Human No More

12 Are We There Yet?

The End of Anthropology Is Beyond the Human

Neil L. Whitehead

For anthropology the recognition of multiple modernities, both now and in the past, and the existence of other globalized worlds beyond that of the Western sensorium and the expansion of that sensorium enabled by new digital worlds (Jones 2006) suggest that many of the central categories of Western intellectual experience, such as the cultural and the natural, the modern and the traditional, and the global and the local are all deeply entwined in any discussion of society, history, environment, and the beings through which such abstractions are constituted. This is true throughout the humanistic and social science disciplines, not just anthropology. In this context the notion of “post-human” presents itself as a historical and intellectual judgment as to what is, a revelation as to what we already know and experience. This chapter, in seeking to find an end, a purpose, to anthropology beyond the idea of simply the “human,” looks to what might be the objects of future anthropological enquiry and why anthropology should be directed toward these new purposes.

The alternative to rethinking anthropology’s methodologies and objects along these lines would be a collapse into intellectual conservatism and political quietism in the face of burgeoning new cultural worlds that, as chapters in this volume show, have become otherwise functionally un-interpretable and un-researchable. This does not mean that such cultural worlds are unimportant, although such an assumption no doubt would perfectly suit many current regimes of intellectual and political power. Academia does not exist in a cultural vacuum, so our sense of what is a priority and whose experiences are relevant to intellectual understanding are part of wider cultural discussions. In this way an uncritical ethnography practiced as part of a normative anthropological agenda can easily slip into an unthinking co-option by military, industry, and government interests (Price 2008), suggesting that ethnography’s epistemological ancestry makes this a persistent danger for those, like most anthropologists, who would rather use ethnographic engagements to foster emancipatory and advocacy goals (Whitehead 2009a).

DOI: 10.5876/9781607321705.c12

However, a critique of ethnographic epistemology alone is not sufficient, because it simply returns us to the question of what anthropology and ethnography are for. It is here that the meaning of the debate about the posthuman becomes all-important because we face a crisis of ontology, not just of epistemology. As all the chapters in this volume show, it is the multiple ontologies generated in online worlds and present in occluded offline worlds that have been overlooked or actively ignored because we lack adequate methodologies to engage immaterial, digital subjects ethnographically or the ethical issues raised by participant observation among violent, drug-taking, insurgent, and criminal subjects seem insurmountable (Whitehead 2009b). The limits of standard ethnographic methodology challenge us to develop new forms of engagement, as the authors in this volume demonstrate. However, beyond methodological questions we still need to consider what the goals of anthropological knowledge are or should be. Assuming that “ethnography” stands outside of social relationships is clearly an untenable position, and although the profession has been questioning the relation between researcher and subject in many effective ways over the last two decades, recent events suggest that much remains to be done. In particular, the avid interest of government security agencies in recruiting anthropologists as a means to “weaponize” cultural knowledge has resulted in important analyses and critique of this kind of co-option (Kelly et al. 2010; González 2009; Price 2008). But if the kind of cultural knowledge that ethnography produces can be “weaponized” in this way, further thought needs to be given about how this can occur, given the largely progressive and emancipatory aims of most anthropological practice.

In these ways anthropology faces fundamental challenges to its unexamined epistemological and ontological assumptions. Without rethinking both the goals of anthropological knowledge and the forms of ontology ethnography needs to engage to achieve such knowledge, anthropology risks becoming a mere catalog of the exotic and diverse. At the same time ethnography risks becoming a generalized methodology, stripped of the complexities arising from long-term subjective engagement and reduced to little more than the protocols that institutional review boards require to govern human-subject interview techniques.

The chapters here amply illustrate important forms of collective association and practice that highlight such issues, and the authors’ responses to these challenges of ontological and epistemological reformulation do much to show us new ends and means to a future anthropology. It is also critical to consider how such case studies suggest the need for a wider critique that can reveal the systematic implications of these approaches for a reformulated anthropology. To that end, the rest of this chapter will consider how the essays collected here stake out new anthropological fields and take us beyond the human.

TRADITION, MODERNITY, AND THE COLLAPSE OF CULTURE

The question of what anthropology should have as its knowledge goals is not unique to this volume. Arguably, the last two decades of the “reflexive turn”—the notion that problems of inequitable and colonizing epistemologies are overcome when the observers participate with the subjects of their observation—has adequately de-centered any lingering naive modernism about the possibility for achieving total “knowledge” of others. However, this shift has not led to any indication of what our post-colonial knowledge goals should be and how we can pursue them in a way that does not continually reproduce the cultural superiority of observers over observed, whatever the manner of engagement with those other lives (Mbembe 2001).

To some extent the force of such questions was blunted by attempts to salvage the anthropological tradition as it has been constituted so far (Ortner 2006; Rabinow et al. 2008) and even with the new opportunities of the digital online world kept front and center (Boellstorff 2008). In an afterword (notably not in the introduction), Rees writes of the discussion he mediated between Rabinow Marcus and Faubion:

[They] explore some of the ways in which anthropology has been developing since the 1980s and seek to articulate ... the conceptual challenges these developments imply for the practice of anthropological inquiry today. Today, what is anthropology? What could it be? Where does it come from and in which way might it develop? What’s the role of culture, the place of society where we anthropologists no longer exclusively—or predominantly—address culture and/or society? What new objects have been emerging? What new concepts? What’s the role of fieldwork under these renewed circumstances? What constitutes ethnographic data and what could serve as a measure for descriptive thickness? (Rabinow et al. 2008, 115–6)

That such questions, but not their answers, conclude the work suggests that this is not another moment for “recapturing” anthropology (Fox 1991) or, as that work terms it, “redesigning” anthropology. In any case, some form of design “makeover” hardly seems to meet the need to examine the deep structure and history of the discipline at a critical intellectual juncture. In short, the outcomes of failing to address such epistemological and ontological problems are already with us and have proliferated, leading to serious ethical and political issues in professional practice with, at times, even lethal consequences (Tierney 2002; Whitehead 2009a).

This failure to address our problems has led others to question anthropology’s purpose and to identify a tendency for anthropology to devolve into a species of area studies as comparative religion, literary studies, political science, geography, and sociology all discover “field work” and a untroubled program of synthesizing ethnography to undergird it. All of this occurs at a moment when the anthropological sciences—archaeology and biology—are also seeking to find practices that problematize their own forms of knowledge gathering and subjective engagements to reinvent new ends suitable to those purposes (El Haj 2002; Schmidt and Patterson 1996; Atlan and de Waal 2007; Schmidt 2009).

For exactly the same reasons, the Brazilian anthropologist Viveiros de Castro asks in his recent volume Métaphysiques cannibales, “Conceptually, what should anthropology be to the peoples it studies?” (2009, 1, my translation). Through this question, Viveiros de Castro is trying to go beyond all those studies generally grouped under the label of “reflexive anthropology” by showing the inadequacy of the traditional opposition between a naively objectivist anthropology that systematically reveals others through writing about them and a postmodernism that insists on a unique particularism among others that forever eludes translation or interpretation, and thus the theoretical construction of “culture.” Although Viveiros de Castro is quite right about the epistemological limits of a reflexive anthropology, the notion of culture is still unquestioned and the issue of ontology replaced as one of viewpoint. But although such “perspectivism” (discussed below) is a powerful insight into translation among different epistemological regimes, it leaves the question of ontology untouched because, for Viveiros de Castro, to have a “perspective” it is necessary also to have an interior form of “humanity” (2009, 1).¹ How viewpoints and ontologies are interrelated and how ways of being produce ways of seeing nonetheless require more thought. The chapters in this volume begin some of that work by showing how digital lives are not experienced and cannot be known through observational practices alone. Rather, participation—that is, the development of one’s own digital subjectivity—is a prerequisite for any observational activity (Whitehead 2009b), and this fundamental principle guides how ethnography may be reformulated. For this reason we can pluralize “perspectives” endlessly, but then such “perspectives” only function philosophically as “culture” once did.

In North American anthropology, Arjun Appadurai’s iconic Modernity at Large (1996) continues to give anthropology a powerful vision of culture as a mobile, plural, and ever-changing phenomenon, unlike earlier more static and essentialist models. By suggesting that a global modernity was effectively linking even the most isolated populations, Appadurai’s work seemed to offer a way out of the impasse of trying to invent new strategies for “writing culture” that had all foundered when faced with the impossibility of identifying what “culture” meant in such literary exercises (Clifford 1988; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Marcus 1998; Marcus and Fischer 1999). It also perfectly matched the post-Soviet moment by suggesting a social philosophy of democratic and entrepreneurial freedom through the globalization of “glasnost,” or openness and transparency, which was celebrated as the source of Soviet internal collapse and a key difference between the Soviet system and Western democracy. Since the notion of culture itself has remained problematic, the notion of global modernity supplanted culture as a guiding theoretical category. Consequently, Clifford (1997) was now writing “mobility” rather than “culture,” and, as Sahlins (2000) announced it, the topic for anthropology in the twenty-first century became ethnographies of global modernity’s “indigenization,” that is, of “culture[s] in their practice,” to paraphrase the title of Sahlins’s book. But the isomorphism of modernity and culture for such authors ignores the way in which the ideas of “culture” and “modernity” are historically contingent and culturally particular. Thus, there may be multiple and alternative modernities that do not necessarily match the chronology of American and European history or express the liberal democratic values that the advent of this latest version of “modernity” is supposed to entail.

Many anthropologists and historians of non-Western cultures have been more open to the idea that invasive modernity has been experienced in other times and places, specifically as a result of domination by one of the early regional empires in, for example, Mexico, Egypt, Rome, the Indus Valley, or China (Ferguson and Whitehead 2000; Gaonkar 2001; Abu-Lughod 1991). In any given historical and cultural context, “modernity” cannot be understood apart from those ideas that also give meaning and content to the idea of “tradition.” In this sense, “modernity” is both ancient and plural, an aspect of the continuous construction of “tradition,” closely interrelated and historically contingent, the mutual condition of their possibility. The expansion of industrialized capitalism in the last 200 years was a contingent historical phenomenon, bringing along with it particular notions of tradition and modernity formed largely in colonial encounter.

Nineteenth-century anthropology had an important role to play in generating these categories through the contemplation and classification of “primitive” peoples that were encountered, and it is those notions of tradition and modernity that have been globalized in our version of a “modern” world. This process is not permissive, because even if local meaning and form is given to the modern, what the process should be is a matter of continuous debate and sometimes embittered conflict for those on the point of imminent envelopment by national states and international corporations (Comaroff 2001; Ferguson 2006; Scott 2009; Whitehead 2002). In short, there has not been a “convergence” of modernities, as suggested by both Marx and Durkheim, to produce a global social and cultural uniformity but rather an explosion of alternative modernities.

In this frame, the need to become modern is less a precursor to the inevitable advent of a set of uniform social and cultural conditions as invented in Euro-America over the last 200 years than it is a signal of a political and economic condition of marginalization from current global systems. This frame of reference also allows a different kind of understanding of not only cultural tradition and its allure but also those cultural fundamentalisms that seem poised to challenge Western modernity as morally bankrupt, spiritually dissolute, and socially competitive.

Thinking about the global nature of modernity is thus a way of focusing on the cultural process through which certain regimes of power—states and corporations—are established over and against local folklore and traditions in the social and cultural sphere. In turn, this process often represents an assertion of the individuality of “human” rights and obligations in relation to the state and the denial of other forms of collectivity—family, clan, mosque, or church. This is not an end to culture, or to anthropology, but it is a theoretical impasse for an anthropology wedded to notions of culture that cannot allow for this expanded frame of reference in writing about the local and global, the traditional and the modern. Supposedly, nothing could be more “modern” than the digital, but virtual, mobile worlds are arguably ancient (Zielinski 2008) and perfectly compatible with “tradition” as demonstrated by the chapters in this volume by Alemán, on the use of digital media by indigenous peoples, and Wisniewski, on globalized social consciousness among Amazonian peoples.

CULTURE, NATURE, AND THE POSTHUMAN

In the same way that notions of “culture” collapse when faced with the dynamics of how people deploy their traditions and modernities, so too is the binary of culture/nature or natural/human destabilized by how people practice relationships with non-humans and things and to the extent that culture is seen as a unique property of the “human” (Santos-Granero 2009; Whitehead 2012). In the same way that debates about modernity supplanted theorizing about culture, the use of mediating concepts such as “perspectivism” and “landscape” have been put forward as ways in which the categories of “human” and “natural” can be sustained despite the long-overdue acknowledgment of the agency of animals and objects, as well as the digital and unhuman subjects that are at the core of this book. Just as notions of the theater state (Geertz 1981), the magical state (Coronil 1997; Taussig 1997), and the state as exception (Agamben 2005) showed the state to be a quasi-object (after Latour 1993), eluding typology and definition through social science, so too the ideas behind the notions of “perspectivism” and “landscape” show “nature” and “human” to be quasi-subjects.

However, as Latour (1993) suggests, such mediation still leaves the poles of the binary intact and thus, by itself, fails to address ontological questions, even while providing clarification of epistemological issues. Anthropologies and histories of landscapes, commodity chains, and the labor that creates them have been extensively researched over the last three decades, particularly in South America beginning in 1970s with Alfred Crosby’s groundbreaking work The Columbian Exchange (1973; Mintz 1986; Stewart and Strathern 2003; Tsing 2004; Feld and Basso 1997; Hirsch and O’Hanlon 1995; Topik, Frank, and Marichal 2006; Striffler, Moberg, and Joseph 2003). Nonetheless, the centrality of the “human” as an analytical category still persists, like a nagging hangover from Enlightenment categories. As a result, the human continues to be constituted through reason and its cultural expression as language, whereas embodiment is mapped through biological, neurological, and zoological understandings of psychology, physiology, and genetics.

Cary Wolfe (2009) in What Is Posthumanism? has carefully unpicked both affectual and ethical theoretical positions that have stemmed from the various attempts to bring animals and other non-humans into this theoretical landscape (e.g., Haraway 1990, 2007). However, the intent here seems to be to provide “humanism-humanities” with a more adequate theoretical foundation and the means for détente with science. Thus, for Wolfe the proper way to craft an ethical pluralism that gives place to the animal other is to arrive at this animal other by way of ethical theory and reason. As Wolfe (2009, xv) puts it, through an intensification of humanism, when theory is done “well enough,” we will eventually discover that other animals are not Other in the sense of belonging to some wholly foreign “outside” but rather constitute a radical difference and alterity that structures “the human” in its very core. But such a hope for the triumph of theory and reason not only excludes the animal as ontological Other but also reproduces the human as merely an ethical entity rather than as a fully spiritual being. To paraphrase Bruno Latour (1993), God is still crossed out, which is another way of saying that Cartesian models are highly reductive of both the human and the animal.

Although most theorists see the problem in terms of animalizing the human or humanizing the animal, the absence of other biotic taxa (insects, fish, microbes) in such a project is matched by an exclusion of all those people considered subhuman/unhuman—junkies, abusers, thugs and gangstas, insurgents, terrorists, the insane or disabled, and the damaged or deformed, as well as those considered non-human, such as avatars, networked identities, and the whole realm of digital actors described in this volume. For these reasons, Wolfe’s formulation fails to escape the logic of capitalism and colonialism since the universalization of “human” rights and the extension of those rights to “animals” beg too many questions about animality and humanity, as well as the emancipatory potential of the human rights discourse itself. The logic of domination is inherent in “human rights” discourse; thus, in our attempts to write animals in, just as with the category of “children,” the perceived lack of opportunity or ability to “speak for oneself” invites the rescuing discourse of inherent rights to supplant this silence. The “rescue missions” under way in Iraq and Afghanistan should, therefore, give us pause in uncritically accepting such a discourse at face value. Likewise, among the wild beasts, the “naturals,” the occurrence of thrill killing, rape, and mono-gendered and trans-species sexuality, as well as myriad other forms of “biological exuberance” (as Bagemil [1999] has called it), cannot fit into these reasonable theories that Wolfe aims to construct and that seem to result in another glorious triumph for reason and science. But in some arenas of anthropology, the human has already been surpassed in a more proactive attempt to replace the logos of anthropology with experience-based concepts rather than those of biologized identity. In just this way, the notion of trans-species formations is being used by anthropologists and historians of South America to track how, through the exercise of imperial biopower, the manipulation of all life continually creates and redefines the speciation and destiny of both naturals and humans (Few and Tortorici 2011). However, although we still preserve the notions of speciation, or its the exemplar the human, in ordering such narratives we have yet to escape from a discourse that also enables power and domination over a threatening and foreign “nature.” To that end we might direct our attention to non-Western thinking about nature and its “perspectival quality” (Århem 1996; Viveiros de Castro 2000).

This perspectival character to epistemological and cosmological systems results in viewing the world as inhabited by different sorts of subjects or persons. Such persons apprehend experience from distinct ontological positions, which we bifurcate into just two classes—human and non-human. As many anthropologists have already concluded, the classic distinction between nature and culture cannot be assumed to describe domains internal to non-Western cosmologies. This has led to the suggestion that “multi-naturalism,” as opposed to Western “multi-culturalism,” is a key and revealing difference here. To paraphrase Viveiros de Castro’s (2000) analysis, multi-culturalism, the plenitude of culture, is founded for Western thought on an assumption of the unity of nature but the plurality of cultures. The natural proceeds from a supposedly objective universality of body and substance; the cultural is generated by the subjective particularity of affect (spirituality) and meaning. To express this multi-naturalism through a Western lens, non-Western conceptions suppose a spiritual unity and a corporeal diversity in which culture or the subject is the form of the universal, whereas nature or the object is the form of the particular. So humans do see humans as humans, animals as animals, and spirits as spirits; however, animals and spirits may also see humans as animal-prey to the same extent that animals (as prey) see humans as spirits or as animal-predators. In this way, the houses or villages of parrots, piranhas, peccaries, or jaguars—their places—give rise to their own particular forms of culture. Fur, feathers, scales, fins, claws, teeth, and beaks are indeed seen and worn as body decorations and as cultural instruments for loving and killing by both animals and humans, as we term them. So, too, in a direct inversion of sociobiology, the naturals see their social systems as human institutions of chiefs, shamans, rituals, and marriages. Moreover, indigenous perspectivism is not just a latent ahistorical symbolic category but a living theory of cultural practice, most dramatically in hunting and war. And we encounter here perhaps the most fundamental way of loving, being, and killing animals as others and humans as ourselves.2

CONCLUSION

Sustained engagement with other ontologies and epistemologies through ethnographic participation in hunting (or fishing), as well as petkeeping and household husbandry, thus suggests new methodologies for centering the naturals in history and anthropology. This requires close attention to the meaning-laden contexts of action and behavior that provide an extended hermeneutic for the interpretation of ultimately ineffable others, whatever their forms of speciation (Grandin 2009). By the same token, the variously unhuman digital, marginal, criminal, and tribal persons that are the central subject of this volume achieve a more complete theoretical status through inclusion within such a hermeneutic.

Anthropology, in the field of the human, has long realized that totalizing “holistic” explanation is impossible. No one can say why another does as they do, because we cannot even do that for ourselves. Therefore, it is the purposes of knowledge rather than hope for its completeness that needs to drive our explanatory projects of humans, naturals, and the plenitude of trans-species, online/offline formations to which all of life gives rise.

We are not adapted; we are just here. But like the “well-bred” show dogs that cannot survive without veterinary intervention, the Enlightenment project of the “human” was not a process of discovery but one of exclusion of the savage, the animal, the inferior, and the superstitious from the fully human. In time, colonial civilization developed these subhumans into the fully rational self-maximizing entrepreneurs, and the early Christian Gnostic claim—that God had made an imperfect world and then abandoned it in disgust—was put aside. Only with the mass slaughter of the First and Second World Wars did the notion that we are all crippled, damaged, somehow “hollow men” again take hold. The carnage we inflict on ourselves and others reveals that “modern” life is unlivable. Our militarized subjectivities, the “war machines” that we have become (Deleuze and Guattari 1987), now give rise to subjectivities that are also profoundly enchained to prosthetic systems of communication supported by digital devices, without which we can no longer function as fully “modern humans.” But it is not the entanglement in prosthetics that is the problem so much as the inequalities of access to the relevant technologies. In the spirit world of amodern peoples the shaman exhibits control over the techniques of ecstasy, prophecy, and sacrifice, but in this case the technologies are intellectual and organic and thus accessible in social ways unlike an iPod or Reaper Drone.³ Indeed, by reason of their ontological congruence with people, even animals can be seen to use these shamanic technologies while obviously being no less excluded from high-end digital technology.⁴ Nonetheless, they are disciplined by human speciation and state-sponsored ecological management, and their wildness is “nomadic” (after Deleuze and Guattari 1987) and so inimical to the state no less than the savage cannibal on a desert isle or in a forest fastness. War, counterinsurgency, special policing, riot control, homeland security, and its economic profits through energy and resource extraction drive the perpetual colonialism of wild animals and wild people by erasing their codependent landscapes and their subjugation to those regimes of capitalist modernity delineated by Marx and Foucault. For these reasons, an understanding of magic and spirituality is necessarily part of the project of going beyond the rational Enlightenment human as well as its counterpart, the unthinking animal. Popular resistance to the strictures of modernity is then directly reflected in the global resurgence of sorcery—precisely, “the modernity of witchcraft,” to borrow Peter Geschiere’s (1997) phrase—no less than the animal-rights and human-disabilities movements in the “developed” West.

If we have never been and never will be modern, we never were traditional. Therefore, it is not what makes us different from or the same as other animals (unhumans) that is significant but rather what experiences we include or exclude as relevant to our attempts to live, that is, to achieve a satisfaction for the desires we experience—something that we envy in animals but have new possibilities through the digital experience. The neologism “zoosomnial blurring” (New York Times, op-ed, September 12, 2010), the notion that animals probably do not distinguish much between dreaming and being awake, nicely captures the envy of those trained to practice a Cartesian consciousness for those who have managed without such a bifurcation of mind and world. This envy, however, is always restrained by a fear of the consequences of unthinking belief or the “unexamined” life.⁵

Reflexively examined or not, the suffering of the battery chicken is no less theoretically relevant to the future anthropological project than the agonies of the military torture room, and in any case, no practical difference between these situations can ethically allow us to exclude either experience from an anthropology that goes beyond the human. Ethnography is also a relational practice that establishes the limits of human variety under the guise of the ethnic and linguistic. But this sorting of subjects, as Latour (1993) showed us, is apt to produce its own marginalizations precisely at the boundary of the human, thereby producing animals as unhumans, the disabled and virtual as para-humans, and the asocial as subhumans/savages. Thus, the issue becomes whether ethnographic methodology can perpetually recuperate the human among those marginalized and expanding groups of quasi-humans (the virtual, digital, criminal, insane, and insurgent), or should it relinquish its role in policing those borders to reconceptualize the existing results and future strategies of the discipline? The answers must be “yes,” and the essays in this volume show both why and how that can occur. But we are not there yet.

NOTES

1. As Pierre Charbonnier notes in his review (L’Anti-Narcisse de Viveiros de Castro, La Vie des idées, 4/15/2010), “Dans la mesure où toute entité, humaine ou non humaine, est réputée être dotée d’une intériorité analogue à celle de l’homme, elle est aussi dotée d’un point de vue sur ses partenaires écologiques et sociaux. Et la particularité de ce point de vue est donnée par le « vêtement » matériel qui envelope cette intériorité: un corps de jaguar, de singe, d’homme, etc.”

2. However, “multi-culturalism” has not meant that the idea of a genetic-biological core of the idea of the “human” has likewise been critiqued, as Maurice Bloch’s (2011) essay on the “phenomena of people” shows. He writes that we should see “people as natural organisms rather than as the abstractions of unclear ontological status,” but despite acknowledgment of the instability of human ontology, problems with the idea of “natural” are not considered.

3. Bruce Kapferer (1997), following the works of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), characterizes both “war machines” and state governance as practices of power. Kapferer also explicitly and productively references such practices as forms of sorcery, seen as quintessentially operating outside the normal relations of modern capitalism, disrupting established hierarchies of value, and perpetually transforming material realities (1997, 274–285).

4. Jaguars consume the hallucinogen yajé, as shamans do; see footage from a BBC documentary here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqGDv0KCJl8.

5. The Socratic warning is that “[t]he unexamined life is not worth living for a human being” (ho de anexetastos bios ou biôtos anthrôpôi). But Mark Twain riposted that “[t]he unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all.”