Why Should Anthropologists Become Public Intellectuals?
I just finished Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s book ‘Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence’. Actually sometime ago there was a post about Eriksen’s book on this blog (6 March 2007, third tone devil). Eriksen is a social anthropologist at the university of Oslo. His book is wonderful; every anthropologist and anthropology student must read it.
Briefly Eriksen says anthropologists deal with every aspect of human life and human experience from food, football, music, dance, tourism to poverty, famines, AIDS, development, human rights, feminism, indigenous rights, migration, refugees, identity, nationalism etc. They are able to reflect on different perspectives, and diversity in society rather than describing everything as black and white (or as the oversimplistic ‘the West and the East’ language of Huntington or
Fukuyama) or pitting one group of people against the other. Therefore they have the potential to create a better informed and enlightened public through writing popular books or contributing to popular newspapers. But Eriksen claims anthropologists, especially academics, generally do not try to reach out the wider public either because of lack of time or because they do not want to go out of their own way or they look down on popular anthropology writing or they do not want to simplify or generalise things or they are not good at writing in a lucid way. He mentions Margaret Mead, Claude Levi-Strauss and some other anthropologists as successful writers who managed to get wider public attention. Eriksen says anthropologists should not shy away from commenting on general public issues whether it is related to their ethnographic work or not. I agree with Eriksen.
For example, in Australia the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner (1905-1981) was a public intellectual. He worked with indigenous Australians, and he reflected on the ‘Great Australian Silence’ about the indigenous people and their welfare in the 1968 Boyer lectures called ‘After the Dreaming’.
Nice post Nursel. I remember a seminar Michael Herzfeld did at Macquarie last year for postgraduates. He said he didn’t like the term ‘applied anthropology’, preferring ‘engaged anthropology’ instead. I like the term because it doesn’t create the artificial boundary between ‘applied’ and ‘academic’ anthropology which so often creeps into debates within, and about, the discipline. And in my experience, most anthropologists I know are interested in applying their work in some sense, even if they are not working in ‘applied’ settings; they are engaged with real-world issues and their work is also often an intervention into things that matter to the people they work with. Of course, this is not quite the same thing as being a ‘public intellectual’ but I also don’t think this is the only mode by which anthropologists can become involved in wider community issues.
Eriksen talks about anthropologist as a writer, and he already mentions the anthropologists who apply their knowledge as experts and consultants and he appreciates their work. Of course being a public intellectual is not the only way to engage in the wider community, but I belive it is the best way to share one’s knowledge and make people become more aware of thigns. Actually Eriksen says there is not many public intellectuals not only in anthropology but in other disciplines either.
A couple of months ago I read an article by Amanda Wise (from Macquire uni, Centre for Research on Social Inclusion), and also by Ghassan Hage (a social anthropologist from Sydney uni) about the Cronulla riots on Sydney Morning Herald, which was quite nice.