Commentaries on The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn
In the 2019 cultural anthropology year-in-review essay in American Anthropology, titled “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn,” Ryan Cecil Jobson wrote that we need to abandon anthropology’s liberal suppositions and adopt a radical humanism as its political horizon. This call for a renewed anthropology demands that anthropology eschew an “exceptionalism” that places itself outside its histories of violence and reckon with the way that anthropology, as a discipline, not only participated in particular exclusions to humanity but also continues to presume a coherent subject that can be known, documented and spoken for.
Yet, with the COVID-19 pandemic upon us, the global call that “Black Lives Matter,” institutions pledging to address systematic racism, and students demanding change from their university leadership, contemporary anthropology could not be more suspicious for its enduring place in knowledge erasure. These commentaries are meant to accompany Jobson’s essay and the webinar that was co-sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and UCLA’s anthropology department. Each builds on Jobson’s claims in different ways, questioning the unitary “we” held to stand in for anthropological practitioners from a variety of vantage points. Each also imagines new horizons for the discipline and insists that anthropology be done in the service of real-time material, affective, and ideological transformations.
American Anthropology, Decolonization, and the Politics of Location
In this essay, we highlight the American of American Anthropologist in order to contend with the ways the politics of location shape Jobson’s call for anthropology to adopt a radical humanism as its political horizon.
A Different Kind of Unmooring
Ryan Jobson’s year-in-review essay begins in San Jose at the 2018 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, a moment that presciently foreshadowed this contemporary conjuncture when, as Achille Mbembe (2020) has noted, a “universal right to breathe” has forcefully reemerged. Beyond mere inclusion, this right is a demand and a reckoning—a call for reinvention.
Revisiting the “Field” of Black Internationalism
The mood that Ryan Jobson captures in his 2019 annual review in American Anthropologist resonated with me. I too felt the frustration he recounts in the social media posts of Karen Nakamura, Zoe Todd, and others who participated in the 2018 meeting of the American Anthropological Association.
After the Ash and Rubble Are Cleared: Anthropological Work for a Future
What I have tried to communicate here is this: the world is on fire, anthropology as a discipline tethered to whiteness is on fire, and while some within the discipline throw buckets of water on the flames with futility, and some sit idly by yet are choking on the smoke, others are already involved in building reciprocal relations of learning and pedagogy rooted in care that will persist when the ash and rubble are cleared.