Here Comes Everyone: Anthropology And World Affairs

Anthropology and World Affairs

Ralph Pettman

• Publisher: WSPC
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9789813209206
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

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International relations, as a discipline, is overwhelmingly top-down. It looks at world affairs with notable detachment. By taking a cultural anthropological approach, however, it is possible to engage with those involved in a more comprehensive and cogent way. It is possible to provide a deeper understanding of how people live there.

This book directly addresses a significant gap in the international relations literature, namely, the lack of a systematic account of its cultural context. It does so by examining the subject in anthropological terms. It shows, that is, how cultural anthropologists are able to provide both analysts and leaders with an augmented awareness of what their field involves. Presenting a wide range of unique insights about how the world works, it will be of interest to many readers, such as students, policymakers, teachers, researchers, professionals, and the general public alike.

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ChapterBEING: Ontology

1

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In the Introduction it was said that “being” describes people’s social existence and how it came about. It describes what life means to them and what they think is real in this regard.

It was also said that nearly all people everywhere are currently having to cope with the globalising culture of modern science and technology (Pettman, 2000, pp. 71–109). This is the case not only for those who created this culture but also for those who came to it later.

As a discipline international relations looks from above at the spread of this culture while anthropology looks from below at how it affects people. One is detached and top-down. The other is engaged and bottom-up.

Though there are exceptions to this general rule, they are not mainstream. As such they serve to highlight this difference. They highlight, for example, how most analysts and global leaders do what the rule tells them to.

One exception would be the world affairs scholar who explores regional affairs — such as those of the Middle East — both internally and externally (Burke, 2015). Another would be the scholar who tries to understand foreign policy-making by combining the particular characteristics of foreign policy-makers, their official behaviour, the affect on them of their governmental structures, the affect on them of non-governmental factors like national unity or the extent of industrialisation, and the affect on them of systemic factors like the existence of external threats or their geo-political situation (Rosenau, 1966; Pettman, 1975, pp. 52–57).

Another exception would be the anthropologist who explores how many cultural universals there might be. One such list includes linguistic universals like language itself, lying, and the classification systems that highlight age, kin, and sex. It also includes social universals like the conferring of personal names and the global fact of families, laws, moral feelings, promises, property, conflict, a collective identity, collective decision-making, gender roles, inheritance rules, jealousy, shame, territoriality and trade. It includes ritual universals, as well, like healing practices, rites of passage, dance performances, forms of play and feasting, mourning rites, and how bodies are adorned. And it includes technological universals like the making of shelter, tools, weapons, fire, and cooked meals (Brown, 1991). Brown claims that all people everywhere manifest these behaviours, in other words, they do so without exception.

So: What does “being” mean to world affairs analysts and practitioners and what does anthropology highlight that this discipline does not? What do cultural anthropologists do, for example, to compensate for the gap in world affairs where studies of the European Enlightenment — and its global consequences — should be?

Rather than stand back and look in detached terms at what is involved this chapter will stand close and listen to three accounts of what being-in-world-affairs involves. One is by Richard Falk, an American international relations specialist and international lawyer. The second is by Shmuel Eisenstadt, an Israeli sociologist. The third is by Francis Bugotu, a Solomon Islands linguist, educator, bureaucrat and diplomat.

As a world affairs analyst Falk is one of the few who is well aware that the discipline has “generally neglected culture ...” (Falk, 1990, p. 267). He makes this statement quite categorically, that is, with little qualification and no fear of denial.

He is also well aware that the dominant doctrine in world affairs is realism and that realists have few cultural concerns. From their viewpoint the world is a “dog-eat-dog”, anarchic, self-help one, where defending a nation’s interests means having the military and productive power to do so. Culture is only relevant when it helps global leaders gather the power they require.

Falk knows, too, that realists cannot explain the rise of “the West” and the way reason was freed from the shackles of a belief in the supernatural. They see the world as one where the strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they must. They do not see this changing over time (Falk, 1990, p. 267). And yet, as Falk well knows, “the West” did ascend, cultural recasting did occur, reason was prioritised as an end in itself, and all this happened because of changes in Europe’s culture. The cost of that ascent was high when measured in terms of communal fragmentation and individual alienation. But the European Enlightenment did take place and realists, as noted in the Introduction, cannot account for it.

Falk then notes that realism’s preoccupation with defending the state means any interest in concepts like “civilization” or “the West” is minimal. Indeed, such concepts make no sense when the primary objective is promoting state sovereignty. Realists simply cannot see that there might be ways in which people organise themselves that are less about waging war and more about spreading religious beliefs, for example, or promoting more prosperous ways of living.

Falk also notes that domination of the discipline by realists helps hide how — from the eleventh to the seventeenth century — a system based on the supremacy of faith gave way to a state-centric one (Falk, 1990, p. 268). To the realists, states — in one form or another — were always there. They did not come from the collapse of European Catholicism. Falk finds this odd. Realists do not appreciate how the state, that they so ardently defend, originated.

The modern state system was originally defined as such in Western Europe. It was part of the solution to a thirty-year war. It was a regional way of resolving a regional conflict.

Falk thinks this is also ironic. He sees a paradox in the way IR analysts and policy-makers make general statements about world affairs while coming from a particular region of it, namely, Western Europe (Falk, 1990, p. 268). World affairs doctrines, including that of the realists, did not begin as global ones. They were first formulated by Europeans for Europeans. In principle they were supposed to apply world-wide. In practice they did not. The invention of the state, for example, did not bring about global national self-determination and a world of sovereign states. It brought about European imperialism instead. This was because Europeans saw themselves as chosen by their religion to dominate others. Their culture, Falk says, was based on a “cult of superiority”. As members of this cult they saw themselves as having a mandate to impose their cultural norms and forms upon the rest of the planet. Only after two large wars in their own heart-land did the last of these empires finally fall apart.

There is also irony in the way the challenge to “the West” that brought about an end to the territorial form of its imperialism was mounted by analysts and practitioners well versed in the culture of “the West”. Their challenge promoted Western rationalism, with its science, its technology, and its industry, even though many of those making it wanted to reject these cultural practices, or at least, to accept them selectively (Falk, 1990, 1971).

Falk notes in this regard the challenge Islamic fundamentalism represents. When he wrote his essay he was referring to Iran and the fall of the Shah. The Islamic challenge continued to spread after he wrote, however, and in ways he anticipated. For example, it did so in ways that prompted extremist Muslims to reject the culture of modernity while relying at the same time on many of the products this culture promotes (Falk, 1990, p. 271).

Falk also notes other challenges like those mounted by the civilizations based on Confucianism and Hinduism. These challenges are more likely to succeed, he says, when compared with those built on Islam, and especially so if China and India do not deny their cultural history and use it to craft an appropriate sense of their civilizational selves (Falk, 1990, pp. 272, 276).

Finally Falk notes what he calls a postmodern challenge to nuclear weapons, industrial pollution, materialism and consumerism. He sees this particular challenge coming from radical segments of the contemporary civil society such as the environmentalist and feminist ones (Falk, 1990, p. 277).

Though he calls those who mount this opposition postmodernists, they are not postmodernists in the way defined in the Introduction. They are not, that is, rationalists who turn reason back on itself to ask why priority should be placed upon reason. To Falk they are those who the rationalists push to the world’s social periphery for not being rational enough (the rationalists being mostly well-off, European men). There the peripheralised actively resist their marginal status. They do use the thinking and speaking spaces postmodernists (as defined in the Introduction) provide but they are not themselves postmodernists (as Falk defines them).

In the light of the above Falk can be said to see world affairs as a discipline with a cultural context. He sees this context as being conspicuous by its absence in mainstream studies of the subject. World affairs do have such a context, he says, but most world affairs analysts do not appreciate the part it plays.

This is an unusual conclusion for a world affairs analyst to come to. As an international relations commentator Falk is an exception.

This said, his perspective is top-down. As an international relations commentator Falk is not an exception.

He sees the cultural context to world affairs as the result of the European Enlightenment and the invention of modern science, that is, as rationalism. He sees the technology this cultural innovation made possible as having given Europeans the power to dominate the rest of the world. He sees traditionalists as loving some of the technology but loathing some of the values that underpin it. He sees them opposing the West’s power and he sees those pushed to the global periphery by the rationalists who most assiduously promote the European Enlightenment as opposing it too, for example, women, environmentalists, and indigenous peoples. And he sees all this from above. As such he cannot be accused of being a positivist, that is, of wanting to copy the natural sciences. He does not, for example, promote the scientific method with its search for analytical patterns, its hypothesis testing, and its quantitative measurement. His approach is more historically grounded, more qualitative, and more of a discourse.

What he does not “see” is what the very act of “looking at” obscures. Despite his awareness of non-Western cultures (like Islam and Confucianism and Hinduism) and “alternative cultural orientations” (like anti-nuclearism, environmentalism, and feminism), the way his own awareness is constructed is part of the problem. His objectivity stops him from getting close to people to listen to them and to take part in their lives. This in turn stops him understanding — and helping his readers to understand — what world affairs involves from the bottom-up. In doing his research, for example, he does not become a practising Muslim or a Confucian or a Hindu. He does not climb the anti-nuclear ramparts himself, or sail with the greens, or take an active part in what women’s associations do. He does not situate himself in social and cultural contexts like these. As a result he can talk about the people involved but he cannot describe what world affairs means to them from his own experience.

While it is an important first step to highlight the rationalist project, it is also important to take the second step, which is to highlight the various ways in which people become involved. The rationalist project is not a geological process like plate tectonics. It is what people do. It is their patterns of social and cultural practice. It is their living responses to the changes rationalism brings about. It is not enough to provide an outlook that reviews these responses. Insight is required as well.

Falk describes how people contend with the results of the rationalist revolution and he does so analytically. He is also an heir to the rationalist revolution which means his description is analytical.

His strength (and it is a relatively unusual one) is that he knows about the discipline’s cultural context. He knows about the importance of the modernist project and those who oppose it.

His weakness is his detachment. This inhibits him from talking about the subjective significance of this project and its various effects.

He knows that this kind of rationalism is a challenge to communal coherence. He knows that it alienates the individuals involved. He knows that extremist Muslims reject the social and cultural — indeed the spiritual — values these individuals promote. He also knows that feminists and environmentalists want other ways of living.

He cannot show in any cogent way, however, what people feel about what is happening. He cannot add the subjective detail his objective analysis only hints at.

Shmuel Eisenstadt, by contrast, tries to do what Falk does not. He is a sociologist. As such he is not bound by the limits IR sets. He is able to approach the subject in both global and local terms.

Eisenstadt describes world affairs in terms of “multiple modernities”. This directly contradicts, he says, the conventional idea that as societies industrialise and modernize they cease to be different and become similar or the same.

Conventional analysts see the “cultural program” that the modernist rationalists devised in Europe going global. They see the result as being greater homogeneity. They see it as world dominance for Western ways, that is, they see modernisation as Westernisation.

In practice, however, the opposite is occurring. The result is diversity-in-uniformity, not uniformity alone (Eisenstadt, 2000, p. 1).

To Eisenstadt this opposite is manifest in changes to families, economies, polities, cities, education systems, communication systems, and personal preferences (Eisenstadt, 2000, p. 1). As a result of these changes he thinks there are many organisational and doctrinal practices emerging world-wide (Eisenstadt, 2000, p. 1). In other words, the world’s many social traditions are not carrying over into the modern day. The present is not more of the past.

While every society is becoming modern, he says, it is becoming modern in its own way. It is becoming a mixture. It is combining its own particular cultural assumptions and its own particular historical story with that of the Enlightenment project and it is doing so to original effect. It may be ambivalent towards this project. It may be “anti- Western” or “even antimodern”. It is contemporary, however, just like every other society or culture (Eisenstadt, 2000, p. 1).

To Eisenstadt, then, modern-day world affairs are best understood in terms of the drafting of many normative agendas. The result is that the culture of modern science and the affect of the West are no longer one and the same.

The culture of modern science came first. It arose, Eisenstadt says, when Christianity was called into question. It remains to this day the key global touchstone.

But other cultural projects are now emerging and they are no less valid. They are taking the Enlightenment on board but the outcome is not carbon copies of the European original. It is many synergistic copies. It is many hybrids. It is many combinations of modernity and tradition, all of which are genuine and all of which are part of the contemporary world.

Modernity, in other words, is no longer a story told only by the West and repeated verbatim elsewhere. It is changing local conversations but they are changing it. Modernity’s momentum is self-evident but traditional cultures are challenging the West’s assumptions and institutions in turn.

Does this mean the Enlightenm...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• About the Author
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 BEING: Ontology
• Chapter 2 KNOWING: Epistemology
• Chapter 3 COMMUNICATING: Orality
• Chapter 4 ORDERING: Polity
• Chapter 5 PRODUCING: Economy
• Chapter 6 IDENTIFYING: Society
• Chapter 7 RANKING: Hierarchy
• Chapter 8 DEVELOPING: Poverty
• Chapter 9 MIGRATING: Demography
• Chapter 10 EXPRESSING: Culturality
• Chapter 11 SURVIVING: Catastrophy
• Chapter 12 TRANSCENDING: Spirituality
• Conclusion
• References
• Index