Sustaining Conversations

These "Thin Partitions": Bridging the Growing Divide between Cultural Anthropology and Archaeology, 2017

American Anthropologist, 2014

In this review essay, I explore the relationship between cultures of circulation and anthropological facts. Research published in 2013 advanced the field by attending to the coproduction of globally circulating things (commodities, race, brands, authenticity, blood) and specific cultural landscapes. Building on the field’s renewed interest in materiality, scholars showed how anthropological facts are produced at the intersection of interlocking cultural classification systems and a world that is heterogeneous and dynamic. Moving beyond the notion that shared meanings and categories are attached to or layered on people and things, this approach conceptualized such relations recursively. Scholars suggested that race—as an anthropological fact—becomes biological through social practice and, similarly, that cultural assumptions and political biases become environmental because they are embedded in our infrastructures and built landscapes. This approach permeates many of the articles reviewed and links the clusters into which I have grouped them: “Value and Incommensurability,” “Brands and Authenticity,” “Race and Blood,” and “Infrastructure and Citizenship.” I conclude by discussing the challenges and opportunities for a sociocultural anthropology that recognizes the transformative power of global connection while refusing to give up its long-running pursuit of cultural wisdom and more humane social configurations.

A Post-Exotic Anthropology of Soqotra Vol. 1, 2020

This Prologue outlines the broad set of concerns that constitute the context in which this book intervenes. Accordingly, it summarizes the nature of the research project that resulted in this two-volume total community study of Soqotra; it identifies the initial vector that launched my quest for an alternative to the prevailing practice of anthropology; it invites the global audience of established and aspiring social scientists, to whom the book is addressed, to consider a different modality of doing anthropology; it highlights the pitfalls of the narcissistic foundation of ethnography and calls for its abandonment; it explains my oppositional attitude toward the transactional nature of fieldwork and its bathos; it situates Soqotra within an interstitial geo-cultural space that exempts it from the prevailing assumptions and themes associated with neighboring regional social formations; it proposes the re-centering of research subjects as audience of our research results as part of a discursive ethic of reciprocity; it laments the intellectual impasse engendered by the discipline’s anachronistic commitment to a Eurocentric geopolitics of knowledge production that insists on a West-Rest antinomy and suggests an exit strategy; and finally, it confronts the endemic dumbing-down campaign for the use of “plain English” in academic social science that promotes the use of language as “mental popcorn.”

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2024

The relationship between anthropology and literature has attracted renewed theoretical energy in recent years (Brandel 2020; Debaene 2014; Fassin 2014; Reed 2018; Wulff 2016), developing and deepening connections with, for example, anthropological theories of art (Reed 2011), religion (Furani 2012), subjectivity (Olszewska 2015), and ethics (Bush 2017), as well as with allied fields and traditions, including postcolonial theory (Sadana 2012), Bourdieuan sociology (Dalsgård 2021), media theory (Rosen 2022), and ordinary language philosophy (Brandel 2023). Among the most fruitful trends in current research has been a revitalized emphasis on the possibilities for collaboration between writers and anthropologists, which has generated critical debate on the ethical and political limits of conventional methodologies (Schielke & Shehata 2021). The following set of conversations reflect and refract these trends in different ways, while proposing further openings for future work, particularly around questions of translation, creativity, care, and particularity. Each of these dialogues took place between anthropologists and writers with long-standing relationships, as members of collaborative research teams, co-authors, companions, mentors, and fieldwork interlocutors. Their differences in form reflect their range of commitments and approaches to the study of creative language practices. Participants were provided with an initial set of orienting questions and provocations, including about what brought the groups together, about the basis for the comparisons they draw between their work, and a reflection on whom they write for and why. They were edited and assembled with the help of one of the editors, Adam Reed.

2016

Anthropological Contributions for Sustainable Futures, 2019

Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 1994

23* tions even this proposed agenda. Are we led, it asks, to imagine that habitual thought might be modeled on language only because our local metalanguages of thinking and of speaking are structurally identical? To the extent that this challenge genuinely gives pause, however, it also must vindicate the very suppositions it questions-such a critique of the Whorfian position is itself fundamentally Whorfian and so now reflexive in another sense.

Journal of Folklore Research, 2013

In this essay, I comment upon the articles included in the first section of this special issue, "Listening for Voices," with primary emphasis on discovery and dialogue but with attention as well to matters of genre, language shift, and ethno poetics as a criti cal vantage point on anthropological theory and practice. I conclude with a discussion of voice, one of the principal organizing concepts of the collection.

Throughout, Palmié applauds the metaphors with which Ortiz proposed to understand what we call cultural change, in particular the notion of cooking and constantly adding to a pot of ever-changing ingredients. He develops this idea in a diverting coda, but in the end he wonders about the utility of the metaphor. The exercise yields an intriguing comparison between saltfish and ackee and amalá con quimbombó (identified as traditional dishes in Jamaica and Cuba), even as it underscores the futility of invoking any metaphor in trying to account for cultural change. To be sure, the musings about food, cooking, and authenticity offer another point of entry into the bundle of questions the book poses. Palmié allows them to take on a little too much analytical weight, and then retracts it, returning to musing about the collective composition of Afro-Cuban religion, about which we will never again think the same way.

Anthropological Notebook, 2020

The present time is a witness to uncertainties and upheavals caused by the social and political tensions on the one hand, and the ecological crisis widespread across the globe, on the other. Whether it is a natural calamity or socioeconomic instabilities caused by the rise of repressive state agencies, anthropology as a discipline has responded to this phenomenon in its own ways. Seeing the human in relation to other terrestrial beings is a concern anthropology has raised since its inception. How does, then, anthropology carry on with this tradition of moral connection with other beings on the planet and what methodological promises does it make to comprehend the enterprise of humanity in contemporary times? Anand Pandian's, A Possible Anthropology is an ethnography gleaned through experiences of anthropologist ranging from canonical and marginal figures of ethnographic storytellers and contemporary scholars to the activists and artists engaged in the diverse field of inquiry.