster, a plea to read closely and to work collectively to dismantle the apparatus stalking all of us, which has been assembling for half a century.
None of this is happening in a vacuum. It is one transnational operation working many fronts at once—the Report; the hollowing out of Black studies, ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies; the year-long campaign against the Mellon Foundation; the more than one hundred and fifty statehouse bills that target intellectual freedom and threaten democracy in the US; a nine-page “compact,” offered to every institution in the country, trading federal funding for control of what they teach, whom they admit, whom they hire, and how they spend; and the recent tragic end to the stalking of Jason Arday, who resigned from Cambridge only to face more media harassment. Their common object is the infrastructure that lets certain people make knowledge, and it is striking the foundations. What can we do to disabuse our colleagues of the folderol that one proper, well-behaved corner of anthropology can be “saved,” if one is simply scientific enough; or firmly enough ensconced in the “savage slot;” or polite, compliant, and very quiet?
This week we learned that Northwestern is stripping its Program of African Studies—the first in the country, built in 1948 by the anthropologist Melville Herskovits—of its standing as a research center, with by one account its staff cut to zero. The university says the program has “not closed.” It is “in a period of transition.” Transition rhymes with combination, which is synonymous with collapse. Not burned but starved to death. At Texas they folded four departments into one, by email—including the African and African Diaspora Studies Department, which grew out of the Program in Anthropology of the African Diaspora that Edmund Gordon built along with Sheila Walker and others. There are many more examples, and counting, of the roll out of this extinction-level event disguised as prudent housekeeping.
I am not here to reopen an old argument. Those who want control of the university and the exclusive power to produce or suppress knowledge see all of us as one line item– whether well-behaved or insurgent. I am here to remind us of what some in the decolonizing generation saw coming. Pem Davidson Buck named the enemy at the New Orleans 2010 Decolonizing Generation roundtable— warning against those with “massive elite and corporate funding” who “know what they are doing” because “the effects are intended.” Leonard Leo, who left the Federalist Society to direct a $1.6 billion fund, said that conservative philanthropy must stop merely producing ideas and start weaponizing them to “crush liberal dominance at the choke points of influence and power.” The university is the primary “choke point.” Philanthropy is another. This is the strategy, described by the people executing it, and her analysis has proven prescient. In that same conversation with original contributors to the foundational Faye Harrison anthology, Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology for Liberation, Michael Blakey named the answer that we must lean into today: a web of connection, a collective front. This is the moment to push the work of decolonizing and transforming anthropology further, and—out loud and together—to refuse to let people who never valued that which is utterly precious, to dismantle our discipline.