The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019

Abstract

This essay principally meditates on the scholarship published by sociocultural anthropologists in 2019. In 2019, the field of anthropology confronted anthropogenic climate change and authoritarian governance both as objects of scholarly inquiry and as existential threats to the reproduction of the discipline. Taking the 2018 American Anthropological Association meeting in San Jose as a point of departure, this essay posits the California wildfires as an immanent challenge to anthropological practice. Pace Mike Davis, the case for letting anthropology burn entails a call to abandon its liberal suppositions. As a discourse of moral perfectibility founded in histories of settler colonialism and chattel slavery, liberal humanism and its anthropological register of ethnographic sentimentalism proved insufficient to confront the existential threats of climate catastrophe and authoritarian retrenchment in 2019. The case for letting anthropology burn is fortified by efforts to unsettle the conceptual and methodological preoccupations of the discipline in service of political projects of repatriation, repair, and abolition. By abandoning the universal liberal subject as a stable foil for a renewed project of cultural critique, the field of anthropology cannot presume a coherent human subject as its point of departure but must adopt a radical humanism as its political horizon. [sociocultural anthropology, settler colonialism, afterlives of slavery, climate change, the human]

Introduction: Computing in/from the South

“…Euro-American expert discourses on science and technology often needed their underdeveloped or Indigenous technological "Others" through which to institute their own place in the world writ large (Fabian, 2002;Jobson, 2020;Trouillot, 2003). This relational model, once establish, would continue to be a theme in computing through the mid-twenty-first century.…”

From Sparks and Embers: Concluding Reflections on Anthropology, Generation, and Central America

“…I followed another intellectual pathway. Hauntingly, I see myself in Jobson's description of a “decolonizing generation” that “once suffered from widespread neglect, it now risks being silenced by passive incorporation into a professional enterprise marked by enduring inequalities” (2020, 267). More than a decade later, I am a full professor.…”

“…This IFI was born in a bar conversation in the toxic haze of the San Jose AAA meetings. So, as we review the journal's legacy, and consider missing voices and alternative possibilities, we must ask, remembering Jobson's provocation was also sparked in that smoky California venue (2020): (How) does it participate in a liberal humanism rooted in indigenous dispossession and Atlantic slavery?…”

“…Indeed. Jobson (2020) reminds us that the discipline, born of the Western colonial project, clings to its liberal suppositions. In the past quarter century, of course, most cultural anthropologists have challenged (though not overcome) the imperialist, extractive, all‐seeing scientific holism of early practices, and many have embraced ideals of multiplicity of voices and alternative ontologies.…”

“…While in the mid‐1990s some of a certain generation of thinkers, particularly materialists, dismissed such moves as “postmodern,” a more profound critique might deem them to be rescues for a flawed liberal project. In Jobson's words: “Anthropology, like Malibu, pursues its own fixes for its cyclical crises of legitimacy” (2020, 260). What would it mean to have published more Central American anthropologists in the journal?…”