Metropolitan Ethnography: Rural Imaginaries in the Age of Urban Academies
David G. Anderson
Department of Anthropology
University of Aberdeen
The history of anthropology has often been that of the history of discovery: of reaching out
across frontiers to describe poorly known peripheries. In recent years, partly because of the postcolonial critique, the discipline has tried to reform itself into one which studies human and nonhuman predicaments anywhere and increasingly also within metropolitan spaces. Rather than
turning its back on its colonial past, this paper argues that the turn to urban anthropology in many
ways reinvents the stereotypes and assumptions of previous generations perhaps more through
silence than through categorisation.
A strong marker of Euroamerican (including Eurasian)
anthropology has always been its urban headquarters. Metropolitan laboratories have been the
places where the rules and frames of ethnography have been distilled. Although the overt subject of
anthropology might shift, the discipline continues to play an important role in how rural places are
imagined. In this paper I discuss the way that anthropological objects have been constructed
primarily across the global North. I argue that a significant challenge for the discipline today is not to
learn to imagine the urban experience but instead to unlearn it. The challenge is to imagine how
anthropological knowledge can be rooted in other than urban places.
Like many disciplines, anthropology defines itself by its methods. In most national traditions
it is a discipline that requires a strict personal commitment of the ethnographer to long-term
exposure to an alternate culture through travel or consulting texts. In most, anthropology further
defines itself by its relativism and its patience with alternate worldviews. Finally, an increasingly
important hallmark of the discipline is the procedure of ‘object-creation’: once the authoritative
construction of a particular society or nationality; now the reflection of a particular theme such as
‘gender’, ‘human-animal relations’, or ‘water’. Each of these activities is often packed into the
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notion of ‘fieldwork’, which suggests semantically that it is the opposite of the laboratory work. But
to what degree is laboratory experience – the experience of proximity, debate, and discipline – truly
absent in the creation of anthropological knowledge?
It is difficult to generalize about all anthropological traditions, but for most, ethnographic
facts are thought to exist and reproduce themselves ‘out there’ and can only be witnessed when the
ethnographer travels away to record them. Nevertheless, like the tree which falls in the forest,
anthropological knowledge only comes into being when these stories are ‘brought home’. The
formal concepts, whether it be a creed of cultural evolution or a theory of actants, is created in the
company of other anthropologists at conferences and seminars, during one-to-one meetings with
one’s supervisor, or in academic papers. For the most part, these meetings or readings are built
within the architecture of an urban academy – its seminar rooms, libraries, and servers. Co-presence
of our colleagues in a physical time and place serves as an important validation of our
generalizations, perhaps in a much stricter sense than in the replication of the results formed of
physical and chemical experiments. Despite the stereotype of ethnographic experience being a
lonely one, ethnographic knowledge is formed collectively. This collective knowledge is not of the
manipulative, positivistic kind that one would expect in a bio-chemical experiment. It represents
perhaps more of a consensus of what is mutually acceptable and understandable. Nevertheless, it
introduces a gap between what is directly experienced and that which can be ‘brought home’.
The American anthropologist Paul Nadasdy has directly addressed this disjuncture in his
meditation on the status of animal agency in Kluane lifewords of Yukon Territory in Northern Canada
(Nadasdy 2007). He documents how generations of ethnographers in Arctic Canada, as in other rural
settings, have documented that many human residents in the Arctic speak ‘as-if’ animals were
persons. The postulate of ‘animal personhood’ has become somewhat of a hallmark of Northern
anthropology (Hallowell 1960, Ingold 2000) and indeed has now grown almost into a discipline in its
own right with sociologists, archaeologists, and historians advocated a specialisation of ‘animal
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studies’ (Haraway 2008, Cassidy and Mullin 2007, Russell 2010). However, according to Nadasdy’s
critique, even the most sympathetic ethnographers stop short of accepting that animals are people.
Instead they bracket their thoughts by ‘citing’ their informants speaking metaphorically about
animal action. Instead, human society and intuition occupies the front stage in their accounts. In my
own ethnographic work, having experienced similar pressures, I also make Evenkis speak radical
postulates of landscape or animal agency that I judge may sound strange to urban audiences. For
example, I have written that ‘Evenkis say’ that the tundra uses moral laws to judge human action
(Anderson 2000) rather than just arguing, as one might do today, that human action is ‘entangled’
with certain landscape imperatives. In an older idiom, Sergei Shirokogoroff would class these
statements as ‘Tungus hypotheses’ and argue that they are equally valid as the hypotheses of ‘alien
complexes’(Shirokogoroff 1935). On the one hand, one can argue that this ethnographic
ventriloquism is a pragmatic solution to make an unexpected point of view more palatable. As any
skilled narrator knows, when one ‘brings stories home’ one adapts and changes them to appeal to
the audience and in so doing make them more evocative and influential. However, at the same
time, as Nadasdy argues, withdrawing the legitimacy of one’s own voice weakens turns these ideas
into peripheral oddities that require explanation rather than statements about the world. The
architecture of the laboratory-as-seminar-room allows rural-urban dichotomies to reproduce
themselves by making local ideas a minority postulate which needs to be contextualized rather than
unfolded.
Some ethnographic laboratories are more powerful than others. Together with my Russian
colleague Dmitryi Arziutov, and with funding from the Wenner Gren Foundation, we have been
interested in researching the history of the Siberian Department of the Museum of Anthropology
and Ethnography as a ‘laboratory’ which led to the ratification of Siberian identities through its
many-decades of participation in the editing of the book The Peoples of Siberia (Levin and Potapov
1964, Levin and Potapov 1954). The book, in turn, as is well known, took on a life of its own in
English translation through the advocacy of the American anthropologist Sol Tax and the work of the
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anthropological community gathered around the University of Chicago Press. The discussions
surrounding this book, the subject of rather detailed and long protokoly and stenographic reports,
created a model of ethnographic description of which one can still find the echoing in the modern
series Narody i Kul’tury. In the book, human identity is classified around the intersecting axes of
certain domains such as clothing, food, and genesis rather than, perhaps, what might recognize as
local idioms of hunting luck or reciprocity with the tundra or taiga. It is a worthwhile exercise to
examine the range of discussion in the stenographs, but the one quality that emerges from the text,
or at least between the lines, is that every experienced ethnographer engaged in this debate
understood that the Department had to produce a single collective representation that would stand
as a sort of encyclopaedic reference marker of its object of study.
To my mind what is striking about this ethnographic entrepreneurship is the power that it
holds to create a certain rural imaginary. In contemporary fieldwork in Siberia people often
volunteer examples of clothing, reindeer saddles, or children’s cribs - without being asked- as
markers of their culture or identity. This is perhaps more surprising to an ethnographer trained in
Western Europe than a Russian one. The material markers of identity have been raised so high as
markers as culture that they obscure other idioms of civil relationships such as kinship or reciprocity.
In the ethnographic rural imaginary, the periphery produces symbols that speak of culture. The
speeches are heard in the urban academy. However the social imaginary (l’imaginaire social),
according to Cornelius Castoriadis’ and Claude Lefort’s somewhat differing accounts, is a symbolic,
ideological force that both dominates human action as well as creates possibilities which ‘fold’ open
for new or different actions (Thompson 1982). Ethnographic imaginaries of compact cultures
reproducing themselves through material objects often set high standards of craftsmanship for
informants which can be a matter of pride and self-identity, and thereby affirm local identities as
much as represent them. However this materiality often creolises in interesting ways which point to
other intuitions. For example, across the North material objects often fold-open into specific
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historic or sacred sites on the landscape which hold powerful meanings (Hornborg 2008, Simonova
2012).
It is easy to establish a sense of disjuncture, as Nadasdy does, between what some might
identify as a rich sphere of local knowledge and what I am identifying as the somewhat strict and
distilled sphere of the urban academic laboratory where the representations are refined and
presented.
It is not so easy to imagine a more flexible knowledge-producing protocol. Dispersing
the urban academy across the rural periphery in a new Cultural Revolution is probably not the best
way forward.
One interesting experiment might be to alter the architecture of the laboratory itself.
Studies of enskillment and embodied forms of practice are now a widely publishable genre where
the frame of recognition lies not with urban audience but among enskilled practitioners themselves
(Palsson 1994, Ingold 2011). Skilled craftsmen can sit anywhere in both rural and urban settings.
Further, various sorts of problem-based applied anthropological projects allow local perspectives to
be embedded within institutional process whether they be negotiations over wildlife management
(Harkin and Lewis 2007), the establishment of protected areas (West, Igoe, and Brockington 2006),
or laws guaranteeing various forms of rights (Novikova and Tishkov 2002). In this case, the frame of
the problem provides the criteria by which the categories and theories work. For all of these
examples texts and ideas are still discussed in urban laboratories, but the laboratories function ‘as-if’
they were fieldsites. The skill of reading and listening to ethnography perhaps best sets in the
practice of stripping away the boundaries of the laboratory to make it dissolve into the field.
The ethnographic gaze can also be turned to document the construction of the rural
imaginary itself, much as it has been turned to describe ‘orientalist’ readings of culture (Said 1995).
In this frame, the intent is not so much to measure a loss of fidelity between academic accounts and
local worldviews but to explore how urban ethnographic imaginaries create new relationships. A
strong example I would offer is that of environmental management in Scottish Highlands (Smout
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2000). Scotland, an ancient nation with a particularly violent history both of being colonized and
serving as a colonizer, is coveted today for its prosaic landscapes which, as a rule, are rural
landscapes. The heather-covered glens serve today as the beats for sports hunters as much as areas
for hill-walkers to access ‘Nature’. It is a not-so-well-kept secret that these vast open landscapes
were created by a violent policy of dispossession wherein a dense network of hunters and
agriculturalists were pushed off their common land to create ‘enclosures’ for commercial sheep
management. In part, fuelling the industrial revolution and a related critical revolutionary literature
which was to shape much of the world, the landscape became an empty, sublime place coveted by
urban vacationers and tourists. Globalization has not been patient enough to allow ironies like this
to remain unchallenged. Shocks in the development and supply of fossil fuels have made it a strong
point of public policy to create networks of renewable energy installations – windmills – which can
only be situated in treeless open areas. The prosaic highlands, for ecological and economic reasons,
have become one of the prime sites for the development of renewable energy networks reliant on a
new type of infrastructure which disturbs the gaze of wealthy incomers. The appearance of these
energy monsters – like those that Don Quixote sparred with – have created a series of controversies
about the social ownership of open, windy, space. Incomers wish to preserve the open landscape
for its aesthetic value, while the descendants of the dispossessed wish to harness the space to
create a sustainable energy industry in unstable times (Small 2012, Bergmann, Colombo, and Hanley
2007).
A monster, as folklorists tell us, is any active agent which is ‘out of place’ by reason of its
appearance, size, weight and power.
According translation theorists, the monster is also an
ambiguous actor which combines natural and social realms defying the modern predilection to keep
nature pristine and urban areas cultivated (Law 1991). The windmill is a metallic, industrial, urban
product which yet relies on the strength of the winds to activate its mechanism. There is no
stronger illustration of a technoculture, in the words of Arturo Escobar, which so thoroughly mixes
nature and culture and the urban and the rural (Escobar 1999). The technocultural monster
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however creates a Lefordian ‘fold’ or ‘crease’ which opens up a space to challenge the legacy of land
dispossession through reassembling rural and urban interests in a chaotic and unpredictable way.
The ethnography of environmentalism in this case frames this issue in a way that is at the very least
a different rural imaginary.
One can find technocultural monsters of this type all across the circumpolar Arctic. They are
more traditionally experienced in the hydroelectric dam projects which have had such a terrible
transformational impact on all Arctic nations from Canada, through Scandinavia, through the Russian
Federation. In at least the first two examples, these creatures of concrete, height, and flowing water
have been at least as productive of aboriginal rights discourse as they have been productive of
electricity. In an evocative study by Harvey Feit, the James Bay Cree experience this infrastructure as
‘cannibal monsters’ which eat and swallow the land and society that give them sustenance(Feit
2004). Decentring the urban environmental critique (which if left to its own devices would prefer to
construct spaces as pristine, rural, and natural) Cree politicians argue that these powerful monsters
can be coaxed into a socially productive activities much like Atuush cannibal figure of their oral
tradition. In this example, folklore does not serve as a ‘marker’ to illustrate the compactness and
distinctiveness of a rural cultural group but produces evocative characters and moral lessons which
help to engage with industrial monsters born in a slightly different form, but still amenable to
negotiation.
In thinking about the question of the rural imaginary I have reflected a lot on the issue of
domestication – a theoretically-rich domain where one finds both postulates of what defines
humans separate from animals and a spatial metaphor of what defines rurality. Domestic animals
are of course not confined to rural spaces. Much of the inspiration behind ‘animal studies’ has been
the study of people’s attitudes to domestic pets – arguably constructed as the most human of the
non-human persons. However the hard work of creating a domestic animal is often thought to have
been an event which has taken place far away both in space but in time. Urban intuitions – in the
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here and now and close to the corridors of power – tend to limit themselves the management or
conservation of what has come down to them as a natural type.
I believe that ethnography can play an important role in breaking down these divisions.
From what we know from complex relations between hunters and animals in the circumpolar North,
it is rare that an animal is tracked down and subjugated as if it were fleeing (Knight 2012). Most
accounts document a mutual understanding described in terms of mutual perception (Ingold 2000),
mimesis (Willerslev 2007), or even seduction (Scott 1989) – although in some violence also plays a
role (Brightman 1993). These ethnographic accounts place their emphasis on emotions and skill
over canniness. There is room to discuss whether these interpersonal analogies are accurate or not,
but the ethnographic record suggests that animal that the behaviour of so-called ‘wild’ animals is
not pre-programmed as if were a fixed, natural type. Instead, these entities enter into relationships
and negotiations with their neighbours, human persons.
When one entertains the idea that human persons and animal persons inhabit a similar
realm of intuition and mutual-understandable action, the ethnographic task then becomes one of
categorising these ‘alien complexes’. It is very rare that animal realms are portrayed ‘as-if’ they
were exactly the same as human societies. They seem to experience the world and react to it in a
unique way, and in that is the ethnographic challenge. A useful illustration of this is perhaps an
overly formalized one. One of the classic experiments that forms the rural imaginary of humananimal relationships is the much-cited Novosibirsk farmed-fox experiment (Trut 1999). Here several
generations of scientists at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics through a rigid regime of natural
selection have created an Arctic fox that behaves with docility and warmth as if it were a cat. The
experiment is widely quoted in biology and archaeology for identifying physical markers of
domestication. However as a circumpolar ethnographer, what is striking if not shocking is the idiom
of helplessness and dependency that is used to define domestication.
This type of ‘cuddly’
domestication is a type of behaviour that it is safe to say is unknown in most settings of the
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circumpolar North – settings where domestic animals are expected to have autonomy and the
stamina to look after themselves. The radical sense of autonomy bred into dogs, reindeer, and
perhaps even domestic salmon, is one of the reasons cited by biologists for putting the Arctic as a
region where ‘full domestication has not occurred yet’ or is ‘incomplete’. Rather than condemn the
region as being an incomplete fulfilment of a rural imaginary, I would argue that ethnography can
play an important role in folding this imaginary into a more mature definition of interrelationship.
Aspects of this maturity would be treating animal worlds with a kind of ‘diplomacy’ or ‘politeness’
(Candea 2010) where they hold the right to both engagement and indifference, rather than slavish
attention to human needs.
Another extreme of the rural imaginary is the creation of ‘protected’ or ‘coveted’ species like
wolves or bears which are thought to embody a primal heart of nature and require often powerful
state action to defend the from urban encroachments. The creation of coveted species, often also
known as predators, is perhaps the single most dangerous threat to reindeer herding livelihoods at
the beginning of this century (Davydov 2013, Torp and Sikku 2004). Here the quality that creates the
danger is not the method by which predators are ‘controlled’ but the legal-technical mechanisms
which break down the relationships by which this predation was moderated by knowledgable
herders.
With the development of digital and satellite technology at the start of this century, and the
end of the last, one would hope that the powerful influence of urban academic architecture would
give way to a stronger platform for alternate non-urban voices. There are indeed many interesting
experiments in cultural heritage repatriation and the documentation of local knowledge which are
widen the scope of the imaginary. Anthropology’s strength has always been in the subtle way that
‘stories are brought home’, and if we add to that the challenge is set to create a broader home for
anthropological discourse, we can chart a course to unfolding the rural imaginary within our
discipline.
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Acknowledgements The research for this paper has been possible by a Wenner Gren International
Collaborative Research Grant held together with the Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and
Ethnography entitled "The Concept Of The 'Ethnos' In Post-Soviet Russia” as well as an Advanced
Grant from the European Research Council entitled “Arctic Domestication”.
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