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Editors’ Forum Theorizing the Contemporary


INTRODUCTION: AN OTHERWISE ANTHROPOLOGY

From the Series: An Otherwise Anthropology

Photo by Laura McTighe. A Luta Continua (The Struggle Continues). Constitutional
Court of South Africa, Johannesburg.

By Laura McTighe and Megan Raschig

July 31, 2019

Publication Information Expand

Cite As: McTighe, Laura, and Megan Raschig. 2019. "Introduction: An Otherwise
Anthropology." Theorizing the Contemporary, Fieldsights, July 31.
https://culanth.org/fieldsights/introduction-an-otherwise-anthropology

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> The otherwise in all its plentitude vibrates afar off and near, here but also,
> and, there.

> —Ashon T. Crawley, “Stayed | Freedom | Hallelujah”

In recent years, the concept of the otherwise has been tracking across
anthropology to name and frame political potentialities that are still emerging.
Often drawing on phenomenological and continental theoretical lineages,
anthropologists of the otherwise have worked to glimpse that which has been
prefigured but not formed; to speculate possibilities beyond our dystopic
present; or to hold and open a place for relations or actions that don’t quite
fit into liberal understandings of politics. However, in other fields, such as
Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, postcolonial, queer, and gender
studies, the otherwise has been understood and felt to enjoin scholars to an
enduring struggle for liberation. Within these fields, and their firm
foundations in social movements, the otherwise summons simultaneously the forms
of life that have been able to persist despite constant and lethal forms of
surveillance, as well as the possibility for, even the necessity of, abolishing
the current order and living into radical transformations of worlds.

As the contributors to this collection have found, these liberatory commitments
can (and already do) have palpable and challenging effects when smuggled into
the space of ethnographic inquiry. Indeed, that is the point. We are women,
femmes, and nonbinary people; Black, Indigenous, people of color, and white
accomplices. As junior scholars, we have aligned ourselves with emancipatory,
decriminalizing, life-affirming social projects that have unapologetically
transformative demands. For the last four years, we have been asking one another
and our co-thinkers on the ground: What kind of anthropology can contribute to
this deep and enduring practice of otherwise world building? It is through this
sustained work that we have learned that we must get closer and work harder than
merely glimpsing otherwise political potentialities, lest we become complicit in
perpetuating the same forms of colonial violence of sight, surveillance, and
voyeurism under and amid that which existing otherwise worlds have fought to
persist. Working harder means opening ourselves, as well as our embodied and
institutionalized ways of doing anthropology, to the possibility of conversion
and to being transformed in the process (Jackson 2005).

Together, we call for a move from the anthropological study of the otherwise to
an Otherwise Anthropology. We focus our labors constructively towards
experimenting with and modeling how theories of “otherwise possibilities”
(Crawley 2016, 2) call us into different forms of being together in our field
sites, communities, and institutions: work that is tactile, iterative,
relational, and involving. Our work begins from and proceeds through a critical
hapticality borne of longstanding and transformative commitments to liberatory
projects: to “feel that what is to come is here” in the words of Stefano Harney
and Fred Moten (2013, 98). We align ourselves with anthropologists who are
unapologetic in showing up in their field and writing in the fullness of their
own being (Simpson 2014; Cox 2015; Shange 2016), whose fugitive stance is borne
of the ethnographer’s ever-situated embodiment (Berry et al. 2017) and of our
commitment to reciprocal and redistributive relations of effort and scholarship
(Rosas 2018). We swim in the wide wake of decolonizing methodologies (Smith
2012; Sharpe 2016) as we reckon with and rework the power relations we, however
inadvertently, inherit when we become anthropologists; we also own the
contemporary complicities (Cacho 2012; Gomberg-Muñoz 2018) that demand we work
harder to build otherwise worlds alongside. We extend approaches that seek to
disclose possibility through hermeneutic interpretation by working to pursue
those possibilities alongside (Povinelli 2002; Zigon 2019). In so doing, this
Otherwise Anthropology takes to heart Deborah A. Thomas’s (2011) claim that
reparative (M4BL 2019) thinking (and doing) is the key in which to enact today’s
engaged anthropological ethics, building together, day after day, in the spaces
of our most intimate fieldwork and institutional relations.

In the provocations that follow, diverse in regional focus and content, we
develop a set of epistemological tools and ethical stances for building and
doing an Otherwise Anthropology. These texts push us to refuse scholarship that
studies violence in ways that rehearse and further entrench the norms of
racialized terror; they also demand that we begin to repair these from the
relations of anthropological praxis itself. These texts are attuned to concerns
like, What are the ethico-methodological principles that ground this Otherwise
Anthropology? What elements and tactics do we use with our interlocutors,
comrades, and colleagues to not only document what is, but to actively build
together what could be? And how does this skin-in-the-game pursuit transform the
discipline? The transformations of an Otherwise Anthropology are accountable to
the needs, demands, and world-building visions of the otherwise projects to
which we are accountable. Co-thinking necessitates co-authorship, and of texts
that vary in genres beyond the published research manuscript; the siphoning of
grant resources into otherwise projects; and the generation of a category beyond
the critical/applied binary that mixes radical theory with grassroots relevance,
and swaps instrumentality for liberation. We write for many reasons: to make
sense, to document, to write something more into being. What would happen if we
were up front with each other and our institutions about these relations and
stakes, and worked from this intimate space of involvement?

“Together we must move like waves,” activist-author adrienne maree brown (2017,
16) beckons. We offer these Otherwise Anthropology essays in this spirit, as an
emergent and tactical toolkit—to show up for the discipline’s debts, and to
conjure the words, modes, and methods for moving in concert to shape change and
change worlds.


REFERENCES

Berry, Maya J., Claudia Chávez Argüelles, Shanya Cordis, Sarah Ihmoud, and
Elizabeth Velásquez Estrada. 2017. “Toward a Fugitive Anthropology: Gender,
Race, and Violence in the Field.” Cultural Anthropology 32, no. 4: 537–65.


brown, adrianne maree. 2017. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds.
Chico: AK Press.

Cacho, Lisa Marie. 2012. Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the
Criminalization of the Unprotected. New York: New York University Press.

Crawley, Ashon T. 2016. Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility.
New York: Fordham University Press.

Cox, Aimee Meredith. 2015. Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of
Citizenship. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Gomberg‐Muñoz, Ruth. 2018. “The Complicit Anthropologist.” Journal for the
Anthropology of North America 21, no. 1: 36–37.


Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and
Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions.

Jackson, John L., Jr. 2005. Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.

M4BL. 2019. “Reparations Now Tool Kit.”


Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities
and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press.

Rosas, Gilberto. 2018. “Fugitive Work: On the Criminal Possibilities of
Anthropology.” Hot Spots, Fieldsights, September 26.


Shange, Savannah. 2016. “Unapologetically Black?” Anthropology News 57, no. 7:
e64–66.


Sharpe, Christina. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press.

Simpson, Audra. 2014. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of
Settler States. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.


Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous
Peoples. 2nd edition. London: Zed Books.

Thomas, Deborah A. 2011. Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in
Transnational Jamaica. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Zigon, Jarrett. 2019. War on People: Drug User Politics and a New Ethics of
Community. Oakland: University of California Press.

Back to Series Description

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SCA WEBSITE

These results are drawn from our Fieldsights content, as well as announcements
and information pages.




OUR JOURNAL

These results are drawn from articles published in Cultural Anthropology since
2014.

 1.  Writing Publics
     
     
     A CASE OF CULTURAL MISUNDERSTANDING: FRENCH ANTHROPOLOGY IN A COMPARATIVE
     PERSPECTIVE
     
     By Vincent Debaene
     
     November 2013
     
     This paper offers a study of French anthropological tradition in a
     comparative perspective. It focuses on French anthropologists' writing
     practices and, in ... More

 2.  Futures of Neoliberalism
     
     
     "XENOPHOBIA" IN SOUTH AFRICA: ORDER, CHAOS, AND THE MORAL ECONOMY OF
     WITCHCRAFT
     
     By Jason Hickel
     
     February 2014
     
     This article explores the violent, anti-immigrant riots that swept through
     informal settlements in South Africa in 2008, during which more than sixty
     foreigners... More

 3.  Futures of Neoliberalism
     
     
     HOMEOWNERSHIP IN ISRAEL: THE SOCIAL COSTS OF MIDDLE-CLASS DEBT
     
     By Hadas Weiss
     
     February 2014
     
     What motivates people to make home purchases that seem imprudent in
     narrowly economic terms, and how does the salience of homeownership debt
     shape political str... More

 4.  Articles
     
     
     WRITING THE IMPLOSION: TEACHING THE WORLD ONE THING AT A TIME
     
     By Joseph Dumit
     
     May 2014
     
     This article puts a reading of Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2 in dialogue with
     Donna Haraway’s works and methods. Working through the former helps me
     unpack the proc... More

 5.  Race Theory/Anthropology Today
     
     
     SITTING AT THE KITCHEN TABLE: FIELDNOTES FROM WOMEN OF COLOR IN
     ANTHROPOLOGY
     
     By Tami Navarro, Bianca Williams, Attiya Ahmad
     
     June 2017
     
     This text explores the difficulties faced by faculty of color, particularly
     women of color, in the academy. Building on existing literature on these
     issues, the... More

 6.  Writing Publics
     
     
     ETHNOGRAPHY IN THE WAY OF THEORY
     
     By João Biehl
     
     November 2013
     
     In this article, I return to my engagements with people in the field not
     only to address the specific circumstances and trajectories I encountered
     there, but to... More

 7.  Futures of Neoliberalism
     
     
     CAST ASIDE: BOREDOM, DOWNWARD MOBILITY, AND HOMELESSNESS IN POST-COMMUNIST
     BUCHAREST
     
     By Bruce O'Neill
     
     February 2014
     
     The homeless, in post-Communist Bucharest, Romania, are bored. They
     describe themselves as bored all of the time. Drawing upon nearly three
     years of ethnographi... More

 8.  Articles
     
     
     GOVERNING DISASTER: THE POLITICAL LIFE OF THE ENVIRONMENT DURING THE BP OIL
     SPILL
     
     By David Bond
     
     November 2013
     
     This article presents an embedded analysis of how scientists and federal
     officials scrambled to get a handle on the deepwater blowout in the Gulf of
     Mexico. Tak... More

 9.  Articles
     
     
     PERFORMING ROYALTY IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICA
     
     By Susan Cook, Rebecca Hardin
     
     June 2017
     
     Sovereignty and governance in contemporary Africa are hotly contested
     issues with important—even dire—consequences for all those interested in
     the continent'... More

 10. Cityscapes
     
     
     TOKYO'S COMMUTER TRAIN SUICIDES AND THE SOCIETY OF EMERGENCE
     
     By Michael Fisch
     
     June 2017
     
     This article considers the treatment of commuter train suicides in Tokyo's
     commuter train network in an effort to think critically about the lived
     experienc... More

 11. Articles
     
     
     HUMAN RIGHTS AS MORAL PROGRESS? A CRITIQUE
     
     By Jarrett Zigon
     
     November 2013
     
     In this article I critically engage the view that the enactment of human
     rights is the enactment of moral and political progress. Drawing on my
     research of inte... More

 12. Articles
     
     
     TRAVELING TECHNOLOGIES: INFRASTRUCTURE, ETHICAL REGIMES, AND THE
     MATERIALITY OF POLITICS IN SOUTH AFRICA
     
     By Antina von Schnitzler
     
     November 2013
     
     In this article, I explore the politics of infrastructure in South Africa
     by focusing on the "travels" of a small technical device. Since the end of
     a... More

 13. Race Theory/Anthropology Today
     
     
     T/RACING BELONGING THROUGH CUBAN TOURISM
     
     By L. Kaifa Roland
     
     June 2017
     
     Because Cuban "race" operates on a flexible black–white continuum, with
     performance and social markers like class and foreign-ness affecting racial
     as... More

 14. Cityscapes
     
     
     POST/SOCIALIST AFFECT: RUINATION AND RECONSTRUCTION OF THE NATION IN URBAN
     VIETNAM
     
     By Christina Schwenkel
     
     June 2017
     
     This article explores the engineering of affect in socialist urban design
     and subsequent changes in the affective register of a rapidly growing city
     in late soc... More

 15. Futures of Neoliberalism
     
     
     ASCERTAINING DEADLY HARMS: AESTHETICS AND POLITICS OF GLOBAL EVIDENCE
     
     By Saida Hodžić
     
     June 2017
     
     This article asks what anthropology can contribute to public and scholarly
     debates about politics of knowledge in global governance and argues that
     bringing tog... More

 16. Articles
     
     
     DISCIPLINARY ADAPTATION AND UNDERGRADUATE DESIRE: ANTHROPOLOGY AND GLOBAL
     DEVELOPMENT STUDIES IN THE LIBERAL ARTS CURRICULUM
     
     By Richard Handler
     
     June 2017
     
     Like most disciplinary scholars, anthropologists have been reluctant to
     reorganize their undergraduate programs to speak directly to student
     concerns. Yet, stud... More

 17. Race Theory/Anthropology Today
     
     
     MEXICAN GENOMICS AND THE ROOTS OF RACIAL THINKING
     
     By John Hartigan
     
     June 2017
     
     This article confronts the cultural limitation of critical race work in the
     United States by examining genomic practices at two national institutes in
     Mexico—on... More

 18. Articles
     
     
     SPECULATIVE MATTER: SECULAR BODIES, MINDS, AND PERSONS
     
     By Abou Farman
     
     November 2013
     
     The relationship between life, death, and personhood is articulated by the
     body, without which there would be no such relationship to begin with. How
     do secular... More

 19. Futures of Neoliberalism
     
     
     WRAPPED IN PLASTIC: TRANSFORMATION AND ALIENATION IN THE NEW FINNISH
     ECONOMY
     
     By Daena Aki Funahashi
     
     June 2017
     
     Coming out from the shadow of the economic crisis of the 1990s, the
     neoliberalizing Finnish state identified another emergent threat:
     "burnout," a men... More

 20. Futures of Neoliberalism
     
     
     EXISTENTIAL DAMAGES: THE INJURY OF PRECARITY GOES TO COURT
     
     By Noelle J. Molé
     
     June 2017
     
     Psychological workplace harassment, called "mobbing," can include vicious
     bullying but also practices normative within neoliberal labor regimes. It
     ha... More

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