What is our Anthropology for? Knowledge Production and Platform in a Time of Genocide
By Maura Finkelstein
What does it mean to be an anthropologist right now? I have been asking myself this question a lot these days. As I write these words, we are more than a year into Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, which has increased and accelerated the Nakba, a settler colonial project of extermination and displacement, beginning 76 years ago and continuing into the present. Many of us have been watching this new iteration of the Nakba in real time, as Gazans have been live-streaming their own annihilation. Everyone I know has spent almost a year watching Palestinians be murdered in the most gruesome ways on social media. While the official death toll has hovered around 40,000 for months now, The Lancet estimates at least 186,000 people could be dead and the numbers are likely much higher, given the scope of the violence and Israel’s refusal to allow foreign journalists and aid into Gaza. Meanwhile, those in power–our politicians, our corporate media, our college and university administrators–either justify and fund this destruction or deny it is happening. In this moment of live-streamed genocide, what is anthropology for?
We anthropologists know a lot about power. We study it in the field, we read about it in our theory books, we encounter it in the institutions where we work. And we reckon with our own complicity in these institutions of power every few decades. Right now, anthropology is having a reckoning and that reckoning is Palestine. Those in our discipline are so anxious about the work we do, and a lot of the time this anxiety is well earned. We were once the “handmaidens of colonialism,” and over the past century, anthropologists have used their training in the service of Nazi Germany (Gottschall 2022), concentration camps of Japanese-Americans, (Starn 1986) and the Human Terrain System project (González 2008) to name just a few atrocities. Many anthropologists have worked hard over the past fifty or so years to transform a discipline built on extraction into something new. Sometimes these reckonings are purely performative, the stakes mainly limited to the small world of our discipline. Sometimes they transform not just the way we do and teach anthropology, but also the way our discipline can impact a larger world. Mostly, our reckonings are a little bit of both.
Over the past decade or so, we have been reckoning with “decolonization,” as many anthropologists have called for us to “decolonize anthropology” (Allen and Jobson 2016; McGranahan et al. 2016; Thomas and Clark, 2023). What does this mean? How do you decolonize a colonial institution? How do you decolonize a discipline? As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang have taught us, “decolonization is not a metaphor.” Often anthropologists talk about decolonization and they mean something very different. Often, de-canonization is mistaken for decolonization, as are DEI initiatives in hierarchical and nepotistic hiring practices. But these are not decolonial movements. De-canonization is pedagogical, DEI initiatives are liberal. Calls for decolonization within colonial institutions are ones of contradiction. However, the movements for decolonization within Palestine are real, systematic and structural.
With that in mind, where are the anthropologists?
Every anthropologist who has ever called for “decolonizing anthropology” (as well as everyone else) should be actively invested in using their platform, as teachers and as scholars, to call for a free Palestine and an end to the Israeli occupation, ongoing for 76 years. What is our voice good for, if not for this? Over the past six months, many faculty members across the country and around the world–many of whom are anthropologists–have been taking risks, speaking out, and placing their bodies and their careers on the line because Israel is committing genocide in Palestine, in our name and with our tax dollars. Still, there is too much silence. Unfortunately, a lot of anthropologists who have built their careers through scholarship involving postcoloniality, decolonial movements, war and violence, medical anthropology, and gun violence (to name just a few subspecialties) have been completely silent, or are only now speaking out in support of their students. Why are you silent? What is our work for, if not for this? There is nothing anthropologists study that is not directly connected to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine. Anthropologists who choose not to use their voices and expertise to support the decolonization of Palestine and demand an end to the genocide are revealing themselves to be careerists invested more in the institutions they serve than the communities they claim to represent. Right now, we are seeing the absolute best and absolute worst of what anthropology can be. As we begin the 2024-2025 academic year, how can we commit to engaging the most powerful elements of our discipline?
As scholars and practitioners invested in interrogating structures of power, issues of representation, and methodologies invested in the situatedness of knowledge, we have an obligation to engage our tools in the service of a more just world. We can be remembered for doing so, or we can be mostly forgotten (aside from a small corner of academia) for our engagement with theory, our interest in “all sides,” our commitment to an apolitical curiosity that erases lived reality. But history does not look back generously on genocide apologists, history does not generously remember those who work in the service of empire. And history does not look back generously on those whose scholarship sees decolonization and resistance as fertile ground for study but remain silent as a decolonial movement is met with the genocidal violence of a settler state, armed with the world’s most destructive arsenal of weapons.
Our job is to imagine alternative futures beyond the bounds of our institutions, our borders, and our existing frameworks and then throw the weight of our creativity, our teaching, and our writing, in the direction of these horizons. James Baldwin once said “I can't be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter. So, I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive, whatever we must survive.” We cannot let human life remain an academic matter in our discipline. Following Baldwin, perhaps we must also say, “I am an optimist because I am a writer, a thinker, a teacher.” Better worlds are possible. A free Palestine is possible. The end of Israel as a genocidal settler colonial ethno-state is possible. The end of the United States as a fascist imperial power upholding its foundations of Indigenous genocide and dispossession and anti-Black racist capitalist extraction is possible. But first we have to work in the service of those possibilities. Right now, we owe Palestine our voice and our platform. What is our anthropology for, if not for this?
References
Allen, Jafari Sinclair, and Ryan Cecil Jobson. 2016. “The Decolonizing Generation: (Race and) Theory in Anthropology since the Eighties.” Current Anthropology 57 (2): 129–48. https://doi.org/10.1086/685502.
González, Roberto J. 2008. “‘Human terrain.’” Anthropology Today 24 (1): 21-26. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8322.2008.00564.x.
Gottschall, Lisa. 2022. “Assisting in the Holocaust: Pro-Nazi Anthropologists from Vienna in Occupied Poland (1940–1944).” History of Anthropology Review 46. https://histanthro.org/notes/assisting-in-the-holocaust/.
McGranahan, Carole, Kaifa Roland, and Bianca C. Williams. 2016. “Decolonizing Anthropology: A Conversation with Faye V. Harrison, Part I.” Savage Minds, May 2. https://savageminds.org/2016/05/02/decolonizing-anthropology-a-conversation-with-faye-v-harrison-part-i/.
Starn, Orin. 1986. “Engineering Internment: Anthropologists and the War Relocation Authority.” American Ethnologist 13 (4): 700–720. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.1986.13.4.02a00070.
Thomas, Deborah A., and Kamari Maxine Clark. 2023. “Can Anthropology Be Decolonized?” Sapiens, January 24. https://www.sapiens.org/culture/can-anthropology-be-decolonized/.