SOLUTION: ANTH 104 University of New Hampshire Public Anthropology Reading Response

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
YEAR IN REVIEW
Public Anthropology
Public Anthropology in 2015: Charlie Hebdo, Black Lives
Matter, Migrants, and More
Angelique Haugerud
ABSTRACT In this review essay, I focus on how anthropologists have addressed salient public issues such as the
European refugee and migrant crisis, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the attack on the Paris office of the
satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Public anthropology relies on slow ethnography and fast responses to breaking
news stories. It is theoretically informed but reaches out to audiences beyond the academy. Drawing on proliferating
anthropological contributions to news media and blogs, as well as scholarly articles and books, I explore how
anthropologists today counter grand narratives such as the “clash of civilizations”; how they grapple with risky
popular misconceptions of culture, difference, and suffering; and how they surface less visible forms of compassion,
care, and solidarity that have long sustained our species. The challenges of this era of growing polarization and
anti-intellectualism appear to have energized rather than quieted public anthropology. [public anthropology, Charlie
Hebdo, Black Lives Matter, migrants, year in review]
RESUMEN En este ensayo de revisión, centro mi atención en cómo los antropólogos han abordado cuestiones
públicas relevantes tales como la crisis de migrantes y refugiados en Europa, el movimiento las Vidas Negras
Importan, y el ataque a la oficina de Parı́s del magazine satı́rico Charlie Hebdo. La antropologı́a pública depende de la
etnografı́a lenta y las respuestas rápidas a las historias de noticas de última hora. Es teóricamente informada, pero
alcanza a llegar a audiencias más allá de la academia. Basada en proliferantes contribuciones antropológicas a los
medios de prensa y blogs, ası́ como artı́culos académicos y libros, exploro cómo los antropólogos hoy confrontan
las grandes narrativas tales como “el choque de civilizaciones”; cómo ellos luchan contra concepciones erróneas
populares, problemáticas de cultura, diferencia, y sufrimiento; y cómo ellos sacan a la luz formas menos visibles de
compasión, cuidado, y solidaridad que han sostenido a nuestras especies por largo tiempo. Los retos de esta era de
creciente polarización y anti-intelectualismo parece haber energizado en vez de silenciado la antropologı́a pública.
[antropologı́a pública, Charlie Hebdo, Vidas Negras Importan, migrantes, añ3o en revisión]
A
decade ago, “The Seven Deadly Sins of Samuel
Huntington” was Hugh Gusterson’s (2005) title for a
pithy essay denouncing Harvard political scientist Samuel P.
Huntington’s (1993) influential “clash of civilizations” thesis.
Published the year before Twitter was founded, Gusterson’s
title (as well as Huntington’s, for that matter) today would
qualify as clickbait, a headline that entices Internet browsers
to click on a URL and view an article. Briefly, Gusterson
targeted Huntington’s argument that seven emerging civilizational blocs defined by cultural similarity, rather than
ideology, constitute the “fault lines” of conflict in the post–
Cold War era.1 Huntington termed these “the ultimate
human tribes” and argued that “the clash of civilizations
is tribal conflict on a global scale” (Huntington 1996:125,
C 2016 by the American Anthropological
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 118, No. 3, pp. 585–601, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433.
Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12606
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American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 3 • September 2016
quoted in Gusterson 2005:25). Like many scholars, Gusterson (2005:28) rejects Huntington’s “premise that there are
distinct civilizational zones that have been relatively culturally homogeneous and stable over centuries.” He finds fault
as well in the actual boundaries Huntington mapped between
supposed civilizations (e.g., excluding Greece from Western civilization). In short, Huntington’s “sins,” for Gusterson, include stereotyping cultures, ignoring change, denying
multiculturalism, maligning Islam, using deficient scientific
methods, and assuming that “the West is the only civilization capable of secular reason, liberal democracy, and true
individualism.”2
Gusterson’s criticisms—though shared by some
of Huntington’s political science colleagues as well as
anthropologists—are anything but self-evident for contemporary publics. Indeed, many pundits, policy makers, and
others have been quite receptive to Huntington’s ideas.
The “clash of civilizations” thesis remains, eight years after
Huntington’s death, a powerful ideological frame globally
among political leaders, pundits, and ordinary citizens—
perhaps especially in recent debates about Islam and
terrorism.
The 2015 attack on the Paris office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo is a case in point. The “clash of civilizations”
notion (albeit often in less nuanced form than the original)
cropped up frequently in public discussion of that tragic
event, and for that and other reasons, anthropologists—
as I discuss here—have challenged popular narratives about
Charlie Hebdo. Furthermore, anthropologists’ 2015 interventions in public discussion of issues such as race and policing,
the European refugee and migrant crisis, Ebola outbreak,
and the ethnographic method itself also upend popular narratives that—like the “clash of civilizations” notion—have
staying power in spite of frequent scholarly critique.
These remarkably persistent narratives center on ideas
about culture, race, poverty, gender, biology, and modernity that have long been fundamental to anthropology.
In their introduction to Why America’s Top Pundits Are
Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back (a collection that includes
Gusterson’s essay on Huntington), Gusterson and Catherine Besteman (2005:2) flag “a loosely coherent set of myths
about human nature and culture that have a strange staying
power in American public discourse: that conflict between
people of different cultures, races, or genders is inevitable;
that biology is destiny; that culture is immutable; that terrible poverty, inequality, and suffering are natural; and that
people in other societies who do not want to live just like
Americans are afraid of ‘modernity.’”
I have opened with these core critiques from Why
America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong partly because they remain as
pertinent as ever in succinctly framing key public issues, and
they illustrate how contemporary anthropologists continue
the discipline’s long tradition of reaching out to wide
audiences to address issues of profound public importance.
Public anthropology is not about watering down or “thinning” academic work; rather, it aims to translate complicated
ideas into widely intelligible and engaging language. That
can mean following the advice of editors of scholarly
crossover publications: craft a compelling story, build suspense through plot or questions, avoid paralysis by nuance,
connect heart and head (connect viscerally with readers),
and allow bold assertions and a clear takeaway message.3
Writing style, however, is by no means the only obstacle to wider public consumption of anthropology. Some
wonder if the discipline’s message about complexity and
context may face even steeper challenges today than it did
a decade or two ago.4 Increased polarization and incivility
in the public sphere, for example, create friction in discussions of minority issues and migration in Europe and race
in the United States. The durability in public discourse of
frameworks that many anthropologists reject poses particular challenges in a period of growing anti-intellectualism,
corporatization of universities, and political and economic
polarization. Yet, however daunting, these challenges seem
to have energized public anthropology.
Here I take the term public anthropology to encompass
knowledge production by professional anthropologists that
is intended to reach beyond disciplinary specialists, and usually beyond the academy, in ways that differ from engaged,
applied, or practicing anthropology.5 As this journal’s
public anthropology section editors David Griffith, ShaoHua Liu, Michael Paolissso, and Angela Stuesse (Griffith et al.
2013:125) have stated, “public anthropology is not a field of
anthropology but a form of anthropological expression . . .
[that] deal[s] with social problems and issues of interest to a
broader public or to our nonacademic collaborators yet [is]
still relevant to academic discourse and debate.” Like their
predecessor editorial team—Melissa Checker, David Vine,
and Alaka Wali (2010:5–6)—the current section editors
welcome attention to a wide variety of sources such as conferences, blogs, websites, online videos, op-eds, art, theater,
and more.6 Thus, I follow the practice of previous public
anthropology year-in-review essay authors and emphasize
such sources. Like them, I also confine my discussion mostly
to cultural anthropology, and I appreciate, as Griffith and
coeditors (2013:126) put it, that “much public anthropology
happens in small, subtle, but important actions during meetings, in conversations, in memos or letters-to-the editor of
local newspapers, or in moments of networking in which we
communicate something about anthropology and its application to a public issue.” Furthermore, public anthropology
in a broader sense encompasses teaching, mentorship, participation in community organizations, and multiple “public
means of human coping, problem solving, relating and affiliating, teaching and learning” (Benson 2014:380). In short,
this kind of review essay can capture only a fraction of the
vibrant domain of public anthropology.
A glimpse of the stakes and breadth of public anthropology is provided by this journal’s previous year-in-review
articles. Last year’s essay, by Courtney Desiree Morris
(2015), addressed the Ebola outbreak, Black Lives Matter,
climate change activism, the Israel–Palestine conflict, and
Haugerud • Year in Review: Public Anthropology
AAA discussions about appropriate actions the organization
might take, including a possible Boycott, Divestment, and
Sanctions (BDS) campaign. Two years ago, Peter Benson’s
(2014) public anthropology year-in-review essay on 2013
literature considered anthropologists’ engagement with debates about same-sex marriage in the United States, the
trial on genocide charges of Guatemala’s former dictator
Efraı́n Rı́os Montt, and publication of Napoleon Chagnon’s
controversial memoir entitled Noble Savages. Three years
ago, Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz’s (2013) review of public anthropology in 2012 included special attention to anthropologists’ responses to Florida governor Rick Scott’s public
disparagement of the value of anthropology; public debates
about the KONY 2012 viral video; the role of anthropologists in Occupy movements; and anthropological initiatives on immigration policy and immigrant rights. All of
these topics have inspired insightful anthropological analysis, and many continue to be the focus of intense debate
today.
Charlie Hebdo is my initial focus in this article, which
goes on to consider anthropological contributions to public
debates about Black Lives Matter and its international resonance, the European migrant and refugee crisis, the Ebola
outbreak, public scrutiny of the ethnographic method itself,
and additional key issues that drew substantial anthropological attention in 2015.
CHARLIE HEBDO
The year 2015 saw persistent atrocities by Boko Haram in
Africa (Okeowo 2016) and tragic terror attacks on Garissa
University in Kenya (Gettleman et al. 2015), Beirut (Barnard
and Saad 2015), and elsewhere, but none of them attracted as much global media attention as the January and
November attacks in Paris. The January 2015 attack on the
satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, in which 12 people were killed, was quickly incorporated into narratives
about naturalized and supposedly irreconcilable differences
between “the West” and Islam. Anthropologists and others
observed that such narratives can fuel policies that assume any
Muslim in France (or elsewhere) is not to be trusted and
that they downplay commonalities, dialogues, and migrations that cross-cut presumed civilizational divides, as well
as obscure fissures within “civilizational” blocs. Dominant
media narratives, for example, often efface the sentiments
and ideologies that motivate volunteers and activists of many
nationalities who mobilize to assist refugees and migrants
and to “rehumaniz[e] a dehumanizing situation.”7 Popular
master narratives also enable historical erasure of growing inequalities, such as immigrants’ experiences of discrimination, rejection, and meager economic opportunities.
Some key public figures in France, for example, dismissed
the latter arguments and affirmed instead neoliberal narratives about individual responsibility (Fassin 2015a). In scholarly and popular publications, blog posts, and social media,
anthropologists engaged these debates. They include, among
others, John Bowen, Didier Fassin, Alma Gottlieb, Bruce
587
Kapferer, Fiona Murphy, Kevin Karpiak, and Alessandro
Zagato.
John Bowen (2015), a specialist on Islam in Europe
and elsewhere, contributed a commentary to Time Magazine
shortly after the Charlie Hebdo attack. Countering news
media tendencies toward ahistoricism, he highlights the historical roots of France’s current tensions about secularism,
immigration, and Islam and notes that “France has been
more closely engaged with the Muslim world longer than
any other Western country” through France’s post–World
War I control of Syria and Lebanon, French settlers in
North Africa, and post–World War II migrations of North
Africans to France for factory work that disappeared in the
postindustrial era. It was the children and grandchildren of
the North African migrants, Bowen writes, who “in 2005
exploded in rage over their exclusion from French society
. . . these explosions had nothing to with religion”—
contrary to “clash of civilizations” assumptions. Bowen
(2015) also remarks on France’s continuing economic and
military involvement in its former colonies in Africa and
the Near East, controversies over France’s 2010 public
ban on face veils and other official forms of opposition to
organized religion, and the tendency for the Far Right in
France to depict the Charlie Hebdo attack as confirmation of
the “incompatibility of Islam and the values of France”—a
position connected to the expanding appeal of Far Right
anti-immigration stances elsewhere in Europe. Charlie
Hebdo, Bowen (2015) notes, “succeeded a long line of satirical magazines that ridiculed religion” and reflected France’s
modern tradition of “opposition to organized religion, and
satire of its pretensions,” whether Christian or Islamic.
A few weeks after the Charlie Hebdo attack, Didier Fassin
(2015a) wrote in the magazine Dissent that his research during the past decade on the “French police, justice, and prison
systems shows that ethnic minorities living in disadvantaged neighborhoods are disproportionately subject to being
stopped and frisked in the street, more severely punished
in court cases, and overrepresented in jails for minor offenses.” Rather than rejecting French values, Fassin (2015a)
said, most youth in the banlieues (suburbs) “silently endure
this situation . . . [and] “simply request that these values be
extended to them.” Prime Minister Lionel Jospin dismisses
such explanations as “sociological excuses,” and there is little space in the French public sphere for historical or social
analysis of the country’s profound inequalities in a period
of insistent national unity and proclamations of liberty and
laı̈cité (the “French version of secularism”).8 Fassin (2015b:7)
contributed opinion pieces to French newspapers as well,
some of which he said elicited strongly negative reactions
online, along with very positive responses in private.
Alessandro Zagato (2015), within months of the attack,
published an edited collection, The Event of Charlie Hebdo:
Imaginaries of Freedom and Control, with contributions from
nine scholars based at the University of Bergen, Norway.
In that volume’s introduction, Bjørn Bertelsen and Zagato
(2015:7) criticize media tendencies toward ahistorical
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American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 3 • September 2016
spectacularization of the event and argue that the attack
disrupts “clash of civilizations” logic and other common
responses centered on a “narrowly identitarian logic.”
Humor theory frames Bruce Kapferer’s (2015) afterword
to the Zagato volume, which is titled “When Is a Joke Not
a Joke?” In addition to joining others in criticizing insertion
of Charlie Hebdo into grand narratives such as the “clash of
civilizations,” Kapferer explores why the question in his title
is “ultimately unanswerable.” Anthropologists who analyze
the Charlie Hebdo attack, Kapferer writes, are themselves
caught in paradox and in the collapse of the joke frame under
the weight of the same social structural realities of suffering
from which the joke sprang. Furthermore, the joke’s end
sets off more jokes, as in the English satirical journal Private
Eye, which mocked the almost instantly ubiquitous “Je suis
Charlie” slogan by placing the bubble “Je suis Charlatan”
over the heads of world leaders in the famous photo of
a January 2015 solidarity march in Paris. For Kapferer
(2015:98), the Private Eye cartoon “revealed the joke in
the structure, the hypocrisy of the hierarchs who, in their
affirmation of democracy and freedom, hid the fact that they
are the instruments of the daily subversion of these values.”
In addition to these popular and scholarly publications, anthropology blogs offered lively discussions of Charlie
Hebdo. The collective “Allegra Lab: Anthropology, Law, Art
& World” posted Fiona Murphy’s (2015) summary of discussions that occurred during an international, multidisciplinary
conference at Maynooth University (National University of
Ireland) about the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack. Allegra also live-tweeted the event. Conference contributors
cautioned against condensing meanings of Charlie Hebdo into
a symbolic singularity, as in the “Je suis Charlie” mobilizations online and offline, and they reflected on the “insertion
of Charlie Hebdo into grand narratives such as the enlightenment, the clash of civilizations, race and multiculturalism
and secularism” (Murphy 2015). Similarly, Kevin Karpiak
(2015a), in a blog post for Anthropoliteia, urged attention
not just to freedom of speech but also to power, inequality, and colonialism—a framework that leads him to see the
Charlie Hebdo cartoons themselves as “antithetic to the liberal
tradition in which they drape themselves . . . [as well as]
dangerous in that their effects—in the form of security crackdowns, illegal intrusions on liberty, social ostracism . . . —
will almost surely further endanger and antagonize the lives
of France’s broad and complex Muslim population.” In a
turn away from common public sphere questions about why
anyone would even consider killing people for making distasteful jokes or how politicians believe such atrocities can
be prevented, Kerim Friedman (2015a), writing at Savage
Minds, crafts an anthropological response to radical Islam that
highlights religious belief as a set of historically contingent
social practices.
Related pedagogical contributions include Michelle
Hagman (2015) on the anthropology of Islam and how
Western mass media shape views of Islam and Marianinna Villavicencio (2015) on “Muslim Immigration and
Integration in France.” Both of these re …
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