The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology PDF

The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology Author(s): Nancy Scheper-Hughes Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 36, No. 3 (1995), pp. 409-440 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Stable URL: https://www...

The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology Author(s): Nancy Scheper-Hughes Source: Current Anthropology, Vol. 36, No. 3 (1995), pp. 409-440 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2744051 Accessed: 27-11-2024 06:49 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The University of Chicago Press, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Current Anthropology This content downloaded from 218.103.242.245 on Wed, 27 Nov 2024 06:49:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 36, Number 3, June I995 ? i995 by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved oo32o4/95/3603-ooo3$2.oo For much of this century cultural anthropology has been concerned with divergent rationalities, with explaining 2 how and why various cultural others thought, reasoned, and lived-in-the-world as they did. Classical anthropo- The Primacy of logical thinking and practice are best exemplified, per- haps, in the great witchcraft and rationality debates of decades past.2 Ideally, modernist cultural anthropology the Ethical liberated "truth" from its unexamined Eurocentric and Orientalist presuppositions. But the world, the objects of our study, and consequently, the uses of anthropology have changed considerably. Exploring the cultural logic Propositions for a Militant of witchcraft is one thing. Documenting, as I am now, the burning or "necklacing" of accused witches, politi- Anthropology' cal collaborators, and other ne'er-do-wells in belea- guered South African townships-where a daily toll of "charred bodies" is a standard feature of news re- by Nancy Scheper-Hughes ports-is another.3 A more womanly-hearted anthropol- ogy might be concerned not only with how humans think but with how they behave toward each other, thus engaging directly with questions of ethics and power. In South African squatter camps as in the AIDS sana- In bracketing certain "Western" Enlightenment truths we hold toria of Cuba and in the parched lands of Northeast Bra- and defend as self-evident at home in order to engage theoreti- zil, I have stumbled on a central dilemma and challenge cally a multiplicity of alternative truths encoded in our reified notion of culture, anthropologists may be "suspending the ethi- to cultural anthropology, one that has tripped up many cal" in our dealings with the "other." Cultural relativism, read a fieldworker before me (for example, Renato Rosaldo as moral relativism, is no longer appropriate to the world in [I989:i-2i] in his encounters with Ilongot headhunt- which we live, and anthropology, if it is to be worth anything at ers): In bracketing certain "Western" Enlightenment all, must be ethically grounded. This paper is an attempt to imag- ine what forms a politically committed and morally engaged an- truths we hold and defend as self-evident at home in thropology might take. order to engage theoretically with a multiplicity of alter- native truths encoded in our reified notion of culture, NANCY SCHEPER-HUGHES iS Professor of Anthropology at the anthropologists may be "suspending the ethical" (Buber University of California, Berkeley (Berkeley, Calif. 94720, I952:I47-56) in our dealings with the "other," espe- U.S.A.). Born in I944, she was educated at Berkeley (Ph.D., cially those whose vulnerable bodies and fragile lives I976). She has taught at the University of North Carolina, are at stake. Moreover, what stake can anthropologists Chapel Hill, at Southern Methodist University, at the University of Cape Town, and at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences expect to have in current political debates in rapidly "de- Sociales, Paris. Her research interests include the application of mocratizing" nations in Eastern Europe, Latin America, critical theory to medicine and psychiatry, the anthropology of and Africa where newly drafted constitutions and bills the body, illness, and suffering, the political economy of the emo- of rights-and those of Brazil and South Africa are exem- tions, and violence and terror. Among her publications are Saints, Scholars, and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ire- land (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, unreflexive cultural relativist, Levinas's notion of a "pre-cultural" I979), the edited volume Child Survival: Anthropological Per- moral repugnance toward unnecessary human suffering came back spectives on the Treatment and Maltreatment of Children (Dor- to haunt me with a vengeance, along with the specter of three-year- drecht: D. Reidel, i987), and Death Without Weeping (Berkeley old Mercea, who died abandoned by both her mother and her an- and Los Angeles: University of California Press, i992). The pres- thropologist during Brazilian Carnival celebrations in i989. ent paper was submitted in final form 25 x 94. 2. Excellent reviews of these debates in anthropology can be found in Mohanty (I989), Hollis and Lukes (I98 2), Wilson (I985), and Tambiah (I990). i. This paper was originally presented as a keynote address at the 3. Here is how the death of suspected police collaborators and Israel Anthropological Association Meetings, Tel Aviv University, witches is described in the local white newspaper in Cape Town on March 23, I994, where the conference theme was "Politically (my emphasis): "Dozen Bodies Removed from Guguletu in Week- Committed Anthropology." On my return to South Africa I pre- end Casualties"; "The charred bodies of seven people, including a sented the paper to my colleagues at the Department of Social 50 year old woman and her teenage daughter, were found in Tho- Anthropology, University of Cape Town, on May I3, I994, where koza hostel and Katlehong on Friday.... The burned and blackened it achieved a certain notoriety and generated a strong response, bodies of two young men were found at the Mandela squatter camp aspects of which have worked their way into this revision. In No- in Thokoza and another body at Katlehong railway station" (Cape vember I994 parts of this paper were read at the AAA symposium Times, September I993); "Another 40 bodies found on the East "Rethinking the Cultural: Beyond Intellectual Imperialisms and Rand"; finally, "Charred bodies of two witches found in Nyanga" Parochialisms of the Past" (see Winkler I994:Ai8). I am grateful (Argus, January 2i, I994). The women accused of witchcraft had to my Israeli, South African, and North American colleagues for been bound together with rope and were "badly burnt." While their contributions and criticisms. Finally, at a crucial moment in white deaths "counted"-as, for example, in the extensive and my failed attempts to "make sense" of the "useless suffering" of personal coverage of the white victims of the St. James Church the multitudes of Northeast Brazilian angel-babies, T. M. S. Evens "massacre" in Cape Town in late July I994-the black victims introduced me to certain key writings of Emmanuel Levinas (i 986). of township violence were merely "counted," recorded as body Although I originally rejected these with the vehemence of the counts. 409 This content downloaded from 218.103.242.245 on Wed, 27 Nov 2024 06:49:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 4IO I CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 36, Number 3, June 1995 plary-speak to a growing global consensus ("Western," "my" anthropological subjects. On the day that I was "bourgeois," "hegemonic," if you will) defending the about to leave the field in Northeast Brazil in i982 a rights of women, children, sexual minorities, the ac- fight broke out between my research assistant, "Little cused, and the sick against "traditional and customary Irene," and several women of the shantytown of the Alto law," cultural claims increasingly viewed as hostile, op- do Cruzeiro (aptly named Crucifix Hill) that was to pressive, and exploitative? change irrevocably the course of my life and work as an anthropologist. The women-all of them shantytown mothers-were waiting outside the creche and social Framing the Issue and Calling the Bluff center of the squatters' association where I was gather- ing the sad reproductive histories that would eventually In the introduction to Death Without Weeping (i992b: result in the publication of Death Without Weeping a 2i) I suggest that cultural relativism, read as moral rela- decade later. tivism, is no longer appropriate to the world in which When I emerged to see what the commotion was we live and that anthropology, if it is to be worth any- about, the women were prepared to turn their anger thing at all, must be ethically grounded: "If we cannot against me. Why had I refused to work with them when begin to think about social institutions and practices in they had been so willing to work with me? Didn't I care moral or ethical terms, then anthropology strikes me as about them personally any more-their lives, their suf- quite weak and useless." The specific instance I treat at fering, their struggle? This was a reference to my previ- length in Death Without Weeping concerns the moral ous history in the community when, during the mid- thinking and social practices of poor shantytown I960s, I lived and worked in the Alto do Cruzeiro as a women toward some of their small, hungry babies politically committed community organizer, helping to viewed as "wanting" to die or "needing" to die, as filling found UPAC, the squatters' association, and attending the role of "generative scapegoats" (Girard i987) and dy- to the community's perennial quest for clean water, gar- ing, like Jesus, so that others might live. bage collection, street lights, and paved streets, along- More recently, I have dealt with the impact of the side the fight for fair wages, rudimentary medical and AIDS epidemic on moral thinking, public policy, and dental services, protection from police brutality and the "politics of truth" in the United States, Brazil, and death squad violence, and, perhaps most important, Cuba (Scheper-Hughes I993, I994a). I suggest that more proper and dignified burials. could have been done to prevent the spread of the epi- Why was I now, 20 years later, so-how could they demic if such standard public health measures and prac- put it?-so passive, so indifferent, so seemingly resigned tices as routine testing with partner notification had not to the destruction of the association by right-wing politi- been rejected in the United States and, more generally, cal attacks, to the closing of the creche, and to the end in the West (through the WHO global AIDS program) as of the festas and celebrations of everyday lives and ev- politically unpalatable. I point to a lapse in moral cour- eryday saints that I had once thrown myself into with age by those empowered to protect the well-being of the such abandon. I explained, once again, what anthropol- social body and in the writings of medical anthropolo- ogy was and that I was there to observe, to document, gists, among whom "critical" thinking seems to be sus- to understand, and later to write about their lives and pended in the time of AIDS. Finally, in South Africa I their pain as fully, as truthfully, and as sensitively as I ran headlong into a dispute with local "discipline" and could. "security" committees in a black squatter camp of the That was all well and good, replied the women, but Western Cape, where the threat of the "necklace" and what else was I going to do while I was with them? public floggings were used to keep especially young bod- Shouldn't we hold squatters' association meetings again, ies in line. now that grassroots organizations had been "unbanned" In each case I have had to pause and reconsider the by the newly democratizing government? Couldn't the traditional role of the anthropologist as neutral, dispas- old "cultural circles" and Paulo Freirean literacy groups sionate, cool and rational, objective observer of the hu- that we once had be revived? Many Alto men and man condition: the anthropologist as "fearless specta- women had lost the basics of reading and writing that tor," to evoke Charles McCabe's (un)felicitous phrase. they had learned years before. And what about the And I am tempted to call anthropology's bluff, to expose creche building itself? It was in a bad state of disrepair, its artificial moral relativism and to try to imagine what its roof tiles broken, its bricks beginning to crumble. forms a politically committed and morally engaged an- Shouldn't we organize a collective work force, a muti- thropology might take. rao, as we did in the old days, to get the building back in shape? I backed away saying, "This work is cut out for you. Anthropologist and Companheira My work is different now. I cannot be an anthropologist and a companheira at the same time." I shared my reser- My transformation from "objective" anthropologist to vations about the propriety of a North American's tak- politically and morally engaged companheira was, how- ing an active role in the life of a poor Brazilian commu- ever, the result not so much of a tortured process of nity. This was "colonialist," I patiently explained, trying critical self-reflexivity as of the insistence of some of to summarize the arguments of Edward Said, Talal Asad, This content downloaded from 218.103.242.245 on Wed, 27 Nov 2024 06:49:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  D'ANDRADE/SCHEPER-HUGHES Objectivity and Militancy I 4II and others that had gained such currency in anthropo- courteous relations with both the white aristocracy and logical circles. But my arguments fell on deaf ears. "Oh, the black sharecropper families (see Powdermaker I 9 3 9). Nanci," they protested, "Doutor Claudio [the owner of But the times and anthropology had changed. It now the local sugar mill, Cuaranji] is colonialist, not us." seemed that there was little virtue to false neutrality in And they gave me an ultimatum: the next time I came the face of the broad political and moral dramas of life back to the Alto do Cruzeiro it would be on their terms, and death, good and evil, that were being played out in that is, as a companheira, "accompanying" them as I the everyday lives of the people of Alto do Cruzeiro, as had before in the struggle and not just sitting idly by in Sunflower County in the I930S and in the squatter taking field notes. "What is this anthropology to us, camps surrounding Cape Town and in Jerusalem and anyway?" "its" occupied territories today. What makes anthropol- And so, each time I returned between I987 and ogy and anthropologists exempt from the human respon- i992-for four more fieldwork trips in all-I assumed sibility to take an ethical (and even a political) stand on the local cargo of anthropologist-companheira, dividing the working out of historical events as we are privileged my time (and my loyalties) between anthropology and to witness them? political work as it was assigned to me by the activist The plot and the dilemmas thickened as I moved from women and men of the Alto, even when it meant being Northeast Brazil into the even more politically charged drawn (and not always happily) into local campaigns on climate of South Africa during I993-94. behalf of the Socialist Workers' Party candidate for presi- dent, Lula, during the heated election campaigns of I989 or being asked to support a mill workers' and cane cut- ters' general strike the year before. My reluctance to do Who's the Killer? so was born out of my own natural anthropological incli- nation to want-as Adlai Stevenson once put it-just to At a special showing of the once-banned antiapartheid sit back in the shade with a glass of wine in my hand film A Dry White Season at the University of Cape and watch the dancers. Town in August I993, I was unprepared for a spontane- But the more my companheiras gently but firmly ous audience reaction: muted but audible boos and pulled me away from the "private" world of the hisses accompanied the scene of the I976 Soweto wretched huts of the shantytown, where I felt most schoolchildren's uprising against forced instruction in comfortable, and toward the "public" world of the mu- Afrikaans. "Why would a liberal audience of Capetoni- nicipio of Bom Jesus da Mata, into the marketplace, the ans react so negatively to the scene of black township mayor's office and the judge's chambers, the police sta- youth defending their rights?" I asked a new colleague tion and the public morgue, the mills and the rural the next day. I had recently arrived in South Africa to union meetings, the more my understandings of the take up a new post, and, still suffering from the disloca- community were enriched and my theoretical horizons tion, I desperately needed a running interpretation of the were expanded. True, I lost the chameleon-like ambidex- subtexts of everyday life. "I suppose some people are terity of the politically uncommitted (or, at least, the sick and tired of violent schoolchildren on rampage," noncommital) anthropologist, and as I veered decidedly the colleague replied. The answer surprised me, and I toward "left-handedness" I had to deal with real politi- tucked it away in a fieldnote. cal foes who, on more than one occasion, sent local Before the month was out, however, I had seen my thugs after me, requiring me to leave our field site until fill of newspaper and TV media images of local township the "heat" was off. Now I had to accept that there were schoolchildren burning textbooks, toyi-toyi-ing [the places where I was not welcome in Bom Jesus da Mata high-spirited revolutionary marching dance of Southern and local homes-both grand and small-that were irre- Africa] while chanting for death to the "settlers" and vocably closed to me and consequently to anthropology. "torching" the cars of suspected government "agents" There were embarrassing incidents, such as the time I who dared to enter the black townships during the was accosted in the main town square just as a busload teachers' strike called "Operation Barcelona" (an allu- of people returning from Recife spilled onto the side- sion to the i992 Olympic Games in Barcelona and the walk. Fabiano, the dominant plantation family's parti- torches carried by their lead runners). In townships san journalist, red-faced and angry, knocked me off bal- torches were also a symbol of liberty but were used more ance and yelled drunkenly, "Nanci, Nanci, querida, ominously to keep out "settlers" and to burn out sus- watch out! Why are you messing around with a bunch pected collaborators and other "bad eggs" whose shacks of worthless anarchists and a Commie-faggot priest?" were torched or whose bodies were set afire with "neck- "Tsk! Tsk!" commented local middle-class residents as laces" of petrol-filled tires wrapped around their necks. they scurried past, heads down, with their shopping bun- We learned our lesson when our car was denied entry to dles under their arms. the New Crossroads squatter camp outside Cape Town I wondered what my late mentor, Hortense Powder- on the day we had hoped to attend an ecumenical peace maker, would have said, recalling her enormous pride in service announced by Archbishop Tutu. her ability to negotiate her way skillfully between Later, however, my work brought me into contact and around the "color line" in Sunflower County, Mis- with the rural squatters of Chris Hani camp, a new com- sissippi, in the I930s, managing to maintain open and munity of recently arrived African migrants from the This content downloaded from 218.103.242.245 on Wed, 27 Nov 2024 06:49:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  4I21 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 36, Number 3, June 1995 black homeland of Transkei. The camp suddenly ap- Sidney: You see they stole 400 rands from one of the peared in i992 on the hilly landscape of Franschhoek, a people's houses. So they bought brandy and weap- white-dominated grape-farm, vineyard, and tourist com- ons, pangas [machetes] but when they were caught munity in the Western Cape, as blacks took advantage they gave 2oo rand back. Due to certain codes of con- of a new liberal spirit and presence on the Franschhoek duct they were punished this way. At first the com- town council. (Franschhoek was the site of Vincent Cra- munity called for burnings, then it got set up at IOO panzano's celebrated book Waiting: The Whites of South lashes. Before the punishment was set people were Africa, published in I985.) The incident to which I now waving pangas and said that they are going to get turn concerns three young thieves whose "necklacing" burned because they are thieves. So the boys were was narrowly averted by the intervention of ANC and here just waiting to get killed. PAC (Pan African Congress) politicized youth, who drew me into their action as a way of diverting attention from NS-H: Why wouldn't they run away? themselves. Though I was fearful of being lured into a potentially dangerous trap, the even more fearful condi- Sidney: They couldn't because they were surrounded tion of the "disciplined" young thieves overdetermined by the whole community and the people had these a "human" and engaged rather than a distanced and "ob- pangas and sticks. They didn't have any chance to jective" anthropological response. run away. The incident involved the theft of 400 rands (about $i25) from a shabeen owner by three teenaged boys. Caught red-handed, the thieves were immediately sur- NS-H: Do the people ever think to wait until things rounded by a mob demanding their death by necklacing. are more calm to take action? The sentence was overruled, however, by a small group of youths, citing the ANC Bill of Rights, which con- Sidney: No, no, no! If they catch them now, within demns the death penalty. Necklacing was replaced by five minutes this whole place is full of people. It's ioo strokes with a sjambock (a large bullwhip), further very quick. But this is not the traditional way. In reduced to 50. The floggings were performed collectively the homelands [Transkei] where I come from, I don't by several older men of the squatter-camp community. have the right to judge. Only an old man with a lot Sidney Kumalo, my i8-year-old field assistant, just re- of experience can stand up and speak out and give cently returned from his month of Xhosa initiation, iso- up the punishment. But here it is too simple. If I lation, and disciplined hunger in the bushes near Khaye- don't like that one or that one I can just say, "Give litsha township, confronted me for the first time as a him 8o lashes." Other people who like him better reborn, remade man: "There is something you need to may come up with a smaller number, and so on. It's know about our codes of discipline. You must see the very harsh. boys for yourself," he said, and I accompanied him and his small group of comrades with trepidation and a NS-H: Would they really kill you for stealing 400 heavy heart. Squatter-camp business is public business, rands? and within minutes the word would spread from shack to shack that the new "white woman" was in the camp Sidney: Let me ask the boys themselves.... Yes, again and nosing around the "prisoners." Recording for they say the punishment was that they must get whom? they would wonder. burned... but some of us had sympathy with them "We all deserve a lashing," I had recently written in and we said, "No, just give them the lashes." a despairing letter to friends. "The sadism of society de- mands it." But the sight of the raw and bleeding backs NS-H: Who wanted to protect them? of the young thieves made me want to eat those words. Kept in isolation and denied food and water as a continu- Sidney: Some of their friends. And a lot of the young ation of the discipline imposed by the community, the people here in the PAC and the ANC youth commit- boys were not a pretty sight. They could not bend their tees are against the discipline codes. The ANC does legs, sit down, or walk without wincing, and three days not want us to use the lash on ourselves like a Boer after the whipping they were still unable to urinate or farmer. defecate without difficulty. The smallest, Michael B., scowled with pain and revenge. "I'll kill them," he kept NS-H: What about their relatives? repeating of his tormentors. The community did not want anyone (especially not me) to see the boys for fear Sidney: If their relatives speak out, the people here of police involvement and had refused them medical at- will think, "oh, so you put them up to this, you sent tention. Their parents were nowhere in sight, fearful them there [to steal]." So the parents don't have any that their shacks might be burned were they to show chance to defend their children. And from my experi- any concern for their children. The following was tran- ence, if a parent speaks up for a son, the people can scribed from a tape-recorded interview with the boys, come and burn down your shack. They are very with Sidney serving as translator/interpreter: strict in this discipline. This content downloaded from 218.103.242.245 on Wed, 27 Nov 2024 06:49:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  D'ANDRADE/SCHEPER-HUGHES Objectivity and Militancy I 4I3 NS-H: Has anyone ever been "burned" in this com- for general infection and possible kidney damage. She munity? departed for Cape Town that evening, but her visit to the camp had aroused anxiety and suspicion. The next Sidney: No, not yet. And that's what makes it diffi- morning Sidney and I took Michael by combi-taxi to the cult for them to kill. No one has been killed yet. regional hospital in Paarl, where the boy was put on a And we are afraid, we youth committee people, of course of intravenous antibiotics. The young Afrikaner what will happen here after they take that step once. doctor noted that he was severely dehydrated, anemic, and malnourished and recommended keeping him hos- NS-H: Ask Michael what he learned from this experi- pitalized for a few days. That night I received an anony- ence. mous phone call at "The Anchor Bed and Breakfast," my safe little harbor in rural Franschhoek. "Stay away Sidney (interpreting for Michael): At this moment he from Chris Hani camp," the heavily accented brown- don't think he will steal again, but the only thing Afrikaner voice warned. "People there are angry that that's going through his mind over and over is re- you interfered with their 'discipline.' Your safety cannot venge. But I told him that if he takes revenge he'll be guaranteed." be punished all over again. But right now he can't The next time I returned to Chris Hani camp, several think about anything but revenge, except he doesn't days had passed, and I went to attend the funeral of have the power to do it. a young comrade who had died of tuberculosis, the new scourge of squatter-camp life. His young widow was NS-H: Since the whole community made the deci- beside herself. I slipped into the back of the hastily con- sion to whip him, he would have to take revenge structed "chapel," a lean-to of scrap metal and wood against everyone! covered by a large tarpaulin, painted red, green, and black in the ANC colors. After the service we left in Sidney: Yeah, but he knows who were the people procession, accompanied by strains of the "Umkhonto who did this to him, the ones who whipped him, be- we Sizwe" military rag, recorded with background cause they don't cover their faces. He knows all sounds of rifle and cannon shots. At the grave site the their faces of those who did this. men took up shovels to bury their fallen comrade collec- tively. Then Duncan, a close friend of the deceased, sud- NS-H: Does he have a job? denly came alive and led the ANC youth in a militant toyi-toyi, stamping his feet and chanting in English, Sidney: Nothing permanent. He only works casually while staring fixedly in my direction, "Who's the killer? on the farms helping with the harvests. Who's the killer? Who's the killer?" The following Sunday a community meeting was held NS-H: Is he initiated? to discuss the question of justice and security at Chris Hani. The intervention in the incident of the three Sidney: No, none of them has been initiated. Here in youths had provoked a crisis and the security committee the camp there are even grown men who have not had quit the night before, and there had been blood- been initiated! They may have built their own shed in the camp. Residents were asked their opinions: house, have a child, but still they don't have any Should the security guard be reconstituted, or should rights. the community allow the regular (white) police to patrol NS-H: Why don't they go through the initiation? the community? One by one people stepped forward to express their views. Everyone wanted the local security Sidney: The difficulty is money. In the old days you system, but they wanted the rules and regulations to be would just go to the kraal and get a goat or a sheep, clearer: but today you must spend a lot of money. You get presents but that only pays back a small part of the Who are the security, anyway? People come to our money that is spent. Another thing, the clothes you door and give us orders and we do not know if they wore before the initiation, you must give them are really our security or not. away, for now you are starting a new life. Even the room you stay in, these newspapers on the wall, In the heat of the moment everyone calls for pun- you must take them down and start all over. So you ishment, but after it is carried out, everyone wants see, everything goes back to money and these guys to criticize. don't have any. On the following Saturday I brought a young "col- What about the fairness of the punishments given? ored" medical student from the University of Cape It shouldn't be that people with stronger families get Town to examine the boys, who were still under house off easier than single people, but that often happens. arrest. Rose decided that Michael, the smallest and most injured of the boys, needed more extensive treatment What does the ANC say about discipline? This content downloaded from 218.103.242.245 on Wed, 27 Nov 2024 06:49:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  4I4 1 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 36, Number 3, June 1995 The ANC is against the necklace. her favorite son a final hug, "You'll be able to come back." But was that a threat, an irony, or a critique? Shall we build a jail here? Can't we just wait for the elections in April and Waiting: The Anthropologist as see what happens then? Spectator Finally, I was called up to speak, and my knees were weak as I approached the microphone (Sidney and In juxtaposing "militancy" and "the ethical" in this pa- Temba served as translators): per I wish to question two sacred cows that have pre- vented anthropologists from participating in the strug- Forgive me, for I am a stranger here and have no gle: the proud, even haughty distance from political authority to speak except as you ask me to. I am a engagement and its accompanying, indeed, its justifying member of the ANC ["Long live! Long live!" re- ethic of moral and cultural relativism. The latter has sponded the crowd] and I understand why you reject returned with a vengeance in the still fashionable rheto- the police and why you want to have your own sys- ric of postmodernism, an excuse for political and moral tem of justice. I interfered not to be partial to three dalliance if ever there was one. boys who wronged the community but because I felt In his book on white South Africans of the Western sorry for their mothers, who were ashamed of what Cape, Crapanzano (i984:44) invoked the generative met- their sons had done but who were afraid to help aphor of "waiting" to describe the intellectual and moral them. [Here the older women nodded their heads in paralysis of rural white farmers, both Boer and English, agreement.] And I was afraid that Michael had a seri- on the eve of the inevitable unraveling of apartheid: ous infection and could die without antibiotics. Many people are asking for alternatives to whippings Waiting means to be oriented in time in a special and burnings; some of the young people and many way.... It is a sort of holding action-a lingering. women think it might be better to put thieves to (In its extreme forms waiting can lead to paraly- work for the community: digging ditches, cleaning sis.)... The world in its immediacy slips away. It is up garbage, sewage, and hauling water. de-realized. It is without elan, vitality, creative force. It is numb, muted, dead.... [Waiting] is A committee was formed representing all groups in marked by contingency-the perhaps-and all the the camp-old and young, men and women, sports anxiety [and all the... powerlessness, helplessness, groups, political parties, security members them- vulnerability, and infantile rage] that comes with the selves-to draw up alternatives for popular justice. In experience of contingency. [Waiting] is a passive ac- the interim there would be no more whippings. Squat- tivity. One can never actively seek the object of wait- ter-camp leaders asked for help from the Community ing.... ultimately its arrival or nonarrival is beyond Peace Foundation of the University of the Western Cape, our control. and two representatives of that foundation attended sub- sequent meetings to help the community draft less puni- These phrases irked my white South African colleagues tive rules and alternative punishments. After elections at the University of Cape Town to a point of near- in April, civic association leaders began negotiations murderous rage (see Coetzee I985, Skalnik n.d., Bothma with the local police about sharing responsibility for i99i). They appeared to cast aspersions on all white keeping order at Chris Hani. South Africans and to ignore the role of those coura- Michael, who could not get over his anger and desire geous whites who had joined the political struggle that for revenge, was advised to leave the squatter camp and eventually brought the apartheid state to its knees. But, was helped in locating a new home. The other two while their anger was understandable, their actions dur- thieves accepted their punishment and were reinte- ing the tumultuous year of political transition might be grated into the community. Following Sidney's lead, described in terms of the metaphor of waiting. This is several other youths went into the bush to undergo not surprising, for watchful waiting is what all anthro- Xhosa initiation. The last time I saw one of the thieves pologists are best-trained to do. Above and outside the he was slathered in white clay and smiling broadly. He political fray is where most anthropologists cautiously boasted that his circumcision "cut" had hurt him worse position themselves. than his flogging. In the Department of Social Anthropology at the Uni- When I left Chris Hani, a few older men scolded me versity of Cape Town, "business" proceeded as usual. for having exceeded my role as a visitor and a guest, but The content of anthropology was presented in the An- the women invited me to a farewell beer party where I glo-American tradition of modern social anthropology, was asked to show the slides I had taken of the boys with little attention-except for an incessant preoccu- after their whipping. Seated at the front of the room, pation with falling "standards" and with diagnoses of the women murmured their disapproval. The older men, the presumed "lack" and "deficiencies" of the incoming somewhat abashed, stood to the back of the room close black students-to the dramatic shift in the composi- to the door. "Don't worry," said Mrs. Kumalo, as I gave tion of the student body as black Africans, Indians, Ma- This content downloaded from 218.103.242.245 on Wed, 27 Nov 2024 06:49:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  D'ANDRADE/SCHEPER-HUGHES Objectivity and Militancy I 4I5 lay Muslims, and "Cape Coloured" students began in the investigation into Webster's death, and the inquest much greater numbers to take their places in the front- ended without reaching any definitive conclusions. But row seats of large lecture halls. "Race," "ethnicity," the judge in the inquest said that "the truth was not "tribe," "culture," and "identity" were dutifully decon- told on who killed Webster because many of the suspect structed and de-essentialized in Anthropology ioi, witnesses were professional liars who made their living where they were taught as historically invented and fic- in deception" (Mkhondo I993:84-85). Given this hor- tive concepts (see Boonzaier and Sharp i988). Mean- rendous social and political reality, leaving South Africa, while, throughout the year South African Xhosas and my anthropological colleagues would say, was easy; the Zulus (manipulated by a government-orchestrated decision to stay behind was more difficult and fraught "third force") daily slaughtered each other in and around with sometimes life-preserving compromise.4 worker hostels in the name of "tribe,"1 "ethnicity," and But in the necessary settling of accounts now taking "culture." The relativizing, deconstructionist exercise place in South Africa,5 a radical self-critique6 is a neces- seemed irrelevant to the material history of oppressed sary precondition for recasting anthropology as a tool for and oppressor "tribes" in South Africa and to the recov- human liberation in the new South Africa. Without this, ery of "spoiled identities" and "spoiled ethnici- anthropology in South Africa will survive only as the ties" ("Colored," "Zulu," and "Afrikaner" among them) quaint hobby of privileged postcolonials. in the politically negotiated process of new-nation building. And tea was still served, with predictable regularity, Moral Accountability and Anthropology in at ten, twelve-thirty, and three in the appropriately Extreme Situations dowdy tearoom, the same space where Monica Wilson once held court. Departmental "founding father" A. R. The idea of an active, politically committed, morally Radcliffe-Brown's rough-hewn initialed mailbox still engaged anthropology strikes many anthropologists as perches jauntily on a side table, a sacred icon to the unsavory, tainted, even frightening. This is less so in less-than-sacred history of anthropology at the Univer- parts of Latin America, India, and Europe (Italy and sity of Cape Town (see Phillips I994:2I-29, 270-74). France, for example), where the anthropological project As the tea itself, served up with a sharp, intimidating, is at once ethnographic, epistemologic, and political and exclusive, and only rarely self-mocking humor, is a re- minder that the old order is hanging on to the bitter 4. For example, Monica Wilson bowed to pressure from the ruling end, tearoom topics are carefully circumscribed: cricket, South African National Party's apartheid govemment and removed film, and popular culture are acceptable, as are anec- what the govemment viewed as an offensive chapter on black dotes about foibles of odd and eccentric South African South African resistance movements from the second volume of or European anthropologists, living or dead. Anxieties her and Leonard Thompson's History of South Africa, I870-I966 (i982), published in Cape Town by D. Phillip. The edition pub- and fears about the political transition are (understand- lished in I97I in New York as the Oxford History of South Africa ably) commonly expressed. However, any seemingly na- included that chapter. Many South African radical intellectuals ive and optimistic reference to the "new" South Africa were extremely critical of this publishing decision. can result in a dramatic exodus from the tearoom. 5. The new parliament of South Africa has established a Commis- "What do you expect?" commented an ANC constitu- sion of Truth and Reconciliation to enable South Africa and South Africans to come to terms with their past. Just before leaving Cape tional lawyer and former professor of human rights, now Town in July I994 I received a memo from the Ministry of Justice a member of the new Parliament. "Academics are use- and from Minister Dullah Omar, MP, addressed to the chair of the less. They are far too willing to serve any master." The Department of Social Anthropology. The memo outlined the steps involvement of one tradition (English) of South African to be taken by the official commission, and it invited the depart- ment along with all other "public organizations and religious bod- anthropology in the service of colonialism and, of an- ies" to submit comments, suggestions, and proposals regarding the other (Afrikaner) in the implementation of the mun- commission's work. My thoughts on the topic were also stimulated danely evil details of grand apartheid is illustrative. by an IDASA (Institute for Democratic Alternatives in South However, in the complicated and dangerous history Africa)-sponsored conference entitled "Justice in Transition- of contemporary South African politics, noninvolve- Dealing with the Past" that I was privileged to attended in Cape Town on February 25-27, I994. ment had its virtues, and it could be seen as an evasive 6. What "colonialist" social anthropology did not do in the "old" microstrategy of resistance. One South African anthro- South Africa was open its doors to the training of black South pologist, David Webster, who made his resistance rather African anthropologists in great numbers who might have been more public, was murdered for his involvement in the able to put our discipline in the service of human liberation there. Insofar as social anthropology did not seek to make itself an intel- political struggle against apartheid. At the time of his lectual and moral home for black South Africans, the discipline assassination David Webster was a lecturer in social an- was consequently impoverished. There are some exceptions. Today thropology at the University of the Witwatersrand. On there is one African social anthropologist, Harriet Nugubane (who May i, I989, as he walked to the back of his van to let was trained in Britain), who is serving as an elected official, a mem- out his dogs, a white sedan with darkened windows sped ber of the new parliament, where she represents her homeland, Kwazulu, and the Inkatha Freedom Party. Mamphele Ramphele is down the road, a shotgun appeared through the back an African anthropologist (as well as a physician) who is a deputy window and at close range and shot a hole through Web- vice chancellor at the University of Cape Town, where she received ster's chest. Senior police officers took steps to inhibit her doctorate in anthropology. This content downloaded from 218.103.242.245 on Wed, 27 Nov 2024 06:49:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 416 | CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 36, Number 3, June 1995 where anthropologists do communicate broadly with [leave anthropology behind] and we enter the politi- "the polis" and "the public." cal process. Many colleagues reacted with anger when I first began to speak and to write about the routinization and medi- But why is it assumed that when anthropologists en- calization of hunger among Brazilian sugarcane cutters ter the struggle we must inevitably bow out of anthro- and about the mortal selective neglect and unnecessary pology? Since when is evil exempt from human reality? deaths of their young children, in which layers of bad Why do anthropologists so steadfastly refuse to stare faith and complicity joined the oppressed and their op- back at it, to speak truth to its power? What are we pressors in a macabre dance of death. The bad faith ex- passively waiting for? One listener threw up his hands isted on many levels: among doctors and pharmacists in mock confusion in response to a paper on the political who allowed their knowledge and skills to be abused; economy of mother love and infant death in the Brazil- among local politicians who presented themselves as ian shantytown that I delivered at the University of Chi- community benefactors while knowing full well what cago in I987." Why are we being served this?" he asked. they were doing in distributing tranquilizers and appe- "How are we supposed to feel?... And what in the tite stimulants to hungry people from the overstocked world are we supposed to do?" drawers of municipal file cabinets; among the sick poor themselves, who even while critical of the medical mis- treatment they received continued to hold out for a med- The Politics of Representation ical-technical solution to their political and economic troubles; and, finally, among medical anthropologists As writers and producers of demanding images and whose fascination with metaphors, signs, and symbols texts, what do we want from our readers? To shock? To can blind us to the banal materiality of human suffering evoke pity? To create new forms of narrative, an "aes- and prevent us from developing a political discourse on thetic" of misery, an anthropology of suffering, an an- those hungry populations of the Third World that gener- thropological theodicy? And what of the people whose ously provide us with our livelihoods. suffering and fearful accommodations to it are trans- What was I after, after all? Chronic hunger, of the sort formed into a public spectacle? What is our obligation that I was describing in rural Brazil, was not unusual, I to them? was told at a faculty seminar at the University of North Those of us who make our living observing and re- Carolina, Chapel Hill, in I983. Many, perhaps the ma- cording the misery of the world have a particular obliga- jority, of Indonesian villagers the critic had been study- tion to reflect critically on the impact of the harsh im- ing were surviving on a similarly meager and deficient ages of human suffering that we foist on the public. I diet as the Northeast Brazilian cane cutters. Why had I think of the brutal images of fleeing Haitian boat people made that-the mundane concreteness of chronic hun- and the emotionally devastated family around the bed- ger and its eroding effects on the human spirit-the driv- side of a dying AIDS patient with which the business ing force and focus of my Brazilian work? "Is this an magnate Benetton has assaulted us, for reasons that re- anthropology of evil?" asked the late Paul Riesman as a main altogether unclear, and of the daily media images formal discussant in a AAA-sponsored symposium in of horror in Bosnia, Somalia, the Middle East, and the response to my analysis of the "bad faith" which al- townships of South Africa and of Sebastiao Salgado's im- lowed clinic doctors, as well as rural workers them- ages of hunger and death in the Brazilian Northeast. To selves, to overlook the starvation that lay just beneath what end are we given and do we represent these images the skin of their own and their babies' "nervousness," as long as the misery and the suffering continue un- "irritability," and "delirium" and permitted the doctors abated? The experience of Northeast Brazil and South to medicate even the smallest toddler's hunger with Africa indicates that the more frequent and ubiquitous painkillers, phenobarbital, antibiotics, and sleeping the images of sickness, political terror, starvation- and pills. Riesman (cited in Scheper-Hughes I988:456 n. 4) death, burnings and hangings, the more people living concluded: the terror accept the brutality as routine, normal, even expected. The shock reaction is readily extinguished, It seems to me that when we act in critical situa- and people everywhere seem to have an enormous ca- tions of the sort that Scheper-Hughes describes for pacity to absorb the hideous and go on with life and with Northeast Brazil, we leave anthropology behind. We the terror, violence, and misery as usual. leave it behind because we abandon what I believe As Michael Taussig (i992) has noted, citing Walter to be a fundamental axiom of the creed we share, Benjamin's analysis of the history of European fascism, namely that all humans are equal in the sight of an- it is almost impossible to be continually conscious of thropology. Though Scheper-Hughes does not put it the state of emergency in which one lives. Sooner or this way, the struggle she is urging anthropologists later one makes one's accommodations to it. The images to join is a struggle against evil. Once we identify an meant to evoke shock and panic evoke only blank stares, evil, I think we give up trying to understand the situ- a shrug of the shoulders, a nod-acceptance as routine ation as a human reality. Instead we see it as in and normal of the extraordinary state of siege under some sense inhuman, and all we then try to under- which so many live. Humans have any uncanny ability stand is how best to combat it. At this point we to hold terror and misery at arm's length, especially This content downloaded from 218.103.242.245 on Wed, 27 Nov 2024 06:49:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  D 'ANDRADE/SCHEPER-HUGHES Objectivity and Militancy I 4I7 when they occur in their own community and are right that most Cape Town Xhosa, Venda, Zulu, Afrikaner, before their eyes. Anthropologists do so themselves and Moslem students want is not the anthropology of when they apply their theoretical abstractions and rhe- deconstruction and the social imaginary but the anthro- torical figures of speech to the horrors of political vio- pology of the really real, in which the stakes are high, lence-both wars of repression and wars of libera- values are certain, and ethnicity (if not essentialized) is tion-so that the suffering is aestheticized (turned into certainly essential. Here, writing against culture7 would theater, viewed as "performance") and thereby mini- be writing against them, against their grain, against their mized and denied. The new cadre of "barefoot anthropol- emergent need, in a newly forming and, one hopes, dem- ogists" that I envision must become alarmists and shock ocratic state, for collective self-definition and historical troopers-the producers of politically complicated and legitimacy-for a place in the sun. morally demanding texts and images capable of sinking Anthropology, it seems to me, must be there to pro- through the layers of acceptance, complicity, and bad vide the kind of deeply textured, fine-tuned narratives faith that allow the suffering and the deaths to continue describing the specificity of lives lived in small and iso- without even the pained cry of recognition of Conrad's lated places in distant homelands, in the "native yards" (i9io) evil protagonist, Kurtz: "The horror! the horror!" of sprawling townships, or in the Afrikaner farm com- munities of the Stellenbosch and the Boland. And we need, more than ever, to locate and train indigenous lo- Anthropology without Borders: The cal anthropologists and organic intellectuals to work Postmodern Critique with us and to help us redefine and transform ourselves and our vexed craft. Ethnography has had a rough time of it lately. In the Many younger anthropologists today, sensitized by brave new world of reflexive postmodernists, when an- the writings of Michel Foucault on power/knowledge, thropologists arrive in the field everything local is said have come to think of anthropological fieldwork as a to dissolve into merged media images, transgressed kind of invasive, disciplinary "panopticon" and the an- boundaries, promiscuously mobile multinational indus- thropological interview as similar to the medieval inqui- try and workers, and transnational-corporate desires and sitional confession through which church examiners ex- commodity fetishism. This imagined postmodern, bor- tracted "truth" from their native and "heretical" derless world (Appadurai I99I) is, in fact, a Camelot of peasant parishioners. One hears of anthropological ob- free trade that echoes the marketplace rhetoric of global servation as a hostile act that reduces our "subjects" capitalism, a making of the world and social science safe to mere "objects" of our discriminating, incriminating, for "low-intensity democracy" backed by World Bank scientific gaze. Consequently, some postmodern anthro- capital. The flight from the local in hot pursuit of a pologists have given up the practice of descriptive eth- transnational, borderless anthropology implies a parallel nography altogether. flight from local engagements, local commitments, and I am weary of these postmodernist critiques, and, local accountability. Once the circuits of power are seen given the perilous times in which we and our subjects as capillary, diffuse, global, and difficult to trace to their live, I am inclined toward compromise, the practice of sources, the idea of resistance becomes meaningless. It a "good enough" ethnography (igg2b:28). While the an- can be either nothing or anything at all. (Have we lost thropologist is always a necessarily flawed and biased our senses altogether?) The idea of an anthropology without borders, al- though it has a progressive ring to it, ignores the reality of the very real borders that confront and oppress "our" 7. Here I have taken Lila Abu-Lughod's "writing against culture" anthropological subjects and encroach on our liberty as notion out of context, and I want to suggest that her reflections on the "abuses" of the culture concept are not incompatible with well. (The obstacles that the U.S. government puts in the views put forward in this paper. Culture has been invoked in the way of North Americans wishing to conduct re- many inappropriate contexts as a kind of fetish. Paul Farmer (I994) search in Cuba or establish ties with Cuban scholars are notes in his recent reflections on the structure of violence that the just one case in point.) These borders are as real as the idea of culture has often been used to obscure the social relations, political economy, and formal institutions of violence that pro- passports and passbooks, the sandbagged bunkers, the mote and produce human suffering. Cultures do not, of course, armed roadblocks and barricades, and the "no-go zones" only generate meaning in the Geertzian sense but produce legiti- that separate hostile peoples, territories, and states. The mations for institutionalized inequality and justifications for ex- borders confront us with the indisputable reality of elec- ploitation and domination. The culture concept has been used to tric fences, razor wire, nail-studded hand grenades, exaggerate and to mystify the differences between anthropologists and their subjects, as in the implicit suggestion that because they AK47's; where these are lacking, as in South African are "from different cultures, they are [also therefore] of different townships and squatter camps, stones and torches will worlds, and of different times" (Farmer I994:24). This "denial of do. coevalness" is deeply ingrained in our discipline, exemplified each Having recently returned from South Africa, where time we speak with awe of the impenetrable opacity of culture or of the incommensurability of cultural systems of thought, mean- both black and white tribes, Zulus and Afrikaners, were ing, and practice. Here culture may actually be a disguise for an demanding enclosed and militarily defended homelands, incipient or an underlying racism, a pseudo-speciation of humans it is difficult to relate to the whimsical postmodernist into discrete types, orders, and kinds-the bell jar rather than the language extolling borderless worlds. The anthropology bell curve approach to reifying difference. This content downloaded from 218.103.242.245 on Wed, 27 Nov 2024 06:49:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  4I8 | CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 36, Number 3, June 1995 instrument of cultural translation, like every other crafts- gins as a mediator in the clash of colonial cultures and person we can do the best we can with the limited civilizations, anthropological thinking was, in a sense, resources we have at hand: our ability to listen and to radically "conservative" with respect to its "natural" observe carefully and with empathy and compassion. I suspiciousness of all projects promoting change, devel- still believe that we are best doing what we do best as opment, modernization, and the like. We knew how of- ethnographers, as natural historians of people until very ten such interventions were used against traditional, recently thought to have no history. And so I think of nonsecular, and communal people who stood in the way some of my anthropological subjects-in Brazil Biu, of Western cultural and economic expansion. Therefore, Dona Amor, little Mercea, little angel-baby that she is it was understood that anthropological work, if it was to now; in South Africa, Sidney Kumalo and the three boys be in the nature of an ethical project, had to be primarily rescued in the nick of time from a mortal flogging-for transformative of the self, while putting few or no de- whom anthropology is not a "hostile gaze" but rather mands on "the other." The artificial and (at times) coun- an opportunity for self-expression. Seeing, listening, terintuitive notion of cultural (and moral and political) touching, recording can be, if done with care and sensi- relativism evolved as the sacred oath of anthropological tivity, acts of solidarity. Above all, they are the work of fieldwork. As the physicians' injunction was to "do no recognition. Not to look, not to touch, not to record can harm," the anthropologists' injunction was (like the be the hostile act, an act of indifference and of turning three monkeys of ancient China) to "see no evil, hear away. no evil, speak no evil" in reporting from the field. If I did not believe that ethnography could be used as While the first generations of cultural anthropologists a tool for critical reflection and for human liberation, were concerned with relativizing thought and reason, I what kind of perverse cynicism would keep me re- have suggested that a more "womanly" anthropology turning again and again to disturb the waters of Bom might be concerned not only with how humans think Jesus da Mata or to study the contradictory medical and but with how they behave toward each other. This political detention of Cubans in the Havana AIDS sana- would engage anthropology directly with questions of torium? Or, more recently, to study the underbelly of ethics. The problem remains in searching for a standard political violence and terror in the makeshift mortuary or divergent ethical standards that take into account chapels of Chris Hani squatter camp (Scheper-Hughes (but do not privilege) our own "Western" cultural pre- I994b)? What draws me back to these people and places suppositions. is not their exoticism and their "otherness" but the pur- In the shantytown of Alto do Cruzeiro in Northeast suit of those small spaces of convergence, recognition, Brazil I encountered a situation in which some mothers and empathy that we share. Not everything dissolves appear to have "suspended the ethical"-compassion, into the vapor of absolute cultural difference and radical empathic love, and care-in relation to some of their otherness. There are ways in which my Brazilian, Cu- weak and sickly children, allowing them to die of ne- ban, Irish, and South African interlocutors and I are not glect in the face of overwhelming difficulties. In the so radically "other" to each other. Like the peasants of South African squatter camps of the Western Cape I Ireland and Northeast Brazil, I too instinctively make stumbled upon another instance: the expressed senti- the sign of the cross when I sense danger or misfortune ment that one less young thief or police "collaborator" approaching. And like Mrs. Kumalo and so many other makes good sense in terms of social and community middle-aged women of Chris Hani squatter camp, I too hygiene. At times the shantytown or the squatter camp wait up (till dawn if necessary) for the scrape-scrape resembles nothing so much as a battlefield, a prison sound of my son and daughters as, one by one, following camp, or an emergency room in a crowded inner-city their own life plans, they turn their keys in the latch hospital, where an ethic of triage replaces an ethical re- and announce their arrival one more day from an unsafe gard for the equal value of every life. The survivor's and booby-trapped outside world. "logic" that guides shantytown mothers' actions toward some of their weak babies is understandable. The fragil- ity and "dangerousness" of the mother-infant relation- The Primacy of the Ethical ship is an immediate and visible index of chronic scar- city, hunger, and other unmet needs. And the The work of anthropology demands an explicit ethical revolutionary logic that sees in the pressured but self- orientation to "the other." In the past-and with good serving acts of a young police collaborator the sorcery reason-this was interpreted as a respectful distance, a of a scarcely human witch or devil is also understand- hesitancy, and a reluctance to name wrongs, to judge, able. But the moral and ethical issues must still give to intervene, or to prescribe change, even in the face of reason to pause and to doubt. How often the oppressed considerable human misery. In existential philosophical turn into their own oppressors or, worse still, into the terms, anthropology, like theology, implied a leap of oppressors of others! faith to an unknown, opaque other-than-myself, before Anthropologists who are privileged to witness human whom a kind of reverence and awe was required. The events close up and over time, who are privy to commu- practice of anthropology was guided by a complex form nity secrets that are generally hidden from the view of of modern pessimism rooted in anthropology's tortured outsiders or from historical scrutiny until much later- relationship to the colonial world and its ruthless de- after the collective graves have been discovered and the struction of native lands and peoples. Because of its oni- body counts made have, I believe, an ethical obligation This content downloaded from 218.103.242.245 on Wed, 27 Nov 2024 06:49:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  D 'ANDRADE/SCHEPER-HUGHES Objectivity and Militancy I 4I9 to identify the ills in a spirit of solidarity and to follow anthropology to the natural sciences, "witnessing" links what Gilligan (i982) has called a "womanly" ethic of anthropology to moral philosophy. Observation, the an- care and responsibility. If anthropologists deny them- thropologist as "fearless spectator," is a passive act selves the power (because it implies a privileged posi- which positions the anthropologist above and outside tion) to identify an ill or a wrong and choose to ignore human events as a "neutral" and "objective" (i.e., un- (because it is not pretty) the extent to which dominated committed) seeing I/eye. Witnessing, the anthropologist people sometimes play the role of their own execution- as companheira, is in the active voice, and it positions ers, they collaborate with the relations of power and si- the anthropologist inside human events as a responsive, lence that allow the destruction to continue. reflexive, and morally committed being, one who will To speak of the "primacy of the ethical" is to suggest "take sides" and make judgments, though this flies in certain transcendent, transparent, and essential, if not the face of the anthropological nonengagement with ei- "precultural," first principles. Historically anthropolo- ther ethics or politics. Of course, noninvolvement was, gists have understood morality as contingent on and em- in itself, an "ethical"and moral position. bedded within specific cultural assumptions about hu- The fearless spectator is accountable to "science"; the man life. But there is another philosophical position that witness is accountable to history. Anthropologists as posits "the ethical" as existing prior to culture because, witnesses are accountable for what they see and what as Emmanuel Levinas (i 987: Ioo) writes, in presupposing they fail to see, how they act and how they fail to act all meaning, ethics makes culture possible: "Mortality in critical situations. In this regard, Orin Starn's poi- does not belong to culture: [it] enables one to judge it." gnant essay "Missing the Revolution: Anthropologists Here I will tentatively and hesitantly suggest that re- and the War in Peru" (i992) indirectly makes "my" case. sponsibility, accountability, answerability to "the Anthropologists, no less than any other professionals, other"-the ethical as I would define it-is precultural should be held accountable for how we have used and to the extent that our human existence as social beings how we have failed to use anthropology as a critical tool presupposes the presence of the other. The extreme rela- at crucial historical moments. It is the the act of "wit- tivist position assumes that thought, emotion, and re- nessing" that lends our work its moral, at times almost flexivity come into existence with words and words theological, character. In Death Without Weeping I ob- come into being with culture. But the generative pre- served how participant-observation has a way of drawing structure of language presupposes, as Sartre (I956) has ethnographers into spaces of human life where they written, a given relationship with another subject, one might really prefer not to go at all and, once there, do that exists prior to words in the silent, preverbal "taking not know how to escape except through writing, which stock" of each other's existence. Though I veer danger- willy-nilly draws others there as well, making them ously toward what some might construe as a latent so- party to the witnessing. ciobiology, I cannot escape the following observation: I have an image, taken from John Berger (i967), of the that we are thrown into existence at all presupposes a ethnographer/witness as the "clerk of the records." The given, implicit moral relationship to an original village clerk listens, observes, and records the minutiae (m)other and she to me. "Basic strangeness"-as the psy- of human lives. The clerk can be counted on to remem- choanalyst Maria Piers labeled the profound shock of ber key events in the personal lives and in the life his- mis-recognition reported by a great many mothers in tory of the community and to keep confidences, know- their first encounters with a newborn-is perhaps the ing when to speak and when to keep silent. The prototype of all other alienated self-other relations, in- ethnographer/witness as clerk is a minor historian of cluding that of the anthropologist and her overly exot- the ordinary lives of people often presumed to have no icized others. Just as many women may fail to recognize history. Privileged to be present at births and deaths and a human kinship with the newborn and see it as a other life cycle events, the clerk can readily call to mind strange, exotic, other-a bird, a crocodile, a changeling, the fragile web of human relations that bind people to- one to be returned to sky or water rather than adopted gether into a collectivity and identify those external and or claimed-so the anthropologist can view her subjects internal relations that destroy them as a community. In as unspeakably other, belonging to another time, an- the shantytowns and squatter camps of Brazil and South other world altogether. If it is to be in the nature of Africa there are a great many lives and even more deaths an ethical project, the work of anthropology requires a to keep track of, numbering the bones of a people often different set of relationships. In minimalist terms this thought of as hardly worth counting at all. The answer might be described as the difference between the anthro- to the critique of anthropology is not a retreat from eth- pologist as "spectator" and the anthropologist as "wit- nography but rather an ethnography that is personally ness." engaged and politically committed. If my writings have promoted a certain malaise or discomfort with respect to their sometimes counterintuitive claims, then they Witnessing: Toward a Barefoot Anthropology have done the work of anthropology, "the difficult sci- ence": to afflict our comfortable assumptions about In the act of writing culture what emerges is always a what it means to be human, a woman, a mother. highly subjective, partial, and fragmentary but also I want to ask what anthropology might become if it deeply personal record of human lives based on eye- existed on two fronts: as a field of knowledge (as a "dis- witness accounts and testimony. If "observation" links cipline") and as a field of action, a force field, or a site This content downloaded from 218.103.242.245 on Wed, 27 Nov 2024 06:49:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 420 1 CURRENT ANTHROPOLOGY Volume 36, Number 3, June 1995 of struggle. Anthropological writing can be a site of re- academic health? Why should we assume that cul- sistance. This resembles what the radical Italian psychi- tural-social-anthropology has any unity other than atrist Franco Basaglia (I987) called becoming a "negative through an administratively driven economy of knowl- worker." The negative worker is a species of class trai- edge? Why should we assume that unity is desirable? tor-a doctor, a teacher, a lawyer, psychologist, a social There are many often contradictory practices of anthro- worker, a manager, a social scientist, even-who col- pology, including the pedagogic, and many divergent ludes with the powerless to identify their needs against goals, methodologies, interpretive strategies, and ex- the interests of the bourgeois institution: the university, planatory procedures. I would argue that the reduction the hospital, the factory. Negative workers are hospital- of anthropology to a single practice is neither realistic based psychiatrists who side with their resistant or nor morally or politically commendable. This is particu- "noncompliant" mental patients, grade-school teachers larly true today with the development of anthropologies who side with their "hyperactive" students, social around the world and the consequent increase in distinct workers who side with their welfare "cheats," and so orientations that, threatening to our hegemonic assump- forth. tions, may well produce a backlash justified on bogus Anthropologists, too, can be negative workers. We can scientific grounds. practice an anthropology-with-one's-feet-on-the-ground, Anthropology should be conceived, I believe, as a cre- a committed, grounded, even a "barefoot" anthropology. atively agonistic arena whose centering and boundaries We can write books that go against the grain by avoiding are always in question. Stabilization suggests that forces impenetrable prose (whether postmodernist or Lacanian) beyond its immediate ken are at play. I am not denying so as to be accessible to the people we say we represent. anthropology its turf. I am asking for the critical consid- We can disrupt expected academic roles and statuses in eration of that turf, its formation, its definition, and the the spirit of the Brazilian "carnavalesque. " We can make practices and transgressions it facilitates and those it ourselves available not just as friends or as "patrons" in does not. We should look at anthropology with the same the old colonialist sense but as comrades (with all the critical edge that we look at our chosen subjects of eth- demands and responsibilities that this word implies) to nographic research. the people who are the subjects of our writings, whose What distresses me about these papers is their failure lives and miseries provide us with a livelihood. We to look with ethnographic rigor at the field which, as can-as Michel De Certeau (I984) suggests-exchange they argue, they constitute. They are polemical. For gifts based on our labors, use book royalties to support D'Andrade the enemy is those who hold a moral model radical actions, and seek to avoid the deadening tread- of anthropology and are therefore willing to sacrifice ob- mill of academic achievement and in this way subvert jectivity for moral engagement. For Scheper-Hughes the the process that puts our work at the service of the sci- enemy is those who refuse moral and political engage- entific, academic factory. ment. Despite their differences, they are united by a dis- We can distance ourselves from old and unreal loyal- trust if not a rejection of relativism, which they identify ties, as Virginia Woolf (I938) described them: loyalties at times with postmodernism. In their papers postmod- to old schools, old churches, old ceremonies, and old ernism is an empty category that serves a defining (a countries. Freedom from unreal loyalties means ridding latently unifying) function. Projectively predetermined, oneself of pride of family, nation, religion, pride of sex it offers no real challenge to its critics' assumptions. and gender, and all the other dangerous loyalties that I don't have the foggiest idea what D'Andrade or spring from them. In doing so we can position ourselves, Scheper-Hughes or many anthropologists who bandy as Robert Redfield once put it, squarely on the side of "postmodernism" about mean by it. I don't know to humanity. We can be anthropologists, comrades, and whom they are referring. I don't know what commonal- companheiras. ties they find, if indeed they find any, in the writings of Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Baudrillard, Andrew Ross, or the contributors to Writing Culture. In our political cli- mate relativism can neither be dismissed nor accepted Comments easily. Certainly it cannot be reduced to the promiscu- ous surface plays that have been identified with a post- modemist sensibility, if only because there are many VINCENT CRAPANZANO types of relativism, including the moral and the heuris- Comparative Literature, CUNY Graduate Center, tic, which is probably an essential though transitory 33 W. 42nd St., New York, N.Y. 10036-80gg, U.S.A. component of any interpretive practice. I3 XII 94 This projective dismissal of postmodernism reminds me of other, equally empty dismissals that have charac- The two papers under consideration assume a disci- terized American anthropology's struggle for internal pline-an anthropology-that permits their juxtaposi- hegemonic orientation-think of the rejections of struc- tion, their arguments, the containment of their con- turalism and of psychological, symbolic, and interpre- flicts. But is this disciplinary unity a necessary, a tive anthropology over the past few decades. I've heard realistic assumption-one that can be justified on objec- serious anthropologists call these approaches "intellec- tive, on moral or political, grounds? on the grounds of tual" with all of the vituperative antiintellectualism of This content downloaded from 218.103.242.245 on Wed, 27 Nov 2024 06:49:22 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  D'ANDRADE/SCHEPER-HUGHES Objectivity and Militancy I 42I a Jesse Helms. Of course, I've heard "intellectuals" and honest debate. We cannot accept the demands of the name-call too. Is our discipline(s) so fragile that it re- people we work with naively any more than we can ex- quires such mindless rhetoric? Can't we accept a chal- pect their naive acceptance. We have to grant them their lenge, however absurd we may at first find it? Ought we ability to see through us. The moral, however rational- not to treat postmodernism as a social fact like any ized, is always the result of a complex play of desire and other? We should ask why so few anthropologists enter power. We can never become companheiros and com- into critical, public conversation with advocates of posi- panheiras. We are always outsiders-and there lies our tions they find questionable. power, as dangerous as it may be, and the source of Obviously I cannot resolve the differences between our interpellation and responsiveness. We cannot deny D'Andrade and Scheper-Hughes and the several episte- our expertise-the fact, the conviction, of at times mologies they invoke. D'Andrade's insistence on the ob- knowing better-any more than we can deny our infor- jective fact as prevailing over the moral and political mants' expertise-their conviction, the fact, of their entanglements produced by engagement is noble. Were knowing better. We have to resist easy slogans like "the it only true! It takes neither a Marx nor a Foucault to struggle against oppression." In their abstraction, remind us that the objective cannot be separated from though they may flatter and excite, they counter effec- the plays of personal and collective power. In his at- tive engagement. We have-and here we must acknowl- tempt to separate the scientific from the moral D'An- edge D'Andrade's call for objective knowledge, as flawed drade recognizes this. It's clear that we should do our as it may be-to modulate our desire and the lure of best to separate the two, but can we? I ask this question power with "hard" fact. There can, I suppose, be no mo- with regard to its social and psychological feasibility rality without truth. Truth, knowledge, and objectivity and its epistemological possibility. Personal experience are not, however, precluded by moral and political en- leads me to answer the first negatively. I admit my ever- gagement. One can perhaps be more objective in assum- increasing pessimism. I would also answer the second ing a moral and political stance than in denying one in negatively, and not simply because our research involves the name of scientific disinterest, for in disinterest active engagement with our subjects. (Even the most power and desire are suppressed but no less effective. invisible anthropologist is, despite himself, an active presence.) If, as I have suggested in Hermes' Dilemma and Hamlet's Desire (I 994), categories of social and psy- JONATHAN FRIEDMAN chological understanding are derivative of the complex Department of Social Anthropology, Lund indexical dramas that characterize ordinary social inter- University, Box 114, 221 00 Lund, Sweden action, including that between anthropologist and infor- ([email protected]). I I 95 mant, then it follows that our human sciences are mor- ally grounded and have to be recognized as such. To These two statements ought not, in my view, to be un- argue for the separation of moral and scientific models derstood and discussed as opposing positions with re- is not necessarily to argue against the moral grounding spect to anthropology: science versus morality. Rather, of scientific epistemology. their foci dovetail or overlap at certain central points. We have to develop an epistemology for our disci- I therefore feel obliged to deal with them separately and pline(s) which is appropriate to its practice. We cannot then return to them in a concluding paragraph. buy into irrelevant or only partially relevant models of I feel a great deal of sympathy with Scheper-Hughes's science that have clout because they have been success- very personal account of political engagement. The kind ful in other domains. It seems obvious that most but by of ethnography that delves into the lives of people and no means all anthropological research precludes correc- is not afraid to take up issues relating oppression and tion through replication. Are we to dimiss all but the social crisis to their transfiguration in the horrors replicable? Better that we accept it, acknowledging self- and interpersonal violence of the everyday is a critical critically its limitations and acknowledging the limita- necessity for a responsible anthropology. I must also tions, the determinants, of our self-criticism. confess that I was quite shocked at the reactions by I stress these determinants because there is always the other anthropologists to what she refers to as the "rou- possibility that in the name of critical self-reflexivity a tinization of and medicalization of hunger." Have I un- rigid and morally insensitive stance may be warranted. derstood the situation correctly, or has something been There is danger in S