ACTIVISTS IN ANTHROPOLOGY: Issues

In "activist anthropology", there needs to be a direct confrontation of the status quo. 
  • There's a huge difference between saying "gee things look bad for those people, I think I'll go help them" and undertaking a critical analysis of socio-spatial conditions situated firmly within Braudel's three times. 
  • Through this we gain spatial context (local, regional, intra- and inter-state), temporal context (event/moment, conjocture, longue durée), and the social facts though which this triple dialectic acts/is enacted. 
  • An "activist" anthropology that is useful or revolutionary in any way must proceed from a critical platform.


"Studying" informants and "empathizing with them to better explain their story" is inherently paternalistic in itself. 
  • Activist anthropology rejects the construction "scientist/informant" because it replicates power/knowledge. 
  • As well, the idea that anthropology is about explaining the "other" is rejected (drawing from subaltern and post-colonial studies) because it reinforces power/knowledge, the colonial legacy that is anthropology as a discipline, and authorizes an outsider as the speaker. 
  • When the anthropologist claims the role of speaker or crafter of the narrative, they do so by taking that role from the people they are trying to represent. 
Does that set up a huge question of how to go about ethnographic work, both the research and writing up? You bet. 
  • But a key principle in activist anthropology is co-authored work. You don't speak for them, you speak in conversation. 
  • Activist anthropology relies on the idea of "accompaniment", which interestingly is a huge contribution from the Zapatistas. "Walking together while asking" is more or less the idea. 
    • Unless the community of struggle you're working with/in is actually your own community (say, a trans anthropologist working on issues directly pertaining to that experience) your role is never to dictate what the struggle ought to be, or the next step, or how to achieve a better world. 
    • Your role is to walk alongside them and give them your skills to use - which includes passing them on. 
    • As an example, I work with prisoners in solitary confinement. In addition to writing about the whole set of issues I'm studying, I also help to publicize and sometimes publish things my friends in the SHU have asked me to disseminate, I work in my area to draw attention to the corruption and abuses endemic to the prison system, I help them to access resources (photocopies of interesting articles to read, contact info for disability advocacy, contact info for lawyers, etc), work with some prisoners who want to pursue higher education in my field by facilitating letter-based reading groups, and when I've moved into the next phase of my dissertation research I'll be pursuing a paralegal credential so I can better offer legal assistance. The work I do with them entails a give and take on both sides, and they aren't my research subjects. 

Say you're studying a community of struggle. Is the ethical thing to do standing there and taking notes while the MST collective you've been living with for the past year is gunned down by paramilitaries, or one of the sex workers you've been meeting with for interviews comes in with a black eye and a broken arm, or the low-income residents of an inner-city neighborhood are systematically evicted to make room for gentrification?
  • Or is it to offer yourself and your support, because their liberation is tied up in your own, and because having the privilege to walk away means you are actively choosing complicity in their oppression in favor of a fictitious notion of "objective" science? 
  • Philippe Bourgois really famously wrote on this when he was doing his dissertation research in El Salvador. Because he chose to act, his research was thrown out (there was no room in the discipline at the time for that kind of anthropology). Nancy Scheper-Hughs has also famously made huge strides against the black market organ trade. Calling what they do "not anthropology" raises some pretty serious questions about how you understand the discipline. 
All science is politically situated; all scientists have bias.
  • First, admitting you have a political bias is better than denying it and presenting yourself as an objective onlooker. 
  • Second, you shouldn't assume that such a bias is baseless. A well done work in activist anthropology will outline why the author is taking the position they are.
    • Seth Holmes advocates (as both a medical doctor and anthropologist) for a better, more situated understanding of migrant medical conditions. He doesn't do so because of blind solidarity but because he has a deep understanding of the structural violence they face through his fieldwork while acknowledging the limits of his understanding (he did work for a couple of years, crossed the border illegally once, and doesn't need to do it to survive.)