We Are Not Alternative: A Communal Take on Theorization and Canon in Anthropology Theory Courses - Part 3: The Role of Desire
By Elise Ferrer, Nada Bahgat, and Madison Shomaker
This piece is the third of four installments in the series “We are Not Alternative: A Communal Take on Theorization and Canon in Anthropological Theory Courses.” (Find the series here). This series explores the rethinking and challenging of traditional anthropological canon that we experienced in our Fall 2022 graduate course The Craft of Anthropology II at American University in Washington, D.C.
When anthropologists begin to question the foundations of the discipline (as we frequently do), rather than answers, often only more questions rise to the surface. In the first installment of this series, we investigated the perception of the anthropological canon and why it must be reimagined. Canon is but a construction. Therefore, unsettling the assumptions, credibility, and language of theory and canon also necessitates a conversation on the role and value of the manufacturer—the researcher.
This question was present from our first week of reading, in which we read Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston. As we mentioned in Part I, Kossula, the primary participant, is also the primary theorist. It necessitates the question—where is Hurston?
That’s not to suggest that Hurston is totally absent; Hurston’s presence, as the compiler and distributor of the story, is there in the silences, the decisions on what anecdotes stayed and which were left out, what Kossula chooses to share and what to withhold for himself. Nor is the byproduct solely influenced by researcher and participant. Hurston, like all institutionally affiliated and financially dependent researchers, had responsibilities and allegiances to her universities, mentors, and patrons. Yet even considering these acknowledgments, Hurston embarks on a structurally different project with Barracoon.
In the supplemental essay to the book, Alice Walker calls Hurston a priest, a storyteller, an interlocutor. Each of the phrases both recognizes a fundamental shift in interpersonal engagement and presents less extractive, authoritative attitudes for anthropological work. In Barracoon, when asking Kossula for a portrait, Hurston respects and does not challenge his representational desires. In contrast to anthropological photography which reduces, instrumentalizes, and caricatures “othered” subjects, Kossula sets the terms for his own photo.
Yet even in offering the stage to Kossula, given Hurston’s positionality as a Black, Southern women who wanted to study and work with Black, Southern people, she, like so many of the authors in this syllabus and their demographic contemporaries today, struggled to be acknowledged and valued as a researcher. Hurston’s experience, drawing from Black feminist theorists in her wake such as Patricia Hill Collins and Gina Athena Ulysses, can be described as an “outsider within” or “alter(ed)native perspective.” Not only were her merits not encouraged during her lifetime, but the type of embodied work she practiced would go unnoted even during anthropology’s reflexive turn.
As Rachel Watkins points out in her piece, “An Alter(ed)native Perspective on Historical Bioarchaeology,” and as this syllabus demonstrates, the tension between the long-standing practice of Black, Brown, Third World, non-Western, and women/queer/gender-nonconforming people operating against white, hegemonic modes of scholarship and the repeated dismissal, belittling, avoidance of, and rejection of this type of scholarship is the default practice of mainstream anthropology. Because simply, the embodied type of work that came in vogue for white, Western researchers with the “reflexive” turn was only novel for them. The syllabus explored in this series presented a multitude of scholars—W. E. B. Dubois, Frantz Fanon, Katherine Dunham—who were in and of movements, seeking to make theory as they made the world. They were reflexive because they had no other choice.
The compulsory reflexivity for many scholars necessitates an interrogation into the “why” of anthropology in general. What happens when people come first and discipline comes second, and how, we ask, does this change and challenge how we imagine the researcher? There are plenty of examples of anthropologists who see their scholarly work as a mechanism within a larger social movement, to be used in conjunction with the work of on-the-ground activists and organizers. Sometimes they work as outside advocates and supporters; other times, they themselves play the dual role of activist and academic.
Though the type of scholarship modeled by our syllabus may be perceived as new and alternative, what this syllabus offers is an opportunity to do the reparative work of honoring the plethora of existing reflexive, embedded scholarship as the disciplinary legacy. These works, by critical, reflexive scholars and activists are the anthropological canon—not new, not alternative, and certainly not absent.
It also prompts continued reflections on how to consider engagement and responsibility not just to the field, but also to our communities and to ourselves, to dismantle assumptions that the “researcher” and “the field” have competing loyalties, goals, and identities. One such scholar who raised perhaps the most interesting conversation regarding the researcher, the researched, and desire was Mākereti, or Maggie Papakura, author of The Old-Time Māori.
For those new to Mākereti’s legacy, she was a Māori ethnographer and cultural expert. Born to a high-ranking Te Arawa woman and an Englishman, she first received praise and notoriety by working as a guide for British royalty during a trip to Aotearoa, or New Zealand.
Over the course of her life, Mākereti worked as an ambassador, preserver, and translator of Māori cultural heritage. Later in her life, after decades of what should be considered anthropology in practice, she joined the British Anthropological Society and subsequently enrolled in a formal anthropology degree at the University of Oxford. Her book, The Old-Time Māori, was a by-product of that work, though it was published posthumously by collaborator T. K. Penniman.
Our challenge with Mākereti, then, was not because of doubts about her wisdom, intellect, or savvy. Rather, we were left unsettled by her complexity. On one hand, Mākereti’s life work, best articulated through The Old-Time Māori, was incredibly significant, as it challenged white, hegemonic scholarship practices and theories. Mākereti posited notions of cultural relativism, locates the influence of European colonization on Māori culture change demonstrating culture as non-static, and rejected pathological perceptions of her own culture. She offers descriptions of communal memory, undermining Western conceptions around modes of knowledge production.
Mākereti focused on the daily activities of women, an aspect often ignored by the men in the field. She also has an absolutist allegiance to her community’s customs and perspectives; she knows herself as inseparable from her whole and acts in accordance, diligently consulting with and honoring the perspectives of her home. Mākereti, and later Penniman, gather consent meticulously from her collaborators in Aotearoa. She practices, too, what Audra Simpson later would call “ethnographic refusal” by refusing to describe certain cultural practices or translate passages citing her community’s desire to do so and the inability of foreign readers to fully understand the deep meaning of certain cultural tenets even after translation.
Yet even with this powerful offering of ethnographic work, Mākereti’s life-long alliance with the English, her work within white anthropological contexts, and her verbalized pro-imperialist stance caused a reaction with our class. How should we understand this engagement with “the master’s tools and the master’s house” in relation to her pro-Māori, dehegemonized anthropological work? Does the tension here signify as negation, a contradiction, a complexity, or is it even a tension at all?
It was at this point in the conversation that our professor, Dr. Sangaramoorthy, paused our discussion to ask: “How are you interrogating your own desire in the engagement with Mākereti’s work?”
Not only should we (not just students or anthropologists—but “we” who engage with scholarship) examine the desire of the researcher and our desire in conducting research, but we should also examine our desire in engaging with such scholarship.
To name desire is not to forgo any investigation into complexity. Anthropology is the study of people. And people, both the writer and the written, are nuanced. To consider desire is to examine preconceived notions of the piece and author, to take complexity as a centrality rather than a disqualification. Acknowledging, understanding, and interrogating desire is recognizing when one’s positionality and power should pause or preclude critique.
As we closed the week on Mākereti’s work, we did not try to “solve” her complexity; the topic of desire, from that point forward, became a common question and consideration in our remaining discussions. Whether in discussing Hurston, Fanon, Fei, Deloria, or Dunham, we became more critically aware of how our own desire was illuminated in our engagement with each of the scholars.
Because of the power dynamics of the discipline, embedding a political critique of desire within anthropological knowledge production and theoretical analysis is necessary. In a context in which white, western men and women maintain the role of researcher—where they control the ability to deem work valuable, credible, and worthy, unveiling, naming, and challenging our/their desire as a central logic—interrogating the disciplinary status quo is critical if mainstream anthropology is truly to take on reparative, anti-colonial approaches.
As stated in the title of this series, We are not Alternative, we, the authors, are not attempting to create a new anthropological canon, but instead, we are elevating the existing scholarship that is foundational to our contemporary understanding of the discipline. This means that we are not replacing the old dignitaries with new ones; we are rewriting the rules and logic of the canon itself. And, throughout this process, we must remember to interrogate our desires in engaging in and with research, the cruciality of co-creation, and how to channel our disciplinary trademark self-consciousness into meaningful work as we move into the future of anthropology.
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Cite As
Elise Ferrer, Nada Bahgat, and Madison Shomaker. 2024. “We Are Not Alternative: A Communal Take on Theorization and Canon in Anthropology Theory Courses.” American Anthropologist website, Feb 13.
