We Are Not Alternative: A Communal Take on Theorization and Canon in Anthropology Theory Courses - Part 4: On the Future of Anthropology

By Elise Ferrer, Nada Bahgat, and Madison Shomaker

This piece is the final of four installments in the series “We are Not Alternative: A Communal Take on Theorization and Canon in Anthropological Theory Courses.” (Find the rest of the series here.) This series explores the rethinking and challenging of traditional anthropological canon that we experienced in our Fall 2022 graduate course The Craft of Anthropology II at American University in Washington, D.C. 

In the earlier sections of this series, we explored how the established conventions in Anthropology related to the Western-dominated normative works, theoretical frameworks, personal inclinations, and the researcher's function hinder the possibility of disciplinary evolution. We proposed alternative perspectives for conceiving these elements. With this installment, we engage with the inquiry of how to translate these insights into actual applications. We present our observations and contemplations by reflecting on our experience in our American University’s Anthropology course, "Craft of Anthropology II," which exemplifies the style of Anthropology education we aspire to promote.

Course Takeaways  

We began the course by using materials from Rosa, Bonilla, and Jobson tackling historical issues in anthropology and embracing humility when looking at the discipline’s future. Then, we read Hurston’s Barracoon, discussing the role of researchers and how it can be changed. We focused on respecting the knowledge of "participants" and not using people's lives and stories as a tool. We went through readings by Ulysse, Stengers, The Combahee River Collective, and Benton, making space for knowledge production to be emotional, communal, and decentered. Eastman, Feeley-Harnik, and Simpson helped us consider how anthropology defines kinship. We realized that past and present ideas about kinship, ancestry, personhood, and consciousness are influenced by power imbalances, cultural bias, and politics in knowledge creation. 

DuBois's work led us to consider how racism and white supremacy are created—not innate. Firmin and Goldman showed us that the progression of theory isn't always linear and that supposedly new ideas in anthropology often have historical roots. We looked at the politics of refusal and cultural loyalty through Mākereti's scholarship. We questioned why we even engage with theory. Fei’s work taught us to connect ethnography with politics and structure, a change from how it used to be done. 

Sitting with Deloria’s work, we reflected on how the white, Western conceptualization of indigenous Americans is unsettled in a time in which stereotypes and violent white ideas were the norm. Using Fanon, we understood health within a global oppressive context as well as articulated an anthropology of power and how for those whose lives are defined by violence scholarship must reimagine new bounds and dimensions for itself. Katherine Dunham's work and life helped us understand theory as something fluid and physical, and how culture can be utilized to create new futures. Ulysee's writing led us to think about our lineage and how knowledge is passed along. 

Of course, even the breakdown above of scholarship we engaged with in Craft II doesn't fully capture how the texts built upon each other forming overarching themes throughout the semester. Do we even need to describe these texts in relation to the normative canon—as radical, anti-racist, diverse, decolonial—or can this just be canon? For those of us who came to the course with anthropological backgrounds and with more traditional classroom experience, it’s difficult to describe this syllabus without placing it in conversation with disciplinary norms, making the syllabus in their experiences truly cutting edge. For those of us with no anthropological training, the syllabus, without anything to compare it to, could more easily stand by itself. Regardless of the language we independently adopt, what is true holistically is that the syllabus and class have fundamentally shaped how we approach theory and canon.  

Modeling the teachings into practice

It's incomprehensible to not mention how the teaching practices we seek were effectively modeled in our class with our Professor, Thurka Sangaramoorthy. What we did appreciate in our class was Sangaramoorthy’s heterarchical, not hierarchical classroom approach. Each week, pairs of students would design the discussion structure and facilitate conversation. Though she would help guide the conversation or offer important provocations when we needed to think deeper, she gave us the space to theorize and make theory for ourselves, and instead of prescribing what we needed to think about theory, we were free to engage in the messy and often unpleasant process of learning, not memorizing.  

Admittedly, this was something that caused many of us, especially at first, discomfort. It was strange, new, and at times confusing to have a professor who did not position their knowledge as infallible but instead operated from a place of progress. In an academic system in which students have learned to expect (and as a result fear) punitive evaluation and to treat teachers as faultless purveyors of knowledge, operating with an understanding of right/wrong as a false binary – and a rubric to which we would not be held – was for many of us unchartered territory.  

Overall, this was a powerful model not only of how to envision what can be taught in the class but how we ourselves have new possibilities for being in community and in conversation with each other. 

Furthermore, we strongly recognize that these instructional techniques are thoughtfully integrated and showcased in our other courses within the "Public Anthropology" master’s

Program at the American University in Washington DC. The program is purposefully geared toward promoting social justice. It aims to equip anthropologists as catalysts for societal transformation, instilling in them a commitment to sharing knowledge with broader audiences. We would like to express our sincere gratitude to all our professors in the Anthropology department, who genuinely empower and challenge us to explore our thoughts, articulate our ideas, delve into our inner selves, employ our senses and emotions while engaging with theory, and foster a heightened people-centric and ethically conscious approach when engaging with individuals and communities.

Conclusion 

As the semester concluded, our group started individual papers on the work of a scholar we each chose. For the final exercise, we picked a quote and brought it to class. Following the class approach, we formed a poem collaboratively using these quotes, with no set rules on how to create it or guidelines for our teamwork. The poem-making began by arranging the quotes like a collage. A class member then linked the excerpts with a central trunk, branching out into blooming flowers. As we pushed further, we broke the quotes into fragments, using our understanding of their meanings to reconstruct and reimagine a new tapestry of ideas and theories. 

There was something empowering about our all-female and gender-non-conforming class. This uniqueness became evident during our cutting, pasting, and shared creative space on that day. Being in this anthropological realm (the classroom) and challenging—being ready to break down—the very core of the discipline (reading these scholars and using their words) stands as an act of resistance against the dominance of the discipline itself. Defiance, resistance, and merely existing were recurring themes we explored throughout the semester. In writing this piece, we've attempted to dissect how the course has transformed us—how our defiance, resistance, and existence within the discipline pose a challenge to anthropology as it is and chart a vital path toward what it could be. 

Perhaps it wasn't unusual for many of us in the class to read the authors mentioned in the syllabus, as for those of us new to the field, it marked our first encounter with anthropological texts. Or perhaps it was because we, too, are scholars striving to write and exist beyond the confines of the modern anthropological canon. Every week, we viewed anthropology through our unique identities. We interpreted emotions as theories, allowing our thoughts to wander both within and outside the assigned texts, while our professor listened, took notes, and encouraged us to think more expansively when our ideas seemed trapped in established theoretical patterns. 

The authors aren't certain if there are many questions left unanswered or if certain questions should never have definitive answers. What drives our urge to read? Who is the theorist in each piece? Why confine theory and method to narrow categories? These questions should remain open-ended since they apply to any text analyzed. Speaking for the whole class (or at least the authors of this piece), we've experienced the friction of not engaging directly with the works of Boas, Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, and similar figures. Yet, like any transformation, this friction led to something new. It granted us the tools to dismantle the conventional narrative of the discipline and, more importantly, the willingness to do so. 

Our final poem is the physical embodiment of this transformation, symbolizing the friction, the camaraderie, and the potential of theory. It illustrates that theory isn't linear or teleological, and that past, present, and future are in perpetual dialogue. There's an element of playfulness, deliberate pairings of words and phrases that invite diverse and multi-faceted interpretations. It shows that theory and canon can, and should, be something more. 

References

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Benton, A. 2017. “Reading the classics. Ideology, tautology, and memory.” Ethnographic Emergency (blog).

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Combahee River Collective. 1983. “Combahee River Collective Statement.” In B. Smith (Ed.), Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (pp 264-274). New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.

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Deloria, E. C. 1944. Speaking of Indians. New York: Friendship Press.

DuBois, W.E.B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk. 

Eastman, C. A., ed. Red Hunters and the Animal People. New York: Harper & Brothers.

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Fei, H. 1939. Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley. New York: E.P. Dutton.

Firmin, A. 2000. The Equality of Human Races (Positivist Anthropology). Translated by Asselin Charles. Introduction by Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban. New York: Garland Publishing.

Gattey, Emma. n.d. “Makereti : Māori ‘Insider’ Anthropology at Oxford.” Oxford and Empire Network. Accessed May 12, 2023. https://oxfordandempire.web.ox.ac.uk/article/makereti

Hurston, Z. N. 2018. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.” New York: Amistad.

Jenks, Angela. Twitter Post. July 16, 2019, 2:58 pm. https://twitter.com/angelacjenks/status/1151204579389792256

Lutz, Catherine. 1995. “The Gender of Theory.” IN Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon, eds., Women Writing Culture/Culture Writing Women, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2323826

“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” 1984. In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, by Audre Lorde, Revised, 110–13. The Crossing Press Feminist Series. Berkeley, Calif: Crossing Press, c2007.

Makereti (Sometimes Chieftainess of the Arawa Tribe, Known in New Zealand as Maggie Papakura). 1938. The Old-Time Māori. London: Victor Gollancz.

Nine Network. 2007. KETC | Living St. Louis | Katherine Dunham. (YouTube video,25:56).

Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). 1978. “Katherine Dunham.” Arlington, VA: Macneil-Lehrer Productions. (Video).

Simpson, Audra. 2007. “On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship.” Junctures, 9 

Simpson, Audra. 2014. “Constructing Kahanawà:ke as an ‘Out of the Way’ Place: Ely S. Parker, Lewis Henry Morgan, and the Writing of the Iroquois Confederacy.” In Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States, 67-94. Durham: Duke University Press.

Ulysse, G. A. 2017. “Why Rasanblaj, Why Now?: New Salutations to the Four Cardinal Points in Haitian Studies.” Journal of Haitian Studies 23 (2): 58-80.

Ulysse, G. A. 2018. “How do you overturn history in 400 years?” In G. A. Ulysse (Ed.) Because When God Is Too Busy: Haïti, me and THE WORLD (pp. 66-71). Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univ Press.

Ulysse, G.A. 2019. “Homage to Those Who Hollered before Me/Meditations on Inheritances and Lineages, Anthropological and Otherwise.” Anthropology News, April 8, 2019. 

Walker, Alice. 2018. Foreward to Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.” New York: Amistad.

Watkins, Rachel. 2019. An Alter(ed)native Perspective on Historical Bioarchaeology. Historical archaeology. 53. 10.1007/s41636-019-00224-5.

Yale University, “An Anthropology of Abolition / Liberation with Aimee M. Cox and Panelists,” YouTube Video, 1:28:50, April 6, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-BTMpj9KYI.

Cite As

Elise Ferrer, Nada Bahgat, and Madison Shomaker. 2024. “We Are Not Alternative: A Communal Take on Theorization and Canon in Anthropology Theory Courses.” American Anthropologist website, Feb 13.