The future of anthropology

Simon During reviews Magic's Reason in Public Books:

But this line of inquiry increases the conceptual strain on anthropology. Let’s state that thought like this: if anthropology was invented to bring the full force of modern rationality to bear on “primitive” societies and cultures, and this under conditions in which the division between the modern and the primitive was most concretely based in the division between reason and magic, what happens to anthropology once the hard division between magic and reason is undone (as it is here), and in the same breath the hard division between “primitive” and “modern” (once again) crumbles?

In this situation, anthropology itself, rather than being a vehicle of universal rationality, becomes an expression of a particular society and culture and, indeed, a performance somewhat like a magic performance in which partial, more or less ritually produced statements are passed off and sanctioned as legitimate objective knowledge.

This difficulty cannot be bypassed just by directing the “ethnographic gaze” indifferently toward all kinds of institutions and lifeways, “modern” or not, nor even by anthropology’s avowed acceptance that it too participates in the societies it studies rather than merely observes them. [...]

The solution to this problem, as Jones’s book also allows us to suppose, is to move away both from the discipline’s Boasian transformation and from Latour’s emphasis on hybridity and de-purification, so as to imagine it differently. [...]

Or, to put it more concretely, we are to accept that anthropology is a practice, based in training, in which lifeways are characteristically examined by experiencing them as if simultaneously from the inside and the outside, with a will, then, to describe their regularities, analogies, exclusions, moods, risks, challenges, and so on, ultimately for bureaucratic (i.e., academic) reasons and uses. In such a view of anthropology, the discipline comes to be based not in reified reason and modernity but in presence and experience—in the capacity to live with one’s objects of attention and knowledge simultaneously as a participant and as a bearer of academic office, methods, and duties.

In this paradigm, anthropology can make claims to pursue globalized truths not just because its practices can be learned through training, but because universities and their disciplines are now, as a matter of fact, global, the world being divided into nation-states, almost all of which contain universities, and many of these train and hire ethnographers. Magic and reason have nothing to do with it.