Against Gravity: A Worldly Interview with Gustavo Lins Ribeiro
By Penelope Papailias (University of Thessaly), Pamila Gupta (University of the Witwatersrand), Eileen Jahn (University of Bayreuth), and Pedro Silva Rocha Lima (University of Manchester) interviewing Gustavo Lins Ribeiro (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana)
French translation of the interview
What does US anthropology look like from other sites of anthropological thinking, research, and teaching? Burning, imploding, guilt-ridden, self-involved? Creative, striving, critical, open? A wellspring of resources, including concepts, networks, funding, publications, and institutions, οr a ruthless extractive enterprise, incorporating just a sliver of diverse scholarships on its own terms, oblivious to the rest.
Probably a bit of all the above for us anthropologists who are based in “other locations.” As incoming editors of the World Anthropologies section, we are aware that this journal is a product of the above paradoxes. It is unclear if this section is for “us” in those other locations or for “you” who identify as “American anthropologists.” Indeed, one could imagine “neither” as the answer. Yet, at the same time, it could not be clearer that at this point in time, we desperately need deeper—not just perfunctory—conversations about the production of social research around the world and the (geo)politics of knowledge. We need more, rather than fewer, ways of communicating, networking, and sharing ideas in and across societies—but frequently also academic institutions—hostile to the anthropological project.
To this end, we sought out as an initial interlocutor the US-trained Brazilian anthropologist Prof. Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, an expert in political economy and globalization. He has played a pivotal role in establishing both a theoretical framework and a networked infrastructure for a pluriverse of anthropologies. In his prolific writing and organizing around the concept of “world anthropologies,” Ribeiro has offered a pointed critique of global hierarchies among anthropologies and anthropologists.
“Metropolitan provincialism” is the term he has coined to describe the lack of knowledge that anthropologists in the United States and other centers of anthropological knowledge production tend to have of anthropological research outside those hegemonic sites. “Provincial cosmopolitanism,” by contrast, names the extensive knowledge that anthropologists in those nonhegemonic sites have—and often need to have—of the discourses promulgated in recognized centers of cutting-edge anthropological production (Ribeiro 2006, 2014). Despite his structural critique, Ribeiro has remained hopeful about the possibilities for fostering and harnessing a transnational anthropological conviviality and collegiality against the forcefield of prevailing political, economic, linguistic, and cultural power dynamics.
This interview was conducted over a videoconferencing platform on March 31, 2021, between Professor Gustavo Lins Ribeiro from his home in Mexico and American Anthropologist’s World Anthropologies associate editor Penelope Papailias in Greece, associate editor Pamila Gupta (visiting) in the United States from South Africa, contributing editor Eileen Jahn in Germany, and contributing editor Pedro Silva Rocha Lima in the United Kingdom. We would like to thank Professor Ribeiro for taking the time to speak with us.
Transnational Community Making
Eileen Jahn (EJ): What do you think has changed—or not—in the global anthropological hierarchy since the 2006 publication of World Anthropologies (Ribeiro and Escobar 2020)?
Gustavo Lins Ribeiro (GLR): It’s not easy to change long-established, hard global hegemonies. Hegemony, as we know as anthropologists, has its own dynamics. Change is a long process—unless you have a revolution. But this is not the case.
A positive result of the World Anthropologies (WA) project is a growth in consciousness of the diversity of anthropologies and of their histories on a global scale. But most anthropologists still look at the hegemonic centers, like Berkeley, Chicago, New York, London, Paris. They don’t look at Cape Town, Delhi, Brasilia, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, or Stockholm. In French anthropologist Benoît de L’Estoile’s (2008) terms, this is the gravitational force of traditional internationalization. This situation is not easy to change because it’s structured by many powerful forces and differences within the world system. Educational and scientific systems, infrastructure, language, access to global flows are at play.
One of the strongest outcomes of the WA project is the World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA), founded in 2004. The WCAA is very active, with more than fifty associations today and the online journal Déjà Lu. I think associations are key actors. They’re the collective expression of our profession. They are our political bodies, and we have to do politics within them. When you establish a collective political subject, you’re stronger. This is what we were missing in the early 2000s: a global voice, a global proactive subject. I see anthropology as a transnational cosmopolitics, with rituals of transnational community making, under the umbrella of an international association that is led by colleagues from different countries.
The downside has to do with the materiality of hegemony. Anglo-American hegemony is still basically untouched despite the sympathy that the WA project has attracted in the United States and in the United Kingdom. The American Anthropological Association, for instance, has a very strong formal organization and management. The size of the association, the number of graduate programs in the country, the strength of its editorial industry, all definitely contribute to the quality, importance, and weight of American anthropology.
But there’s also another angle to this question: it’s that we anthropologists are very fond of diversity. The WA project is very understandable to American or British colleagues. They know that the loss of diversity is a loss of intelligence. It’s a loss of possibilities of constructing different worlds. So they’re not closed off to this project. To the contrary, since the beginning we have always worked also with American and British colleagues.
But an asymmetrical ignorance—that is, ignoring the work done outside the hegemonic centers—is something that some people still take as a natural order of the global academic system. This is one thing we have to struggle against because it diminishes everyone’s imagination. And that’s why we coined the term metropolitan provincialism (Ribeiro 2014). In the end, if you’re in the center of the system, you can indulge yourself and ignore others. Many colleagues do that unknowingly, and that’s a problem. There are a lot of excellent anthropologists in many countries today. It’s a pity that most of the time, their voices cannot be heard.
Penelope Papailias (PP): In light of what you were saying about differences among anthropological associations around the world, I just want to note that here in Greece we just managed to establish an anthropological association, the Association of Social Anthropologists Greece, this past year.
GLR: That draws my attention. Several countries only recently have organized themselves in terms of national associations. Perhaps the WCAA has been an inspiration for that. I come from an anthropological community that is highly politicized. Since the 1950s, the Brazilian Association of Anthropology has been organized and active. It’s a political entity with lots of visibility. It’s going to be seventy years old in 2025. The Brazilian association is highly committed to everyday public life against the fascist government we currently have in Brazil. It’s a daily struggle.
GIF defining “metropolitan provincialism,” by Eileen Jahn.
Decolonizing Anthropologies
PP: In terms of this particular historical moment, I would like to ask you how the World Anthropologies project relates to renewed demands for decolonizing anthropology—or maybe even prefigured today’s demands?
GLR: “Decolonizing anthropology” resonates differently in different countries. If we’re talking about countries that are currently imperialist or were in the past, that’s one thing. If we’re talking about countries in which anthropologists were engaged with internal colonialism, that’s another thing. And if we are talking about countries in which anthropologists have always been on the right side, that’s another. So, it is hard to make a general statement about what the need for decolonizing anthropology means. Decolonization is a huge umbrella: not only does it mean different things in different countries, but it also has political and epistemological implications that are general and other ones that are specific.
Also, let me say we did not prefigure the need to decolonize anthropology. This discussion has been going on at least since the 1970s. There are many key works that are expressions of these debates that came before the WA project and that, to some extent, were inspirations for our project: Talal Asad’s (1973) Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, Dell Hymes’s (1974) Reinventing Anthropology, Jean Copan’s (1977) Anthropologie et Impérialisme, Hussein Fahim’s (1982) Indigenous Anthropology in Non-Western Countries, and Faye Harrison’s (1991) Decolonizing Anthropology. Also, Arturo Escobar, who was highly involved with the decolonial movement in Latin America, brought in issues like the “coloniality of knowledge” (Mignolo 2011, citing Quijano 2007).
PP: How do you respond to critiques of the contemporary discussions of decolonizing anthropology as themselves provincial—reflecting an internal crisis of North American anthropology. Do you think the new iteration of the decolonization struggle that we have been experiencing will be able to address the epistemological imperialism of the United States?
GLR: There is obviously a tendency within American anthropology to confuse its own crisis with a global crisis of the discipline. At the same time, given the hegemonic power of the US academy and the fact that decolonizing anthropology is one thing that is also needed outside of the centers, there is a trend to establish the “turns” defined in the United States as the general global fads. In traditional internationalization, there is a propensity to quote an author from the United States and not from Greece, although perhaps the Greek piece is more interesting than the American one. This is, to simplify the matter, the objectivity of hegemony. It allows you to create the impression that your own problems are global ones even if you don’t want to. And I’m not sure if most of our American colleagues realize that they should be more careful about this silent universalist pretension.
Pedro Silva Rocha Lima (PSRL): Perhaps turning to internal epistemological crises within anthropologies elsewhere could help get the conversation moving away from a US-centrism. Recently, Indigenous scholars have begun to occupy positions in academia in Mexico and Brazil and have questioned established epistemologies, contrasting them with their own. How have the anthropologies within these two countries addressed this issue? What is the place of Indigenous scholars within the WA project?
GLR: We have to look at Indigenous scholars as subjects of knowledge engaged in two or more different but interrelated worlds. If we look at Latin America, for instance, how can there be a 100 percent pure Indigenous intellectual after five hundred years of violent European and national colonialism? There can’t be. They have been changing for five hundred years because of ethnocentric contact, genocide, ecocide, epistemicide, and epidemics. So there’s a kind of double consciousness: as an Indigenous person, one is different from the national society, but you’re also part of it. How can you escape it entirely? More often than not, you’re even speaking the national language and you’re not writing nor communicating in your own native language. But this double consciousness is exactly the source of their political and utopian power.
Coming back to the issue of decolonizing Brazilian anthropology. In the past ten years, the numbers of Native Brazilians and Afro-Brazilians who are coming into the Brazilian anthropological community are growing fast. Several of them are doing incredible work and becoming political leaders too within the Brazilian Association of Anthropology. The Mexican situation is different. There aren’t many Indigenous or Afro-Mexican scholars in the academic and political leadership of Mexican anthropology. But there is a powerful Indigenous theoretical critique: la comunalidad (Martinez Luna 2015).[1] This exemplifies the fact that decolonization has different contexts and meanings in different countries. In this sense, local knowledge has also been very important for the WA project. Here we have been influenced by the work of Archie Mafeje (1991, 1992, 1997), the South African anthropologist, a brilliant critic of Eurocentrism.
GIF defining “provincial cosmopolitanism,” by Eileen Jahn.
Language, Power, and Heteroglossia
Pamila Gupta (PG): Gustavo, I would like to ask about English and its dominance as a form of imperialism. Could you comment on the contradiction between the anthropological embrace of cultural and linguistic diversity and the dominance of academic English as the gold standard of exchange?
GLR: Language is a central issue. It always comes up. Why are we speaking in English here? It obviously has to do with the history of imperialism in the world. First, British imperialism, then American imperialism after World War II, which established the processes through which English has become the global language.
We also need to consider what I call the paradox of transnational communication. If you want to talk to different people from different language communities, you always return to one language. Edward Sapir (1931) already raised the need for an “auxiliary international language.” Perhaps one day this paradox will disappear: some kind of software will allow everybody to speak in his or her native language and their speech be simultaneously translated to other languages.
Although Spanish has become quite an important international language, if you want to reach a wider global readership, you still have to publish in English. But publishing in English comes with a difference in style, and that worries me more than the surface of the problem. Just to give an example, look how the French write and how the Americans write. Look at Pierre Bourdieu or Michel Foucault in French. They write huge paragraphs, long phrases and sentences, and it’s okay, while in English you don’t write like that. You use small sentences. What are we losing when writing in English? We also adapt to the English style of writing.
If there is a technological solution for translation, then we wouldn’t need polyglots anymore. I think that’s also a loss. What does it mean if you only speak your native language? If we don’t need to learn another language, something is going to be lost, including the way our brain works because we have to make some effort to learn different languages and accommodate different sign systems in our brains and minds.
PG: Could you connect this discussion of language and power to the WA emphasis on heteroglossia and trying to improve the “conditions of convers-ability” (Ribeiro 2014, 489)?
GLR: Heteroglossia is central to our idea that increased cross-fertilization will make anthropology into a stronger discipline in different global and local scenarios. We always come to the language issue, but “we”—at least the people who are here now talking—are always thinking in European languages. Of course, this is not true in the Arab world or in Asia, with some exceptions. And that has an impact, too. In this sense, what happens in Japan is illuminating of what happens in other countries. Since you seldom find readers of Japanese outside Japan, either you are satisfied with the national readership or you have to write in English. And in India it is even more interesting, because there you have the use of English as an academic language, and it’s a minority that speaks English. This creates a variety of relations between different forms of knowledge and linguistic skills and power positions. Again, the language issue varies in different scenarios. There are some remarkable initiatives that build on ideas of linguistic pluralism in world anthropologies, such as Bérose, a multilingual online encyclopedia based in France, and Anthropen, an online “dictionnaire francophone,” based in Québec.
GIF defining “convers-ability,” by Eileen Jahn.
Sticking with the Contradictions
PP: I want to address the elephant in the room: that is, American Anthropologist. The fact is that we’re meeting here in the pages—or screens—of one of the flagship journals of American anthropology, founded in the 1890s. We’re having our conversation in English. Yet the interview is happening on three continents.
Pamila and I are both American-trained, but have been based for over fifteen years in non-US institutions. I work in a non-English-speaking institution. Pedro is from Brazil but studying in the United Kingdom, and Eileen is studying in Germany. So we’re all really outsiders to American anthropology. The fact that we are having this conversation today, though, has to do with how this particular journal, building on the decolonizing critiques you mentioned—but also more recent calls for abolitionist anthropology, for “burning down” anthropology and for challenging the anthropology of white supremacy—has been at the forefront of politicizing US anthropology.
So, now that Pamila and I have this opportunity as editors of World Anthropologies to do something in this section, with this space, I’m curious if you could give us some tips. How can we connect US scholars to world anthropologies but also grow an audience beyond US anthropologists to read our content?
GLR: I’m glad you asked this question. Contradictions are everywhere, and politics is full of contradictions. When we talk about wanting to change the way academic visibility and prestige on a global level is structured, we are also talking about politics and power. It’s not only the epistemological, the theoretical. It’s real politics. How do you engage people and institutions to do something else?
I’m not afraid of my American and British colleagues for the reasons I mentioned before. I see them as allies. The AAA has always had a positive relationship with the dream of world anthropologies. This has to do with the role that diversity plays in our own imaginaries. Think of Franz Boas, “founder” of American anthropology. He was German. He was a migrant. What is at stake here is whether you embrace critical cosmopolitanisms or not. If anthropology is a form of cosmopolitics, you have to have a critical cosmopolitical vision and always criticize your own academic biases. At the same time, the centrality of American anthropology makes it mandatory to have a voice in the center so that hopefully we can also change the center.
But can we really change the center? I don’t know. It’s a political process. An interesting step would be to see foreign graduate students engaging with local academic communities, taking, for instance, a couple of courses in graduate local programs and quoting the local colleagues that have worked with the same issues they are working on. That’s another form of decolonizing. I mean look at the bibliographic references of dissertations. It looks like no local anthropologist in the country where research was carried out wrote about those subjects. It’s crazy. Ignoring the local anthropological production is a form of cognitive extractivism.
I think that another strategy for your editorship of World Anthropologies in AA would be to choose a subject and ask anthropologists from different countries how they and their fellow anthropologists see a specific issue—for instance, environmental destruction and Native peoples. I think this would be challenging and interesting for the readers and for yourselves.
PSRL: I have to say that I came into this World Anthropologies section very much from that perspective. When I did my fieldwork in Brazil, in Rio, on global humanitarianism, the literature was mostly written by Euro-American scholars. But then doing research in Brazil, I discovered a variety of published works on violence. So I’ve been trying to make those two areas, their concepts mainly, stick together. So I think this is something really interesting and it’s what we had discussed in previous meetings among ourselves. It’s really good to get confirmation that it’s a good way to go forward.
REFERENCES CITED
De L’Estoile, Benoît. 2008. “Hegemonic Gravity and Utopian Pluralism: A Comparative Framework for Analyzing the International Space in Anthropology.” Journal of the World Anthropologies Network/Red de Antropologías del Mundo 3:111–29.
Mafeje, Archibald B. M. 1991. The Theory and Ethnography of African Social Formations: The Case of the Interlacustrine Kingdoms. London: Codesria.
Mafeje, Archibald B. M. 1992. In Search of an Alternative: A Collection of Essays on Revolutionary Theory and Politics. Harare: SAPES Books.
Mafeje, Archibald B. M. 1997. “Who Are the Makers and Objects of Anthropology? A Critical Comment on Sally Falk Moore’s Anthropology and Africa.” African Sociological Review 1 (1): 1–15.
Martínez Luna, Jaime. 2015. “Conocimiento y Comunalidad.” Bajo el Volcán 15 (23): 99–112.
Mignolo, Walter. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Quijano, Aníbal. 1997. “Colonialidad del Poder, Cultura y Conocimiento en América Latina.” Anuario Mariateguiano 9:113–21.
Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins. 2006. “World Anthropologies: Cosmopolitics for a New Global Scenario in Anthropology.” Critique of Anthropology 26 (4): 363–86
Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins. 2014. “World Anthropologies: Anthropological Cosmopolitanisms and Cosmopolitics.” Annual Review of Anthropology 43:483–98.
Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins, and Arturo Escobar. 2020. World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations in Systems of Power. London: Routledge.
Sapir, Edward. 1931. “The Function of an International Auxiliary Language.” Romanic Review 11:4–15.
NOTE
[1] Comunalidad (communality) is an experiential concept developed by two Indigenous Oaxacan anthropologists, Floriberto Díazand and Jaime Martínez Luna, which is based on the interdependence of communal life and the values of respect, reciprocity, and survival of the world. Its four foundational and interrelated elements are nature (territory, soil, geography), society (community and the family inhabiting nature), labor (activities society enacts on the territory) and enjoyment (fiesta, satisfaction, and tiredness, that which is obtained from work in society and community on a particular soil and territory).