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Editor's Foreword -- Virginia R. Dominguez
I want to suggest two ways of reading this issue of American Ethnologist,
one by topic and the other by the way authors approach critique and criticism.
Topically this issue of AE addresses familiar concerns—racialization, globalization,
counterglobalization, neoliberalism, privilege, land, communal life, individuation,
and privacy. read more >> The articles in some groupings may seem more obviously related than
others. All, however, aim to prod, poke, or stretch our imagination, even if we
think we know the contours of debate on any of the issues considered.
In each section, there is a twist, an element of surprise worth pondering. This issue’s AE Forum (“Genomics and Racialization”) addresses racial thinking and its reproduction in the United States (a long-standing topic in anthropological life and pedagogy), but it does so by exploring the current visibility and interest in genomics, looking at parallels between genomics and witchcraft. Likewise, “Middle-Class Conundrums” addresses many of the relative privileges, choices, insecurities, and degrees of control of middle-class professionals and businesspeople and clearly indexes existing scholarship on privilege and hierarchy—studying up and studying sideways—but neoliberalism is the backdrop here, not social stratification in the abstract, and women, not men, are the leading figures in both of the section’s articles. The articles in “Engagement, Participation, and Complicity” might look like a “natural” grouping. After all, they echo studies of local, regional, or national movements in relation to larger powers and the political, economic, historical, and discursive conditions that produce and reproduce marked inequalities of power and privilege in the world. Yet they all emphasize active, thoughtful participation in the “global,” the “counterglobal,” and the “imperial,” by those who are more than consumers (active or passive) of mass-produced goods marketed worldwide. A similar twist is evident in the “Land and Relatedness” articles, which intersect with long-standing anthropological work on the social, economic, and political life of land (but largely evoke the emotional investment that often accompanies it), and in those in the “Bodies in Public and Private” section, which resonate with work on public and private spaces and gendered bodies but concentrate on individuation, fragmentation, and privacy. Individually and vis-à-vis one another, these articles are wonderfully informative and substantial, and I am delighted to include them here. But I also want to urge readers to consider what these articles, in combination, have to say about critique and criticism, how they explore, address, entail, or reveal usefully different stances toward criticism and critique, both within the anthropological community and significantly beyond it. Readers will find that each article featured here defies easy characterization as social or political critique. Yet each also takes on criticism as an intellectual project, often in relation to social, economic, or political projects of protest or criticism that extend well beyond anthropology. For example, in this issue’s AE Forum, Stephan Palmié offers a thought-provoking critique of a current and growing phenomenon. His is clearly not a simple critique of scientific privilege and authority; it seems to me to worry more about the consumption of genomics (especially by segments of the African American community) than about its privileging and production. Given recent eruptions for and against “science studies” in some anthropological circles (biological and sociocultural), I urge attention to the actual argument in Palmié’s article, not to expectations of what Palmié, a sociocultural anthropologist, might have to say about science. Likewise, in the debate and discussion that follows the article, Palmié’s toughest critics are not the biological anthropologists (Alan Goodman, Jonathan Marks, and Kenneth Weiss), in general, but, rather, some of the sociocultural anthropologists (Nadia Abu El-Haj and Stefan Helmreich) currently working within the network of “science studies.” In nearly all of the commentaries (including those by Carolyn Martin Shaw and Katya Gibel Mevorach), there is something unexpected about the amount of critique (or lack of it), the source of the critique, and the target of the criticism. In the two articles on middle-class conundrums—one based on research in Barbados and the other on Puerto Rico—criticism is less visible, and this relative invisibility is itself worth exploring. Clearly many of the Barbadian businesswomen of interest to Carla Freeman operate within an expanding neoliberal, capitalist set of relations and goals. Yet Freeman’s goal is not to critique the women or the capitalist strategies they adopt but to track the way the strategies work, and are put to work, by those in particular gendered systems of relations. The Puerto Rican schoolteachers Patricia Silver discusses are employees more than entrepreneurs and seem more politicized than the women in Carla Freeman’s study. Yet her article likewise succeeds in making the effects of compromised sovereignty and neoliberal transformations understandable and palpable to a degree often missing in broad critiques of neoliberalism and U.S. imperialism. The articles on “Engagement, Participation, and Complicity” feature terms that index anthropological praise or critique: counterglobalization, globality, and empire. But these articles plumb depths that readers will not expect from the use of these terms. How do, or how should, local communities relate to huge international mining operations and the finance capital that sustains them? When public criticism of corporate mining practices takes a certain form and intensity, how should social scientists track the impact of those practices on labor, public welfare, material conditions, and communal fault lines? Navigating the world of public protest and critique requires the kind of subtlety and clarity I believe we find in Stuart Kirsch’s article. In Kenneth Broad and Ben Orlove’s analysis of the tracking of the late 1990s El Niño event in Peru, readers will find a similar mix of clarity, subtlety, and critique. Contemporary sociocultural anthropology has not often engaged with climate, except peripherally, for example, focusing on the aftermath of singular events like Hurricane Katrina. But rather than analyze failure and disaster in clean-up operations or NGO practices, Broad and Orlove focus on Peruvian uses of international technology and their currency in domestic, national politics. Little about their analysis makes Peruvians simply consumers of “global technology,” and much in it does the opposite, pointing to more productive avenues than binarisms in analyses of “globalization,” “neoliberalism,” “counterglobalization,” and “empire.” Unusual in its focus and of particular relevance is the review essay by Keith Brown and Catherine Lutz, which features the published writings of lower-level military personnel who have served in the U.S. interventions in Iraq in recent years. Brown and Lutz review the books both as data and as texts, as a sample of a publishing phenomenon worth noting, and as a set of commentaries on the war in Iraq. The material reviewed is fascinating in itself, but I also want to urge readers to consider the way Brown and Lutz approach their task. Their review essay is not a scathing critique of those who have served in the U.S. military in Iraq and come home to write about it. It is, indeed, an analysis of personal engagement with the war and of varying responses to it by people with direct experience of it. Importantly, it models one way to write about an unpopular war, and even about a policy many fellow intellectuals decry but for which there remains ample support in some social and economic circles. Under “Land and Relatedness,” Helen Siu’s and Jackie Feldman’s articles clearly address matters that go beyond contestations over land, tensions that arise because of competing claims to land, the buying and selling of land, and the defense of land seen as the property of individuals, families, or groups. But I think reading Siu and Feldman side by side is fruitful because both address less frequently examined questions about land and people’s relationship to it. Siu asks what happens to people whose lives have changed substantially (becoming urban and metropolitan) because they have not moved, rather than because they have. Feldman asks what happens when Christian pilgrims seek Jewish guides to one of the most contested stretches of land on the planet. Siu’s article could be read as critiquing scholarship on migration for continuing to focus too much on those who leave rather than on those who stay behind, and Feldman’s as critiquing scholarship on Israel, Palestine, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam for not focusing enough on those social relationships that are sought precisely because they cross group lines. Critique here is partly explicit and partly backgrounded, unlike the critique that appears in several of the commentaries in the AE Forum and even in some of the other full-length articles. A final mix is evident in “Bodies in Public and Private,” which addresses the social, communal, and legal life of human bodies and human remains, one article more classic in its structure and the other definitely pushing the envelope. Diane O’Rourke’s carefully crafted argument about individuation and communal values in Greece looks more conventional, even functionalist, within the corpus of anthropological writing. Margaret Everett’s article borders on autoethnography, taking her extended personal experience with the legal system and medical genetics to ask about de facto degrees of individuation and control (even when they seem to go against strongly reproduced ideologies of individuation in U.S. society). Whereas Everett seeks an explicit way to combine description, analysis, and criticism of a contemporary sociolegal phenomenon, O’Rourke deftly critiques what people say and do about tradition and change, their own practices and values, and what it all means. Quite different in their data and the immediacy of their experience, Everett and O’Rourke still offer readers related discussions of individuation and communalism as compromised ideologies requiring both careful analysis and effective critique. Overall, these articles remind me of how important it is to be thoughtful about analytic critique and public criticism, the way we handle it, the moments to engage it, and the way to make it productive. Critique is never necessarily sharp nor is it necessarily public, as these articles attest. But, as many of us have seen over the past few months online, some of it is both, and the question is how to engage, report, or address such eruptions. When they pit one anthropologist against another, various factors may be in play. When the eruptions pit one type of intellectual work against another, I am convinced that an important intellectual debate needs airing. I have chosen to include an unusual short piece here (a rebuttal I solicited from Susan McKinnon) because I think this is one of those times. A sharp critique by Henry Harpending of her most recent book was posted on AnthroSource along with the February 2007 issue and has already elicited sharp language of its own in online blogs and related websites. In the interest of making the fault line visible, I include McKinnon’s rebuttal here. Clearly, science and the field of science studies evoke strong reactions within some segments of the anthropological community, even within the sociocultural anthropological community. The intensity of the reaction typically lies just beneath the surface, but periodically it flares up. How we address it is a matter for all of us to contemplate. Silencing it does not seem productive. Airing it might, so long as it proves intellectually productive for anthropologists, our students, our publics, and our fellow travelers. [foreword, critique and criticism, genomics, racialization, land, neoliberalism, global connections, life and death, individuation] VIRGINIA R. DOMINGUEZ EDITOR
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