Organizer Introductory Remarks

Executive Panel Discussion AAA New Orleans 2010

Breaching the Boundaries of Anthropology, Circulating Ideas, Creating a Public Discipline: Anthropology at Work in Overlapping Spheres of Design, Education, Public Sector, and Policy

Chairs and Discussion Moderators : Inga Treitler and Dena Plemmons

Introductory Remarks

In its 100 year history anthropology has done a lot to address grand public challenges, from war to race, to poverty, to environmental change. But we need to do more. We need to work within many industries and sectors and with people practicing in other disciplines. We need to work with people with whom we have resonance, and also, perhaps especially, with people we don’t agree with. Why? Because when we do, we see questions and directions and repercussions and benefits refracted in unanticipated ways. That is what connects the particularly disparate group you see before you — anthropologists and non anthropologists, working in all sectors of society. Anthropologists are good at observing, and not so bad at describing. But many of us get nervous about the possibility of our work being used by people whose ideologies diverge from ours. And yet while we observe, our need to be morally engaged often causes us to try to affect change even while we try to maintain the objectivity of an observer. How are these tensions — lying at the very heart of this current epistemological moment in our discipline — to be reconciled? To circulate, indeed to innovate, if that is what is called for, requires us to step up to our power to bring about change.

We’ve been hampered by at least two concerns in our efforts to circulate beyond our work in familiar and expected ideological terrains. Let’s call these concerns the communication problem and the ethics problem. First, to the communication problem--we have trouble getting heard by people who can make positive change. Some of that is because we speak of simple things in life in a particular manner that makes them unrecognizable to others—dare I say we are exclusive? insular? But we’re making headway. The Race Project sponsored by AAA and funded by the NSF and the Ford Foundation is an exemplary case of anthropology being heard, loudly and often. The purpose of the race project is to communicate the core notion that race is not biological but cultural. It came from our association and has resonated in small towns and big cities all across the country, and the Internet, and through the halls of the government. Though the evaluation is not yet complete, to an observer the Race Project appears to be a success in many ways including impact on federal policy. Anthropology has been heard on Capitol Hill.

And now to the ethics problem--people hear us, and then they misuse our work to bring about damaging change. Fears of our services and our work being misused have been most recently exemplified by the very public debate about embedding anthropology in the ranks of the military in a context of armed conflict. The debate has been heard the world over. But in the urgent need to reduce armed conflict, that cry in all of us to do something is lost to the fear that our principles will be misrepresented by ineffective, even dangerous spokespeople. What to do? Some have tended to turn inward begging for less engagement rather than better understanding. Others have taken on tasks within the AAA – like the Race Project -- to create a public dialogue that might stand to inform policy at highest levels. More recently though, the military engagement dialogue yielded a project currently underway to collect material for an Ethics Casebook. Two contributors at this table are involved in reviewing material for the casebook with the aim to add transparency to the ethical problematic in certain anthropological engagements. Still others are taking on jobs in industry, in colleges, in consulting, in marketing, where they put anthropological models, theory, methods, and ethnographic case material to work, with subtle transformation in the human condition the goal. That transformation is through education, through consulting, through reporting and writing, through advising those in greater positions of power, and eventually through taking those positions of power and leadership on ourselves.

In drawing together the particular individuals you see here we looked at the idea that anthropological research follows an arc that can ultimately impact policy -- though it rarely does. Some of us have an awareness of that arc, some have been directly influential in that point of influence, and others are at the fuzzy ethnographic front end on grand issues that will ultimately benefit from their input. We keep anthropology’s epistemological moment in the forefront of our thoughts to remind ourselves that ideas and knowledge do not emerge fully formed but follow an arc and often a cycle. What is the place of ethnographic study in that process of knowledge creation? What is that tension of innovation and tradition in the process of understanding and honoring the dignity of the human condition? We know that the process of knowledge creation often begins with provocations and perturbations in what we take as given—what counts as popular wisdom, public knowledge or just plain unquestioned facts. The perturbations are often born of crisis, as happened in the anthropological engagements in armed combat. These critical moments have been understood by one of our contributors through the metaphor of the acupuncture needle, a letting go of presumed tensions in a release of energy.

We are here to seek the help of one another and of the audience to get better at using our ethnographic knowledge and new interpretations to bring our influence to grand public challenges. And also simply to get better at understanding the arc of knowledge creation, so as to know how to move from specific cases to broad and general human principles. How do we use the authority of our science in bringing change to the human condition where and when it is needed?

Moving into that next stage in this discussion we begin by taking a stance-that anthropology, the study of the human condition, has a responsibility to address grand public challenges – to reduce armed conflict, to relieve conditions of poverty, to contribute to a sustainable practice of commerce that supports human dignity, and to make civic engagement a natural feature of societies.

We suggest that anthropology has promise as a public discipline. By that we mean that we bear a responsibility to engage in public debates through our work and our actions as we work with others who are bringing about a reduction of human suffering in many arenas. Those you see here have a demonstrated history of crossing disciplinary boundaries to have broader influence in the arena of grand public problem solving. The work we do is at the intersection of science, culture, policy, and politics. And in these arenas we listen hard and walk away from ideological rigidity.