Some Books By Non-Anthropologists For Cultural Anthropologists To Read

Like most scholars, I have a passion for books. Having enjoyed putting together two posts (here and here) on my favorite books from last year, I’ve decided to begin a semi-regular feature of discussing books I’ve found rewarding that I think other cultural anthropologists (or anyone else) might also find engaging, interesting, provocative, or otherwise worth reading.

The Riddle of the Dinosaur, by John Noble Wilford, Knopf, 1986.

I read this book when I was just beginning to organize the writing of my dissertation. I was reading a wide variety of non-fiction pertaining to an array of topics and disciplines to get a sense of the diversity of ways of organizing the presentation of a topic (a strategy I’d recommend for anyone now writing theses or dissertations). This book didn’t particularly influence my writing in any formal way. Instead it influenced my thinking about my relation to ethnographic data. (It’s also a fun read for anyone with a fascination for dinosaurs.)

You’ll learn a lot about dinosaurs from this book, but you’ll also learn much about the history of the paleontology of dinosaurs. Wilford’s account is essentially an epistemological history, tracing the history of the development of conceptualizations of dinosaurs and methods for studying them (I tend to think of methodology as applied epistemology – and I’ve found thinking about research methods a lot more interesting ever since I started thinking about it that way).

In most ways, paleontology and ethnography have little in common. In reading Wilford, I realized that one thing they have in common, albeit for different reasons, is that they’re both scholarly endeavors that tend to foreground epistemological concerns, if not to exist in a perpetual state of epistemological crisis. As I said the reasons for this are different: with paleontology, one is faced with a paucity of information and a real concern about what can legitimately be reconstructed about the anatomy and physiology, much less lifeways, of these creatures from 65+ million years ago with in most cases minimal and highly fragmented information; with ethnography, the researcher is generally overwhelmed with data, but with concerns about the effects of the researcher’s own prejudices and predilections on interpretations and even observations, and the reader is left with the task of attempting to discern the merits of the ethnographer’s text with no ability to engage in anything like laboratory replicability.

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, Pantheon, 2003, and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, Pantheon, 2004, both by Marjane Satrapi.

Although I’m no expert on the Middle East, much less Iran or Persian culture specifically, I’ve read quite a few books about Iran in recent years, several of them excellent, including Fredrik Barth’s minor class Nomads of South Persia (an ethnography from the 1950s), Michael Fischer’s Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (an ethnography written right after the revolution, and one of the more insightful accounts of it), and Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ali Mohammadi’s Small Media, Big Revolution: Communication, Culture, and the Iranian Revolution (another insightful account of the revolution focusing on the use of media technology by the revolutionaries).

Satrapi’s two volume graphic memoir (probably already familiar to fans of graphic novels and non-fiction, and recently made into a movie) is the one thing I’ve read, though, that gave me a sense of growing up and being in contemporary Iran (not that the memoir is confined to Iran alone – it also entails an account of Satrapi’s years in a European boarding school, for example).

Reading Satrapi’s memoir, as well as other graphic non-fiction, such as the various works of graphic journalist Joe Sacco, makes me wish I could draw. I don’t think any particular medium is the best way to write or present culture, but the form used here does have the unique ability to draw on the strength of the word and the image and to avoid to an extent some of the pitfalls of each, e.g. the way in which so much ethnography feels enervated, missing so much of the sensual reality of culture (though of course even here, the sounds, smells, and even colors [it’s in black and white drawing] are still missing), or the ambiguous quality of many images – lacking in context and conceptualization without commentary, yet coupled with an often overbearing sense of reality deriving from their visual impact.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond, W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.

I may be one of the few cultural anthropologists who likes this book. Many cultural anthropologists have criticized this book, mostly as being geographically determinist (which is an incomplete charge at best, given the importance of the availability or absence of domesticated animals to societies in Diamond’s argument) or for reducing the highly various tapestry of cultural diversity to a simple narrative.

If you take Diamond’s account as a sufficient explanation of everything cultural, then it’s a disappointment, because it doesn’t do that, as if any theoretical framework could. Perhaps I’m overly charitable, or just plain wrong, but I don’t think Diamond claims to have explained everything in any case, but just to have laid out a set of arguments that explains much about human cultural history in general.

Insofar as Diamond draws our attention to factors many anthropologists might have otherwise not considered, such as the presence or absence of domesticated animals, directional orientation of trade and other cultural contact networks, or relative ease of transportation over long distances in different world areas, Diamond’s account is useful in making us aware of patterns that over long stretches of time have significant impact on the particular histories of specific societies.

Part of many anthropologists’ resistance to Diamond probably stems from the longstanding particularist bent of American cultural anthropology, the important emphasis on detail on cultural uniqueness, but also a sometimes corresponding resistance to identification of general patterns. (See Kerim’s post on the Savage Minds blog on this topic from about two months ago.)

Part of the resistance likely also stems from an academic turf-war mentality and a resistance to non-anthropologists poaching on anthropological territory. (There’s reason to be wary of the variety of sociobiologists, chaos theorists, meme theorists, economists, etc., who attempt to explain better than anthropologists the topics conventionally seen as anthropologists’ own. [If it makes any difference, Diamond, trained as a geneticist, is also poaching on geography’s turf.] Still, poaching doesn’t always make them wrong.)

There’s also a bit of internecine anthropological squabbling in disguise going on here. Though Diamond’s synthesis is highly readable and insightful, it is ultimately a synthesis of a lot of many scholars’ work from the previous few decades, notably William McNeill’s The Rise of the West, as well as Europe and the People without History by anthropology’s own Eric Wolf. I suspect a lot of the anthropological resistance to Diamond comes from anthropologists opposed to the more generalist approaches within the discipline, whether in the form of political economy, cultural materialism, or structuralism and their various progeny.

Two Items on Bolivia

For those following the news from Bolivia, you know that recently there has been heightened political tension within the country. This has to do with constitutional reforms associated with President Evo Morales. The tensions map onto a longstanding social and geographic divide between the mostly poor highland west, where most of the country’s population resides, and the lowland east, associated with agricultural production, the country’s oil and gas resources, and a small wealthy elite. The constitutional reforms would result in more wealth redistributed to the west, with many in the east calling for greater autonomy, or even independence, for the lowland eastern provinces. Simon Romero has published a good overview of the situation in the International Herald Tribune, “Little Middle Ground in Country of Extremes.”

On a related note is a post I recently encountered on the blog “Two Weeks Notice,” written by Greg Weeks, “Thoughts on Democratators.” Weeks addresses a term, “democratator” (and an ugly neologism it is), combining “democracy” with “dictator,” that has been used by some media commentators to imply that some popularly elected leaders (and especially Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa), once elected, act as de facto dictators. Weeks’ point is not to suggest that neither Chávez nor Morales nor Correa are lacking in authoritarian tendencies, but instead to go on to address a larger point, to point out the problematic tendency in much media commentary to conflate all variety of “leftists” and even to conflate all manner of leaders with authoritarian tendencies as if they are the same. Weeks writes, “No matter what you think of Correa, he is not Musharraf. Nor is Chávez the same as Hosni Mubarak.”

Frankly, Chávez probably contributes to this tendency through his cultivation of close ties not just with Cuba’s Fidel Castro (which makes sense) but also with Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Belarus’ Alexander Lukashenko. I would also give credit to the writers of most of the news stories and commentaries I’ve read recently pertaining to Latin America for increasingly differentiating between “leftists” of the Chávez/Morales/Correa variety and “leftists” like Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva or Chile’s Michelle Bachelet. When Lula and Bachelet first rose to prominence, they too were often associated if not conflated with Chávez, where now they are increasingly presented as “good” or “responsible” leftists to the bad leftism of Chávez, Morales, and Correa.

Iran, “Regime Change,” and Détente

An article in the March / April, 2007 Foreign Affairs by Ray Takeyh, “Time for Détente with Iran,” raises interesting issues concerning how best to go about influencing the internal workings of a nation-state like Iran. The reasons to want to effectively influence Iran are apparent. Concerns about Iran’s pursuit of nuclear development, the country’s overall influence in the Mid-East region, the overt and extreme Anti-Semitism of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, or human rights within the country could each be reasons not only for the U.S. government but also the residents of the U.S. and a host of other countries to have an interest in moderating the policies and practices of the Iranian government.

Takeyh argues forcefully that current U.S. governmental policies and practices toward Iran, premised as they are on “Regime Change,” are wrong-headed and ineffective. There are a number of reasons why regime change is not going to happen in the case of Iran, and thus, why a détente of sorts offers a better way forward, on pragmatic grounds at least. The Bush Administration continually insists that all options are “on the table.” The big problem with that is that any options or tactics which are geared towards regime change will not work, whether in the form of military action, supporting an opposition group or movement to reform and/or topple the government from within, or economic sanctions.

Military Action

Given the ongoing military debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military is in no position to take on another war currently, even if there were a good reason to do so, and the American public is clearly in no mood to perceive any good reason for war with Iran. The U.S. military could destroy the Iranian state, but the result would be region wide chaos, clearly not in the interest of anyone.

Supporting the Opposition

There is a reformist opposition within the Iranian government which is worthy of support. The trouble is that any effort to support them within the context of an overall policy clearly premised on regime change consistently ends up undermining rather than actually supporting those reformers. And as Takeyh points out, beyond the reformers, there is essentially no opposition outside of government looking to topple the government. Radio broadcasts and other efforts to support such non-existent anti-government revolutionaries have the effect of affirming nationalist resistance to outside interference if they have any effect at all.

Sanctions

Sanctions and other economic tools like embargos, when aimed at regime change, are ineffectual. Just look at North Korea, Iraq throughout the 1990s, or Cuba. To the extent that such uses of sanctions have an effect, it is to shore up the power of authoritarian leaders and it is usually the population at large that is hurt. This doesn’t mean that sanctions have no place, or even that they have no place in international policy towards Iran, but that their power is far more limited than anything like “regime change,” and that for them to be effective at all, they must be very carefully and specifically targeted and for a specific more limited purpose.

Détente

This brings us to Takeyh’s argument for détente with Iran. If the U.S. and other governments are to move forward with more positively influencing Iran, it must be in a transformed context no longer premised on regime change. As Takeyh also argues, doing so doesn’t mean refraining from criticism of the Iranian government. Instead, by at least recognizing the right of the Iranian government to continue, a way is opened to more positively recognize some real common interests between Iran, the U.S., and other countries, and to engage in a more open and continuous dialogue concerning items of contention.

As with sanctions and other methods, though, we should be aware of the realistic limitations of détente. My main criticism of Takeyh is that on occasion he seems to hope and perhaps even expect too much from détente. For example, he says (p. 29), “The United States has an interest in promoting a more tolerant government in Tehran, but it will not help itself by broadcasting tall tales from Iranian exiles or with Bush’s appeals to an indifferent Iranian populace. (True enough.) Integrating Iran into the world economy and global society would do far more to accelerate its democratic transformation.”

I would note that many on the left argue much the same with regard to Cuba, that if only the U.S. embargo were lifted, democracy would surely flourish. (Aside from the fact that both Cuba and Iran are targets of “regime change” by the U.S. government, I’d also like to note that I’m not suggesting any other real commonality between the two cases.) While I do support an end to the embargo of Cuba, and I do support détente with Iran (though possibly along with some specifically targeted sanctions, especially with regard to nuclear programs), I don’t believe that such actions would particularly democratize either country. Here, the People’s Republic of China is an important comparative case. Détente has done essentially zero to democratize China, even alongside one of the most dynamic economies in the world. True, the Chinese government is currently considering reforms concerning private property in order to assuage the concerns of the growing middle class (see two articles in the March 10, 2007 issue of The Economist, “China’s Next Revolution” [p. 9] and “Governing China: Caught between right and left, town and country” [pp. 23 – 25], for discussion), but it is not particularly doing so in a democratic fashion and is only doing so several decades after détente with the west. In short, Takeyh is right that détente should be a main goal for interaction with Iran, but while this would provide better options than current policies and practices, we shouldn’t expect too much.