It’s Time for a Stronger Commitment with Our International Colleagues

Leila Rodriguez Associate Professor of Anthropology

University of Cincinnati

The American Anthropological Association lists knowledge dissemination as one of its guiding ethical principles. In particular, it discourages withholding findings from research participants. But anthropologists who conduct fieldwork internationally have three additional and related ethical obligations: to participate in the academic conferences of the countries and regions in which they conduct research, to publish their findings in the academic journals of those countries and regions, and to cite the scholarship of local anthropologists. Failure to do so results in the continued colonization of knowledge and imposition of Western theory and epistemology as the true representation of social reality.

Why do so many U.S. anthropologists fail to fulfill these responsibilities? Diminishing funds in U.S. universities force academics to choose in which conferences to participate, and those closer to home may be more affordable. While funding is a legitimate concern, it is not an excuse for not publishing in local journals or knowing and citing local scholars. There is growing recognition about the importance of this kind of international academic engagement. The Wenner-Gren Foundation, for example, offers an Engaged Anthropology Grant for its grantees to return to their research site and share results with the community in which the research was conducted or the academic community in the country or region of research.

Increasingly strict tenure requirements often value U.S. conferences and journals more highly. The decreasing availability of tenured positions further pressures academics to focus their energy only on activities that will be most valued in tenure evaluations. Still, academic propriety is not reason enough to disregard ethical responsibilities. Most top universities list internationalization as an important value and departments have leeway in determining their tenure requirements: we can make a case for valuing the kind of international academic engagement I propose. More importantly, an occasional international presentation or publication, and the citation of international scholars in U.S.-based publications will not make excessive demands on the time nor diminish the rest of the scholarly output of researchers.

Some anthropologists may simply be unaware of the academic community in the countries in which they work. While problematic in itself, this is perhaps the most easily resolved. The World Council of Anthropological Associations lists almost 50 national and regional anthropological associations. Many others are missing from the list, and can be found using a quick Google search: Anthropology Southern Africa, Central American Anthropology Network, Latin American Biological Anthropology Association, to name a few. Technology further enables us to locate the existence of international anthropology journals. For example, Redalyc and Latindex provide a directory and catalog of most academic journals in Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal.

Many anthropologists contribute to local communities and share their work with research subjects in other ways. Those efforts are absolutely necessary. Recently, a Chilean colleague lamented that local anthropologists’ access to some Mapuche communities has

been hindered by negative views of the discipline, a fact they attribute in large part to primarily U.S. and European graduate students not sharing their findings and publications with their Mapuche research participants. While sharing information with research subjects is crucial, it is not enough. The three tasks that I propose are aimed at something else that directly involves academic communities: they are necessary steps in the decolonization of knowledge.

My call to decolonize knowledge is by no means new. Anthropologists have been calling for it for several decades, and the publications on the topic are numerous and impossible to summarize here. Twenty years ago Mexican anthropologist Esteban Krotz (1997) remarked that “[i]t is ironic that the establishment within the North Atlantic civilization of an ever more prosperous and successful scientific discipline, dedicated particularly to cultural diversity, has come hand in hand with a strong and sustained tendency of the same civilization to silence that diversity.” The predominance of English language in academia contributes to that silencing, but it is not the sole culprit. To quote Harrison (2012) “there is a problematic tendency for southern anthropologists to be treated as high-level informants or over-qualified fieldwork assistants […] at best local anthropologists are relegated to the role of minor-stream scholars, rather than being regarded as significant sources of theoretically-nuanced mainstream knowledge.” This sentiment was echoed by a Central American colleague who complained that in some instances local archaeologists, who collected the assemblages or published reports with raw data that are analyzed by U.S. archaeologists, are at best cited in the bibliography with no real consideration of their contributions and perspectives. Countries like Costa Rica and Guatemala have enacted laws that require foreign archaeologists to collaborate with, hire or otherwise involve local scholars in their work. Cultural anthropologists are not subjected to the same requirements.

It is unlikely that any U.S. anthropologist today will admit to placing little value on international colleagues and their theory making. Elsewhere, anthropologists have called for the revision of anthropological curricula to include more diverse and so-called peripheral scholarship (see further readings list below). Moving forward on this issue, however, requires more steps, and I propose this one: include in the AAA’s Principles of Professional Responsibility the commitment to share knowledge with –and incorporate the knowledge of – local anthropologists by the three means I outlined above: participate in the academic conferences of the countries and regions in which they conduct research, publish findings in the academic journals of those countries and regions, and cite the scholarship of anthropologists from those countries and regions. Addressing these responsibilities in the ethics statement advances the narrative about decolonizing anthropological knowledge as an issue of ethics, or a “reexamination of one’s own taken for granted moral stances, respect and consideration for other cultural traditions of morality, and reflection on how to resolve the juxtaposition of sometimes disparate moral discourses” (Black 2016). Engagement with international scholars IS an ethical issue. As a scholarly community and as a professional association, we have the choice to continue to suppress local scholarship, or to learn it, spread it, critique it, and value it as much as U.S. scholarship.

References Cited:

Black, Steven P. 2016. Ethics, Anthropology and Adjudication. Available at: https://ethics.americananthro.org/ethics-anthropology-and-adjudication/

Harrison, Faye V. 2012. Dismantling Anthropology’s Domestic and International Peripheries. World Anthropologies Network 6:87-110

Krotz, Esteban. 1997. Anthropologies of the South. Their Rise, Their Silencing, Their Characteristics. Critique of Anthropology 17(3)237-251

Further Reading:

Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. Theory in Anthropology: Center and Periphery. Comparative Studies in Society and History 28(2)356-361

Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff. 2012. Theory from the South or, How Euro-America is Evolving toward Africa. London: Paradigm Publishers

Connell, Raewyn. 2007. Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge:Polity

Dominguez, Virginia. 1994. A Taste for the “Other”: Intellectual Complicity in Racialized Practices. Current Anthropology 35(4)333-348

Harrison, Faye (Ed.) 2010. Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation. 3rd edition. Arlington: American Anthropological Association

Mignolo, Walter. 2007. Introduction. Cultural Studies, 21(2-3)155-167

Mignolo, Walter. 2011. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke UP.

Ntarangwi, Mwenda, David Mills and Mustafa Babiker (Eds). 2006. African Anthropologies: History, Critique and Practice. Dakar:CODESRIA-Zed Books

Ortiz, Renato. 2006. Social Sciences and the English Language. Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 2(SE)0-0

Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America. Nepantla: Views from South 1(3)533-580

Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins and Arturo Escobar (Eds). 2006. World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power. Oxford:Berg

Said, Edward. 1981. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2012. Decolonizing Methodologies. 2nd edition. London: Zed Books

Wolf, Eric. 1999. Anthropology among the Powers. Social anthropology 7(2)121-134

An Intersectional POV On How the Contingent Faculty Market Is Against Our Other Principles in the AAA Code of Ethics

The author of this post wishes to remain anonymous.

This blog discusses the ways in which people of color, and especially women of color first generation PhDs, experience the contingency market differently because of their intersectional identities and how this undermines the discipline’s goals of contributing a diverse body of knowledge under truthful conditions of knowledge production.

 

This blog entry seeks to encourage a long-needed discussion on how our structural participation in the contingency market can be seen as contra to the general AAA Ethics Principles we, as dues-paying members, hold ourselves accountable to. In their March 27th 2015 AAA Ethics blog post “Professional Precarity, Ethics, and Social Justice,” my colleagues and fellow linguistic anthropologists Netta Avineri and Steve Black focused on how the contingency market compromises the final part of the AAA Code of Ethics. Their focus naturally was Principle Seven, “Maintain Respectful and Ethical Professional Relationships.” I want to expand on their important contributions here to foreground how structural conditions of the most marginalized contingent faculty, which I will define below, impacts the other objectives in more indirect but just as equally consequential ways to the profession, the communities we study, and the students and broader society we aim to serve.

 

Before heading into the principles, I want to make a few important caveats that are often not made when this complex issue is discussed. I am not talking about faculty and administrators at all higher education institutions that rely on contingent faculty. Many institutions have actually created and shared best practices through forums like the Delphi Project at the University of Southern California. (Sadly, these practices are still few and far between and still seen as anomalies rather than innovators in higher education.) Moreover, I am not addressing all members of the contingent faculty class. There are contingent faculty members who are post-academics, or scholars who no longer work full-time in any academic position, and retired academics. These two classes often use contingent faculty positions as supplemental income and, at times, even donate their salary back to the institution. Some even say this is who these positions were originally designed for–people who are able to bring ‘real world’ experience to student instruction. Sadly, this minority of contingent faculty is also used by many to rationalize the current inequities in resources, compensation, and more for these positions when in fact we know this is not the majority of those we hire to teach classes.

 

Invoking Kimberle Crenshaw’s (1989) original framing of intersectionality to recognize not all oppression and ethical violations are felt equally, I emphasize that I am writing from the place of lived experience with the most marginalized of contingent faculty in anthropology departments: those part-time PhDs and PhD graduate students not in post-academic careers that are typically women and scholars of color (if not both–see the New Faculty Majority/New Faculty Majority Foundation’s Women in Contingency Project as well as the statistics from the American Federation of Teachers Report). Many times, like myself, they are also first-generation PhDs without adequate financial and cultural/social capital resources, which also includes knowledge of how to use the PhD as cultural/social capital in post-academic careers because they are often unintentionally cut out from other networks due to ‘pattern matching.’ They return to their home communities after having given a bulk of their lives to academia with their hopes dashed of contributing to knowledge production not only for themselves but also for the betterment of the profession and their communities. Moreover, they occupy a unique place in these discussions. Within their ‘own’ native professional circles that seek to promote ethnic, sexual, and gender diversity in the discipline, these scholars find that, when they make moves to speak of contingent issues, it is often construed as undermining or detracting from the ‘more important’ agendas of anti-racism work underway in academia. What is overlooked is that this is work that only some privileged tenure/tenure track academics get to fight. At the same time, to speak of intersectional identities and their invisibility in the contingent faculty movement risks them being called race-mongers and seen as undermining the labor movement. They are, in essence, in limbo and often relegated as an exception to be dealt with later on both sides.

 

When they face structural discrimination, one cannot tell if it is because of their adjunct status or their ethnic and gender status, if not both. Thus, as Crenshaw reminds us, when we help the most disenfranchised–who often are the most difficult to design