Several years ago, as COVID reshaped the world as we knew it, I was asked to join a small group of researchers and other experts on one of the Zoom conferences that grew increasingly common amidst our variable forms of national quarantine. Asked to speak to the impact and threat of COVID upon transnational migrants resident on the Arabian Peninsula, I briefly noted that in the circumstances partially visible in Doha at that time, it was certainly the case that the male transnational proletariat were the most vulnerable to infection. A majority of these transnational migrants are housed in dormitory-style labor camps that have been cloistered together in the peripheral regions of the urban landscape. Crowded rooms in crowded labor camps packed together in crowded “bachelor cities” and other peripheral zones of the city were, logically, spaces where viral transmission would be prevalent.
A crowd of male transnational migrants gathered in the Industrial Area of Doha, Qatar (photograph by the author).
Conversely, I noted, domestic workers would be more insulated from the virus. Most of these domestic workers are female, and their particular vulnerabilities in the Gulf migration system pertain directly to their isolation: typically dwelling in private homes, these women and men have limited mobility, truncated social networks, and are oftentimes immersed in household politics. Ironically, in the case of COVID, these structural features of domestic workers’ vulnerability play in their favor when it comes to the pandemic: in this case, their isolation means that, as a class of migrants, they are less likely to be infected than the entirely male continent of migrants crammed into labor camps and other crowded residential structures.
Upon noting this irony, there were audible guffaws from the large conference audience, and I received numerous DMs scolding me for diminishing the vulnerabilities women face in migrating to the Arabian peninsula for work in the domestic sector.
These reactions jibe with attitudes long prevalent in the study of migration to the Gulf States. Although the vast majority of migrants to the Arabian Peninsula are proletarian men, the smaller contingent of women, many of whom are employed as domestic workers (AKA “housemaids” in local parlance), have long received an abundance of attention, empathy, and concern from activists and outsiders. Evidently, these women provide the most compelling “victims” of the Gulf migration system, and in some others’ estimations, to speak to men’s vulnerability and exploitation displaces these women’s central place in the limelight of outsiders’ empathy. Indeed, years ago I recall lamenting that the men who I studied (first in Bahrain, and later in Qatar) were oftentimes framed as the capable agents of their own destinies — untrue, in many cases, and a stereotypical byproduct of their masculinity, I suggest.
In my mind, this speaks to the male disposability hypothesis — the widespread tendency to be “less concerned about the safety and well-being of men than of women.” Studies have shown, for example, that in various portions of the American legal system, offenders who victimize women receive longer sentences. Men have higher suicide rates than women, are more likely to be assaulted in American society, and are employed in the most dangerous jobs. This variable (gender) exists atop ethnic imbalances in the same realms. Indeed, many of us employed in higher education can see the challenges and inequities that plague contemporary young men, and simultaneously, the vitriol that is manufactured and directed at them concerning their gender.
The disposability hypothesis seems to echo the architecture of an older set of anthropological ideas. As Ernestine Friedl explained in her 1975 book Women and Men: An Anthropologist’s View, in hunter-gatherer societies around the world men were consigned to the risky activities of warfare and hunting. It’s this same fact that resulted in men’s integral connection to the public sphere, and conversely, to women’s connection to the domestic sphere. You might also take a look at how cultural materialist Marvin Harris reckoned with these same evolutionary facts in his 1977 essay in the New York Times (provocatively entitled Why Men Dominate Women). Regardless of these debates from the 1970s, it’s certainly seems the case that the vestiges of our evolutionary history as a species continued to reverberate into the present moment, and is manifest in the stereotypes that cling to men’s gender roles in our culture and in others.
Although this short essay will take us back many centuries into the brambles of Western intellectual thought, one enduring aspect of the story I’m attempting to relate here was perhaps best summarized by Viscount James Bryce in 1915. There, he noted that, “No branches of historical inquiry have suffered more from fanciful speculation than those which relate to the origin and attributes of the races of mankind” (Bryce 1915, 3). Similarly, decades earlier Bagehot (1869, 3) had noted that, “When a philosopher cannot account for anything in any other manner, he boldly ascribes it to an occult quality in some race.” All of this points to the fact that the foundations of the concept of “race” are deeply suspicious and prone to the worst sorts of speculation, and perhaps more notably, that those foundations were recognized as problematic and suspicious by learned Western thinkers more than a century ago.
So I’ve been reading anthropologist Ashley Montagu’s book Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1952). This is the third edition of the book. The first was published in 1942, and was a part of the spate of books that sought to combat the pernicious rise of the concept of race in North America, to some degree, and more pressingly, in Hitler’s Germany. Ashley was a London-born Jew who was one of Bronislaw Malinowski’s first students at the London School of Economics. Later, he emigrated to the United States and took a PhD from Columbia University under the supervision of Ruth Benedict. Eventually, he served as a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University (a period during which this book was revised for the third edition). He famously disputed the UNESCO “Statement on Race” for trucking in the very idea he sought to combat, and thereby drew the ire of the anti-communists. He would lose his job at Rutgers via the McCarthy hearings, but he persevered and rebounded. Notably, the term “ethnic group” can largely be attributed to Montagu.
In Man’s Most Dangerous Myth, Montagu (1952, 5) suggests that we conceptualize humanity in terms of “major groups,” by which he means black, or Negroid, and the Australoid, the Caucasoid, and the Mongoloid. These “major groups” are formed by a constellation of different “ethnic groups,” in Montagu’s conceptualization: humanity is divided into an array of distinct populations that he refers to as “ethnic groups.” As he argues later in the book, each of these ethnic groups is itself a mixture of various bloodlines, ancestries, and peoples.
In the first portion of the book, he seems busy with two primary tasks. First, he scrutinizes the absolute absence of evidence upon which almost all assertions of race and its existence commence. Most racists — and by this term, Montagu means the proponents of the concept and the viability of race — begin with the premise or assertion that human races exist. They don’t prove it, but simply assume it to be true. As Montagu notes, this recurring initial premise suggests a “view which no biologist and no anthropologist with whom I am familiar would accept. It is today generally agreed that all men belong to the same species, that all were probably derived from the same ancestral stock, and that all share in a common patrimony” (1952, 7).
The second task with which Montagu is busy in the earliest chapters of the book is a discussion of 17th and 18th Century thought in which he complicates the intellectual history of the concept of race. In his careful reading of this intellectual history, it’s clear that 19th Century thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic were quite divided about whether races existed at all. Via his portrayal, the legacy of antiracism rests squarely in the deepest folds of the Western Enlightenment tradition. To summarize for clarity: discrimination abounds and is found everywhere that humans exist, but both the concept of “race” and then the compulsion to disabuse our societies of this pernicious concept belong to Western thought.
Near the end of the book, Montagu penned a chapter entitled “Race” and Democracy. Like me, he likes to keep the term “race” in quotation marks to signal its artificiality as a social construction. Consider a few of his sentiments from that chapter …
“There are no minority groups in America, except those that racists and bigots create. America is a nation made up of the members of almost every ethnic group and every religion, all of which have contributed toward its development … The important thing is to be an American, without being narrowly nationalistic, and to grant all Americans the right to their Americanism, which implies freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and freedom of opportunity” (Montagu 1952, 270).
“Every political system is capable of some improvement, an our democracy is no exception. We stand to profit immediately by giving up acting on “racial” mythology— the “racial” mythology that lurks in the minds of most of us and contributes so much to social friction” (Montagu 1952, 271).
“The flaring of latent “racial” enmities in times of economic stress is an association of events which has never been more painfully evident than it is today” (Montagu 1952, 272).
In perusing this book and considering the theses that Montagu provides, I have a couple of speculative observations that I took home.
Montagu on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. He was a frequent guest.
First, like Boas, Montagu’s attack on racism wasn’t about countering assertions about one race being better than another, or even that the “races” ought to be thought of as equal, but instead was directed at the conceptualization of race itself. Boas, Montagu and others envisioned that the concept of “race” would follow phlogiston and ether to the bin of scientific trash.
Secondly, I’m struck by the longstanding clarity of anthropology’s vantage point on race and racism. Reading this mid-century consideration of racism further affirms my thesis that anthropology had things notably right from the start. Conversely, the gains that anthropology sought in its first century of existence have been mostly lost today. American society seems to have regressed in this realm, for the animus of racialism seems energetic and alive.
Finally, and perhaps obviously, anthropology should be exonerated from the ongoing accusations of its purported racist DNA. To the contrary, and as I’ve argued elsewhere, anthropology is the disciplinary home of antiracism, a legacy which stretches from Edward Tylor to that moment at the turn of the Century, where Paul Gilroy and many others thought we might be done with the concept of “race” once and for all. Between them, it was the same antiracism that underpinned Martin Luther King’s vision of race and its place in the American future.
I suppose my final and closing thought isn’t very optimistic. Indeed, it’s a sad one: It seems to me that anthropology has abandoned this core and founding principle around which the discipline was built. Forged around the notion that race was an unscientific social myth and always a social construct, for the first century of its existence anthropologists ceaselessly attacked the concept of race. Today, many anthropologists I know, and many anthropologists in the public sphere, truck in the concept of race and are energetically committed to its utilization. Put another way, like many others today anthropologists are part of the legion of Americans engaged in the (re)construction of the concept that our discipline previously sought to banish to oblivion.
In this essay I’ve cobbled together a few ideas and perspectives that draw on my long engagement with the discipline of anthropology. The points I’ve collected here have begun to accumulate over sequential semesters teaching several introductory classes at the university that employs me. I remain unsure if this essay has any destination beyond my students’ ears and eyes. Certainly, some of these points and themes connect with threads that have been a part of the classroom conversation I sought to foster over the most recent semester. Other points might be relatively new to my current crop of students. Nonetheless, and altogether, this essay is vaguely intended to conclude our semester together in this class. I recognize that, for many of my students, their time in my course will complete their brief dalliance with Anthropology.
Foremost, I want to speak to the enduring value of cultural diversity, which Anthropology holds in high esteem. It is the epistemological touchstone for the entire discipline, and it grounds a philosophy and paradigm that differs significantly from other disciplines, including philosophy itself. For almost two centuries anthropologists have been seeking to describe the many ways that humans have configured to live, and to sometimes thrive, as the social creatures that we are. Recall that this collection of detailed ethnographies about other ways of being in the world is what we refer to as the ethnographic canon. The assembly of this ethnographic canon over more than a century comprises anthropology’s most significant legacy to academia and to humankind. In this vast and detailed compendium of sociocultural traditions — culled by generations of anthropologists who dedicated their lives to understanding other ways of being in this world — we might find some perspective, some answers, and some alternatives that might help our species navigate the impending challenges that loom in our global future.
Anthropology’s enduring interest in diverse ways of being in this world compels us to recognize the deep cultural differences that continue to define various groups of humans. That cultural ethos, variable from one group of people to the next, is a conceptual abstraction that covers a lot of ground. It won’t delay us too much to briefly revisit the definition of culture that Edward Tylor, the first anthropologist, offered at the outset of the discipline: “Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other habits acquired by man as a member of society” (Tylor 1871: 1). As Tylor perceived, the cultural differences with which he was concerned included aspects of the moral frameworks and deep-set values that one finds at the foundations of all cultural worlds. And these systems of values vary from one culture to the next. As a result, anthropology and the canon it has assembled has revealed a contemporary friction internal to the discipline. At odds are anthropology’s aspirations to respectfully and holistically assess the foundational differences between peoples and the cultures they have built, and the aspiration, shared by many today, that anthropologists ought to endeavor to make the world a better place (as they might envision it). The most honest anthropologists recognize this tension as an atmospheric reality that we, by necessity, must live, think, and work amidst.
Another key feature of Anthropology’s trajectory over nearly two centuries is the changing geography of the culture that anthropology takes as its central topic. For millennia, cultural differences were largely generated by space and by topography, by geographical realties, and by the separations and the isolations resulting from our planetary landscape. Today, the mobilities and interconnections that emerged in more recent centuries and that are characteristic of our contemporary world have indelibly changed this cultural field. Now well into the 21st Century, we humans are all now in sustained interaction with cultural difference. This social fact challenges key features of our disciplinary understanding of the world — cultures are not longer as place-bound as they previously were, and many humans are today embroiled in the cross cultural interactions that were once the intellectual purview of anthropology. In summary, the longstanding association of culture and place has come untethered, and more than ever before cultures and cultural production are today deterritorialized. Ironically, as culture increasingly comes untethered from place, the quotidian nature of interactions with cultural difference makes the anthropological toolkit more pertinent than ever, for those interactions are the experiences anthropology has been preoccupied with for more than a century.
Another notable feature of anthropology is its Western roots. Anthropology is clearly and undeniably a western creation — it is a manifestation of the Enlightenment and of the values the Enlightenment bequeathed to the world. Other societies have had neither the capacity nor the interest in the long, sustained, and institutionalized endeavor required to accumulate this encyclopedia of cultural difference. Nothing similar to the ethnographic canon pioneered by intrepid western scholars over the past two centuries has been assembled anywhere else at any time in history. As a social scientific tradition with Western roots, anthropology is an intellectual framework configured to be shared with anyone and everyone. It is a social scientific tool that is, simultaneously, a gift to humanity. Its dissemination is not an aspiration for the future: already, with its legacy as a social science, anthropology has left its imprint on many diverse cultural groups in this world, and has even played a central role in saving some of those cultural traditions from oblivion. As a social scientific tradition intended to advance human knowledge, anthropology transcends any concerns with the “appropriation” of this Western tradition by others. Like all scientific tools, Anthropology belongs to everyone and to no one in particular. And via the anthropological lens, to cross thresholds of difference with empathy, to seek understanding, and to maintain respect for that difference is, altogether, a clear good for all humankind.
A recognition of the indelible connection between Anthropology and the Enlightenment points to another foundational truism. In its assembly, the ethnographic canon is a manifestation of the Enlightenment’s veneration of tolerance, the emergence of nation-states, and the endurance of the complex plural societies those nation-states often encapsulated. At the core of the anthropological paradigm is the leveling commitment to a universal humanism and the tolerance of difference that any modicum of fealty to that universalism requires. In recent years, however, that core universalist commitment has been overwhelmed by the American emphasis on difference and distinction. In the universalist lens that anthropology inherited from the Western Enlightenment, all human beings are cut from the very same cloth, and all humans share a leveling and foundational solidarity. The Western ideal of equality was enacted by the formation of the nation-state and the rights that began to cohere to citizenship. Notably, in the broader realm of the universalism underpinning anthropology, note also that the subsequent opening the human genome only confirmed what anthropologists already held to be true: humans are fundamentally equal in all capacities, and that the universalism at the epistemological foundations of the discipline is a scientific fact.
In dialectic with that universalism, however, humans are puzzlingly social creatures. From the foundational equality conferred by that universalism, we humans differentiate ourselves from one another via a constellation of different factors, all of which have long been the substance of anthropological inquiry. We differentiate ourselves via gender, via age, via ethnicity, via creed, by culture and nationality, by caste, tribe, and attire, by our physical prowess and by quite a bit more. Via countless social ingenuities human construct difference and assemble social hierarchies that are passed through time. Some of these features by which we group ourselves together are the products of our social existence — they are achieved differences. Others are features that are present from birth — they are ascribed differences. In summary, while anthropologists have long been interested in the categories and variables by which social differences are constructed, our interest and attention to those social variables should never obscure the discipline’s taproot — the universal humanism at the foundation of anthropology.
This perspective runs counter to the contemporary tribalisms and identitarian exclusions that permeate American establishment thinking, and are currently being imperially implanted on the remaining vestiges of social and cultural diversity in our world. The hegemonic American paradigm visible today seeks to emphasize a social topography comprised foremost of fundamentally different categories and varied groupings of humans, organized mostly by categories meaningful to Americans. Indeed, the dominant American paradigm purveys categories and conceptualizations of difference without acknowledging the faulty premises and the discriminatory logics that underpin those categorizations. For example, Marie Moran (2014) convincingly reveals that the concept of identity is a recent invention, and very much the product of late capitalist thinking. Via the fetishization of the concept of identity, our planetary universal humanism is yielding to the ongoing and pervasive siloing of human society into identitarian groups and coagulations. Clearly, this leads away from the universal humanism found at anthropology’s taproot, and simultaneously provides one of the clearest vista points on the ongoing legacy of Western imperialism. With this latest chapter of American imperialism, however, anthropology has been surprisingly quiet.
Leaving that aside for the moment, another feature of anthropology to reckon with is the interdisciplinarity woven into its mission from its birth. Anthropology is quintessentially interdisciplinary in nature. In the mid-1800s, the broad field of concerns that defined political economy was steadily subdivided into the disciplines we know today: history, sociology, political science, geography, economics, and so forth were carved from the holistic concerns of the political economists (see Wallerstein 2001). Uniquely holistic, anthropology inherited the task of pursuing all of these interests in the examination of non-literate societies. The extrapolation of this mission coincided with the sustained colonial encounters of the 19th Century. As a result of these historical arrangements and junctures, anthropology was interdisciplinary from its birth, and has codified this interdisciplinarity in its very DNA.
This interdisciplinarity can also be grasped in the holism to which anthropology aspires, a holism visible in the spectrum of interests and foci that anthropologists maintain to this day. In some ways, this holism is becoming more and more exceptional, for amidst the American hegemony of contemporary academia, one can readily observe the ongoing Balkanization of formerly holistic concerns in the proliferation of area studies programs, ethnic studies programs, and similar new disciplinary configurations. Amidst the ongoing extrapolation of these new particularisms, anthropology remains the disciplinary home for interdisciplinary concerns. For more than a century, anthropology has sustained set of conversations in which these various fields of concern are considered together, in interaction, and as a whole. Put another way, for its entire existence anthropology has capably harnessed the holistic and interdisciplinary energy that, today, looks so desirable to the fragments and intellectual enclaves that are continually carved out of American academia.
Anthropology’s valuable interdisciplinarity can be distinguished from its useful and popular methodological toolkit. From its birth in the colonial era, and over nearly two centuries of existence, anthropology cultivated a methodological toolkit configured for intrepid and exploratory journeys across thresholds of significant cultural difference. This toolkit remains central to anthropology. The goal of the ethnographic method is sympathetic in nature: anthropologists seek to understand different ways of being in the world through sustained engagement with cultural insiders in their natural setting. Anthropologists seek to grasp the world from standing in those insider’s shoes, and seeing that world through their eyes, as best one can — to develop the understanding from which what Bloom (2016) might call a “rational compassion” might grow. The hallmarks of ethnographic engagement are sustained cultural immersion and the understandings achieved via conversation and interaction with members of that society in the form of participant-observation.
The proliferation of the ethnographic method amongst other mainline disciplines and amidst other interdisciplinary configurations that we see in contemporary academia oftentimes relinquishes the emphasis on crossing thresholds of cultural difference. Many ethnographers today seek to work with communities and groups to whom they belong. Others, by the logic of auto-ethnography, generate their understandings via an internal dialogue with themselves. These iterations of ethnography are sometimes valuable. At other times, they are farcical. Altogether, however, these modifications to the ethnographic method might be usefully differentiated from the tradition of anthropological ethnography and its engagement with a culture different than that of the anthropologist.
In an American era in which ideological and moral differences are more likely to be rejected than engaged and tolerated, the anthropological roots of the ethnographic tradition seem particularly valuable. Although this methodological toolkit was configured amidst the colonial encounter, it is a transposable vantage point. The value and understandings generated through anthropological ethnography — a value achieved by crossing thresholds of cultural difference — is a social scientific method. Again, when anchored in science, this connotes that the method is available to all, it belongs to no one, and it is intended for dissemination. With its structural orientation toward difference, ethnography seems increasingly valuable in an era in which meaningful differences are more frequently rejected than respected or tolerated.
For those diverse humans who are well positioned in the material landscape of the inequality that defines all of human history, and amidst the more recent socioeconomic landscape of interconnection and interaction forged by global capitalism, I suggest one might consider the moral utility (perhaps superiority?) of a life devoted to understanding otherness. In the developed world increasingly preoccupied with expression, representation, the myopic project of the self, and fealty to the tribe, the anthropological concern with otherness seems more valuable than ever, and more exceptional and rare. This metastasizing myopia has even attempted to confront anthropology’s foremost concern with otherness. As I wrote in an essay concerning the challenges of teaching anthropology on American college campuses in this contemporary era, “Anthropology should never yield the capacity to speak for others. Speaking for others is indelibly central in our disciplinary tradition” (Gardner 2019).
The ethnographic canon and anthropology’s concern with the longue durée of human existence also suggest to me some new vantage points on the nation-state and the nationalism it cultivates. Certainly, anthropologists and anthropology have had a long and uneasy relationship with the nation-state. In the understanding of the world central to the anthropological paradigm, the beautiful mosaic of cultural diversity is the organic and natural character of our planet. Atop of this mosaic of difference, the nation-states established centuries ago comprised new political boundaries that fully incorporated some cultural groups who had previously occupying that territory. In other cases, those new political boundaries divided cohesive ethnic and cultural groups, splitting them between the sovereignties of newly formed states. Altogether, then, the imposition of the nation-state was viewed as existentially problematic to cultural diversity, as both the incorporation within and sometimes division of cohesive cultural groups between nation-states portended deleterious effects on those peoples’ perseverance, and therefore, to our cultural diversity as a species.
There are clearly strong empirical and historical connections between this understanding of the world and our collective human experience as a species. But in the final accounting, I think these traditional anthropological concerns are outweighed by the benefits of the nation-state. Difficult as they are to speak of in the contemporary intellectual climate, those benefits might be conceptualized in several realms. First, nation-states were human-made socio-political creations that provided a durable spatial mechanism in which differences might coexist, and in which plural and democratic societies to emerge. For example, even a cursory examination of the trajectory of the Northwest Coast cultural area in the 19th Century reveals that the region’s incorporation into two nation-states (Canada and the United States) quelled intertribal warfare, brought indigenous slavery to its conclusion, and eventually guaranteed those native peoples a set of rights equal to those of all other citizens. In addition to forever altering and changing these cultures, incorporation into the nation-state also took one of the most dangerous places for human beings to exist in the world and dramatically altered homicide rates for the better (Donald 1997).
This book was eye-opening, to say the least …
As a corollary to this point, take note that it was the container of the nation-state that was the principle and most significant tool for the dissemination and growth of the civic and human rights that are, today, an everyday feature of our world. Put another way, the artificial bond of nationalism that the concept of citizenship constructed was inextricably entwined with the universalism at the root of the Western Enlightenment. Consider, reader, that your devotion to the “human rights” of whatever faraway people currently have your attention is, at its very taproot, a civic right established by the Western Enlightenment and disseminated around the globe by colonial powers and settler agency. Conversely, when the Elwha S’Klallam saw canoes of Makah warriors paddling for Crescent Beach, there was no thought of an appeal to one’s “human rights” (Swan 1870). Or when Chief Sealth and led a group of Duwamish warriors on the surprise attack that would exterminate the Chemakum as a people, no one pondered whether the “rights” of the Chemakum were being abrogated. The concept of “rights” is a concept tied to the form of nationalist belonging imposed by the expanding nations of Western Europe and North America.
Another reason for an anthropological reconsideration of the national container concerns the technological infrastructure resulting from five centuries of capitalist growth. Nearly every academic colleague in the American university system today is preoccupied with one or another problem of a global scope. Some of these global issues are conceptualized as environmental in nature (e.g. climate change and environmental degradation); others reside more squarely in the social or political realm (imperialism, war, racism, inequality, and so forth). Regardless of what particular terrestrial malady might concern a given scholar, it is absolutely clear that the system of nation-states and their political leaders are the only viable system we have to potentially govern the planet and to arrest these planetary issues. The ceaseless antipathy to the nation-state that emanates from the West is a formal impediment to these problems’ resolution. Moreover, the erosion of the power of the nation-state is, in the final accounting, a neoliberal dream that leads to capitalist hegemony, for it yields the powers of institutionalized governance established over many centuries to the megalithic transnational corporations that curate our public sphere and the communications that comprise it.
There are a host of other points that did not make it into this essay, and I’ll briefly mention them here. I suspect that, from a more rational future, we’ll one day look at the our contemporary era as one in which a fervent moralism took root amongst American liberals. If one reads carefully about the American tradition, Puritanism, and the Progressive movement of the 19th Century, this new religious fervor looks more like an iteration of a traditional American fervency. This perspective already has abundant support (Doyle 2022; Rothman 2022; Mounk 2023; Smith 2014; Winegard and Winegard 2018). I also wonder if American academia will someday come to terms with the cannibalistic nihilism of postmodernism (Fisher 2009, 2014). Somewhere in the combination of those two elements — the moralistic fervency of the establishment orthodoxies reproduced by most American academics today, and the postmodern ethos that knows no strategy other than to build solidarity around the mission of tearing down what exists — is the tenor of American education today. Is there some institutional inertia in our academic system that might allow successive generations to escape the ceaseless ground-clearing and deconstruction that is handed to students as their sole mission? I hope so.
I’ve been thinking about Malinoski’s legacy more than usual, and about his indictment with all our other forebears in anthropology. Like the other humanities in academia, anthropology seems to be deeply engaged in the cannibalization of its own legacy. One part of that sustained indictment of anthropology’s past is the conviction that anthropologists were simply the handmaidens of colonialist regimes. This week, I encountered Rachel Smith’s chapter in 2024’s book One Hundred Years of Argonauts: Malinowski, Ethnography and Economic Anthropology. Consider this:
As she conveys, in 1916, amidst his fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands, anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski delivered a deposition in Melbourne to the “Commission on British and Australian Trade in the South Pacific.” His deposition concerned the potential of the native peoples’ service as a labor force. Might they prove to be productive workers, and might not their service as laborers be in their best interests, Malinowski was asked?
Malinowski argued that the Trobriander was better left alone to pursue “work which is not exactly of a purely economical description, but which for him makes life worth living” (Rachel Smith, One Hundred Years of Argonauts, page 140). Here, Malinowski was pushing back against the interests of the colonial government, and arguing for a more considered and respectful relationship between the state and the indigenous peoples that now fell into its territorial ambit.
Keep in mind that two decades earlier, the anthropologists who led the Cambridge expedition to the Torres Strait were accused by the colonial administration of fomenting unrest amongst the native peoples of the islands visited by the research team (Herle and Rouse 1998: 13).
Both drawn from the earliest historical chapters of the discipline’s development, these two examples are clear evidence that the discipline’s practitioners were NOT the content bedfellows to colonial administrators they are often portrayed to have been. Even at this early date, anthropological practitioners esteemed cultural difference and had the interests of the cultural others they studies at the front of their concerns. I think the strong convictions that many today have about anthropology’s supportive stance toward colonialism, and their purportedly dismissive attitude about the people anthropologists studied in the earliest period of the discipline, need more evidence to be convincing to me.
There is a widespread penchant to attack and undermine the individuals — mostly men — who pioneered the field of anthropology. Indeed, in the aftermath of the postmodern turn, dethroning icons is the preferred sport of many intellectuals and academics. In the discipline of anthropology, many have leveled their critical gaze at Bronislaw Malinowski, the man who single-handedly codified the ethnographic method we use today. To make those critics’ negative assessment a bit more challenging, here I describe the enduring value of Malinowski’s contribution to anthropology and to social science as I see it.
Here is Malinowski and some of the Trobriand Islanders that he lived with for several years. This photograph is from 1918.
First and foremost, like no anthropologist or social scientist before him, Malinowski solidified our disciplinary commitment to the ethnographic method. He described and codified the value of that toolkit, and clearly delineated its mission for the succeeding generations of anthropological practitioners. So above and beyond whatever other contributions others may see, it was Malinowski who gave us the four methodological parameters that, to this day, still serve anthropologists as a veritable right-of-passage into our social scientific guild — to spend at least a year immersed in the culture you wish to understand; to live away from your own kind; to participate in commonplace and everyday activities in the cultural world you’re exploring; and to gather verbatim quotes so that member of that culture might themselves explicate their cultural world in the ethnographies we pen.
Atop those parameters, he also fleshed out the holistic nature of the social anthropologist’s objective. There was a practical aspect to these proclamations — anthropologists should be attentive to the ‘skeleton’ of a given society, the metaphor he used for a given society’s particular social organization. We ought to also be attentive the “body” or “flesh” of that society — to the nature of everyday life, and to the pedestrian activity that fills people’s days. And then we should be attentive to the “mind” of that society — to the ideas, narratives, stories, understandings, and values that define it and differentiate it from other cultures elsewhere on the planet. It was these sustained and comprehensive objectives for data-gathering that concerned his many students: they complained that Malinowski’s aspirations for them were too cumbersome and too demanding.
These practical aspects of the data collection process shouldn’t obscure the deeper philosophical frontiers that, under Malinowski’s leadership, anthropology began to explore in the aftermath of his work. Consider that the demand for anthropologist be attentive to the skeleton, body, and mind in a given social group was the conceptual and methodological premise to the cultural relativism that began to percolate into the discipline’s core principles. For the first time, the methodological toolkit used by anthropologists was configured around understanding the interior life-world of a singular cultural group. Malinowski was key and vital in shifting our attention to individual cultural groups, and to each culture’s historically particular path to the present.
Let’s think briefly about what anthropology and ethnography looked like prior to Malinowski. Certainly it’s true that Boas was busy in the field, and was consistently nudging anthropology in the same directions as Malinowski. But Boas was a devoted empiricist, and amidst the frantic impulses integral to the mission of salvage ethnography, Boas never found the time or focus to distill the methodological nature of the ethnographic toolkit that he too began to explore in this era. So Malinowski successfully distilled and broadcasted those methods in ways that reverberate into the present more than a century later. We might usefully compare Malinowski’s recommendations with the field-practices of Aurel Krause as well — the geographer who, with his brother, was funded to live and write about the Tlingit people in 1883. There, he moved from place to place, wrote down plenty of key information, but had no sense of the value of the “everyday life” that preoccupied Malinowski and most ethnographers who followed him.
Alfred Cort Haddon, the organizer and leader of the Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Strait, and a pioneer in the institutionalization of anthropology.
It’s also true that Alfred Cort Haddon and the Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Strait preceded Malinowski’s time (internment?) on the Trobriand Islands, and there is lots to admire about the methodological forays taken by the expedition members. Indeed, the Cambridge Expedition is also exemplary of a vision of ethnography as a team science, which differs in important ways from the individualistic enterprise the resulted from Boas and Malinowski’s guidance, and would persevere to the present. Haddon’s perspective on anthropology’s central mission remained tethered to the social evolutionary framework that characterized the discipline in the 19th Century, although his work is perhaps notable for its regionalistic focus (Urry 1998,203-205) — a regionalism that served as a stepping stone to the historical particularism that Malinowski and Boas would concretize.
Some portion of the critiques leveled today against Malinowski and the disciplinary forebears like him can be attributed to the contemporary imagination of that era. These first anthropologists were almost always men, and they wore pith helmets and colonial gear as they sought to understand the non-literate cultures on the margins of the colonial systems that organized the map of that day. But the coincidence of these colonial empires with the birth of anthropology is frequently overplayed by critics: in Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Malinowski explicitly criticizes colonial agents for their obliviousness to the tapestry of cultural difference to be encountered just off the colonial verandah. Even the Cambridge Expedition at the end of the 19th Century was criticized by colonial administrators for stirring up troublesome ideas and understandings amongst the native people the team sought to study. The idea that colonization and anthropology were content bedfellows is an unfortunate rumor, and one very much tied to thin understandings and little scrutiny of the documentation these early anthropologists bequeathed us.
Another ream of criticism levied against Malinowski arrived after the publication of his diaries. While resident in the Trobriand Islands, and calculated as an enemy of the crown for his Polish citizenship, Malinowski kept a lively journal. In Argonauts of the Western Pacific, he maintains the notion that anthropology is an objective social science, that the anthropologist must endeavor to rid himself of the biases and understandings that he brings to any analysis, and that the goal of impartiality should mark all ethnographic work. He asked that his journals never be published, but after he died, his estate agreed to publish the journals for the first time. Here we get to see all of the passions, foibles, frustrations, derision, and anxiety that he successfully weeded out of the ethnography he would eventually produce about his time in the Trobriand Islands. After the publication of these diaries, a group of moralistic scholars sought to essentially “cancel” Malinowski for the things he omitted from his ethnography, for the thoughts he wanted to keep to himself, for expressing things in conversation with himself that, today, we find unacceptable in the public sphere.
I might conclude this brief essay mostly about Malinowski with a discussion of the ceaseless penchant for attacking the icons of our discipline, or simply tarnishing the previously untarnished forebears that helped us clamber to the perch where we sit today. In the article that heralded the arrival of political ecology as an interdisciplinary field of enquiry, my mentors Tad Park and Jim Greenberg lamented the “intellectual deforestation” that seems to precede every intellectual effort in contemporary academia. While certainly there is always room for critique in our epistemological progress, I think this penchant for intellectual deforestation is also a measure of the poor of the ideas that others have to offer the public sphere. In the social scientific model of progress, ideas and analyses build on the achievements that came before them. In the model delivered to us by the humanities, the narratives, paradigms, and understandings we’ve inherited are merely appeals to power, and there is no energy that scholars can feed on other than the inertial energy of the institutions and ideas we’ve inherited from the past. I think much of the animosity directed at Malinowski and many others like him is just that — we attack the giants of yesteryear for attention in the present. And buried here is a fascinating postmodern conundrum: the better the set of ideas, the more appealing that a particular understanding or theory might be, the more ire it draws from critics in the postmodern aftermath, for that cannibalism is the only source of energy the deconstructionists perceive.
[here are the opening comments I’ve prepared for one of two sessions I’ve organized at the annual meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology in Santa Fe, New Mexico]
I’d like to welcome you to the first attempt at a session theme that I’d like to explore in conversation together, here, today. Our session is titled as above. I’ll read the abstract as well:
In Michael Agar’s classic estimation, anthropologists are professionalstrangers — their insights seek an impartiality premised, in part, on their positionality outside the cultural worlds they seek to describe and understand. This roundtable session convenes ethnographers with firsthand experience in rural American communities. Although these communities are oftentimes maligned in contemporary American culture wars, in this session anthropologists with some footprint in cultural traditions foreign to America speak to their impressions, observations, and to the understandings they’ve reached while conducting fieldwork in rural America. In doing so, they complicate and humanize communities oftentimes stereotyped and simplified in the contemporary mediasphere.
I’m grateful that three anthropologists were willing to contribute to this conversation and help explore this idea. Anita Carrasco is an anthropologist at Luther College. Felix Ampadu is lecturer at Washington University in St. Louis. Saish Solankar had an impressive and ethnographically-rich undergraduate experience at Purdue University and is poised for more. All three have substantial ethnographic experience in rural American society.
Here’s the thing. Our discipline and our scholarly tradition traces its deepest taproot to the firsthand exploration of cultural and social worlds foreign to the anthropologist herself. For example, that is what brought Edward Pasqual Dozier — born in 1916 in the Santa Clara Pueblo here in New Mexico, and also the first tenured Native American anthropologist — to the Philippines in 1958 and 1959. It’s what brought Margaret Mead to Samoa. It’s what brought me to Bahrain for my dissertation fieldwork in 2002.
Our ethnographic toolkit is designed for the exploration of unfamiliar cultural worlds. But there’s more to think about here. Ruth Benedict was perhaps one of the most insightful anthropologists of the 20th Century, and she admonished all to never forget that a fish can’t really take note of the water it breathes and inhabits. Her point was that much of the culture we anthropologists seek to study is atmospheric in nature.
Recognize that in this situation, cultural outsiders can oftentimes perceive things that insiders cannot. Let’s call this the anthropologist’sadvantage. And let’s trumpet our accomplishment: the anthropologist’s vantage point on culture is remarkable, unique, holistic, and well-informed. We see things that others do not.
Last year, I published an essay entitled Savages and Deplorables in which I lamented the recurring and simplistic portrayal of rural Americans that I increasingly seemed to encounter in the Progressive bubble that I seem to inhabit. In that same article I announced my intentions for the Ethnographic Survey of Rural Cascadia, a longitudinal project that sends undergraduate students to conduct a month of ethnographic work in a rural Cascadian community. Two of those students — Maddie Davis and Jack Leal — are here and can usefully contribute to this conversation. Please also note that they will have posters in the poster session held at 3:45 today.
In part, the idea behind the Ethnographic Survey of Rural Cascadia is this: in the same way that Malinowski used firsthand fieldwork to dispel the notion of savagery a century ago, perhaps today ethnography can bring understanding and humanism to set of American social relations plagued by stereotypes, by essentializations, by simplification, and by condescension.
And so that brings us to the conversation that I want to cultivate here. Saish, Felix and Anita are anthropologists with a fulsome footprint in a culture foreign to us Americans. Obviously, when it comes to rural American culture, they have the anthropologicaladvantage.
I’d like to ask each of you to briefly speak to a couple issues to start our discussion, and then we’ll open the conversation to each other and anyone else in the room.
Can you tell us a little bit about the rural American community or communities that you know best?
What are some of the important features or qualities you’ve observed in rural American society?
Are there any other issues or themes you’d like to introduce to our discussion?
Why might a person like me find it difficult to sit through faculty meetings on an American college campus like the one that employs me? I’ll endeavor to answer that question here.
In significant part it’s because I can’t suffer premises I find to be obliquely racist, puritanical, colonial, and capitalist. The dominant paradigm on display on many American campuses today masquerades behind a facade of victimhood, and thereby hides its elitist status. Proponents of the dominant paradigm continue to envision themselves as a ragged band of disenfranchised outsiders, and disregard the fact that their perspectives are shared by the state, by the largest American corporations, and by the legacy media that suffuses our public sphere to this day. With the concept of “positionality,” they demand an introspection that they themselves are unable to practice.
This dominant paradigm derives its energy primarily from two sources — foremost, by cannibalizing the inertial energy of the various institutions it infects and steadily deconstructs. These are the institutions that we Americans inherited from our forebears and that were built over substantial time. Here one might consult Ryan Grimm’s article Elephants in the Zoom for a sensible early apprehension of this trend. The dominant paradigm also draws energy via the solidarity constructed around identifying and expelling dissidents. It’s the same puritanical energy that Durkheim once envisioned in his musings about a “society of saints.”
Now let me turn to the constitution of this paradigm and my perspectives on it. First, and like a growing number of others, I find its premises to be racist. All around me I see the validity of race — humankind’s most pernicious social construct — being affirmed and reinforced. As someone who grew up in a variety of contexts both inside and outside the United States (including Mexico and the deep South), I was raised to vehemently reject racism in all forms. One can grasp this perspective simply by actually reading Martin Luther King, or perhaps by perusing Monica Harris’ new essay on the same subject. I’ve found Paul Gilroy’s work especially meaningful on this front as well. Building on that upbringing, in adulthood I devoted my energies to a discipline that was anti-racist in its founding DNA. Steeped as I am in the anti-racism pioneered by anthropologist Franz Boas a century ago, I find myself in complete agreement with Coleman Hughes — that we are amidst a period of virulent neo-racism cultivated on campuses mostly in America. That makes it difficult for me to stomach much of what is discussed and premised at many faculty meetings.
Paul Gilroy’s notion of planetary humanism is particularly captivating …
Now a second point. From my vantage point, the self-styled “progressivism” that now infuses our public sphere on American campuses is a manifestation of a uniquely American religious fervor. This religious fervor is centuries old. As it’s conceived today in America, “social justice” is a moralistic paradigm that cannot coexist with the cultural relativism at the heart of cultural and social anthropology. What is today called “social justice” is antithetical to the goal of cultural diversity, for it dictates a set of uniquely American values and American notions of right and wrong. The “progressivism” on campus is another iteration of American Puritanism — the same fervent moralism we saw at the Salem witch trials and in the Second Great Awakening. And it’s the same “progressivism” that yielded abolition, temperance and then prohibition, women’s suffrage, the Chinese expulsion here in Tacoma and elsewhere, eugenics, and the Christian evangelism of the late 20th Century. Thank progressivism for Graham crackers and Kellogg’s cereal. As this list suggests, American progressivism remains a worrisome political energy that has yielded wildly unpredictable outcomes. These sorts of ideas are articulated at more length by Christian Smith, Noah Rothman, Yascha Mounk, and Andrew Doyle, among others. The Washington chapter of this analysis is a result of my own reading.
Sylvester Graham, the Progressive who unsuccessfully sought to vanquish masturbation in the 19th Century
Third, my devotion to anthropology was largely built upon a commitment to the meaningful decolonization of our global public sphere. The moralistic paradigm cultivated on campuses like ours is being exported and deployed worldwide in a new chapter of American imperialism. Universities are center stage in this imposition of American ideas, American understandings, American categorizations of human diversity — we export the tools with which we think and fight. Universities like ours, the faculty all around me, and the students that go abroad are, together, often the emissaries of this colonization (and eventually deconstruction) of otherness. This new colonialism is cloaked in the banner of an American-styled “social justice” and, perhaps most ironically, as part of “decolonization” efforts. One might think of worldly American devotees of this paradigm as contemporary missionaries. No one else has pulled this idea together yet, to my knowledge. It is the subject of my new manuscript, and I first broached the idea in my essay Imperial Diversity.
Fourth, I am deeply and ideologically committed to the limitation of capitalist norms and capitalist relations. I find capitalism and the capitalist marketplace to be invaluable features of our collective existence. The market is an undeniable social treasure. But like feminist geographers Gibson-Graham, I think we need to establish strong firewalls that limit the terrain of capitalist incursions into the social and cultural realm. Capitalism is an engine that needs to be harnessed. Sadly, the American preoccupation with identity, and the whole ambit of identitarianism so popular today are a form of neoliberal subjectivity. To conceptualize individuals in terms of “identities” is to stereotype and essentialize those individuals, certainly. Many others have made this point well. But more vitally, the concept of identity as it is used today eclipses the social nature of our humanity. Instead, identity constructs the individual as an expressive, consumerist agent who is a lone operator in a sea of possibilities. Translation: to recognize that gender or race is a social construction requires you to recognize that those concepts are constructed by the others around you. We — those who are not currently reading this essay — are your society. We decide what your race or gender mean. You see, that’s the “social” part of a social construction. Once you recognize that, you might also recognize that to announce one’s pronouns is to reject society. Pronouns seek to desocialize our world. These ideas also have not totally coalesced in others’ thinking yet, but Marie Moran’s book Identity and Capitalism and Frank Furedi’s Therapy Culture are good starting points, I think.
As an ethnographer and anthropologist, I am a professional listener. My scholarly work testifies to that. To me, the faculty meetings on our campus, or others like it, for that matter, are like passing time in the smoking lounge on the first class deck on the Titanic. I’m asked to come and listen, again, to what John Jacob Astor has to say about the nature of class and privilege that presaged his worldly success, or perhaps I’m asked to intervene in the conflagrations between Benjamin Guggenheim and Ida Strauss over some issue of social etiquette. Maybe Benjamin and Ida want me to scold another passenger who seems to have a problem with Jews. I care a little bit about these issues, and I want the people in first class to be kind to each other. But I’m mostly concerned with how I might leverage my position as an American to best help all the others in this world who didn’t set sail in a first class. Others should do the same.
I care about this institution and its future. For the time being its seems like my presence at the faculty meeting is neither useful nor productive.
[a further note on gender ambivalence in the Northwest Coast Culture Area]
A sketch of a Quinault village from about 1850, image refers to James Swan
In a previous blog post, I noted that after reading quite a bit of early ethnography about the diversity of peoples who were present on the Pacific’s Northwest Coast during the time that explorers, traders, and outsiders from points afar began to arrive, there was no evidence at all to support the way that contemporary ideologues imagine pre-capitalist cultural life to be. While I certainly think the totality of the evidence continues to point to that conclusion, I continue to read widely in this area, and this week I encountered the first ethnography of the peoples of the Northwest Coast that speaks about cases of gender ambivalence. I want to get some of that detail into this blog, and thereby correct my former assertions a bit.
Between 1925 and 1927, anthropologist Ronald L. Olson spent quite a bit of time with the Quinault people of Washington’s Pacific Coast. His ethnography, entitled The Quinault Indians, was first published in 1936, and like many ethnographies of that era, it is quintessentially an example of salvage ethnography — his concerns are foremost to record a way of life that had already vanished, and his most valuable human subjects were the oldest men and women who were capable of recalling details of the way of life they had known as children. Perhaps I can report on this ethnography after I’ve fully digested it.
But to the point — there are two mentions of berdaches in this ethnography. That term is of Arabic origin, and has long been used to describe men who present as women, foremost, and more generally for individuals whose gender identity doesn’t conform to the sex of their birth. Olson’s first mention of berdaches is brief: most villages have a joker — a buffoon who pokes at norms and mocks the powerful. This joker is always a man. Olson reports that the joker he got to know best, a man named Austin Chapelis, mocked another man who intended to marry for actually being a berdache. Chapelis is quoted as saying, “Why are you going to marry that girl? You are part woman. How can you do anything to her?” (Olson 1967: 97).
On the next page, he pens a brief section entitled Berdaches and Homosexuals as part of a chapter concerning Quinault social structure. It’s brief enough to completely reproduce here.
“Berdaches were uncommon and were not linked with shamanism. A “female” who lived some 50 years ago was regarded as an hermaphrodite, but she lived with and reputedly had sexual intercourse with another woman. A Queets [the neighboring tribe] berdache was said to have had all the essential male organs of normal size but he did woman’s work (cooking, basketry), sat down like a woman, and spoke with the voice of a woman. His sexual life was limited to intercourse with old women. This led to his early death, for it was thought to “poison” a young man to have sexual relations with an old woman.
His sister was also a berdache. One Quinault female was masculine and bore a man’s name. Though her organs were those of a normal female she had sex relations with other women. She followed the occupations of a man. The Quilleute and Humptulips also had berdaches among them.
No social stigma seems to have been associated with such aberrations. The males were known as keksatså/nxwix (part woman) and females as tåekxwå/nsix (man acting). Homosexuality was not practiced except by berdaches and their mates” (Olson 1967: 99).
So this is just fascinating, and I appreciate the fact that Olson mentions that these gender ambivalences are also found in a few nearby tribes. The fact that the Quinault joker mocked an individual for being a berdache perhaps runs a bit counter to his Olson’s notion that there is no social stigma associated with these “aberrations,” as he calls them. But he also notes that these berdaches are small in number, and even more interestingly, that beyond these cases, homosexuality was not practiced.
Finally, in my estimation, it’s also of note that gender roles remain anchored in these social systems’ conceptions of the sexual binary — the variances and ambivalences described essential accept and then navigate concretized ideas about men, women, and their different places in Quinault society.
Posters like this (below) are emblematic of American university campuses and the institutional culture cultivated there. Conflagrations concerning various cultures and their appropriation has been a fairly quotidian feature of elite American culture for nearly two decades now. Some of these conflagrations have percolated into the American public sphere. Maybe you feel concerned about this issue.
This is one of countless examples that permeate the realm of elite American culture today
Anthropologists, of course, study culture in all of its manifestations. We invented the concept of culture as it’s used today, actually: in the first paragraph of the book that established anthropology in 1871, Edward Tylor provided the modern definition of culture that we continue to use today. For your edification, here is that sentence from the first page of Tylor’s book: “Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other habits acquired by man as a member of society” (Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1871).
Although it presents itself in a cloak of righteous militancy, contemporary American concerns with “cultural appropriation” are something quite the opposite — they are a capitulation to capitalist hegemony. Oftentimes, that effort is also racist, but we’ll leave that topic for another day. In essence, the discourse concerning “cultural appropriation” suggests that culture — inherently communal, a universally human capacity, the defining feature of our species, a splendrous realm of humans’ captivating diversity — should be conceived as a form of property. The discourse concerning “cultural appropriation” essentially harnesses culture to the capitalist logic of property. To fight against “cultural appropriation” is to demand that we commodify culture.
Feminist geographers J. K. Gibson-Graham once suggested that the most potent feature of capitalism was the myth it seems to generate about its own omnipotence. They took great pains to reveal that this myth was a false portrayal of our social existence. In both past and present, there are innumerable social features of our existence that are exemplary of non-capitalist relations. They argued that, instead, we ought to constrain capitalist relations to the realms of society where they are absolutely necessary or obviously useful. And instead of capitulating to capitalism, we ought to grow the parts of our social world that lead us away from capitalist logic. There is so much more to the human ethos than capitalist agency alone, their argument implies.
These four Halloween partygoers have gleefully navigated the treacherous shoals of cultural appropriation with aplomb!
It’s discouraging to see where we are today on campuses like mine. For seemingly two decades or more, we Americans have had to suffer this tiresome discourse. Although they are oftentimes confused, the proponents and beneficiaries of the cultural appropriation discourse ought to be recognized for who they really are: they are capitalist missionaries, evangelical neoliberal ideologues who seek to colonize the cultural landscape with their thinking. As capitalist agents, they seek to enclose and partition another commons, to subjugate another realm of human diversity to the yoke of capitalism.
We should resist framing our concerns with inequality in terms of cultural appropriation. Don’t you think?
James Swan painted this image of a Klallam potlatch and the interior of a longhouse
There is a widely held notion in contemporary academia that the gender binary deeply lodged in the American tradition is, in reality, a cultural ethnocentricity rooted in capitalism, in western modernity, and perhaps in their combined hegemony. This perspective at least implies that human history, in all its diversity, actually contains an array of ethnographic evidence pointing to diverse sexualities, to various gender categories, and to a more egalitarian alterity. Perplexedly, in whole and in parts these assertions receive vociferous support from a growing number of prominent anthropologists at elite American institutions, where those thinkers are collected and their ideas cultivated. As a result, these ideas have a growing footprint in public anthropology and, of course, in the social mediasphere.
Over the past years I have begun to read and digest the earliest written accounts of the various groups of people who comprised what some anthropologists call the Northwest Coast Cultural Area. This region stretches from southeastern Alaska to at least the Columbia River, and from the coastal mountains to the sea. This region contains a unique, demographically dense, cultural intense, and absolutely fascinating chapter of human history. The region was one of the last places in the globe to be incorporated into the global capitalist system that steadily enveloped the world. Our mission precludes a discussion of those fascinating features of these many cultures, but note that a few interesting details nonetheless leak into the argument below.
I’ve read a fair bit of relevant ethnographic material. For example, I read John Jewitt’s astonishing account of his time as a Nootka slave on Vancouver Island between 1803 and 1805. I’ve read James Swan’s insightful, open-minded descriptions of Makah culture, derived from a long stay that began in 1859. I’ve read Gilbert Sproat’s description of Vancouver Island — 1860 to 1865 — and pored over the ethnological details he provides about the Aht people. Aurel Krause was sent by the Geographical Society of Bremen on an ethnological expedition to Alaska, and I’ve read his wonderful book about the remote Tlingit village he studied in 1882 and 1883. I’ve read Canadian painter Paul Kane’s descriptions from his 1847 visit to the s’Klallam people of the Olympic Peninsula, his descriptions of their longhouses, and his portrayal of their pitched intertribal war with the neighboring Makah. Those descriptions are stunningly enhanced by his paintings of the very same subjects. I’ve read Caroline Leighton’s insightful reflections on s’Klallam culture as well, from her time on the frontier in 1865. I’ve read quite a bit of Franz Boas’s work about various people from the Northwest Coast Cultural Area, and I’ve read the work of one of his earliest students, Erna Gunther, who conducted ethnographic fieldwork with the s’Klallam in the 1920s. I’ve read about what Vancouver and other sea captains saw when they first contacted these peoples. Truthfully, I’ve read quite a bit more than that, but those are at least some of the most memorable pieces I’ve consulted.
Paul Kane’s drawing of the pitched battle between the Makah and the s’Klallam in 1846 or 1847.
As a collection of materials concerned with a singular (albeit, important) geographical area in the ethnographic canon concerning our planetary diversity, there is no mention of any alternative gender categories, nor any evidence of a gender continuum in these pre-settlement societies. In all cases, women are a clearly defined category of human, and all are consigned to subservient roles across the board. They are more likely than men to be enslaved rather than killed in battle. It is true that in this library of cultural diversity there are a few exceptional junctures. In one group of people from the far north, for example, women rather than men were rumored to conduct all trade and bargaining. In another group, women were reported to possess the social right to depart abusive husbands and move on to relationships with other men. It should be noted that both of these cases were memorable because they were exceptional.
Again, to clarify: in my reading of this geographically-limited portion of our ethnographic canon, there is absolutely no evidence to support the premises and assumptions of contemporary American gender ideology.
Some might suggest that the ethnologists listed above were unable to see or perhaps recognize gender ambivalences in the societies they sought to describe. This is clearly an untenable assertion. Consider this: these intrepid explorers and anthropologists were able to access the deep recesses of these various societies. They learned about secret societies, ritual meanings, human sacrifice, infanticide, cranial deformation, menstrual rituals, and all sorts of cultural features that were difficult to see, distant from Western norms, and quite different from Western mores. Third genders, fourth genders, and even basic gender ambivalences would have been exactly the type of social feature that would have fascinated these cultural interlopers. Undoubtedly, if such social features existed, these men and women would have ferreted out those details. For some of these writers, in fact, gender ambivalences would have reinforced the notion, popular at that time, that these native people were nothing more than uncivilized “savages.”
None reported anything of the sort.
In summary, then, while I’m certain that there are individuals who’ve spent quite a bit more time and more effort looking into this particular aspect of the ethnographic canon, in my fairly deep dive into the Northwest Coast Cultural Area, I see no support at all for such an assertion. The most likely explanation, I think, is what many already knew to be true: humans are a sexually dimorphic species. Our societies have grown around this feature of human existence. Our cultures reflect that.
It also suggests that the transgender movement prominent in America today does not signify a return to some natural social form corrupted by modernity. Do people actually believe that? Nor does it signify a social movement that might endeavor to shed our patriarchal and capitalist traditions. Instead, it suggests more straightforwardly that the dominant transgender ideology is a product of Western capitalist modernity. Gender ideology is an expression of the neoliberalist individualism that is very, very American — it’s a telling cultural element of late capitalist culture. Contemporary gender ideology is a last capitalist cultural form, and a very American one at that.
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