Anthropology Put to Work

Les Field, Richard G. Fox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000180541
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

How do anthropologists work today and how will they work in future? While some anthropologists have recently called for a new "public" or "engaged" anthropology, profound changes have already occurred, leading to new kinds of work for a large number of anthropologists. The image of anthropologists "reaching out" from protected academic positions to a vaguely defined "public" is out of touch with the working conditions of these anthropologists, especially those junior and untenured. The papers in this volume show that anthropology is put to work in diverse ways today. They indicate that the new conditions of anthropological work require significant departures from canonical principles of cultural anthropology, such as replacing ethnographic rapport with multiple forms of collaboration. This volume's goal is to help graduate students and early-career scholars accept these changes without feeling something essential to anthropology has been lost. There really is no other choice for most young anthropologists.

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Anthropological Collaborations in Colombia

Joanne Rappaport

Colombian ethnographers have for decades engaged in a committed anthropology marked by political and social collaboration, blurring the lines that separate what their North American colleagues call applied anthropology, advocacy, and pure research (Jimeno 1999; Rappaport 1990). In the past few decades, the communities that Colombian anthropologists traditionally studied have begun to do their own research, forcing a shift in the terms of dialogue between external scholars and communities, as well as in the expectations that communities have of researchers. In this chapter I examine the way an engaged Colombian ethnography emerged over time and tease out of its history a sense of what collaboration has meant to Colombian researchers.

I focus on social scientists whose work with popular movements has revolved around the construction of a research agenda, as opposed to those whose relationships with social movements have been confined to advocacy. I look especially at the development of participatory action research in the late 1960s and the 1970s by Orlando Fals Borda and La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social (Circle of Social Research and Action) in collaboration with Colombian indigenous and peasant organizations, and at the work of the anthropologist Luis Guillermo Vasco in the 1980s with the history committee of the indigenous community of Guambía. Vasco’s approach, unlike La Rosca’s, privileged the field as a site of co-theorizing between academics and grassroots researchers. In considering how these scholars saw the research process transformed by collaboration, I home in on the locus of theorizing, the nature of agenda building, and the creation of horizontal relationships between researchers and community.

The kind of collaborative research conducted by Colombian academics contrasts with many examples of collaborative ethnography in North America. Contemporary North American anthropologists have written extensively about the significance of collaborative writing (Hinson 2000; Lassiter 2005; Lawless 1993; Ridington and Hastings 1997), but such writing does not purport to transgress the boundaries between applied and “pure” research. Rather, its fundamental goal is the production of a new kind of ethnography geared largely to a scholarly readership—that is, a new kind of pure research.

In contrast, Colombian anthropologists’ attempts at collaborative research break down these boundaries in crucial ways. Their commitment to collaboration is tempered by an equally significant engagement with activism. Thus their research is simultaneously pure and applied, though perhaps such distinctions do not cut to the core of what this research is about. Unlike the collaborations of most applied researchers, these scholars’ collaborations with popular organizations are essentially political, geared toward promoting social justice from the grassroots, which makes their research more activist than applied. At the same time, their commitment to community-based research agendas results in work that is not pure in an academic sense, because it is not driven by academic theory (Strand et al. 2003: chap. 4)—although, as I demonstrate, they also produce innovative scholarly publications. Finally, what most significantly distinguishes these Colombian activist-scholars from their North American colleagues is their focus on field practice as a space in which social analysis and political action can be generated, as opposed to an emphasis on writing as a vehicle for scholarly collaboration.¹

This Colombian collaborative heritage bears implications for research conducted by foreigners in Latin America, as well as for the work of nationals. Indeed, it provides us with an alternative intellectual lineage that we can engage in building a new anthropological agenda for the twenty-first century. In the second half of the chapter, I bring this lineage to bear on my own collaborative relationship over the past decade with the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC), a major Colombian indigenous organization.

Initially, CRIC members sought me out after having read my published and unpublished work on the colonial history of the Nasa ethnic group (Rappaport 1998). I was first asked to coordinate history workshops in local communities with the objective of facilitating the collective study of colonial reservation titles whose contents had passed into the oral domain and had become a kind of mythic charter for communities and for CRIC. Later, I was invited to participate as a team member in a study of the history of CRIC’s Bilingual Intercultural Education Program (PEBI). In the process, I discovered that collaborative research does not revolve exclusively around the production of a written text by a research team. Instead, it requires extended exchange with a broader range of activists, transcending the project itself. At the same time, it constitutes a key space for generating a new kind of anthropological theorizing that spans the divides between pure and applied research, between the academy and those undertaking research within popular organizations.

My approach to ethnography is heavily indebted to these Colombian researchers. Although it has resulted in scholarly writing, I have attempted to follow the Colombian example by shifting my emphasis from writing to analytical dialogue in the field. This has led to products that are of utility to the organizations with which I have worked and has contributed even more to the development of a distinct grassroots research methodology. In this sense, my notion of what ethnography is and the ways in which it can be harnessed in an activist context has been permanently altered. The link between theory and ethnographic interpretation has moved, for me, away from being forged through solitary academic pursuit and toward fostering an appreciation of the way collaborative research can promote co-theorization with the communities we study. Reflexivity has come to be redefined, in my experience, as a process of contemplating the epistemology of our theoretical dialogue. This has reshaped my methods, my interpretive strategies, and the contents of my research, redefining ethnography for me in significant ways.

The Militant Research of La Rosca

In 1972, a book titled Causa popular, ciencia popular (Popular cause, popular science) appeared in Colombia, published by La Rosca de Investigación y Acción Social, a network of Colombian social scientists and journalists advocating militant research alongside popular movements (Bonilla et al. 1972). La Rosca members proposed abandoning the university—or at least rejecting the traditional research methodologies of the academy—to employ their scholarly skills in the service of popular sectors by inserting themselves as researcher-activists into local and regional struggles. They argued in favor of establishing research priorities in conjunction with local militants, studying the history of the militants’ organizations, and then returning the results of their research to them (Bonilla et al. 1972: 44–46).

Participatory action research, as this approach came to be called, presupposed “that the researcher himself is an object of investigation: his ideology, knowledge, and practice are judged in light of popular experience. The exploitation that occurs when people are studied as ‘research objects’ (a veritable sacking of their cultural values and of the treasure-house of their experience) is abandoned, leading to a respect for them, their contributions, their critiques, their intelligence” (Bonilla et al. 1972: 46, my translation). Final authority would rest with the popular sectors and not the researchers (1972: 47). La Rosca proposed, in essence, that popular sectors “expropriate” scientific knowledge, techniques, and methodologies (1972: 48).²

La Rosca’s task did not conclude once its research was completed. Its members advocated a methodology that they called “critical recuperation,” which turned research results toward activist ends:

Critical recuperation is achieved when, on the basis of historical information and an adequate understanding of current conditions, militant researchers arrive in communities to critically study and learn about the traditional cultural base, paying special attention to those elements or institutions that have been useful in the past to confront the enemies of the exploited classes. Once those elements are determined, they are reactivated with the aim of using them in a similar manner in current class struggles. (Bonilla et al. 1972: 51–52)

Local peasant practices of labor exchange and institutions such as the resguardo (or reservation, an institution that ensures collective land rights for native peoples) and the cabildo (the resguardo council, which operates as a semi-autonomous entity) were the sorts of practices La Rosca hoped to study and subsequently reintroduce into communities (1972: 52).

The best-known of La Rosca’s efforts is the publication of a treatise by Manuel Quintín Lame (1971 [1939]), a Nasa leader who forged a land-claims movement in the Colombian southwest during the first half of the twentieth century (Castillo-Cárdenas 1987; Rappaport 1998). The posthumous appearance of Lame’s writings reactivated his memory among the Nasa of Cauca and the Pijao of the neighboring department of Tolima, helping to spur the Regional Indigenous Council of Cauca (CRIC), founded in 1971, to include in its organizational objectives Lame’s demands for reclaiming land within the resguardo structure and for strengthening cabildos (Avirama and Márquez 1995). La Rosca members produced historical pamphlets reviving the memory of eighteenth-century hereditary chiefs who created resguardos in the region (Bonilla 1977), and they introduced a series of picture maps through which local history could be collectively recaptured (Bonilla 1982).³ The products of La Rosca’s research, although not academic, would not have appeared if not for the intervention of these activist-scholars. The continued significance of these publications in indigenous organizations—where they are still studied and used by people at the grassroots—points to the possibilities of a collaborative model that transcends academic writing.

La Rosca also produced some academic documents, such as Orlando Fals Borda’s Historia doble de la costa (Double history of the coast), a four-volume experiment in narrating the history of the agrarian struggles of people living along Colombia’s Atlantic coast (Fals Borda 1980–86). Historia doble is organized in two channels, one narrative and the other theoretical and methodological. Fals intended the narrative channel to be consulted by leaders of agrarian organizations and the theoretical channel to be read by politically committed intellectuals and academics. A series of comics, pamphlets, and audiovisual materials was to be produced for the rank and file of the social movements in the region (Bergquist 1990: 160).

The ethnographer Luis Guillermo Vasco made an insightful critique of La Rosca’s methods with the hindsight that came from his collaborative experience in the indigenous community of Guambía in the 1980s. He argued that the politically committed scholars of the 1970s made the positivist error of separating field practice from the theoretically informed interpretation of data—the error, precisely, of the organization of Fals Borda’s history of the Atlantic coast (Vasco Uribe 2002: 454–57). As a result, he said, La Rosca’s attempt to “return” its research to the communities in which it had worked was not entirely successful; La Rosca members did not recognize the position of power they occupied as scholars or that they, like other researchers, had constituted the groups they studied as objects of analysis (2002: 457–58). Ultimately, many aspects of La Rosca’s project were academic in their intent and unassimilable (at the time) by the social movements with which they were concerned (Bergquist 1990; cf. Fox 2005).⁴ In short, La Rosca’s political commitment did not preclude its adherence to traditional ethnographic procedures or its insistence on employing theory originating in the academy.

Theorizing and Co-theorizing

The African American sociologist W. E. B. DuBois argued in The Souls of Black Folk (1989 [1903]: 2–3) that racial minorities in the United States keenly perceived that they at once stood within the North American social system and were marginalized by it. This produced what he called a “double consciousness,” a dual identity that carried the potential of granting a privileged perspective on social life, which he termed “second-sight.” Following DuBois’s lead, African American scholars have taken up the challenge of producing theory, something that as early as 1970 Delmos Jones (1970: 251) argued would be crucial in creating a “native anthropology.” The scholars I have in mind, particularly the anthropologist John Langston Gwaltney (1981, 1993) and the feminist Patricia Hill Collins (1991), proposed that such a body of theory could arise only out of collective reflections with common folk who, drawing on their life experiences, could theorize in collaboration with academics.

La Rosca’s project involved workshops of the sort used by Gwaltney and Collins, but La Rosca’s community meetings were directed primarily toward establishing research priorities and collecting information, not toward generating theory out of local cultural forms. Indeed, workshops are a prime vehicle for social research in Colombia (Riaño-Alcalá 2006), constituting a practice that permits information gathering, collaborative strategizing, and political action simultaneously. This format contrasts with the tendency among North American ethnographers to privilege one-on-one interviews, which control the interview situation to a greater degree than is possible in the communal setting of a workshop.

Workshops, however, are a necessary but not sufficient tool for promoting theorizing among ethnic minorities and other popular groups. The generation of theory from below became possible in Colombia only in the 1990s, after a layer of indigenous activists was trained in structural linguistics at Colombian universities and began to experiment with the use of linguistic forms as conceptual guides in cultural research.⁵ It was necessary for them to learn what theory was and why it was needed before they could subvert the theory learned in the academy.

One of the explicit areas of activity of the members of CRIC’s Bilingual Intercultural Education Program (PEBI) is theoretical production. The theorists in CRIC’s ranks are indigenous linguists and students of cosmovision—a kind of a politicized take on cosmology—because it is from indigenous languages and shamanic knowledge that these activists derive their theoretical building blocks. By theory, they mean the conceptual vehicles that guide the analysis and interpretation of cultural forms and the construction of strategies for revitalizing cultural practices and reintroducing them into social life. Although such conceptual frameworks may originate in indigenous cultures, they are also, as I illustrate later, appropriated from the theoretical traditions of the dominant culture and recast according to native priorities.

Theory may be employed to guide the production of narrative, as I describe shortly for the Guambiano History Committee (which is affiliated not with CRIC but with the Indigenous Authorities of Colombia [AICO], another indigenous organization) and for the history of PEBI. But theorizing also takes place when activists use language and cosmovision to coin new definitions of citizenship that are incorporated into their political strategies, a process reflected in the translation of the 1991 Colombian constitution into indigenous languages (Ramos and Cabildo Indígena de Mosoco 1993; Rappaport 2005). The generation of theory is therefore both an intellectual exercise and an activist objective. Theorizing is a means of imbuing political organizing with cultural significance, a process necessarily punctuated by moments of research and reflection. The ultimate objective, however, is political, not intellectual. In other words, this is a kind of “situated theorizing” (Haraway 1991) in which not only does intellectual practic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Participants in the Wenner-Gren Symposium
• Introduction: How Does Anthropology Work Today?
• 1 Anthropological Collaborations in Colombia
• 2 Gray Spaces and Endless Negotiations: Forensic Anthropology and Human Rights
• 3 Collaborating to Meet the Goals of a Native Sovereign Nation: The Tule River Tribal History Project
• 4 Doing Cultural Anthropology and Disability Studies in Rehabilitation Training and Research Contexts
• 5 In Praise of “Reckless Minds”: Making a Case for Activist Anthropology
• 6 What Do Indicators Indicate? Reflections on the Trials and Tribulations of Using Food Aid to Promote Development in Haiti
• 7 Working Anthropology: A View from the Women’s Research Arena
• 8 Potential Collaborations and Disjunctures in Australian Work Sites: An Experiential Rendering Sandy Toussaint
• 9 The Dilemmas of “Working” Anthropology in Twenty-first-Century India
• 10 Ethnographic Alchemy: Perspectives on Anthropological Work from Northern Madagascar
• 11 Reflections on the Symposium
• References
• Index