by Michael Edwards

When I was growing up in Australia in the early 1990s, my parents were a little strict about not letting me watch too many cartoons and ads on commercial TV. Instead, I watched a lot of SBS. One of Australia’s two public broadcasters, SBS (the Special Broadcasting Service) aims, according to its 1991 charter, to “inform, educate and entertain all Australians and, in doing so, reflect Australia’s multicultural society.” Its programming was distinctive: news in English and the languages of diaspora communities combined with current affairs shows, often racy foreign art-house films, and European football matches. The joke was that the initials really stood for “Sex Before Soccer.” 

There are no specific images or scenes from these films that I remember now, though some are probably lodged deep in the recesses of my psyche. What I do remember is something of the mood of watching SBS as a kid on our living room floor in Sydney in the 1990s, a mood shaped as much by my own family histories—my mum the child of European Jewish refugees, my dad the descendant of Irish settlers—as by the political shifts then underway in Australia. This was a time when the Labor government of Prime Minister Paul Keating was pursuing its agenda of reconciliation with First Nations people, deepening the country’s connections with Asia, and promoting its vision for a multicultural society. Keating opened SBS’s new headquarters in Sydney in 1993. My parents and their friends were big fans of both Keating and SBS.

There is a more complex story about Australian multiculturalism in the 90s which anthropologists had already begun to tell close to the time. In White Nation (1998), Ghassan Hage delineates how official multiculturalism left structures of white supremacy and racial hierarchy intact, allowing space for certain, permissible forms of cultural difference while denying it to others. Elizabeth Povinelli, in The Cunning of Recognition (2002), shows how multiculturalism’s insistence on authentic expressions of traditional culture fell heavily on Indigenous peoples. If my parents thought about of these contradictions inherent in liberal multiculturalism, it’s not a topic I recall from what I remember as optimistic and enthusiastic conversations around our dinner table.

A couple of years ago a friend sent me a link to a video that brought that childhood mood, that feeling rushing back. It was the music video for Deep Forest’s “Sweet Lullaby” from 1992, which SBS used in the early and mid 90s as its promo, broadcasting it regularly in the breaks between shows. Recent comments below the video on YouTube suggest it has had the same effect on others. It’s the combination of the music and images that is achingly familiar. At the heart of the song is a Baegu-language lullaby from the Solomon Islands titled “Rorogwela,” sung by a woman named Afunakwa, about an older brother comforting his younger brother after they are orphaned. Recorded by the ethnomusicologist Hugo Zemp in the late 1960s, it was included on a UNESCO collection, from which it was sampled by Deep Forest’s French producers, and then, accompanied by a drum track and synthesizers, went on to become a 90s “world music” hit.

As the anthropologist Steven Feld put it in an article in the year 2000, the story of this song’s creation reveals how “companies, performers, recordists, organizations, and media can now find their identities embroiled in complex multilocal song histories … signs of anxious and celebratory contradictions in world music” (p. 165). For Feld, the increasing pop cultural prominence and commercial success of “world music” in the 90s threw into relief broader issues and anxieties then coming to surround globalisation: the “tensions that characterize global processes of separation and mixing … [and the] increasingly complicated pluralities, uneven experiences, and consolidated powers” (p. 146).

The music video for “Sweet Lullaby”, by the Indian director Tarsem Singh, reinforces the picture. Nominated for the 1994 MTV Video Music Awards, it’s a montage of scenes from around the world, from a muddy shipyard in India to a rainy street in post-Soviet Russia, from the Empire State Building in New York to the Great Wall of China to Gaudi’s Park Güell in Barcelona. Our guide is a young girl, travelling by tricycle through each of the spaces, before returning to an older girl—an older sister?—who cradles her in the opening and closing scenes. Gestures and objects repeat: an arm outstretched to give directions, a mirror, a small wooden frame which the girl and the people she encounters hold up to the world, to each other, and sometimes to us.

When SBS ran the music video in the 90s it added a line, “The world is an amazing place,” at the end.

It’s not just nostalgia that’s had me recently watching the video on repeat. I’ve also been wondering if it can also tell us something more about that 90s moment, one whose legacies continue to shape anthropology today.

In the histories of anthropology that we tend to tell, certain decades loom large: the 1920s, for instance, the time of Argonauts, or the 1980s, the time of Writing Culture. The 1990s, if considered at all, tend to be treated with nostalgia, derision, or some combination of the two—though there are important exceptions. For Joel Robbins, the 90s is the moment anthropology left the “savage slot,” taking on the “suffering subject” as its principal ethnographic and theoretical domain, with a host of ethical and political implications. For Robbins, anthropology in the 90s changes “its relation to those it studies from one of analytic distance and critical comparison focused on difference to one of empathic connection and moral witnessing based on human unity” (p. 453).  

In the wake of the Cold War, with the end of the millennium fast approaching, and with the implications of the World Wide Web rushing into view, the 90s were the setting for an anthropology that placed increasing emphasis on connection and movement, on what Feld referred to as the “transnational flows of technology, media, and popular culture” and related “global processes of separation and mixing, … genericization, hybridization, and revitalization” (p. 146). Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, in their defining volume from the mid-1990s, described the period as “a time of great uncertainty for anthropology, … [and] also one of enormous possibilities,” one in which anthropologists needed to “try to find our feet in a strange new world” (p. 26).  

What does that time look like from today’s vantage? Did anthropologists ever find their feet? Or did the world grow stranger still?

Thirty years ago, around the time that the video clip for “Sweet Lullaby” was getting nominated for the MTV Awards, Anna Tsing was publishing In the Realm of the Diamond Queen. A reflection on the ironic construction of marginality in an “out-of-the-way place” in Indonesia, it is also a study of how her Meratus interlocutors engage with a wider world in Indonesia and beyond, of how certain types of esoteric Meratus knowledge rely, like anthropology, on practices of travel both physical and imaginative. In the 90s, it became impossible for anthropologists to ignore that it was not just they who travelled; the “cultures” they studied did too.

Nowhere was the point more clearly made than in the then expanding anthropological literature on diaspora. It was also in 1994 that James Clifford published his much-cited essay on the topic, locating diaspora in an “unruly crowd of descriptive/interpretive terms [that] now jostle and converse in an effort to characterize the contact zones of nations, cultures, and regions: terms such as border, travel, creolization, transculturation, hybridity” (p. 303). Diaspora, for Clifford and the growing number of scholars whose work he cites, was a term with significant, though complex, potential. Diasporic histories and identities, their complex and contradictory attachments to place, their alternate networks and models of cosmopolitan life, might be able, it was hoped, to push not just against the boundaries of exclusivist nationalism, but also to “reach beyond mere ethnic status within the composite, liberal state” (p. 310), beyond those limited visions of pluralism and tolerance enshrined in official policies and practices of multiculturalism.

Clifford drew on two then recent works: Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993) and an essay by Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin titled “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity” (1993). The latter offers a reading of Jewish diasporism, arguing that it “involves a principled renunciation of both universalism and sovereignty, and an embrace of the arts of exile and coexistence” (Clifford 1994: 322). For the Boyarins, the formation of the modern State of Israel represents “the subversion of Jewish culture and not its culmination … capturing Judaism in a state” (quoted in Clifford, ibid.). In his conclusion, Clifford notes the recent signing of the Oslo Accords, suggesting that “diasporist skills for maintaining difference in contact and accommodation” may be needed to reach a sustainable political solution for Israelis and Palestinians.

Thirty years on, and as Israel’s assault on Gaza has unfolded over the past year, politicians and journalists in Australia have lamented the fraying of “social cohesion,” a fraying felt to threaten the country’s proud multicultural self-mythologizing. Often in their sights are the large number of Australians protesting and rightly angry that the current Labor government hasn’t taken a stronger stand against Israel’s violence. This discourse has been, in large part, about the role and proper behaviour of diaspora communities—Palestinian, Jewish, Arab, Muslim—in Australia’s multicultural fabric. All this was thrown into sharp relief last July when Fatima Payman, a senator who had come to Australia as a refugee from Afghanistan in the early 2000s, quit the Labor Party after defying it to cast her vote with the Greens to support a motion that would recognise a Palestinian State. Payman said she’d been intimated by Labor colleagues after the vote. Journalists relayed party insider concerns that Payman, a Muslim woman, had been somehow inappropriately guided by God in ways that were, again, apparently a threat to social cohesion.

The lessons of Hage’s White Nation stay relevant. As the Payman affair unfolded, Hage himself wrote on Facebook,

Leaving Sydney as the White establishment is laying into Payman. The ‘Eureka Stew’ syndrome strikes again as the White multiculturalist cooks (politicians and journalists) unite in telling Payman that while she is welcome as a multicultural ingredient, her desire to have even a minimal say in how the stew is cooked cannot be tolerated. Here’s white multicultural tolerance on full display for you.

In 2023, White Nation was reissued alongside some of Hage’s other writings in a new volume titled The Racial Politics of Australian Multiculturalism. Some upcoming proceeds from the sale of the book are to be donated to Olive Kids, an Australian charity supporting children in Palestine, where Israel’s war on children has been so catastrophic that it has coined a new acronym, WCNSF: Wounded Child No Surviving Family. Gestures and objects repeat. In a video from Al Jazeera, a small boy in Gaza returns to where his family’s house stood before it was destroyed by an Israeli bomb, retrieving his tricycle from the rubble.  

References

Boyarin, Daniel, and Jonathan Boyarin. 1993. “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity.” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 4: 693–725.

Clifford, James. 1994. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3: 302–338.

Feld, Steven. 2000. “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music.” Public Culture 12, no. 1: 145–171.

Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson. 1997. “Culture, Power, Place: Ethnography at the End of an Era.” In Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, edited by Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, 1–30. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hage, Ghassan. 1998. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. New York: Routledge.

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Robbins, Joel. 2013. “Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19, no. 3: 447–462.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 1993. In the Realm of the Diamond Queen. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

On May 10th 1911, several Interior Salish St’át’imc Chiefs, accompanied by ethnographer James A. Teit, drafted, signed and distributed the charter Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe in Spences Bridge B.C. to articulate clearly to developers, government and other settlers who they are, how their traditional territory has been impacted by colonial expansionist agendas and what their creative visions for a self-determined, just and healthy future is. Based on long-term ethnographic, collaborative and oral history research with St’át’imc elders, chiefs and community members, this paper explores the important messages and original context of the declaration. Building on this, our co-authorship and friendships spanning almost two decades now and drawing on interviews and observations made at an annual gathering to mark the Declaration’s 100 year anniversary, it highlights the consequential and powerful ways in which this signal document is currently mobilized to ensure the continuity of a St’át’imc way of life and fully realize nationhood vis-à-vis colonial doctrines and institutions.

The 100-year celebration of the charter position document at the annual St’át’imc Gathering in May 2011, which invited 100 St’át’imc drums and all descendants of the signatory chiefs to self-identify and be witnesses, provides a pivotal example. Here, we assess James Teit’s theories and methods as political activist, ethnographer, hunter and associate of Franz Boas and examine the importance of these relationships and representations in revisionist and historicist fashion. Together, we draw some critical and pertinent insights for action anthropological, collaborative and ethnohistorical research methods to better equip us to deal with the challenges of our times.

British Colonialism, Indigenous Political Protests and Scottish-Born, Interior Salish-based James A. Teit

At the end of the nineteenth Century, British Columbia’s policies were marked by the colony’s refusal, after the Douglas Treaties, to negotiate or to recognize any Indian title. St‘át‘imc Title and Rights regarding Interior Salish lands and resources were un-settled and unsettling. In the decades between the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1886 and the beginning of the First World War in 1914 tensions surrounding settler colonial expansion heightened. As a result of the growing settler population of British Columbia, Indigenous^[1]The terms “Indigenous”, “Native” and “Indian” will be used analogously in this text to accurately denote the historical periods in which they are and were mobilized politically, by other scholars and historians. communities worried about their loss of access to lands, resources, economic marginalization, and increasing institutionalized discrimination and racism (Cole 2006, 16; Wickwire 1998, 209; Galois 1992, 1). It was in this difficult context that James Teit came to Spences Bridge, ultimately becoming an important ally of Indigenous peoples in their struggles for rights, lands, livelihood and recognition. During this time of frontier-pushing, native political protest was becoming organized. Between the imposition of the Indian Act and federal and provincial disputes over the colonial reserve geography, the growing Indian Rights movement asserted a “nation-to-nation relationship” (Galois 1992; Ware 1983).

Engaging ethnographer and ethnologist James Teit as secretary-treasurer in 1909 (Galois 1992), the Interior Tribes of B.C. made a number of formal requests to the government, known as appeals to the Honour of the Crown. Teit had come to Spences Bridge in 1884 from the Scottish Shetland Islands to work at his uncle’s store. The main customers were local Nlaka’pamux families. Teit soon made friends with many and started to learn their language, joining hunting, fishing and land trips. In 1892 he married a Nlaka’pamux woman, Susanna Lucy Antko from Nkaitu’sus (Tswall Valley), acquiring a profound insider and nonconformist gender perspective onto Salish life (Ray Fogelson, personal communication, November 2016). His familiarity with the Nlaka’pamux ways and language brought him to the attention of Franz Boas in 1894, the then leading figure in North American anthropology. Teit became a close collaborator with Boas and soon affiliated with other major contemporary anthropologists. Under and beyond Boas’ mentorship, Teit meticulously collected field notes on songs and language, traditions, relationship terms, animal legends, mythology, comparative vocabularies, place names, personal names and ethnographic materials (cf. Teit 1906, 1909, 1912). St’át’imc author Joanne Drake-Terry highlights the fact that Teit’s engagement as secretary and interpreter for many Interior tribal chiefs established him as a key witness and advocate for native rights (1989, 246; cf. Wickwire 2019; Laforet et al. 2024)(see Figure 1).

Around this time, the Interior Chiefs decided to affiliate with the coastal Indian Rights Association to demand a settlement of their land question (Drake-Terry 1989, 246). Southern Interior Chiefs met at Spences Bridge in the summer of 1910 to study the demands of the Indian Rights Association. Galois (1992, 23) notes that in pursuing this resolution, native people took their protest activities beyond the bureaucratic channels of the Department of Indian Affairs, seeking access to the centres of political power in white society—imperial, federal and provincial governments. These endeavours involved the use of forms of protest that were readily intelligible to white politicians including letters, petitions and delegations while involving extensive, exhausting and expensive journeys (Galois 1992, ibid.). In the process two basic strategic alternatives for resolving the “Indian land question” were defined: a negotiated settlement—a treaty—or a court decision.

The Interior Chiefs understood how important it was for them to define, and speak for, their own concerns: their treaty rights, demands for compensation for lands appropriated, enlargement of reservations toward permanent and secure title. Overall there was a concern with defining and asserting their inherent rights. They had Teit “write it all down and in essence” in point-by-point form so it could be easily shared and understood (Qwa7yán’ak, personal communication, summer 2016; cf. Drake-Terry 1989; Laforet and York 1998). In the words of the late St’át’imc Elder Sam Mitchell, “the chiefs would get together and deliberate all night long with Teit listening” (quoted by an anonymous Elder, personal communication, August 2016).

The Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe, 1911

A formal and specific St’át’imc assertion of sovereignty over territorial lands and a strong opposition to the confiscation of land by non-St’át’imc settlers was drafted, narrated and written down as the Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe 1911 (see Figure 2), signed by seventeen St’át’imc Chiefs and witnessed by Teit, on May 10, 1911, in Spences Bridge. A key excerpt asserts:

We claim that we are the rightful owners of our tribal territory and everything pertaining thereto. We have always lived in our country; at no time have we ever deserted it, or left it to others. We have retained it from the invasion of other tribes at the cost of our blood. Our ancestors were in possession of our county centuries before the whites came. It is the same as yesterday when the latter came, and like the day before when the first fur trader came. We are aware the B.C. government claims our country, like all other Indian territories in B.C.; but we deny their right to it. We never gave it nor sold it to them. They certainly never got the title to the country from us, neither by agreement nor conquest, and none other than us could have any right to give them title. In early days we considered white chiefs like a superior race that never lied nor stole, and always acted wisely, and honourably. We expected they would lay claim to what belonged to themselves only. In these considerations we have been mistaken and gradually have learned how cunning, cruel, untruthful, and thieving some of them can be. We have felt keenly the stealing of our lands by the B.C. Government, but we could never learn how to get redress. We felt helpless and dejected; but lately we began to hope. We think that perhaps after all we may get redress from the greater white chiefs away in the King‘s country, or in Ottawa. It seemed to us all white chiefs and governments were against us, but now we commence to think we may get a measure of justice.

“The Ability to See Clearly, to See into the Future”: The Context, Spirit, Intent, Agency and Legacy of the Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe and James Teit, 1911 to the Present

Reflecting on the significance, context, spirit and intent of the Declaration, a variety of St’át’imc leaders and descendants’ perspectives emerge as follows. Tsal’alh Elder Desmond Peters Sr. (personal communication, June 2016) explained the implicit nature of the declaration as follows:

The Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe is about Tsciwalus—the ability to see clearly, the ability to see into the future. It reminds us of the natural boundaries of the land, not those on a map the way we map things today. The chiefs could see in the future and know that things would be taken, that which was their livelihood, and they could already see the destruction. The Declaration was about protecting the land. The chiefs all gathered at Spences Bridge because it was the most central point. They were all of hereditary descent. I think we called this declaration “Nt’ákmen‘kalha” which means using the good ways (Nt’ákmen), the laws and standards (Nxékmen) of the people of the land as passed down through the generations. The role of James Teit was his meticulous documentation and by writing in his journal he could compare all the differences between the people and how they belonged to the land and this way owned it while the other sama7s—the white men—just figured that the land was up for grabs. Teit translated from what people said and what they wanted and helped them phrase it into a “we declare”.

Similarly, Xwisten Elder Qwa7yán’ak (Carl Alexander) noted that James Teit did very well by the St’át’imc people (personal communication, August 2016; cf. Smith 1988). He said:

You have to remember that all Interior chiefs had interpreters for their declarations and that’s what they declared and they talked about the land. They did not have to have sama7s, white men, to state ownership, just someone to translate and write it with them. Teit could speak. He could talk. He spoke the language the way we did. That was one of his powers. He knew what the chiefs were saying. He helped us write our language down. He was a good person, an anthropologist.

100 Drums, 100 Years Later: The Declaration’s Significance in the 21^st Century

Moving forward in time: the 100-year celebration of the Declaration of the Lillooet Tribe in Tsal’alh during the annual St’át’imc Declaration Gathering on May 10^th 2011 was concurrent with the planned signing of a charter Hydro Settlement Agreement to compensate for past grievances. To celebrate 100 years of the Declaration, 100 drums were gathered in a large sacred circle (see Figure 3). The Declaration was read in its full length, and a 2011 commemorative Declaration attesting to its validity and continuous use was voiced loudly through the microphone. Many speeches were given regarding what it means to be St‘át‘imc and Úcwalmicw, a people of the land. Everyone who self-identified or was appointed by others as descendant of any of the signatory Chiefs of the Lillooet Tribe was invited onto the stage to explain their relations to the signatory Chiefs and their ancestry. Representatives of the Crown and of the electrical distributor and dam operator BC Hydro came on stage to express their respect and acknowledgement of the gathering and 100 years of the Declaration, speaking about an era of a “better” and “new” relationships based on a “small of measure of justice” as demanded by the Chiefs at the beginning of the twentieth Century.^[2]Co-author Qwalqwalten specifies: The Declaration speaks of “a measure of justice.” Grand Chief Saul Terry phrases this agreement as a small measure of justice for our people, and today, there is talk of “a small measure of a measure of justice”—an important difference. This one agreement does not mean that we have stopped pressing for redress, or compensation on the suite of issues that need to be dealt with between the St’at’imc and the other levels of Government. I am co-authoring this text via my current position as Political Lead for the Joint Planning Forum with St’át’imc Government Services and BC Hydro. It is only through that capacity that I am the political lead, or there would be more noise being made on several fronts.

Qwalqwalten, the political lead of St’át’imc Government Services (SGS), remarked quickly that “this is an acknowledgement of our ancestors and the Declaration, an incredibly strong statement of our people practising their St‘át‘imc Title and Rights” (personal communication, May 2011). Led by Qwalqwalten, the St’át’imc Constitution song was sung, a sovereignty tune composed in 1980 when eight hundred Indigenous people travelled to Ottawa to meet Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau who was trying to take away native status, title and rights through the White Paper policy. Lines include, for example: “We don’t need your constitution! Canada is all Indian land! We are all in solidarity!” (See here: Constitution Song (St’at’imc)).

During the Declaration gathering in May 2011, many St‘át‘imc people echoed that “The Declaration is our law, it says who we are, where we‘re from and where our territory is” (personal communication, May 10^th 2011 at the St‘át‘imc gathering, see Figure 4). Another local leader’s perspective on the significance of the Declaration was the following: “My biggest issue is with the B.C. modern treaty process and some of our people trying to go that way—how is that possible, they’re giving away their rights. Instead, the Declaration should be honoured like a treaty” (personal communication, July 2016).

Qwalqwalten (personal communication, October 2020) added that the St’át’imc political stance to reclaiming and maintaining land, labour, resources and nationhood demands a real treaty relationship:

In our case, we have the wealth, the resources in the land, but someone else is taking our wealth. We should be able to say, Canada, kiss our ass, we don’t need your transfer anymore. We need our fair share. Then we do agreements with BC as part of Canada but not as a separate entity. It could be a treaty with us as a nation. We don’t treaty with low levels of government. The prime minister said nation-to-nation which is Canada and BC is only a part of this. So we’d deal with Canada. It can’t call for extinguishment of our inherent right to our land base. It’s going to take some creative energy.

For this endeavour toward a nation-to-nation or treaty relationship, St‘át‘imc members held that the Declaration and James Teit’s legacy would be instrumental. “Teit’s knowledge, is our knowledge,” Tsal’alh hereditary chief Randy James reflectively stated (personal communication, July 2016, emphasis ours), and added, “it helps us reclaim what colonial forces are working to suppress” (cf. Introduction in Laforet et al. 2024; Wickwire 2019).

These revisionist St‘át‘imc discourses question a tokenistic and cursory Euro-Canadian rhetoric of reconciliation which establishes political legitimations through employing modernist notions built upon European enlightenment values (Cassirer 1951; Adorno and Horkheimer 1993; Asch 2002; Povinelli 2002). They highlight a genuine reconciliatory treatied or treaty-able relationship between equals (Borrows 1998; Noble 2009). Accordingly, Canadian anthropologist Michael Asch (2020, 2014) reminds us that a relationship established through treaty entails that the Indigenous parties agree to share their lands in perpetuity with those subjects of the British Crown who wish to settle on them by establishing an enduring partnership akin to one that exists between relatives in a family. More specifically, the partnership is based on an equality of political standing between the parties in which the kind of sharing and mutual aid that flows from kindness are foundational principles. In the ardent words of Sharon Venne (2007, 2) writing from a Cree Treaty 6 perspective, “[w]hen Indigenous Peoples talk about the land and the making of Treaty, we are talking about our life and the life of the future generations. Land is central to the process. We have a relationship with our Creation based on a legal system designed to protect and honour the land.” This aligns closely with the Declaration vision and the ongoing memory, reinterpretation, honouring and spirit of it.

One enquiry during oral history and life story circles posed to many Elders was “How can we honour the declaration now?” While replying, Elder Desmond Peters Sr. pointed at the interview camera, indicating it could be our role to help get his wisdom out and heard, with reference to the history of anthropology. He inspired us to think about how James Teit attended to the St’át’imc ways, respectfully applied himself alongside Franz Boas in solidaristic alliance while pursuing a variety of interests and supported the long battle for a “measure of justice” proclaimed with urgency in 1911 and the healthy treaty relationship that was envisioned when the first fur traders came. The example of Teit’s collaboration with St’át’imc Elders—pointedly recalled one hundred years later— now appears as an excellent example of a Taxian action anthropology approach following paradigms of truth, freedom, co-production of knowledge and non-interventionism (Smith 2015; Tax 1975). It models a relevant and admirable treaty praxis which protects the interests of the Indigenous communities and focuses on the results of the relationship and work being directly and reciprocally beneficial to their self-determination efforts (Asch 2014; Dinwoodie 2015; Laforet et al. 2024; Noble 2009).

Esteemed Xaxli’p Elder Isaac Adolph‘s words on the ongoing essence of the Declaration (personal communication, August 2011) provide us with an excellent conclusion for reflecting on more than a century of St’át’imc self-determination efforts and if not a good then at least a decent anthropology to support it: “The Declaration is the effort to sacrifice yourself today for the benefits of tomorrow because we have not forgotten the past.”

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the important contributions of many St’át’imc Elders, leaders and community members, many of whom are descendants of the Chiefs who co-drafted the Declaration in 1911. We also acknowledge the very constructive comments and feedback we have received from John Tresch and Richard Handler. The ideas, visions and stories outlined in this text have benefited greatly from conversations and insights with a diverse range of individuals and snúk̓wa7s with whom we have had the opportunity to interact, live and work. We further acknowledge the support from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Kukwstumúlhkacw.

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———. “The Shuswap.” In The Jesup North Pacific Expedition, edited by Franz Boas, 443–758. New York: AMS Press, 1909.

———. “The Thompson Indians of British Columbia.” In The Jesup North Pacific Expedition, edited by Franz Boas, 167–392. New York: AMS Press, 1900.

———. “Traditions of the Lillooet Indians of British Columbia.” Journal of American Folklore 25 (1912): 287–371.

Venne, Sharon. “Treaties Made in Good Faith.” In Natives & Settlers, Now & Then: Historical Issues and Current Perspectives on Treaties and Land Claims in Canada, edited by Paul W. DePasquale, 5–10. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2007.

Ware, Reuben. Five Issues, Five Battlegrounds: An Introduction to the History of Indian Fishing in British Columbia, 1850–1930. Chilliwack, BC: Coqualeetza Education Training Centre for the Stólo Nation, 1983.

Wickwire, Wendy. At the Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019.

———. “‘They Wanted … Me to Help Them’: James A. Teit and the Challenge of Ethnography in the Boasian Era.” In With Good Intentions: Euro-Canadian and Aboriginal Relations in Colonial Canada, edited by Celia Haig-Brown and David A. Nock, 307–316. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006.

———. “‘We Shall Drink from the Stream and So Shall You’: James A. Teit and Native Resistance in British Columbia, 1908–22.” Canadian Historical Review 79, no. 2 (1998): 199–236.

The problem of racism in science is one that concerns all disciplines dealing with human differences, from biological to social and cultural sciences. As race and racism(s) have been central to colonial projects (Grosfoguel 2013), the last decade’s renewed interest in decolonial and postcolonial theories mirrors the incessant and justified preoccupation with understanding and tackling racism today. Anthropology, once again, stands in the spotlight of critical assessments of the colonial roots of scientific racism. While engagements with anthropology’s colonial past are not new, having come and gone in waves (Hymes 1973; Harrison 2010 [1991]; Allen and Jobson 2016), the current upsurge and mainstreaming of decolonial critique seems to bother some—usually grey-haired—anthropologists who, often in a defensive gesture, have problematized critical historical reassessments of their discipline as anachronistic or presentist. Anthropologists defending the discipline against updated charges of complicity with colonialism and racism argue that such critiques are either one-sided, pessimistic or historically shallow; for some of these anthropologists, the role of anthropology in colonial projects was simply circumstantial and reflects neither the intentions nor the many positive contributions of the discipline.[1]

While I understand some—but wouldn’t agree with any— of those defensive reactions vis-à-vis a decolonial (self-)criticism of anthropology, my own critical engagement with anthropology’s past also comes from a place of care and worry for the discipline. Having studied anthropology and other social sciences in Brazil before undertaking my MA and PhD in Germany, I have come to ponder the discipline’s Eurocentric biases, a characteristic that surely does not only affect anthropology among all other social sciences but one that starkly contrasts with anthropology’s commitment to understanding the diversity of human experience. In my own examination of the legacies of racism and colonialism in the discipline (Barbosa 2025, I was inspired by Anand Pandian’s (2019, 117–120) ruminations on critique in anthropology: critically examining anthropology’s past can be an insightful way to multiply alternatives and affirm possibilities. At the same time, as some of my own hair starts to go grey, and after spending some years teaching a younger—and usually much more critical—generation of soon-to-be anthropologists, I also worry about the actuality and preparedness of the discipline to understand and withstand the difficult troubles of the present as well as the current waves of unforgiving, perhaps even (self-)destructive criticism, which have even taken the form of metaphorical self-immolation (Jobson 2020).[2]

Taking these critiques to heart, I started a research project to investigate the history and legacy of scientific racism in anthropology, particularly in physical and biological anthropology (see Barbosa et al. 2016). My research dealt with the history and legacy of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics (KWI-A), an infamous research center located from 1927 until 1945 in Berlin and founded by Eugen Fischer, a German anthropologist who had built a career researching “racial mixing” in the  colony of German South-West Africa, present-day Namibia. Moving beyond an Eurocentric spatial delimitation of this history, I focused on the international influence of this German school of racial anthropology, particularly in India, a place where many of the KWI-A students came from and went back to, including the famous Indian anthropologist Irawati Karve (1905–1970).

Thinking with the case of Karve, whose oeuvre comprises more than 100 publications in different topics and fields of anthropology, I analyzed the tensions and contradictions that make up the work of a physical-biological anthropologist working throughout the mid-twentieth century.This was a time of pivotal discussions and reconsiderations of the scientific and political affordances of race. While Karve’s work is vast and multifaceted, I focused on her physical anthropological work not only because some selection was necessary with such a massive oeuvre, but also because physical anthropology is the subfield most affected by ground-shaking discussions and contradictions regarding the concept of race in the discipline of anthropology. In sum, I strove to understand Karve’s knowledge-making practices in their historical situatedness, considering both her biographical trajectory and agency, especially as she was the only researcher at the KWI-A who contradicted a racist theory that prevailed at that time and place. I examined how she strove to apply and adapt the racial theories and methods she learned in Berlin to her research practices in India and I showed how the legacies of racial knowledge remain present in spaces of anthropology training in India today. While I have extensively dealt with Karve’s history and current legacy elsewhere (Barbosa 2025; 2022a; 2022b), in the following I make some remarks about two approaches that informed my work on this anthropologist’s history: “critical presentism” and “topology.” Both are insightful ways to grasp the persistent legacies of scientific racism, also in less expected places beyond Europe and North America, and contribute to a critical and forward-looking assessment of anthropology.

Critical presentism

While Stocking’s 1965 critique of presentism is still invoked in order to criticize assessments of anthropology’s past wrongdoings for being anachronist, one needs to keep in mind the historical context of Stocking’s formulation. As Ira Bashkow (2019) pointedly shows, Stocking’s widely-cited critique was a response to a specific editorial discussion and political context in the late 1960s; in fact, Stocking later distanced himself from that position and emphasized instead that any historical inquiry lives in an intrinsic tension between a presentist orientation in its object selections and a commitment to historicism. To navigate this inevitable tension, I turn to “critical presentism”, an approach to history of science that was sharply formulated by Laurent Loison (2016) in his programmatic discussion of historical epistemology. A critical presentist approach entails being careful with excessive presentisms:in my project this meant that besides avoiding “inevitabilism” (the most excessive use of causal-narrative presentism), I avoided “descriptive presentism” by paying attention to how the meaning of concepts—including race—shifts situationally, historically, and locally (Loison 2016, 33–36). In sum, writing history with a critical presentist orientation also meant for me that, when I selected aspects of history to focus on, I was oriented by the understanding that history is ultimately looked at from present-day interrogations, to point “the ways into the future,” as Tim Ingold puts it (quoted in Vokes 2014, 124).

I understand this to mean that a critical assessment of the history of anthropology should strive to “reactivate the complexity” of scientific practices (Loison 2016, 36), while also taking account of elements of contingency in the making of scientific knowledge, as we learned from Foucault (1977). By so doing, a history of anthropology can create “awareness of the fleetingness of the present” and “develop tools to criticize present science” (Loison 2016, 36), oriented by historiography’s “double-gesture” of recovering and critiquing (Prasad 2019; Mukharji 2023).

A critical presentist approach also requires an awareness of the risks of moralizing assessments of historical actors based on present-day knowledge and related moral standards. To be sure, while I take for granted that the racial anthropology of Karve and her German colleagues does not hold scientific validity today, I refrain from labelling that racial anthropology “pseudo-science,” for the research done by KWI-A scientists was considered science by the established standards in that historical context (see Mukharij 2023:2-6; Rupnow et al. 2008). Coming to terms with this fact pushes us to reflect more seriously about current scientific standards and our own historical transience as scientists (Loison 2016). At the same time, I avoid judging Karve and her colleagues in moralizing terms as this would not be productive if we want to reflect about our own implications in the legacies of racial knowledge today. As much as we can distance ourselves historically from an anthropologist of the past, devaluing their work on moral grounds would be lazy and self-deceptive way out of the trouble of the heritage of scientific racism, as if current moral standards alone can disentangle science from its past. Also, ethically and morally, different facets of Karve’s oeuvre—although not those tainted by her racial anthropological accents—can be regarded as progressive even today. It is the nuances, changes, and contradictions in a past anthropologist’s work and persona that make them an insightful case to think with when we want to engage with the question of how our science could be better attuned to present-day concerns.

Topology

Grasping the spatial and historical circulation of racial knowledge is tricky. The apparent disappearance and discrediting of “racial science” does not mean that the influence of racial thinking, methods, and theories has ceased (Goldberg 2015). To tackle the legacy of racial knowledge in current science, I built upon different conceptual discussions of temporality and historicity which have pushed against an understanding of history as chronology. For example, Ann Laura Stoler’s (1997) Foucauldian theorization of the “polyvalent mobility” of race called attention to race’s adaptability to different historical contexts. In a similar line, Amade M’charek (2013; 2023) as well as Katharina Schramm and Markus Balkenhol (2019) talk of race as a “slippery object” to describe its situational elasticity and adaptability, while Anne Pollock (2012) writes that race has the ability to jump platforms and take on different shapes rather than disappearing. Both M’charek (2014) and Lundy Braun (2014) have also called attention to how racial knowledge might be inscribed in technologies and material objects which, as they circulate and are put into action, again produce racializing outcomes and thus contribute to the persistence of racialization, despite discursive changes post-race. Thus, as these and other scholars have shown, racial knowledge circulates through time and space in contingent and non-linear as well as material ways.

Therefore, my approach to the legacies of race-ism in their non-linear historicity and through their material incarnations is oriented by what M’charek, Schramm, and David Skinner (2014) termed the topology of race. Drawing from philosophical discussions on temporality, spatiality, and the foldability of time and space (Serres and Latour 1995 cited in M’charek 2014), the topological approach “is based on the presupposition that elements that are distant in time and space can become proximate and relevant in the here and now” (M’charek, Schramm, and Skinner 2014, 472). I followed a topological approach by attending to how objects embody histories and how, as they circulate through space and time, the histories implied in them might be drawn together and relationally affect the outcomes of knowledge production. In other words, topological lenses make visible how historicity in a scene of knowledge production is differently entailed in the human and nonhuman actors at play and how different histories embodied in them come to matter. Seeing through topological lenses implies an understanding of history as multidirectional. It also helps us to delineate how entanglements take shape both in spatial and historical ways.

Topological lenses are especially useful in grasping the circulations of race through less expected routes, also beyond Europe and North America, including in places where race does not directly inform social categorizations, like India. In my research on Karve’s physical anthropology and its legacies, working with topological lenses made visible how race persists despite discursive efforts to erase it and despite the repurposing of objects and methods once created to study race (see Barbosa 2025). Race reappears and circulates also through the methods and technologies Karve and other scientists worked (and still work) with. For instance, many of the anthropometric methods and instruments that were designed in the late nineteenth century to enact racial differences are still being used for purposes other than what the original design foresaw, for instance to study caste or human growth and nutrition. Although the purpose of the research with these anthropometric methods and instruments is not the same as it was a century ago, their use today still produces racializing and biologically-essentializing effects, despite scientists’ intentions. In sum, racializing knowledge persists through the durability of objects like anthropometric instruments and books as well as methods; once put into knowledge-making motion, these elements summon racial knowledge from the past scientific context in which they were designed. Understanding these topological effects is crucial for the continuing efforts in shaping an anti-racist, anti-essentializing, and decolonial anthropology, in India as elsewhere (Barbosa 2025).

Conclusion

There can be different ways to critique the history of anthropology as well as the history of scientific racism, while keeping an eye on the future we want for our sciences. Discussions of historicity and temporality in the study of scientific knowledge have developed since Stocking’s (later self-criticized) postulate against presentism from the 1960s. Both critical presentism and topology present us anthropologists important tools to identify the global histories and lingering legacies of scientific racism in our discipline. If virtually all anthropologists can agree in our concern about the future of anthropology in today’s precarious times, I am convinced that disregarding the calls to deal with anthropology’s entanglement with colonialism and racism just won’t do. Reactionary defensiveness will not just be insufficient to safeguard the discipline’s scientific authority but will also contribute to undermining it. Such willful avoidance of anthropology’s dark pasts can also be hazardous—socially and politically—as it would render us unable to spot the repetition of harmful effects like those in which imperial projects and anthropological knowledge have worked in tight collaboration, intentionally or not. In this sense, the understanding of history that I present here starkly opposes those positions within anthropology that insist on writing hagiographic history or mobilizing counterexamples and anti-racist figures in the history of anthropology, like Franz Boas, as a way to brush aside decolonial critique.^[3] This sort of defensive disciplinary historiography will not save anthropology from its loss of political relevance; on the contrary, this anti-postcolonial defensiveness implies missing the chance to update the discipline’s responsiveness not only vis-à-vis the renewed global political urgency in discussing racism and (neo)colonialism but also vis-à-vis the concerns and moral impetus of younger and ever more diverse generations of anthropology students. Thinking of historical critique as a way to multiply possibilities and visualize how things could be otherwise will allow us to calibrate our (self-)criticism of our discipline’s past to the concerns of the present. By so doing, we can continue to hope for, and actively build, different and better ways of doing anthropology.

References

Al-Bulushi, Samar, Sahana Ghosh, and Madiha Tahir. “American Anthropology, Decolonization, and the Politics of Location.” American Anthropologist. https://www.americananthropologist.org/commentaries/al-bulushi-ghosh-and-tahir. 2020.

Allen, Jafari Sinclaire, and Ryan Cecil Jobson. “The Decolonizing Generation: (Race and) Theory in Anthropology Since the Eighties.” Current Anthropology 57, no. 2: 129–48. https://doi.org/10.1086/685502. 2016.

Anderson, Mark. From Boas to Black Power: Racism, Liberalism, and American Anthropology. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019.

Balkenhol, Markus, and Katharina Schramm. “Doing Race in Europe: Contested Pasts and Contemporary Practices.” Social Anthropology 27, no. 4: 585–93. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12721. 2019.

Barbosa, Thiago P. “Racializing a New Nation: German Coloniality and Anthropology in Maharashtra, India.” Perspectives on Science 30, no. 1: 137–66. https://doi.org/10.1162/posc_a_00405. 2022.

———. “Indian Sociology and Anthropology Between a Decolonising Quest and the West: Thinking with the Case of Irawati Karve.” Revue d’histoire des sciences humaines, no. 41: 181–211. https://doi.org/10.4000/rhsh.7670. 2022.

———. Racializing Caste: Anthropology Between Germany and India and the Legacy of Irawati Karve (1905–1970). Berlin: De Gruyter. Forthcoming 2024.

Barbosa, Thiago P., Owen Brown, Lili Mundle, Julia Kirchner, and Julia Scheurer. “Manufacturing Race: Contemporary Memories of a Building’s Colonial Past.” http://manufacturingrace.org/. 2016.

Barbosa, Thiago P., Owen Brown, Julia Kirchner, and Julia Scheurer. “Remembering the Anthropological Making of Race in Today’s University: An Analysis of a Student’s Memorial Project in Berlin.” Etnofoor 30, no. 2: 29–48. 2018.

Bashkow, Ira. “On History for the Present: Revisiting George Stocking’s Influential Rejection of ‘Presentism.’” American Anthropologist 121, no. 3: 709–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13297. 2019.

Braun, Lundy. Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Goldberg, David Theo. Are We All Postracial Yet? Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015.

Grosfoguel, Ramón. “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn: Beyond Political-Economy Paradigms.” In Globalization and the Decolonial Option, edited by Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar. London: Taylor and Francis, 2013.

Gupta, Akhil. “Decolonizing U.S. Anthropology: Presidential Address.” American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, November 20. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1s21TPVjSSbTvALb60-qjFil9pUNit4bq/edit?fbclid=IwAR0ZZJZNeYe3z6YSd3uznL4r2uzSx0XWagZgaEs_gTHleVZ9KX12LXgASIk. 2021.

Harrison, Faye Venetia, ed. Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further Toward an Anthropology of Liberation. 3rd ed. Washington, DC: Association of Black Anthropologists, 2010.

Hymes, Dell, ed. Reinventing Anthropology. Pantheon antitextbooks. New York: Pantheon Books, 1973.

Jobson, Ryan Cecil. “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019.” American Anthropologist 122, no. 2: 259–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13398. 2020.

Loison, Laurent. “Forms of Presentism in the History of Science: Rethinking the Project of Historical Epistemology.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 60: 29–37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2016.09.002. 2016.

M’charek, Amade, Katharina Schramm, and David Skinner. “Topologies of Race: Doing Territory, Population and Identity in Europe.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 39, no. 4: 468–87. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243913509493. 2014.

M’charek, Amade. “Beyond Fact or Fiction: On the Materiality of Race in Practice.” Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 3: 420–42. https://doi.org/10.1111/cuan.12012. 2013.

———. “Race, Time and Folded Objects: The HeLa Error.” Theory, Culture & Society 31, no. 6: 29–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413501704. 2014.

———. “Curious About Race: Generous Methods and Modes of Knowing in Practice.” Social Studies of Science 53, no. 6: 826–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127231201178. 2023.

Mukharji, Projit Bihari. Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920–66. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Pandian, Anand. A Possible Anthropology: Methods for Uneasy Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Pollock, Anne. Medicating Race: Heart Disease and Durable Preoccupations with Difference. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.

Prasad, Amit. “Burdens of the Scientific Revolution: Euro/West-Centrism, Black Boxed Machines, and the (Post) Colonial Present.” Technology and Culture 60, no. 4: 1059–82. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2019.0101. 2019.

Reis-Castro, Luísa. “Vectors of Health: Epidemics, Ecologies, and the Reinvention of Mosquito Science in Brazil.” Doctoral thesis, Program in Science, Technology and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2021.

Rupnow, Dirk, Veronika Lipphardt, Jens Thiel, and Christina Wessely, eds. Pseudowissenschaft: Konzeptionen von Nichtwissenschaftlichkeit in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008

Stocking, George W., Jr. “Editorial: On the Limits of ‘Presentism’ and ‘Historicism’ in the Historiography of the Behavioral Sciences.” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 1, no. 3: 211–18. 1965.

Stoler, Ann Laura. “Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth.” In Political Power and Social Theory, edited by Diane E. Davis. Greenwich, CT: Jai Press, 1997.

Vokes, Richard. “The Many Histories of Anthropology.” History and Anthropology 25, no. 1: 123–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2013.816848. 2014.

[1] By writing this, I also have in mind the discussions in reaction to Akhil Gupta’s Decolonizing U.S. Anthropology (2021) as well as many positions seen in anthropology departments and conferences in Northern Europe.

[2] Commenting on the Californian wildfires that happened simultaneously with the 2018 meeting of the (US-) American Anthropological Association in an air-conditioned venue in San Diego, Ryan Cecil Jobson (2020) articulated different critiques in and to (US-based) anthropology in that year in his “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn.” My reservations to his review go in the same direction as those written by Luísa Reis-Castro (2021) and Samar Al-Bulushi, Sahana Ghosh, and Madiha Tahir (2020), who call for a consideration of the geopolitics of location in the critique enunciated by Jobson—a tenured professor in one of the most renowned anthropology departments in the US. Jobson’s critique also does not mention anthropological spaces that have also literally burnt in the past years due to lack of funding—the reduction of Brazil’s National Museum to ashes being one example (see Reis-Castro 2021, 147-149). As Al-Bulushi, Ghosh, and Tahir (2020) put it, in conversation with Faye Harrison, “[i]f the appeal to ‘let anthropology burn’ aims to strike at the heart of the highly stratified system of knowledge production in the discipline, then the ‘epistemological imperialism’ [Harrison] of the US academy would be a good place to start the fire.”

[3] On the limitations of “the Boasian fix”, see Jobson (2020). See also Mark Anderson (2019) for a nuanced account on the liberal anti-racism that was typical of the Boasian anthropological tradition.

The Josiah Macy, Jr. Conferences on Cybernetics (1946-1953) originated at a moment of limitless optimism for a “new lingua franca” where a “universal language of information, feedback, and homeostasis” would lead to a capacity to “model all organisms from the level of the cell to that of society” (Kline, 2020: 13). It would be difficult to find another meeting with quite the same scope and soaring ambitions. Including the physical sciences, biology, neuroscience, linguistics, psychology alongside anthropology, the Macy conferences seemed to herald a new era where experts could speak to each other with a common language that would underwrite post-war technocratic dreams. And, as Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson hoped, anthropology would prove key to the development of that language.

In this, the Macy conferences could be seen as an obdurate failure. In anthropology, at least, cybernetics fizzled out by the 1970s. Not even the post-human turn that began in the 1980s seems to have revived the project that Mead and Bateson began in these conferences. Not just “cybernetics” as a term, but the dreams of anthropological cybernetics seemed to have disappeared. And since the conferences ended, the sciences and (other) social sciences have continued apace without much need for our anthropological contributions.

On the other hand, there’s ample evidence that the Macy Conferences succeeded all too well. The technologies that currently dominate our world—the algorithms, the AI models, the networks—all have at least some of their origins with Macy conferences participants: game theory (John von Neumann), neural nets and circular causality (Norbert Wiener, Arturo Rosenbluth and Julian Bigelow) and information as the ratio of signal-to-noise (Claude Shannon). As Hayles laments in “How We Became Posthuman,” the Macy conferences helped usher in a world where everything—including our subjectivity—could be reduced to flows of fungible information, information that can be commodified and manipulated. From this perspective, the Macy conferences were a first salvo in what Haraway would call the “Informatics of Domination,” (Haraway, 1991), in which, as Bateson later suggested, “control” was elevated over “communication” (Bateson, 1991).

Of course, it would a mistake to view this hegemony as inevitable, and many scholars in recent decades have elaborated on alternatives. Second-order cybernetics, for example, (re)introduced subjectivity into the information equation in the question of the observer (Maturana and Varela 1980), while others (like N. Katharine Hayles and Andrew Pickering) have looked to models of embodiment, practice and performance that were also implicit in the physicality of interaction and apparatus (Hayles, 1999; Pickering, 2010).

But what has been the anthropological contribution to all of this debate? Has there been a similarly recuperative moment in the field? This is, I think a fair question: Mead and Bateson were present at every conference. Reading through the (admittedly incomplete) transcripts, it is hard not to notice that the anthropologists were especially loquacious. They brought with them many insights, perhaps none so frequent as what we might call the “anthropological exception”: counterexamples from the anthropological record puncturing the universalist pretensions of the Macy conferees. As Mead sagely notes to Lawrence Kubie’s sweeping generalities: “If you look at some other cultures, you don’t necessarily find that same contrast” (Pias, 2016: 426).

The anthropological exception is the twentieth century inversion of the anthropological universal—that nineteenth century rhetorical tool that allowed Edward Burnett Tylor, James George Frazer and others to build gigantic abstractions like “animism” or “barbarism” out of decontextualized and more-than-occasionally inaccurate “facts” collected by legions of travelers, missionaries and colonial officials. There are many examples of the anthropology of exception – the critique implicit in the culture and personality school of the early twentieth century depends upon it, although the genre arguably crystallized with Bronislaw Malinowski’s Sex and Repression in Savage Society, where he argues that the Oedipus complex is not universal (Malinowski, 1927). This would not exorcise universalism from anthropology, but it would, at least, help to undermine the hierarchies underwriting anthropology as a colonial machine.

The Macy transcripts are filled with examples drawn from Mead’s and Bateson’s fieldwork—exceptions to the “rules” adduced by Macy conferees. But do they make any difference? In the example above, Kubie is hardly disarmed by Mead, and soldiers on in his inexplicitly Freudian way. And looking back, it is hard to see the anthropological dimensions of our world of networked communication and machine learning that are the two of the legacies of the conferences. So what was the anthropological contribution?

We could call the anthropological contribution “misunderstanding”—hardly a term with positive connotations, and one seemingly at odds with the point of an academic conference. The Macy conferences were intended to erect the scaffolding of a universalist science of cybernetics, one that would cut across disciplinary silos. And, yet, Macy conferees reported many misunderstandings. For example, Mead and Bateson critiqued their colleague in a 1976 interview with Stewart Brand: “So we used the model, ‘feedback,’ and Kurt Lewin—who didn’t understand any known human language, but always had to reduce them to concepts—he went away with the idea of feedback as something that when you did anything with a group you went back and told them later what had happened [  . . . ] So the word ‘feedback’ got introduced incorrectly into the international UNESCO type conferences where it’s been ever since” (Brand, 1976: 3).

This is something other than a garden variety misunderstanding. We might instead say that the anthropological contribution had to do with the idea of difference, as in the following example: in the 1950 meeting, J.C.R. Licklider (who would later be one of the architects of ARPANET) delivered a paper entitled “The Manner in Which and the Extent to Which Speech Can Be Distorted and Remain Intelligible.” It is really a paper on sound engineering, full of graphs showing frequency and clipping. It is just the sort of materialism that Shannon engages in his work—albeit in an even drier tone. Mead, however, re-frames Licklider’s presentation in terms of human communication across different languages, and the other conferees enthusiastically add their own anecdotes amidst Mead’s topical hijacking. Mead interjects: “I should like to get back to the question: Is this a translation or isn’t it? What is translation?” (237). While this wasn’t really Licklider’s question at all, Mead plunges ahead. It is, she concludes, “a question of framing. Some people frame all European languages together, so that the idea of learning any Indo-European language is regarded as just another language to be learned; the idea of learning Hawaiian or Japanese, however, would be regarded as something quite different. What is translation for one person is not translation for another” (237). Mead has, in the end, taken things rather far from Licklider’s materialist and quantitative starting point into an interesting meditation on the cultural politics of translation.

The pragmatic effect of Mead’s comments will be familiar to people who have attended academic conferences: the questions that are really comments, the endless self-aggrandizement and digression. Even if we are generous, it would be difficult to see Mead’s comments as helping to elaborate on Licklider’s work; in fact, they seem to accomplish exactly the opposite, jumping the rails entirely to something else, and leading conferees into anecdotes about their own foreign travel that hardly do much to cement the science of cybernetics. But what if the point of the exercise (at least as Mead and Bateson saw it) wasn’t to arrive at a consensus?

The second-generation cyberneticist Gordon Pask built an installation he called “The Colloquy of Mobiles,” consisting of hanging, robotic machines that would rotate towards each other in response to sequences of lights and sounds.

Together, these cybernetic agents produced complex behavior, but what made the installation even more complex was the human component. Pask intended for people to interact with the robots and participants and generate their own patterns using small mirrors to interact with the Mobile. The question here: Is the “communication” between the machines the same as the communication between people? The mobiles, Pask concede, “cannot, of course, interpret these sound and light patterns. But human beings can and it seems reasonable to suppose that they will also aim to achieve patterns which they deem pleasing by interacting with the system at a higher level of discourse” (Pask, 1971, quoted in Pickering, 2010: 359-360). Humans and machines are interacting, but not “sharing” a communicative system from machine to human. Here, Pask encourages human participants to productively “misunderstand” or inject their own meaning into what his Mobiles are up to and strive to build patterns “pleasing” to them. The mobile is not “communicating”; lights would be discharged when capacitors reached a certain level, mobiles would discharge a light, which would be “answered” by a sound. As a cybernetic apparatus, Pask’s Colloquy was interesting, but as a piece of art it invited multiple levels of anthropomorphic interaction, including eliciting affective response in human participants. The point, here, was not to understand the servo-mechanisms, but to interact with the device.

Was the purpose of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics to reduce everything to information and feedback? Or was it to create a forum for people and ideas to interact without reduction to a single set of terms? For Mead, Licklider’s paper is an opportunity to interject notes on language and translation; it starts her down a chain of anthropological examples, rather than, say, reducing anthropological linguistics to acoustics.

Gregory Bateson’s 1970 Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture elaborates on his celebrated definition of information:

In fact, what we mean by information–the elementary unit of information–is a difference which makes a difference, and is able to make a difference because the neural pathways along which it travels and is continuously transformed are themselves provided with energy. The pathways are ready to be triggered. We might even say that the question is already implicit in them (Bateson, 1972: 459).

The sense here (which, perhaps, takes some inspiration from the work of Humberto Maturana, in his co-authored paper, “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain” (Lettvin et al, 1959)), is that the “differences” in the pathway are already there—internally produced even though the stimuli might be initially external. Applied to cybernetics itself, it means interacting across different disciplines, not to unite, but to stimulate differences that, perhaps were already there. Differences without generating differences within. As Pickering writes, “the cybernetic sense of control was rather one of getting along with, coping with, even taking advantage and enjoying, a world one cannot push around in that way” (Pickering, 2010: 383).

Here, the anthropological contribution is difference itself, anthropological examples that lead conferees outside the closed loop of cybernetic interpretation into other frames: the generation of more difference. If we return to Wiener’s definition of cybernetics as “control and communication in the animal and the machine,” then anthropology’s contribution lay almost entirely on the “communication” side (Wiener, 1948). More than that, it’s a refractory communication that escapes the boundaries of the topic and extends—through difference—into something else entirely. To be fair, that seems to be the most successful part of the conference: it continued over almost a decade without, perhaps, ever building consensus on anything.

Yes, one legacy of the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics has been the domination of life by “code,” and the reduction of action, cognition and life itself to flows of information (Geoghegan, 2023). But it is not the only legacy. Another is the capacity to interact across differences in a way that is generative of more difference. It is, I am suggesting, the anthropological imperative—one that remains an unacknowledged contribution of anthropology, and one that presents an increasingly necessary alternative to the constantly expanding empire of the informatics of domination.

At present, we are again assailed by a nightmarish, cybernetic future where tasks that we have classified as definitively human—art, poetry, literature, music—are produced by generative AI models. We are encouraged to understand these outputs as the same as our human work, and that we are little better, in other words, than the stochastic machines that threaten jobs and educational assessment. In this, generative AI is heir to the insights of the Macy conferences, and, like them, leads to a series of invidious comparisons between the human and the machine. But perhaps an anthropology might shift the discourse into something else entirely—to refuse to see AI as a human simulacrum. Can we change the subject? Hijack this deterministic discourse onto another register altogether?

References

Bateson, Gregory. A Sacred Unity. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Bateson, Gregory. Steps Towards an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.

Brand, Stewart. “For God’s Sake, Margaret.” Co-Evolution Quarterly (Summer 1976): 32-44.

Geoghegan, Bernard Dionysius. Code. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Hayles, N. Katharine. How We Became Post-Human. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Kilne, Ronald. “How disunity matters to the history of cybernetics in the human sciences in the United States, 1940-80.” History of the Human Sciences 33, no. 1 (2020): 12-35. 

Malinowski, Bronislaw. Sex and Repression in Savage Society. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1927.

Maturana, Humberto, and Francisco Varela. Autopoesis and Cognition. Boston, MA: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1980.

Pias, Claus, ed. Cybernetics: The Macy Conferences, 1946-1953. New York: diaphanes, 2016.

Pickering, Andrew. The Cybernetic Brain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1948.

Anthropology is often identified as an academic discipline that explores human diversity and the concept of Otherness (see Leistle 2017), offering an opportunity for the anti-hegemonic presentation of plural lifeworlds (Bertelsen and Bendixen 2016: 8). The focus on Otherness has therefore been considered a prominent paradigm, an epistemological basis for anthropological scholarship (Leistle 2015). The earliest instruction for collecting ethnological data compiled by Gerhard Friedrich Müller in 1740, for his follower Johann Eberhard Fischer, accordingly emphasizes the need for collecting “curiosities” that can be contrasted with European experiences (Bucher 2002; Gisi 2007). However, not all (proto-) anthropologies focused on presenting alterity and contrasting non-European peoples with their European counterparts. In Hungary and a few other (semi-) peripheral academic circles in Europe, the concept of Sameness and similarity occupied a significant role in the development of non-European studies.

This two hundred year-old anthropological research legacy is not just a methodological curiosity; it has significantly impacted the field and the research environment for Hungarian anthropologists in Siberia and Inner Asia. The widespread assumption of a common origin based on a shared nomadic heritage, and hence an indelible bond between Hungarian anthropologists and local Turco-Mongolic peoples in Asia, remains a prevalent condition of fieldwork in this area.

In the nineteenth century, Hungarian nation-building and identity construction were heavily influenced by the idea that Hungarians originated from Asia, unlike any other European nation (Klaniczay 2020). The Finnish national awakening had a similar focus on the Finns’ Siberian kinsfolk (Antonen 2012: 343), whereas Estonian nation-building intensely concentrated on Finno-Ugric linguistic relatedness (Raun 2003; Petersoo 2007).

As a result, rather than pursuing colonial agendas, Hungarian travelers in Asia were interested in finding distant relatives or fellow Hungarians (Mészáros et al. 2017). From the mid-nineteenth century, this focus on finding similarities and connections rather than emphasizing differences and exoticizing alterity inspired generations of Hungarian linguists, ethnographers, and anthropologists to conduct field studies in Siberia and Inner Asia. Consequently, Hungarian anthropological scholarship in Asia primarily catered to domestic interests, and was strongly related to the study of Hungarian prehistory; aligning with the major scholarly paradigms of the Anglo-Saxon world was only a secondary goal (Sárkány 2016).

The Self as Other

Several anthropologists have drawn attention to French Enlightenment debates on liberty, equality, and human dignity (Harvey 2012; Graeber and Wengrow 2021). These debates often invoked real and imagined outsiders to critique contemporary European social realities. This well-known hybrid discourse (academic and literary) had an immense impact on the development of anthropology in Europe. 

This was not, however, the only discourse critiquing eighteenth-century European social formations. As a counter-discourse to Western-European experiences of colonial encounters, a robust corpus of texts emerged in German-speaking regions in which fictional ancient German protagonists, rather than contemporary non-Europeans (“savages” or “Oriental others”), articulated their dissatisfaction with the social conditions of the period (Reusch 2008). Alongside the contrastive power of the classical, the primitive, and the Oriental other, a new construction emerged, that of the uncorrupted “same”: the ancestor who lives in original, virtuous social conditions. The ancient German tribespeople appeared as a version of, or rather, a better alternative to, the savage. An essential difference between the two schemes is that the image of the Germanic tribespeople was impregnated with the idea of the “Heimat,” the homeland (Kuehnemund 1953; Skarsten 2012). 

The outsider’s view, provided by the nationally and linguistically identical, but spatially and/or temporarily remote, played an intrinsic role in nation-building processes in Hungarian and to some extent in other (Finnish, Estonian) academic discourses (Merivirta et al. 2021; Annist – Kaaristo 2013). For these academic circles, Siberian and Oriental Sameness represented a point of alignment rather than a contrast. The powerful image of Germanic tribesmen living in an arboreal homeland provides a critical parallel, if not a direct preview, of similar discourses that developed in Hungary in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the case of Hungary, however, the uncorrupted tribesmen and lost homeland are found not in the distant past, but in Siberia or the Orient. 

The representational scheme of Sameness was particularly successful in Hungary. It influenced national discourse and the development of Oriental studies, literary oeuvres, and anthropological interest. It first appeared in the early 1800s as identicality (Békés 1997): the image of the linguistically-nationally identical but uncorrupted Hungarians residing in Asia. Several authors did their best to recognize Hungarian linguistic and cultural traits in Asia, and to create reports about contemporary Hungarians residing in the Orient. This endeavor resulted in a highly varied discourse of different generic and epistemological statuses, such as scholarly articles, reports, pseudo-ethnographies, and literary works (Mészáros 2023). What are the common features of this representational scheme?

First, a fairly uniform portrayal of Hungarians living in Asia came out of this discourse. Their language was reportedly not only similar to Hungarian, but completely identical to it. Therefore, Hungarians from the Carpathian Basin meeting Asian Hungarians could allegedly carry out a conversation easily, and linguists did not need a refined methodology to show that all spoke the same language. Furthermore, the indigenous Hungarian protagonists of these literary works residing between Greenland and China mutually recognized one another as Hungarians (Szeverényi 2002). 

This representational scheme suggested that Hungarians living in Europe and Asia shared a profound sympathy; they were happy to find one another. Furthermore, Hungarians in Asia were portrayed living virtuous lives in abundance and liberty. Compared to Hungarians in Europe, they usually occupied a higher position in the hierarchy of nations. Their language was richer and more authentic, their customs more original, and their religious life more devout. Asian Hungarians encountered outside of Asia in these reports usually expressed dissatisfaction with the degenerate social realities of nineteenth-century Hungary, and were in a hurry to return to their people and homeland (Mészáros 2023). This supposed homeland was said to be located in the Northern Caucasus, Mongolia, Siberia and even in Kandia (Crete).

According to these works, Hungarians living in Asia preserved what Hungarians in Europe had already forgotten: the original meaning of Hungarian words, customs, and personal virtues. At the same time, they maintained economic and cultural traits that were slowly disappearing in Hungary. This element of cultural conservation was one of the main motives for further research and subsequent expeditions to Asia.

Inspired by the discourse on Hungarians living in Asia, and by the European academic currents pointing to the Oriental origin of the Hungarians (Vermeulen 2015; Carhart 2019), more than a dozen research expeditions were organized by Hungarian noblemen and institutions to find Hungarian kinsfolk in Russia and the Orient up to the outbreak of World War I (Mészáros et al. 2017). By cherry-picking those elements from the local lifeworlds that researchers regarded as ancient traits of Hungarian culture, this variety of anthropology created its own frozen, timeless object in Asia: a people who maintained the uncorrupted Asian traits of Hungarian living in Europe.

This object was, therefore, not the Other, but the Self. As a result, popular research topics in Hungary diverged from contemporary mainstream European or American anthropology well into the twentieth century. Instead of focusing on kinship systems or the development of forms of religion, Hungarian (and to some extent Finnish and Estonian) researchers in the late nineteenth century usually focused on fishing and hunting methods, traps (Urbeschäftigungen), and the collection of epic songs in the Urals and Asia (Munkácsi 1893; Jankó 1900; Sirelius 1906). Inspired by earlier studies, in the early-twentieth century Géza Róheim made efforts to reconstruct an ancient Hungarian belief system as a version of Siberian shamanism (Róheim 1954). Based on these ideas, Vilmos Diószegi conducted several field studies in the Soviet Union and Mongolia in the 1960s and 70s, exploring parallel features in local shamanic practices. As a result, he hypothesized an ancient Hungarian pagan belief system (Diószegi 1958, 1968). After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, indigenous researchers in Siberia and Central Asia celebrated his work as a resource for national spiritual revival (Quijada et al. 2015).

The Return of the Idea of Sameness to the Field

Besides developing a set of analytical tools based on the concept of Sameness, Hungarian travelers and anthropologists also established a unique fieldwork methodology based on approaching local peoples in Asia as relatives, rather than exotic others (Klima 2019). Hungarian travelers distinguished themselves from other European travelers and researchers in the region, asserting their desire to reconnect with their kinfolk and visit their homeland (Herman 1898; Szádeczky Kardoss 1895). Notably, Zichy Jenő and Béla Széchenyi, two Hungarian noblemen who organized and financed research expeditions in Asia, sought research permits from the Chinese authorities to conduct research in their ancient homeland (Fajcsák 2023), and in the case of Széchenyi, to visit the graves of Hungarian ancestors, offering prayers for the Hungarian nation (Széchenyi 1890: xix–xxi).

Hungarian researchers highlighted their distinctive position in Asia during their research trips in Siberia among the Obugric peoples. Bernát Munkácsi and Károly Pápai often mentioned their aim to seek out the relatives of the Hungarian nation in Siberia in their fieldwork (Munkácsi 2008:73–74, 93; Pápai 1888: 623–624). A few years later, János Jankó, although heavily reliant on support from the Russian state, assured the indigenous peoples that his intentions differed from those of the Russians (Jankó 2000). When Vilmos Diószegi conducted fieldwork in the Soviet Union and Mongolia after World War II, he also often stressed to the local academic circles and beyond that his main interest was to find parallels between Siberian shamanism and ancient Hungarian religious beliefs (Sántha 2002). Even recent ethnomusicological research trips carried out by János Sipos, Gergely Agócs, and Dávid Somfai Kara reinforce the idea among academic communities and in field studies that Hungarian folk music is part of a great Turkic musical ecumene (Agócs 2020; Sipos 2020).

Sameness and the Diverse Landscape of Anthropology

Hungarian anthropology, focusing on the idea of Sameness, has led to a wealth of research in Asia and has given Hungarian researchers a special position there. This approach has also fostered enduring partnerships with local researchers and communities (Sipos 2003), and facilitated the exchange of information between academic circles and local people (Somfai 2023).

The diversity of the global academic landscape of anthropology is increasingly apparent as research methods and paradigms crisscross between schools and regional varieties. Recently, there has been a growing emphasis on portraying the development of anthropology not only through the major paradigm shifts in metropolitan centers (Kuklick 1991; Candea 2018), but also by giving a detailed picture of the diverse co-development of different anthropologies (Boškovic 2008; Barrera-Gonzalez et al. 2017). The emergence of local (in some cases parallel) disciplines in Europe (Hofer 2018) demonstrates that there is room for diverse and possibly incongruent methodologies and terminologies under the umbrella of anthropology (Sárkány 2013; Mészáros 2022).

The Hungarian example points out that regional academic communities demarcate with a certain degree of independence which activities can be regarded as full-blown academic research, and which do not fulfill the conditions of scientific inquiry. Therefore, not only do the different linguistic, methodological, and sociocultural backgrounds define the national boundaries of anthropological discourse, but also the dissimilar epistemic status of scholarly activities. Texts that may be an organic part of academic discourse in one tradition may be discredited in another.

In Central-Eastern Europe, in what Michal Buchowski has called the “twilight zone of anthropology” (Buchowski 2014), the epistemological status of texts and scholarly contributions is particularly diverse. In the Hungarian ethnological tradition, the epistemological status of texts that focus on Hungarians living in Asia has been the subject of a long debate, preventing their inclusion in retrospective historical studies. This exclusion has led to other contentious debates about Oriental versus primitive Otherness, and the identification of other peoples as kinsfolk in Hungarian ethnology. The irreconcilable difference between the scholarly discourse on Sameness and ideas of Oriental Otherness resulted in incommensurate research epistemologies in Hungary. The extent to which a shared discourse space can be created within anthropology is determined by methodological and epistemological differences and academic networks. Furthermore, many regional varieties of anthropology directly challenge mainstream anthropological or scientific methods, which makes it challenging to find a common ground among anthropological schools.

In anthropologies focusing on Otherness and human diversity, the idea of Sameness is an underlying condition of anthropological work, postulating that “despite, or perhaps because of their differences, all societies embody the same cultural value and worth” (Argyrou 2002:1). That is, “Sameness understood as human unity has always been the ethnological a priori. It has been the axiomatic proposition that demarcated the epistemological space within which it became possible to study Others” (Argyrou 2002:23).

In Hungarian Oriental studies, however, the idea of Sameness had a different epistemological status. Here, Sameness was not an underlying research condition; it had to be unfolded, explored, and demonstrated by subsequent field studies. Not all Asian peoples were identical (or kinfolk) to Hungarians (or ancient Hungarians): only those who conformed to the representational scheme of Sameness established in Hungarian discourse on national origins and prehistory.

Although Sameness is a representational scheme rather than an a priori in Hungarian anthropology, it has been immune to anthropological reflection. The political motivations behind the portrayal of “the Other” as “the Self,” and the perception of Asian cultures as maintaining identical cultural elements from Hungarian prehistory have not been thoroughly explained, and Hungarian anthropological scholarship provides little in the way of a critique of this perspective. Studies on the development of anthropology have pointed out that colonial encounters and dominant European representational schemes of Otherness heavily influenced ethnographic records, but little is known about how the representational scheme of Sameness in Hungary created its own unique Other: the Self. 

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John Tresch and Richard Handler, guest editors

Anthropology’s intense concern with its own past stands out among the social sciences. After a quick review of current literature, economists, political scientists, sociologists, and even historians can jump right into their presentation of new findings. But few anthropologists writing about the contemporary world do so without at least an acknowledgement, and often a careful reckoning, of how anthropology’s previous theoretical frames and (geo-) political position continue to shape current anthropological work on the issues at hand.

In-depth study of the histories of anthropology adds detail and complexity to these briefer acknowledgements. Careful, contextual, polyphonic history reveals hidden contradictions and ambiguities; it can highlight the complicities of canonized figures and movements; it might produce an unwanted empathy for actors and developments we were inclined to condemn. Moreover, historical researchers focused on anthropology—or anthropologists focused on history—can often be deliberate and explicit about the ways in which their archival research, oral history, and hermeneutic reconstruction addresses and engages with current concerns.

This Special Focus Section is the result of a series of panels held in the First International Conference of the Histories of Anthropologies, “Doing Histories, Imagining Futures,” hosted online between 4 and 7 December, 2023. This conference—a landmark for history of anthropology, with nearly 100 presentations from scholars around the world—was organized by the history of anthropology network [HOAN].