Toward an Anthropology of Sexual Harassment and Power: Myth, Ritual, and Fieldwork
By Sarah Shulist (Queen’s University) and Sameena Mulla (Emory University)
Introduction: Sexual Violence, Anthropology, and Disciplinary Critiques
Since January 2022, conversations within anthropology have been circling around events at Harvard, where John Comaroff was sanctioned for violating school sexual harassment and professional misconduct policies. Based on the extensive and widely varied contexts in which this story has been reported, ranging from student newspapers to the New York Times to the anthropology blogosphere, it has clearly been of interest not only to the Harvard community and to anthropologists but also to academic audiences and even to the US public (see Harvard Crimson 2022; New York Times 2022; Walters 2022). Critically, many commenters have emphasized the question of how anthropology, a discipline known for sharp attention to dimensions of power, could so thoroughly shut its eyes to the impact of power within its own backyard. Indeed, we write this piece as an expansion on our own open letter about this very issue. Here, we suggest how some of the central conceptual tools of anthropology can be brought to bear on these recent events, and we contextualize these approaches in public discourses about the state of anthropology.
The unfolding events invite us to think about what is specific to Harvard and what is general to anthropology and academia. Much of the conversation has focused on the status of Harvard and the ways in which elite academics can trade on the currency of prestige, in particular through the use (or withholding) of reference letters. Indeed, one of the most difficult aspects of this story is the degree to which Jean Comaroff’s active and assertive support for her husband, along with the marshalling of signatures from prominent scholars within their professional networks, created a public list of potential reference-letter writers who would be hostile to any accusers. As the dust has settled, we emphasize that this is not solely a “Harvard problem.” Nor is it a problem of recent origin. Rather, anthropology has obstinately refused to take up a broad conversation on sexual violence, fieldwork, and the university as a space of sexual coercion and the abuse of power—even as anthropologists have raised this critique repeatedly.
For many years, our disciplinary spaces have been replete with stories and analyses of sexual violence that sit at the margins of our discipline. Cathy Winkler’s (2002) autoethnography recounts the ways in which the aftermath of sexual assault resulted in her exit from the academy, while Cynthia Mahmood’s (2008) reflection on her experiences in the field emphasizes not only how the events impacted her work but also how her efforts to discuss her experiences were met with dismissal from fellow anthropologists. In 2014, biological anthropologists Kathryn Clancy, Robin Nelson, Julienne Rutherford, and Katie Hinde published a chilling indictment of fieldwork as a site of risk, demonstrating that fellow researchers were the most likely perpetrators of sexual harassment, assault, and coercion. These dynamics situate sexual violence within the academy as academia’s public secret, to borrow from Pratiksha Baxi’s (2014a) framing of rape as the public secret of law. The inhering of sexual violence as a public secret is reinscribed through its crafting as an anthropological object, Baxi (2014b) further argues.
The public secret of rape is also part of anthropology’s history. For example, Megan Steffen (2017) reexamined the historical case of Henrietta Schmerler, who was raped and murdered during fieldwork in 1931. Steffen’s acute analysis focuses on the ways in which the professional spaces of anthropology came to deposit the blame for the tragedy at Schmerler’s own feet, exemplified in the pages of Anthropology News and a special report by the American Anthropological Association debating the ways Schmerler “invited” misfortune upon herself. Alix Johnson (2017) also posed questions about the inability of anthropology to confront sexual assault. Moving beyond the question of disciplinary silences, Johnson (2016) raised the issue of the epistemological stakes of sexual violence and how it positioned the fieldworker as an observer with an expert attunement to the field around her. These concerns were also queried by Mingwei Huang’s (2016) interrogation of the masculinist basis of anthropological epistemologies that are laid bare when sexual assault occurs during fieldwork. Maya Berry et al. (2017) also furthered the conversation, suggesting modalities of fugitivity through which to push back against the effacement of race, gender, and sexuality that characterize the discipline’s refusal to reckon with violence in the “field” and in the professional spaces of anthropology.
Steffen (2021) recently published a second analysis of the archival traces of Henrietta Schmerler’s case and anthropology’s incredulous response, demonstrating how the flawed nature of the archive upheld the insistence of Schmerler’s mentors and colleagues. Their narrative that Schmerler’s rape and murder could have been prevented had she only taken appropriate precautions persisted to the present. Steffen labels this enduring orientation to sexual violence in the field as anthropology’s “project of prevention” and critiques its inability to recognize threats of harm by focusing solely on the fieldworker’s responsibility. More broadly, the many anthropological treatments of sexual violence, and the institutional, juridical, and medical responses to such violence, have rarely been brought to bear on our everyday lives in academia or what our own projects of prevention entail (Hlavka and Mulla 2021; Mulla 2014; Sanday 1990, 1996; Trinch 2003; Wies and Haldane 2011, 2015). While Jennifer Wies and Hillary Haldane fostered a conversation around the “frontline” of gender-based violence, Wies (2015a, 2015b) continues to be one of the few anthropologists whose work envisions the US university as one such frontline. Efforts such as #MeTooAnthropology and #MeTooFieldwork have called for attention to the matter of sexual assault and sexual harassment in anthropology. Yet, echoing Emma Backe’s (2017) invocation of Marilyn Strathern, this same scholarly lens and feminist anthropological sensibility is rarely turned back toward the dynamics of anthropological research and scholarly training. This follows anthropology’s insistence on reserving our analysis for the Other, while rejecting the position of subject ourselves.
To understand this intractability, we argue that academic anthropology itself is predicated on a series of myths and rituals through which it establishes and maintains hierarchies of power and authority. These hierarchies reflect many common forms of dominance and oppression, including white cis-masculine heteronormativity, which find expression in violent encounters within the disciplinary community. We take up the idea that we as anthropologists can and must turn our analytical lens onto the context of our own discipline. As we worked through what it was that we were observing, as we sifted through the responses to and comments on our open letter, we came to recognize that many of the concerns with power, violence, white supremacy, patriarchal heteronormativity, and silencing were embedded within “cultural systems” and practices that we know well from our reading of anthropological theory. In this short discussion, we illustrate three examples: anthropology’s creation myth, hero myths of academia, and the coming-of-age ritual of fieldwork.
Anthropology’s Creation Myth
One of the central tenets of the discourse surrounding the Comaroff story has been that anthropology should be better than it is. We ourselves invoked this idea in our open letter, asking why it is that anthropology seems so paradoxically unable to apply its lens to understand power in its own spaces and practices. Being hyperconscious of power in our scholarly work, we should be able to see, and expunge, this kind of oppression and violence in our praxis. In this view, we encounter various iterations of the creation myth of anthropology as a discipline.
Anthropology’s North American iteration of a creation myth often takes the following form: once upon a time, as we looked upon the diversity of humans around us, we were unable to explain such differences without relying on racist assumptions about the innate biological superiority of whiteness. In this distant, terrible past, Africans and their descendants were struggling to overcome the effects of centuries of enslavement, and Indigenous people were being subjected to genocidal policies of cultural extinction, physical violence, and assimilation. Into this dark world, a savior emerged. A wise man called Franz Boas came from across the sea bearing the light of anthropology as an antiracist alternative. Boas went on to father four children, who work together in harmony to promote a view of our shared humanity, both through the invalidation of scientific racism and through the recognition of the value of Indigenous languages and cultural knowledge, which he and his students sought to preserve for further study about humanity (cf. Baker 2010, 2021; Bunzl 2004; Darnell 2000; Mullings 2005).
These foundational disciplinary myths rest on the presumption that the scholarly project of anthropology is a good thing for humanity as a whole and for Indigenous and marginalized people in particular. To take an illustrative example, consider this blog post by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, in which she argues vehemently against the call to rename UC Berkeley’s Kroeber Hall in light of the harms that the building’s namesake enacted on his Indigenous interlocutors, most particularly the anthropologically famous “Ishi.” Kroeber’s abuses and those of people like the Comaroffs (as the behavior of both John and Jean is named within the lawsuit against Harvard University) are somewhat different from one another in terms of the relationship between abuser and victim, and in terms of the specific forms of violence, but the crux of the power that each of these anthropologists holds is built on the same foundational authority of whiteness and the white gaze. In his 2021 AAA presidential address (coauthored with Jessie Stoolman), Akhil Gupta attempted to imagine a counterfactual in which anthropology had taken a decolonial approach from its inception and thus potentially evaded the harm that the discipline has done to Indigenous people in its quest for knowledge rooted in a centering of the white gaze. While generally well received, Gupta’s statements did not go without commentary by a group, led by Herbert Lewis (2022), situating themselves as protectors of the proud Boasian legacy. Lewis and colleagues cling to a view of the discipline as fundamentally antiracist and liberatory. Our own internal professional forum, the AAA Communities, provides the clearest archive of their perspective, particularly in the days following Gupta’s keynote and in conversations in response to Ryan Cecil Jobson’s (2020) “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019.”
Scheper-Hughes, Lewis, and others return to that foundation in their defenses of both individual anthropologists and anthropology as a whole—those who have been studied by anthropology have no business talking about the harm anthropology has done to them without, at minimum, also expressing their gratitude for having been studied at all. Interrogating anthropology as “white public space”—which entails confronting its foundational myths—is both an old project and a project in constant need of renewal and restatement. While these debates are separate from the stories of harassment and abuse perpetrated by powerful scholars, the foundational myths of the discipline serve to enable the continuation of both direct acts of violence and acts of hostility toward BIPOC colleagues from white, and often male, colleagues universalizing their own positionality.
The Hero Myths of Academia
Alongside creation myths and narratives told and retold about our past, the valuation of anthropology as a discipline is also mapped onto stories of brave heroes who carry these values forward and ensure their transmission to new, younger audiences. The Comaroffs are among those who occupy hero roles in the field, as the initial letters condemning Harvard’s sanctions made clear. When their students and others who have been harmed attempt to call attention to this harm, a network of scholars within anthropology and related fields builds on the central myths of white authority in anthropology to insist that scholarly legacy, rather than any acts of abuse, should influence, if not solely determine, the extent to which actions are taken against them. This kind of insularity and closing of ranks is, of course, not unique to anthropology or even to academia. The combination of academic narratives that valorize “lone geniuses” whose singular brilliance transforms our understandings of important topics and the anthropological myth of social benevolence, however, combines to create a particularly potent setting for the elevation of individual heroes.
These idealized views of anthropology and anthropologists are both central to enabling abuse and entirely rooted in white supremacy. Even as many of us know better than to take for granted the idealization of anthropology as an inherently liberatory force, a means of contesting white supremacy, colonialism, and cis/heteronormative patriarchy, we want to imagine that the field we occupy is capable of providing those tools. It is, for many of us, why we chose this scholarly path. We see ourselves as joining a field that challenges and contests large-scale systems of oppression and exposes the micro-level dynamics through which those systems work. And yet, this hopeful view relies fundamentally on mythological heroes that precede us in this work, intellectual titans who have bravely brought forth critiques of racism and colonialism to help rescue the downtrodden from their experiences of oppression. These heroes are the giants on whose shoulders we must stand, as without their brilliance, we could not possibly have arrived at our contemporary understandings. Their mythical accomplishments are commemorated repeatedly in our citation lists and syllabi, the cultural texts through which we transmit our shared values to future academic generations. Removing reference to those scholars who have been credibly demonstrated to be abusers is often easier said than done, as their place is maintained by the gatekeeping practices of peer reviewers and journal editors and left unmarked and unannotated by libel-suit-averse legal teams like the ones Dan Souleles encountered at Elsevier.
The heroes of these stories further work to select and inaugurate the new generation of scholars/teachers in the field, largely through their invocation of the currency of reference letters. One former student of the Comaroffs, who asked to remain anonymous, expressed how the public reckoning with abuse at Harvard has revealed “the professional academy at its ‘highest’ tier as largely a playground for abusers, wielding references that could make or break a person’s career as clubs over which to compel ‘consent’ and demand silence” (personal communication 2022). Those of us who are not subject to abuse play roles within this game as well, as we are made to feel thankful for their support of our work, and our loyalty is cultivated as a weapon that can be picked up at any time for use against others. Abusers are never uniformly or constantly monsters, and many people have stories of support they’ve received from the same people who have done so much harm to others. Far from being contradictions, these acts are two sides of the same coin of influence and abuse. There is a profound discomfort, then, in looking around to see the playground we are sitting in and thinking about the silences that have constructed it. As Berry et al. (2017) observe, “These silences are linked, in part, to the persistence of patriarchy, its accompanying culture of male bravado, and attendant notions of meritocracy that shape the discipline as a whole.”
In asking ourselves why this story has generated such intense and profound energy at this time, these hero-myth narratives become especially important. At the same time as these widely discussed stories are circulating, additional ones are happening every day at schools of varying prestige, perpetuated by both familiar and unfamiliar scholars. The hero myths of our disciplines fuel banal and everyday forms of harassment and violence. The beliefs in our special status as academics, or within our discipline, are ways that we evade accountability for addressing sexual violence in our profession and go on to cover up and erase such events. Additionally, the Comaroff incident drew attention not only because of Harvard’s prestige and Comaroff’s relative notoriety as an academic anthropologist but also because the story emerged within a moment of near-total dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the conditions of academic labor.
There is a moment of transformation taking place around how we understand the conditions of our work as work, as well as what is owed to us by the universities that employ or train us. As we were drafting this paper, graduate student TAs and RAs at one of the author’s institutions (Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada) authorized a strike mandate not for pay or conventional benefits but for, among other things, paid antiracism and sexual-violence-prevention training. The intensification of university austerity cultures at the start of the COVID pandemic means that at all ranks and positions in the academy, we have been told for two years to carry on and continue as institutions signal that work must continue. To care for ourselves and our communities, institutions tell us, is an unacceptable impediment to the noble mission of teaching, learning, and, of course, scholarly research. In choosing care, it is implied that we are refusing to take up the mantle of those heroes, pushing aside their cultural legacy. As many have noted across diverse institutional contexts and industries, the pandemic conditions have created discomfort and harm for everyone, not just for those already marginalized due to race, gender identity, sexuality, class, or disability, though these harms are not equally distributed (Wahlberg, Burke, and Manderson 2021). We are collectively sitting in a cognitive and emotional space that is the result of repeatedly being confronted with the reality that the institutions we work and live in refuse to protect us. These realizations are new for some, deepening or expanded for others, and continuations of the same for many. In any case, they are omnipresent in our lives right now; this has challenged at least some of us and shaken off some of the complicity that we often see. The academic world is not, in fact, built on heroic acts by exceptional people, but on mundane, everyday realities that carry forward the status quo. The hero myths we may be trained to see as inspirational are distractions from the banal facts of our work.
Fieldwork as Coming-of-Age Ritual
As almost any introductory anthropology course could tell you, myths are often given social weight and meaning through ritual. In the letters defending Comaroff’s actions, and in the narratives about what, exactly, he had said to his student victims, the story of his “warning” to a queer woman student intending to pursue fieldwork in Africa stood out. This was a key charge that was made to stick within the investigation itself, and so it was the topic of much commentary. In their defenses of Comaroff’s actions, not only did his supporters take for granted his self-interested depiction of the interaction described, but they also emphasized that they themselves would feel equally compelled to “warn” a student like this about the “dangers” of such a fieldsite. In their claims that these warnings were necessary and justified, then, a number of anthropologists attune to the nature of the ritual of fieldwork—one in which moving through violence, or the threat of violence, serves to appropriately initiate a student into full membership in the community.
Even as anthropology has made itself interested, over the last few decades, in destabilizing the boundary between “the field” and “home” (Peirano 1998; Visweswaran 1994), it remains the case that not only are certain places—almost always outside of white/settler North America/Europe—construed as sites of danger, but these are also the places that most characterize as the prototypical “good anthropological fieldsites.” Doing research within the United States may even be seen as a lesser form of anthropology. Many Black, Indigenous, and Brown anthropologists have pointed out that the separation between “field” and “home” is both illusory and a white colonial construct. Moreover, it has simultaneously allowed for the maintenance of a convenient fiction that relocates violence away from institutions like the university. The ritual of gaining full membership into the field is predicated on going through a space of danger, and specifically, for those who do not inhabit the privileged position of cis-masculine heteronormativity, the danger of rape in the field. This ritual can be completed even without the actual experience of sexual assault during fieldwork, as it is sufficient to go through the sense of anxiety that is brought about through acts like Comaroff’s discomfiting and graphic emphasis on this threat. The constant management of the self—the questioning of where you can move, the attempt to gauge the trustworthiness of interlocutors whose cultural practices are unfamiliar to you, the mental checklist of planning for what you would do if the threat becomes real—becomes a part of the experience of fieldwork.
This ritualized violent encounter is also, however, a part of the experience of graduate education in itself. In the signature form that we used to gather names for our open letter, we left a space for any comments that people wanted to include. In addition to statements of general thanks and appreciation, a significant number of people used this space to share stories of their own experiences of abuse in academic contexts. We recognized that our role in these interactions was simply to take them in and to act as witnesses; they were not intended to be publicized more widely, nor were signers asking for a response or acknowledgment from us. In a striking illustration of where and on whom the anthropological eye comes to rest, George Marcus (2005, 36) describes the notion of “anthropologist as witness” by emphasizing that:
it is the distinctive professional modality of the anthropological scholar as lone operative immersed in the particularities of closely observed circumstances of everyday life but with the aim of tying those particularities to some transcendent discourse or argument that creates the cogency of the witnessing pose for anthropologists working in places of political upheaval and the intervention of outside authorities.
The events that we were being asked to witness as anthropologists in these stories did, indeed, happen in a place of political unrest, uncertain authority, and violence: the American university. That is not, however, a framing that is usually applied to our own departments and institutions.
The “ordinary human subjects in very complex configurations of macroinstitutional change and social disorder” are our students and colleagues, and the forces against them are not ones from which we can easily “stand apart” because they not only pay our salaries but also provide us with the structural resources that we use to generate and disseminate knowledge. This projection of danger and the dangerous anthropological subject both upholds the white supremacy of anthropology and deflects attention away from the danger within the department. In these spaces, those of us who are not wealthy, English-speaking, white, cisgendered, heterosexual men are supposed to be grateful to have been given entry at all and expected to accept, or possibly even celebrate, the risk of unwanted sexual attention, coercion, assault, and harassment from the powerful men of the metropole.
Conclusion: Using the Master’s Tools
Even as we outlined what an anthropological analysis of our own professional worlds might reveal, as we wrote this piece we also grappled with the oft-noted wisdom that the master’s house cannot be dismantled using the master’s tools (Lorde 1984). The specificity of Audre Lorde’s call to her listeners as she delivered these words cautioned against working within the narrow confines of particular conversations. In this case, she rejected feminist and scholarly orientations to difference that diminished the flourishing of “creative sparks” within feminist social movements required for liberation. Many anthropologists have noted that the masculinist foundation of our disciplinary spaces reproduces itself when we do not mobilize the tools of movements to challenge the discipline’s deep proclivities (Berry et al. 2017), and even more have brought feminist analyses and antiracist and anticolonialist critique to these questions.
Relying on the “master’s tools,” Lorde warns, only results in temporary victories. An impoverished anthropology that cannot heed or learn from the wisdom of adjacent fields, diverse feminist interventions within our own field, or critical reckonings with its own history can only lend us temporary victories. An openness to new tools, a commitment to taking up the research and criticism that our colleagues have been producing for decades, may allow us to see more clearly how power is deeply woven into anthropology’s warp and weft. We must see this tangle clearly in order to commit to the hard work of unknotting the violence of harassment and assault that characterizes our field and to topple the heroes and myths that are foundational to this violence. Our above analysis—turning anthropology’s tools onto itself—is both serious and slightly tongue-in-cheek. We don’t actually accept the notion that these conceptual frames are the best, or even a significantly more meaningful, way of understanding these forms of violence and oppression, nor do we think that using them will serve to dismantle the structures of elitist, colonialist gatekeeping in knowledge production.
In using these tools in the tradition of satirical takes on the anthropological gaze, we again suggest that the only meaningful way forward for anthropology is toward a version that interrogates itself as a central contributor to oppression (which returns us again to the invitation Gupta extended in his presidential address). We must forge and sustain the fugitive strategies proposed by our colleagues (Berry et al. 2017) while also carving out, ceding, and holding space at the discipline’s center (Gupta and Stoolman 2021). It is time to follow those who might dream of new modes of preparation, critique, academic support, nurturance, and healing that our overemboldened patriarchs have never had the creativity to imagine.
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Cite As
Shulist, Sarah, and Sameena Mulla. 2022. “Toward an Anthropology of Sexual Harassment and Power: Myth, Ritual, and Fieldwork.” American Anthropologist website, July 11.