This chapter introduces a new research praxis, namely mesography , to underpin the practice of a post-exotic anthropology, which heralds an overdue shift to a post-ethnography era. It identifies the nature of the changes that must be adopted in order to transition from the practice of an exotic to a post-exotic anthropology that can address the existential issues that are endangering our “art of living together.” Accordingly, the chapter undertakes the following tasks: situates the recourse to mesography within an epochal transition in disciplinary practice necessitated by an emergent global political conjuncture; highlights the three dimensions of a post-exotic anthropology as a domain of study; proposes a new ethical covenant for the practice of mesography; provides a tabular presentation on the entailments of a mesographic approach as the method for a post-exotic anthropology; and re-conceptualizes the nature of fieldwork associated with the practice of mesography. The ultimate aim is to institute a symbiosis between the epistemic ambitions of anthropology and the pragmatic concerns and emancipatory aspirations of communities of research subjects and a critical global audience of readers and scholars.
1.1 An Axial Era : Anthropology in a Post-Universalist Conjuncture
Post-exotic anthropology is a field-based science of the human condition and the foundational cognitive tool for elucidating, and practically contributing toward realizing and sustaining, the “plurality of ways of belonging and being” in the world. This is a world in the throes of a converging dual crisis: an ecological crisis engendered by the dawn of the Anthropocene that threatens the livability of our planet, and a cultural crisis induced by the resurgence of ethno-nationalism animated by a nostalgic recourse to a “retrotopia ” that threatens the “art of living together” on the planet. Retrotopia entails the “rehabilitation of the tribal model of community, return to the concept of a primordial/pristine self, predetermined by non-cultural and culture-immune factors” (Bauman 2017: 12). This is the prevailing mood among the West’s former and current imperial states, their dominions within the European Union, their diaspora’s postcolonial settler states elsewhere, and even in some of their former colonial appanages (e.g., Hindutva India). As their “native” populations, or a significant segment of them, perceive demographic and cultural diversity in their midst and external technological and economic competition as existential threats to their history-endowed supremacy. In such a context, anthropology must reclaim its initial raison d’être as a mediator of the meaningful coexistence of a plurality of worldviews, value repertoires, societal configurations, and sociocultural ontologies. This would renew its abandoned promise of fostering an egalitarian global cross-cultural conversation. This is all the more urgent in view of an emergent polycentric world order that heralds an epistemological and methodological rupture with the Western cognitive empire and its hegemonic disciplinary praxis that assumed the structural permanence of a geopolitical hierarchy between a northern center and a southern periphery.
1.1.1 Emergent Pluriverse: Geopolitical Transition
Indeed, the emergent geopolitical transition from a post-colonial to a post-imperial world and the demise of an Atlantic-centric geopolitics are engendering “the dynamic shift in the world’s center of gravity from the West to the East, [… and] the accelerating surfacing of the restless phenomenon of global political awakening” (Brzezinski 2012: 5).
For the first time in history almost all of humanity is politically activated, politically conscious and politically interactive. Global activism is generating a surge in the quest for cultural respect and economic opportunity in a world scarred by memories of colonial or imperial domination. (Brzezinski 2008)
This awakening is heralding the dawn of an axial moment in global history in the wake of the unraveling of Western hegemony under historic duress. As it is ushering a geographical ecumenalism that irreversibly establishes the temporal coevalness of the world’s social formations and banishes their hierarchical ordering. More significantly, this shift in the world’s center of gravity is heralding a reversal in global power flows that are subverting the hegemonic assumption about neoliberalism’s geocultural singularization of the planet’s pluriverse of social formations, while producing the geocultural pluralization of the world-system beyond neoliberalism and its Atlantic-centric geographic axis. In effect, the emerging global landscape is a “No One’s World” that is without a hegemon’s Archimedean pedestal and devoid of a “consensual ecumene.” As “power is diffusing and politics diversifying, not one in which countries are converging toward the Western way” (Kupchan 2012: 3). Accordingly, a post-exotic anthropology must conceptually relocate disciplinary practice within a reconfigured metageographic imagination in order to recalibrate its practice with the emerging state of the world. This gravitational shift is one of the ramifications of the still incomplete decolonization process and the dethroning of colonialism’s structural legacies and epistemic hegemonies. One hegemony that is being dethroned is the “one world anthropology ” and its facile accommodation to the tyranny of neoliberalism, or more accurately liberal imperialism . As this decolonization process has led to the “shattering of larger coherences … into smaller ones, uncertainly connected one with another, [and] has made relating local realities with overarching ones … extremely difficult” (Geertz 2000: 221). Noteworthy, is that this global power shift and the resulting decolonization effects were catalyzed, not through the dissemination of a westernizing neoliberalism according to the prevailing assumption, but through “the multiculturalization of international capital […which] produced a sense of dispersion, of particularity, of complexity, and of uncenteredness” and engendered a “more pluralistic pattern of relationships among the world’s peoples” (Geertz 2000: 220, 219). The end result of this heterogenizing process is a pluriversal civilizational order encompassing a plethora of heteromorphic sociocultural formations. Moreover, as Law observed, “there is no overarching logic or liberal institutions diplomatic or otherwise to mediate the different realities” between the social formations within the emergent pluriversal world (2015: 127).
This Global South’s awakening has engendered a reaction from the Global North in the form of the “retrotopia ” noted above and its paranoia-driven “identity geopolitics ” based on a cross-nationally shared perception of relative “demographic, economic and political decline, and the loss of intellectual hegemony, [which] have plunged [them] into a vengeful despair” (Mishra 2018). This is manifested in illiberalizing Western societies as political parties are frantically harnessing national electorates into political communities around “the rapid mainstreaming of white supremacism” and virulent xenophobia. This has engendered an increasingly and widely shared perception among southern polities that the West is being dethroned from its self-arrogated “human presidency” pedestal as the pinnacle of social evolution and has gone rogue. This is manifested in the erosion of its global social capital, the loss of its vestigial moral credibility, the forfeiture of its political exemplarity within the global public sphere , which engendered a globally endemic ressentiment against it (Mishra 2017). This is accompanied by a consolidating geopolitical grammar of emancipated southern polities capable of “speaking their own lines” on the global stage. Geertz warned a generation ago that these emancipating polities have made the traditional role of “the anthropologist […as a] tribune for the unheard, a representer of the unseen, a kenner of the misconstrued, increasingly difficult to sustain” (1988: 133).
More importantly, such a world of politically and culturally assertive polities emancipated from the tutelage of empire is heralding a post-universalist phase in the practice of the social sciences, which entails the abandonment of the delusional universal mandate of West-stream travelling theory . In recognition of this eventuality, Bruno Latour’s magnum opus (2013) is dedicated to establishing a symmetrical “comparative anthropology” that promises to rectify the fact that “in the history of anthropology, there haven’t been any ‘first contacts’ with the Whites” who are the sovereign arbiters of the current fading world order (Latour 2013: 478). The ultimate social purpose of his research program is to prepare the primary inheritors of Western civilization for “the planetary negotiation that we are going to undertake in preparation for the times when we shall no longer be in a position of strength” (Latour 2013: 16). Remarkably, the renowned French “tentacular thinker” reflexively affirmed a chauvinistic regional ontology, as he lapsed into sociocentrism: the identification of the West with just one social group—indigenous Christian European “Whites” and some of their creolized progenies in settler post-colonies (see Latour 2013b; Maniglier 2014). In contrast, the mandate of a post-exotic anthropology does not accommodate ethnocentrism or sociocentrism (see below).
This global awakening , and the geopolitical transition it is engendering, demands a renewed empirical engagement through the reconceptualization of knowledge production practices that are de-linked from any universalizing Occidentalism or Orientalism . As Talal Asad noted a generation ago, “Anthropology does not merely apprehend the world in which it is located, but… the world also determines how anthropology will apprehend it” (1973: 12). Henceforth, there is a need to reinvent anthropology’s methodological infrastructure still dependent on a geo-historical perspective that assumes an intrinsic asymmetric relationality between ethnicized participants in the fieldwork encounter; and to reconstruct its theoretical scaffolding still in thrall to the disciplinary heritage of a few hegemonic metropolitan centers of knowledge production and dissemination throughout the world. This methodological reinvention and theoretical reconstruction process entails the quest for an alternative pathway to an anthropological praxis that can elucidate the manifestation of this “global awakening” and of its reactionary antagonist in the guise of a nostalgic ethno-nationalist geopolitics that is endangering our “art of living together.” This chapter will identify the nature of the changes that must be adopted in order to transition from the practice of an exotic to a post-exotic anthropology that can address the existential threats to life in common.
Accordingly, the chapter undertakes the following tasks: (a) situates the recourse to mesography within an epochal transition in disciplinary practice necessitated by the global awakening ; (b) highlights the three constitutive pillars for the disciplinary praxis of a post-exotic anthropology; (c) proposes a new ethical covenant for the practice of mesography; (d) provides a tabular presentation on the entailments of mesography as the method for a post-exotic anthropology; and (e) re-conceptualizes the nature of fieldwork associated with the practice of mesography.
1.2 Epochal Transition: From Ethnography to Mesography
This epochal transition is heralding an intellectual ecosystem of competing alternative conceptions of the organization of society, the purpose of economy, the practice of politics, the role of culture, and their contribution to the social engineering of a diversity of futures. Indeed, it is a historical phase that is generating a geopolitical decentering of the established world order through a structural heterogenization process that obviates the conventional classification of the world either into totalizing civilizational polarities (e.g., West vs. Rest, East vs. West), or into geopolitically ranked trichotomies (First, Second, Third Worlds). Moreover, this process is disrupting the associated one-way knowledge and power flows that materially construct domains of peripherality and symbolically reproduce relations of dependency. This calls for a new epistemic praxis that will elucidate the global mosaic of lifeways within re-emergent multi-continental and plural regional civilizational formations that constitute the post-exotic historical conjuncture. In effect, this conjuncture is the catalyst both to the emergence of “new differences” that are no longer markers of socio-cultural superiority or inferiority and to the renewed contestation of the West’s global monopoly over the “idea of humanity.” Consequently, as the West’s half-millennium crusade “to dominate the world” is retreating into a penumbral phase, it is thus constrained to participate equally in, and not exercise hegemony over, the emerging pluriversal civilizational formation. At last, the prevalent assumption “that everything has a center,” as epitomized by the West as the world’s “historical headquarters” from which everything originates, is being buried.
This emergent structural divergence and entrenching sociocultural heterogeneity calls for a reversal in the discipline’s prevailing structural relationality: from its current Euro-centric axis characterized by the centripetal motion of non-Western societies around Western civilization as a constellation of peripheral dominions, to a world-centric pivot enabling the centrifugal emancipation of non-Western societies beyond Western civilization. This transition is prefiguring the inexorable de-centering of the “West” as the hegemonic frame of reference, interpretive center, as well as politico-economic and socio-cultural anchor for the rest of the world. This emerging conjuncture demands the anticipatory reconstitution of our geographic imagination, which is still tethered to empire as the prevailing political organization of the world. This geographic re-imagining exercise is to be pursued through the empirical mapping of the processes of enmeshment engendered by the circulation of peoples, ideas, practices, institutions, and technologies, which are articulating these territories into spatially imbricated cross-regional civilizational matrices. The reconfiguration of the world’s politico-economic balance of power has invalidated West-stream anthropology ’s conventional relational protocol, traditional research method, and expropriative interpretive practices, which were founded on the structural permanence of a geopolitical asymmetry that subordinated the majority of humankind to an ethno-regional minority. The epistemological challenges posed by this epochal transition has yet to be reflected in anthropology’s mode of methodologically engaging and theoretically representing cultural others. As anthropology is still burdened with the albatross of exoticism , and its exorcism from its practice is mired in epistemological quandaries. For example, researching “matters of contemporary import” in the world while employing travelling theories to interpret them (MacClancy 2002); or through the self-serving repurposing of obsolete concepts (e.g., exoticism, relativism ) (Kapferer and Theodossopoulos 2016).
In fact, exoticism is constitutive of the discipline’s two foundational purposes, which continue to guide its contemporary practice. Marcus and Fischer described them as follows: (1) “the salvaging of distinct cultural forms of life from a process of apparent global Westernization” and (2) the use of these salvaged cultures as allegorical tales “to serve as a form of cultural critique for ourselves” (1986: 1). These two objectives betray the inaugural self-serving raison d’ȇtre of West-stream anthropology through data colonialism and the resulting congenital reciprocity deficit toward its research subjects that has defined the practice of ethnography ever since. Yet they persist as an anachronistic expiatory ritual to memorialize the West’s victims in the Rest. These two archaic objectives can no longer contribute to the decipherment of this emergent historical conjuncture. This epochal transition has effectively provincialized the purview of West-stream anthropology by (a) circumscribing the relevance of its knowledge claims to its native grounds; (b) deflating its hegemonic epistemic pretensions into mere provincial ruminations; and (c) disabling its travelling wings and confining its destination to its regions of origin. This is the background to the necessary transition from ethnography to mesography , which is imperative if anthropology is to emancipate itself from being the epistemic handmaiden to the hegemony of one of the world’s regional cultural provinces and to become relevant to the pluriverse of human communities around the globe.
1.2.1 Epistemological Renewal: Beyond the Neo-Imperial Vulgate
In spite of this epochal maelstrom, the practice of West-stream anthropology is still wallowing in an interstitial academic subculture that straddles two sociocultural worlds: the residual exotic pre-modern past in which anthropology’s conceptual repertoire and research practices were honed, and the dominant late modern post-exotic present that demands its radical retooling. This impasse is partly due to anthropologists’ seemingly entrenched professional loyalty to a particular “investigative modality” that is unable to emancipate itself from its colonial origin. That investigative modality initially emerged from what Cohn (1996: 6) called the “observational/travel” modality and subsequently mutated into the ethnographic method (see Fabian and Rooij 2008). What is significant about this modality is that its vaunted particularities—e.g., face-to...