Future – Page 4 – Anthrozine

Beyond Academia: what else can you do with your anthropology degree?

May 26, 2019June 28, 2019 Imo3 Comments

The notion of what ‘the field’ is in anthropology has been expanding over the last few decades. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz is famously quoted saying: ‘The locus of study is not the object of study. Anthropologists don’t study villages (tribes, towns, neighborhoods…); they study in villages.’ (1973, p. 22). Even studying in villages is a bit antiquated in anthropology these days—many anthropologists study communities of practice that occur in many locations or studying the webs that link people and non-human beings across many locations.

But what do anthropologists do if they aren’t researchers in academia…? Not surprisingly, the work that anthropologists do is similarly diverse and expanding.

I interviewed (with Lani’s help) four anthropology graduates and asked them what kind of work they are doing now and how their anthropology degrees have helped them. Maybe it was just a coincidence, or maybe it says something about job opportunities available to anthropologists but two of the five people interviewed worked in user experience and two of the four worked in product design. Meet the interviewees:

Katie

Studied: a Masters in design anthropology (applied anthropology)

Works as: a consultant at a small consultancy Elabor8 on internal employee culture and engagement and product design.

Previously worked: doing user experience at Australia Post

Pasquale

Studied: Anthropology (Honours) and a post grad diploma in IT.

Works as: a user experience consultant at an IT company

Previously worked: in television

Isabella

Studied: Anthropology and Media & Communications

Works as: a freelance digital marketer doing marketing and product design

Paulina

Studied: Anthropology and Social Theory

Works as: a journalist, writer, university journalism teacher and a researcher at the Polish Academy of Sciences working on an argument about contemporary food culture

Previously worked: as an ESL teacher and freelance journalist and as a reporter for Fairfax Media (before it was taken over by Nine), the Polish Press Agency and the Guardian

A side note: I realise this is a bit of a long article, but the following are answers from each interview (either in audio format, transcribed, or notes that I took from a conversation that wasn’t recorded) and edited by myself to answer some broad questions that any job seeker may have. Feel free to skip through and follow the thread of a particular person who you find relatable to your interests, or read all the answers to a particular question that interests you! I hope you enjoy and feel a bit more comfy in your outlook for the future–I know it can be scary wondering what you will do after you finish your degree.

Why is anthropology useful in your work?

Overview: Generally anthropology was seen as useful to people’s work because it has taught them to listen and empathise with other people, to try to understand their behaviour and their lives. This understanding enables the interviewees to solve problems that their customers or clients identify themselves.

Katie:

Pasquale: ‘Anthropology is really about learning how to understand people, how to understand behaviour, how to understand what’s happening. And more and more organisations now really want to know what’s going on, because they realise now that they haven’t been listening, that they haven’t understood about their clients, their customers, their users. They haven’t even really understood their business all that well. And the great thing about anthropology is it gives you tools like ethnography, and, you know, the way you think about bias and what you are bringing to the work, which I think actually helps companies a lot.’

‘The first step in a design thinking model is you’ve got to empathise with the people who are the target of your project. Well, how do you do that? That’s what people learn when you do anthropology: is how to empathise, how to understand what’s going on, how to make sure you’re not bringing your biases to your work, how to make sure you can get information even when you may not have proper access to people. All of that, they’re all things that anthropologists learn to do and work out on a regular basis…It’s also important at other points in the model when you are trying to define the problem. You want to define the problem with the people, not just make it up as you are going along. When you try to come up with other ideas, you want to bring the people along, so that you can brainstorm those ideas. When you are actually prototyping things, you want to make sure you are including them so they can give you a sense that this thing is going to work or not. So throughout that whole design thinking methodology there’s just anthropology at various points, as far as I’m concerned.

Isabella:

Paulina: ‘I think what anthropology taught me was to always analyse the categories we take for granted. Not everybody lives the same, not everybody eats the same and not everybody dies the same. I see over and over again how normative some journalism/writing/academia can be — constantly reaffirming the same structures and the same processes without looking for the differences and contradictions. I grew up bicultural and bilingual, so I already knew this on some level, but anthropology gave me the necessary disciplinary training to analyse it.’

Are there many other anthropologists in your field?

Overview: As anthropology graduates, the interviewees generally felt like they were quite unique in their fields, with the exception of user experience, IT, and marketing being growing fields for anthropologists because companies are seeking them out for the skills and knowledge that they bring. People with social work, legal, psychology, sociology, politics, and history backgrounds often do similar types of work to anthropologists. An anthropology degree can bring an advantageous edge that others don’t have because anthropologists ask different kinds of questions, use different sorts of methods and get different results.

Katie:

Pasquale: ‘Early on I would have said there weren’t that many, but I think what’s happening now particularly in areas like IT, people are looking at anthropology and ethnography and they actually like what they see, because they want people that can be comfortable in planning and in going in and investigating what’s going on somewhere, or what people are thinking…There is a fast growing area of user research…or UX research (which is slightly different)’

Isabella:

Paulina: ‘I think most people writing about Poland for English-language publications — if I restrict it to this example — are politics or history majors. Many of them seem to have done PPE-style degrees at OxBridge-type institutions. They do really good work, but again, some of them seem to reaffirm structures instead of questioning them (reporting on the state and its institutions as if liberal democracy is the only thing to have ever existed), which during this period of political meltdown is more than a little problematic. Anthropologists ask different questions and I think the more they participate in public discourse, the better we will all be. So get to it!’

What are some thoughts and advice for finding the right work using your anthropology degree?

Pasquale: ‘In the mean time you may have to take up jobs that aren’t that funky. But I think once you’ve realised you want to go in a certain direction then you just keep trying to get into that area.’

Paulina: ‘While I was freelancing, I worked as an ESL teacher in Poland and Australia, which was a great fall-back job (actually, teaching is probably the most useful thing I have ever done). And what better place to flex your anthropological muscles than in another country, in a cross-cultural context.’

A note on writing from Paulina: ‘Writing, on the other hand is a lifelong pursuit with no certain outcome. Being instrumental about it can kill it, being too idealistic about it can kill it too — you shouldn’t do it unless it’s something you feel you need to do. Definitely don’t do it if you want people to like you — they won’t.’

Some final advice from Katie

See more:

Geertz, C 1973, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books.

[Images my own from my travels around this continent – I hope they make you feel as calm as they make me feel.]

A few lessons learned from Anthropology’s past

May 26, 2019June 11, 2019 Imo8 Comments

This history of anthropology as a discipline is rife with unethical and dehumanising intentions and methodologies. I think it’s important as student anthropologists to learn from this history—but not to let it get us down too much about the possibilities of the discipline! I know I have had my doubts and felt sheepish to say I was studying anthropology when entering Indigenous studies classes for example, knowing full well how anthropologist’s have been complicit as agents of colonial exploitation and of the genocide of many Indigenous peoples. There are reasons why it has been said that anthropology is the ‘handmaiden’ and ‘child’ of Western imperialism (Gough 1967).

Napoleon Chagnon, is an infamous anthropologist known for his study on the Yanomami people from the Amazon on the border of Brazil and Venezuela, and his book The Fierce People (1968) which falsely described the Yanomami as an essentially violent people (Tierney 2000, p.52). Chagnon’s case is a perfect example an anthropologist who sets out into the field with a ‘scientific’ theory they want to prove (in this case that there is natural selection towards violence in humans), and as a consequence causes insurmountable harm to the subjects of the research and also causes far-reaching, political consequences (Geertz 2001, pp.129-130). His methods to prove this theory were equally as unethical as his intentions. Namely, Chagnon bribed individuals with machetes and axes in exchange for their ‘tribal secrets’ or in exchange for violating their ‘tribal taboos’ (Tierney 2000, p.55), and staged fights between Yanomami for documentary purposes, which then became real fights and but he touted that the whole thing was ‘real’ (Tierney 2000, p.59; Geertz 2001, p.126). Chagnon wanted to confine the Yanomami in a nature reserve where only the only interaction they would have with the outside world would be with scientists who treated them like lab rats (Tierney 2000, p.60). With the help of Dr. James Neel, Chagnon tested live measles vaccines. When an epidemic broke out that killed large numbers of Yanomami people, Chagnon was quoted saying: ‘That’s not our problem. We didn’t come here to save the Indians. We came here to study them.’ (Tierney 2000, p.60).

Here are also two examples of Yanomami people speaking back: (1) Davi Kopenawa Yanomami (2) Yanomami ask for their blood back (video below)

Is it really worth studying a group of people if you are not doing anything to improve their quality of life or help them make changes in their world that they want to make? I don’t think so.

And this has happened closer to home too. Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer, who has a building named after him at the University of Melbourne, was one of the first anthropologists to study Indigenous Australians in the late 19^th century. While his work on their genealogies is still being used today to help in Central Australian land claims, he carried out his anthropological work with a eugenicist mindset (Dobbin 2015). He believed that Indigenous Australians were a race that was ‘doomed to die a slow death to make way for a new super white race’ (Dobbin 2015) and his recommendations to remove Indigenous children from their families at an early age directly influenced the Australian government’s genocidal policies of forced child removals between 1910-1970, which caused the Stolen Generations (Cummings, Blockland & La Forgia 1997, pp. 25-27).

Aims for a better anthropology:

Avoid ethnocentrism, but remember that anthropology is not an ‘objective’ science (if such thing exists), and so every anthropologist much be self-reflexive about the position in which they inhabit and that positions relationship to power.
I would say generally avoid deductive research methods–top-down research approaches that attempt to confirm a pre-formed theory i.e. what Chagnon did. Instead, inductive research methods–bottom-up research approaches that go from observation to broader generalisations of theory can be more useful and ethical. Besides, anthropology is all about being surprised by what you find. You can’t be really surprised if you go in with a theory to prove.
Let’s all work to decolonise this discipline – remember and make others aware its deeply imperial, colonial, racist, genocidal past – and move forward to actually work with the people we study particularly if they are Indigenous peoples or other marginalised groups.

Resources:

Cummings, B, Blockland, J, La Forgia R 1997, ‘Lessons from the Stolen Generations Litigation’, Adelaide Law Review, vol. 19, pp. 25-44.

Dobbin, M 2015, ‘Heart of darkness: Melbourne University’s racist professors’, The Age, 27 November, <https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/heart-of-darkness-melbourne-universitys-racist-professors-20151127-gl9whm.html>

Geertz, C 2001, ‘Live among the Anthros’, The New York Review, vol. 48, no. 2, pp. 18-22.

Gough, K 1967, Anthropology and imperialism, Ann Arbor: Radical Education Project.

Tierney, P 2000, ‘The Fierce Anthropologist’, The New Yorker, 9 October.

Is Posthumanism The End of Anthropology?

May 13, 2019June 12, 2019 Rita1 Comment

The prefix “post” denotes after-ness: posthumous, postgraduate, postmodernism.

So what business does anthropology have in investigating the posthuman?

First, a clarification: there are two distinct definitions of posthumanism currently in use, both of which I find intensely interesting.

Cannon, an informant in the linked article, on biohacking.

Nick Bostrom in Why I Want to Be a Posthuman When I Grow Up (2008) defines a posthuman as someone who has transcended the mental and physical limits of the human form, through genetic enhancements and technologies presently available to us, also known as “biohacking” (“DIY biology”). By limiting methods of bio-modification to those in current use, Bostrom distinguishes posthumanism from the abstract and distant imaginings of a sci-fi universe. This notion of posthumanism is related to transhumanism, which can be seen as a movement “in transit” toward the ultimate goal of reaching a posthuman future by attempting to supersede the human condition as we know it (Birnbacher 2008, p. 95).

On the other hand, N. Katherine Hayles’ (1999) definition of posthumanism is situated in critical social theory and is in reaction to liberal humanism, a philosophical movement introduced by Enlightenment thinkers in the late 17th-century that conceived the human subject as a rational, unitary, autonomous, and stable being. These might sound like good characteristics, but the Enlightenment’s conception of liberal humanism was based on a racist and colonialist exclusionary project that precluded “the savage, the animal, the inferior, and the superstitious from the fully human” (Whitehead 2012, p. 225). It’s clear, then, why anthropologists seek a more pluralistic conception of the human subject.

Firstly, Hayles’ posthumanism privileges information over corporeality; it views having a body “as an accident of history, rather than an inevitability of life” (1999, p. 2). Second, contrary to the rational human model purported by Enlightenment thinkers, consciousness isn’t the most important part of being human. Third, all bodies are an original prosthesis, and technology is just a prosthetic extension of ourselves. Fourth, the human body is able to be merged seamlessly with intelligent machines, and “there is no essential difference between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism” (1999, p. 3).

So, you’re thinking: is there really no difference between humans and robots? Is this the end of us?

Not quite. As Hayles asserts, “the posthuman does not really mean the end of humanity. It signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human, a conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice.” (1999, p. 286, emphasis added)

The post in posthuman therefore refers to the pluralistic conceptions of the human subject that critical social theorists seek to replace the singular, stable humanist model presented by the Enlightenment. Such alternatives include the cyborg, proposed by Donna Haraway (1991), which breaks down the boundaries between animal and human, organism and machine, and physical and non-physical.

So how can posthumanism, in both senses of the word, be studied anthropologically? Can anthropologists employ fieldwork methods like ethnography and participant observation on cyborgs? Where is “the field“, what is “the culture”, and is there a protocol for ethics?

For both Bostrom and Hayles, the subject respectively becomes the no-longer-human and the no-longer-humanist. Posthumanism has not merely expanded the scope of what constitutes humanhood, it has questioned the entire notion of humanhood as a bounded concept, and following this, anthropology should accommodate new notions of “the field”, culture, and ethics.

References:

Birnbacher, D 2008, ‘Posthumanity, Transhumanism and Human Nature’, in B Gordijn & R Chadwick (eds.), Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity, Springer, pp. 95-106.

Bostrom, N 2008, ‘Why I Want to be a Posthuman when I Grow Up’, in B Gordijn & R Chadwick (eds.), Medical Enhancement and Posthumanity, Springer, pp. 107-136.

Haraway, D 1991, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20th Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, pp. 149-182.

Hayles, NK 2008, How we became posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. University of Chicago Press.

Whitehead, NL and Wesch, M (eds.) 2012, Human No More: digital subjectivities, unhuman subjects, and the end of anthropology. University Press of Colorado.