Or … Normalizing Anthropology’s Engagement with the Centers of Power
When you think “Anthropology,” you probably don’t immediately think, “Yes, those are the academic types that get tapped as regular op-ed writers for major newspapers, write engaging books about broadly relevant topics that large audiences want to read, and get access to the corridors of political and corporate power to advise on big, mainstream political and elite media topics like tax policy, effective institutional organization, and international affairs.” More power to Paul Krugman, but anthropologists are like most other academics; the detailed, specialized concepts and observations we scrutinize and discuss are really comfortable for us to deal with, day in, day out … but as we inhabit this specialized world of work and thought, we have a hard time building and maintaining paths of relevance with communities other than those we study. Moreover, the communities we study tend to be on the margins of contemporary economic and political power. I’ve already discussed Keith Hart’s important ethnographic and activist work on the project of humanizing economic networks, something he addresses and references extensively on the website The Memory Bank. He is particular interested in how grass-roots open currency systems can exist alongside national and supranational ones, facilitating inclusion, empowerment, and resilience of individuals and small networks who are constituted by complex lives and identities … and perhaps most importantly, who have economic connections that fray quickly when larger monetary dynamics–inflation or deflation driven by employment cycles, global credit cycles, industrial commodity prices, or national or international politics–suddenly make everything a greater hardship, throwing into tumult any future plans or hopes. Hart’s vision may aim to reach the global scale, but his ethnographic engagement remains not only local, but with better connecting the politically and economically marginal. (Daniel Lende has a nice discussion of this issue at the Neuroanthropology Blog, showing the importance of such seemingly marginal small projects, which can have really high local impact, in growing the relevance of Anthropology.) The marginality of the communities I study is incomparably greater. Not only am I dealing with prehistoric communities, marginal to written history; I’m dealing with groups whose constituents will always be anonymous … and about whom there are legitimate scientific questions about whether they were actually different from us in some fundamental biological ways. And I mainly have just their garbage and the dirt they tracked around to go by. So, like most anthropologists, I have to admit that my research isn’t going to offer direct suggestions about how to humanize contemporary, massive economies all the way to their centers.
Still, anthropologists can offer relevant, constructive ideas for changing the cultural status quo around the centers of power, where big money and mass media tend to distort our interests and how we use dramatic, mythologized or ritualized narratives to resolve our conflicts of interest in emotional but all-too-often shortsighted ways.
David Stockman (seated to President Reagan’s left) at a budget meeting in the Oval Office in 1981. Public domain photograph from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
Something really struck me about an interview that former Reagan Administration budget chief (and remarkably forthright internal critic) David Stockman gave to Yahoo! Finance on Friday. In this interview Stockman claims that the Affordable Care Act–that is, Obamacare–is “the worst law ever passed in the last four decades by the federal government.” Stockman continues, describing it as “a massive entitlement to end all entitlements,” asserting:
It is going to cause a fiscal hemorrhage that is not even yet anticipated. It will tie up one-sixth of GDP in the most monstrous, massive, bureaucratic snarl that you can’t imagine. So therefore this needs to be stopped before it becomes operational.
This is one of those moments where the basic classroom exercise of delineating what is fact and what is opinion is quite necessary and useful.
I am prepared to accept the part about 1/6 of US gross domestic product being encompassed–in the not so distant future–by Medicare, Medicaid, and Federal or state-run exchanges for buying private insurance policies. Currently, private and public healthcare costs are already more than 1/6 of US GDP, which is one of the biggest reasons why making insurance more affordable and providing technology, organization, and education concerning preventive healthcare is in every American resident’s long-term interest. Add to that the growing demographic momentum of Baby Boomers entering the ranks of the aging–and thus, bringing with them more costly long-term healthcare needs–and it should be clear that it’s no simple task to get healthcare technology, product, and service supply to meet growing aggregate and per capita demand. Here, Stockman is reasonably boiling a very complicated phenomenon down to a simple fact. Aggregate healthcare costs in the United States will continue to rise in the coming years, likely taking on an even greater proportion of national GDP.
It’s Stockman’s bit about an unimaginably “monstrous bureaucratic snarl” that cannot reach escape velocity from the category opinion’s gravitational pull. There are some very good reasons to hold the opinion that Stockman’s “bureaucratic snarl” characterization is itself really opinion. Not fact.
Adam Smith (1723-1790). Image of the 1790 engraving by John Kay courtesy of the US Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons.
I’m not making a cheap joke here. There is actually a deeper irony about a core aspect of European Enlightenment thought and the contemporary American political drive to undermine democratic government in the name of individual freedom. The Enlightenment–and especially the political economic philosophy of Adam Smith–can really get Americans’ attention and emotional focus. Smith’s notion of the invisible hand mythically evokes a mysterious but wonderful harmony that free trade and profit-seeking are believed to offer–if only we get enough individual liberty, free from the yoke of government, that is. Yet, the Enlightenment’s fundamental focus is actually different. It is on liberty as especially important for protecting the right to question, apply reason, and act on novel conclusions based on carefully recorded evidence. This certainly isn’t the kind of liberty that gets evoked in most American political discourse.
Of course, this is on my mind because, as of this writing, the US Federal Government has been shut down except for “essential functions” for about 48 hours. In the name of non-partisan critique, I openly acknowledge that there is plenty unenlightened about Democratic Party rhetoric and leadership, but my anthropological focus is on the uncritical, intensely visceral Tea Party Republican appeal that less government results in more liberty, which is seen as always a good thing. This political rhetoric brings our attention straight back to the issue of symbolic violence in American contemporary culture. Here, the Enlightenment-associated symbolic construction of Individual Liberty=Good becomes a rhetorical smokescreen for emotionally mobilizing and exercising raw power: arbitrarily deciding what is non-essential to the function of government in order to make a dramatic, ritualized show of who’s in (hardworking job creators and aspiring, loyal workers and their families) and who’s out (those out to fraudulently take advantage of taxpayer-funded programs) in order to produce a form of domestic sovereign power. The power to decide arbitrarily that whole categories of people risk not being able to pay their bills. Or worse, that they and their children go hungry.
If Anthropology can offer any insight into the history of Western thought (from which Anthropology as a discipline sprang, of course) and how prestige symbols from Western history influence our political thoughts and actions, it is to take the all-important comparative step back–taking the view from afar, seeing Western thought in a broader cultural context. Otherwise, the Enlightenment’s evocative, usually high symbolic value–based as it is on general, often far-too-vague associations with abstract existential conditions we’d usually like to have more of, now and forever, including liberty, improvement, progress, and a real shot at successfully pursuing happiness–becomes symbolic collateral for emotionally investing in positions or desires that hardly invite reason, careful consideration of evidence, logical articulation of your claims or political aims, and committed self-critical examination of your own assumptions, social judgments and goals.
South-facing Caves 1–4 of Mughr el-Hamamah. Cave 5 (right) is located approximately 30 m to the east. Only Cave 2—the main cave—has substantial in situ prehistoric deposits, and test excavations focused on the front chamber of this cave (courtesy Mughr el-Hamamah Project).
Sometimes multitasking gets the best of us. I’ve been working intensively on a research article, preparing figures and tables especially, for journal submission. This is part of my collaborative project with Liv Nilsson Stutz and a wonderful team of twelve more collaborators; the project focuses on the Mughr el-Hamamah site in Jordan, and this will be our first substantial publication on the site’s Early Upper Paleolithic archaeology. The view of the caves in the Ajlun Governate, Jordan, comes from our brief American Journal of Archaeology report on the 2010 National Science Foundation-funded test excavations. While I look forward to sharing our results on this blog soon, I now have a chance to breathe and reflect over what’s been keeping me from blogging this past two weeks. The thought that really sticks with me is the ambiguous nature of science. Although thinking about this thought also makes me pause about the ambiguous nature of my own thought process, the reason is this:
Well, just as I thought we were finally ready to send in our completed, fully formatted manuscript to the peer-review journal all fourteen co-authors agreed on, I received e-mail notification just this past Monday that was one of those good-news/bad-news moments. The e-mail was sent to all users of a leading technical program (i.e. OxCal–courtesy of Christopher Ramsey) that functions to calculate and analyze more precise ages using results from radiocarbon dating. The e-mail announced that a–no, THE–new international consensus radiocarbon calibration dataset was now available. Since our team’s current work emphasizes presentation and analysis of radiocarbon dating results, it hardly made sense to go ahead and submit for publication all of this quantative data based on a calibration reference database that has just become out of date. I duly downloaded the new calibration reference data this past Monday. I spent much of this past week recalculating, rechecking, and reformatting the dates for our site. Since radiocarbon dating is actually hardly romantic, I won’t dwell on this topic–one in which I maintain an otherwise difficult-to-comprehend interest. But you can check out the new open-access calibration issue of the journal Radiocarbon here: https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/radiocarbon/issue/view/1024. The data for the new curve is available here: http://www.radiocarbon.org/IntCal13.htm. Anyhoo … Although I was quite concentrated–as only a scientist/professional nerd can be–on radiocarbon calibration throughout this past week, a particular line of thought occasionally managed to intrude into my nerd bubble, creating an overly serious philosophizing bubble inside. To gratuitously extend the blogger-in-the-bubble metaphor, as the urgency of the radiocarbon analysis subsided, the philosophizing bubble just seemed to expand. And a serious point crystallized. There are enormous stakes in using scientific knowledge. After all, hugely consequential public policy and legal decisions hinge on arguments and judgments based on knowledge claimed as scientific. And this is (usually implicitly) considered acceptable because science is supposed to reveal truth. But this really isn’t at all what working scientists experience. Scientific knowledge always has a certain amount of ambiguity.
In general, knowledge about the world is–and should be–conditional and contingent. And scientific inquiry distills the fundamentally conditional aspect of knowledge, reminding professional scientists–our moments of most arrogant certainty notwithstanding–that our models and theories about how the universe works … has worked … will work in the future … well, that these models and theories are going to fail to explain, predict, illuminate in some way. Perhaps in some really critical way. And we’ll have to revise our understanding, come up with new models, new relevant questions, and new, logically derived methods. Now, this past week, we found out that the new, more comprehensive, validated reference database shifts our particular radiocarbon date estimates for the Early Upper Paleolithic site at Mughr el-Hamamah by about 0.5% from our initial estimate. This is not a huge deal. In fact, it is rather reassuring that one part of our scientific framework for understanding what humans were doing and when they were doing it tens of thousands of years ago seems to be at the tweaking stage. But there are sure to be more revisions to the radiocarbon calibration data, hopefully minor, in the future. Such revisions may still be consequential enough to alter interpretations about, say, whether a particular archaeologically documented change in human behavior or technology occurred as a consequence of a brief period of climatic change. Where such revisions come from–new samples and new technologies for measurement and analysis–draws our attention to another dimension of knowledge as contingent. How we understand the world depends simultaneously on (1) the technologies we use to probe, prod, and store and analyze and represent information about the world … and (2) the practices we engage in that are structured by and structure our use of those technologies. That we can even argue about what people–who may or may not have been our ancestors–were doing at various points during the last Ice Age depends on a complex tapestry of extraordinary machinery (including accelerator mass spectrometers and number-crunching computer software), symbols that help us to think and communicate efficiently (I’m certainly not taking the time to explain details about the Early Upper Paleolithic now, but my specialist colleagues will immediately fill in a lot of background in their minds, just from that phrase alone), and symbolic systems that help us represent and think through the large numerical values and vast amounts of quantitative information that our technologies allow us to explore. Basically, scientists practice and work really hard so that they can simply see or feel–get a clear or intuitive sense of–whether the technological instruments and materials … and the interrelated symbolic systems of representation yield observations that confirm their existing models and predictions, or whether they require tweaking … or perhaps major revision. Scientists see and feel the world through a joint technological and symbolic special body suit that they constantly have to train at and think about and maintain–and modify, if deemed necessary–if they want to use it well.
And this brings me to the really important philosophical thought. Of course, we all live life through a joint technological and symbolic equivalent of a brain-linked body suit that we constantly have to train at and think about and maintain–and modify, if deemed necessary–if we want to use it well over our long, intensely social lives. It’s just that scientific knowledge production and engagement in the world is symbolically marked in many contemporary cultural contexts. It’s marked relative to everyday engagement in and knowledge about the world, as we develop and act on our identities and interests. The problem is that when scientists finally put together a set of conclusions that supports or reinforces a particular model or theory, the resulting story seems to gain its distinctive scientific authority from extraordinary, impenetrably difficult-to-relate, almost magical process of joint technologically and symbolically dependent inquiry and representation. This is an example of the marked category experienced as qualitatively different from the unmarked everyday one. Yet, the work scientists do is very much like the work we all do in our everyday lives to understand the world … only more (and sometimes alot more) so. We don’t even have to go into the lingering tendency in Western culture to see the product of the mind (that is, what reason allows us to discern from our technologically aided observations and analyses) as independent of and superior to–rather than interdependent with–bodily interaction with technological aids through which we poke and prod, see and hear, sometimes ingest, sometimes act on and change the world around us. Scientists need to be more aware of the similarities that scientific inquiry shares with everyday inquiry … and non-scientists need to be aware of how they use technology AND symbolic systems in culturally structured ways–providing everyday knowledge, with that knowledge contingent on the very technologies and symbolic systems driving and supporting the inquiry–resembling scientific inquiry. And we all need to go with the flow a bit more, understanding that knowledge about the world is not fixed. It is conditional and contingent, for scientists and non-scientists alike.
It seems easier and easier to question the residential four-year college experience–and the liberal arts bachelors degree that legitimizes it. With exorbitant tuition price tags and a highly challenging post-graduate labor market, college may seem an unnecessary luxury. At worst, it may simply be an expensive way for families to encourage self-indulgence in their children who are on the verge of adulthood. Indeed, the fiscal and political pressures on four-year college programs–regardless of whether they are in state universities and colleges or part of private institutions, whether they are highly selective and have high tuition or are more accessible to a wider range of applicants–are enormous. Is college education worth the upfront cost … and does the content and form of that education really buy you a rich source of healthy, lifelong dividend-yielding capital–in the form of maturation, knowledge, problem-solving skills, and values–that will make it a really smart investment?
The Biocultural Evolution Blog 