Commentary on The Public Anthropology of Leo Chavez
(following his talk)
By Sandy Smith-Nonini
“Towards a Public Anthropology” Conference
Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill & the
Department of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University,
April 1997.
From the first -- Leo Chavez doesn't question whether scholars ought to be public
intellectuals, or whether its worth the effort to buck the tide of hegemonic forces, he gets
right to the point: It's an increasingly fast-paced, transnational world, the "other" is
among us, intertwined with us. How can it be that anthropologists, who are so well
positioned theoretically to interpret these developments, are at the same time so poorly
positioned as public spokespersons?
In his career as a scholar and educator about Latino immigrants to the United
States, Leo has consistently sought to communicate with a wider audience than his
academic peers. In his ethnography, Shadowed Lives, Leo is forthright about the
obligation he incurred in the process of fieldwork to be such a spokesperson, a natural
offshoot of building a network of contacts with organizations assisting immigrants. As he
notes, if the public is wrestling with issues that you are studying, then you have an
obligation to contribute to that debate, and if you don't, others will.
His collaboration producing television documentaries provides us with a model
venue for, as he put it, letting people "have a voice" and "allowing categories of people
to become humanized" -- a central goal of most of our research. And, importantly, in the
visually dominated 1990s, even on a bad night this medium reaches far more viewers
than print ever will. According to a 1990 RAI survey in Britain, more students become
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aware of anthropology through such TV programs than by any other medium.
In the edited volume Popularizing Anthropology, Alan Campbell notes that
within the academy popularizers are frequently dismissed as primarily interested in
publicizing themselves, rather than their ideas, and hence their ideas need not be taken
seriously. Such a seductive dismissal; but, and far too easy, given the self-publicity that
permeates the publish or perish world. Leo passes the buck back to the academy,
advising us to first do good anthropology, since authority derives from becoming
recognized as an expert in a given area. We can all name bad popularizers, but it is
their anthropology that is bad, and the answer is not to condemn popularization, but for
good anthropologists to do a better job of it than the charlatans.
The marginalization of scholarly work is, in part, a self-sought obscurity. as was
well demonstrated in the recent debacle over Alan Sokol's satirical article in Social
Text. Here I must differ with Andrew Ross's lament over a breach of trust. I'm much
more alarmed at the collapse of critical response. Po-mo style has finally achieved all
the patina of the emperor's new clothes, and no one dares to say "This doesn't make
sense to me." The academic equivalent of Hyacinth "Bucket" from Keeping up
Appearances.
And then there is the unintentionally obscure. Campbell cites Mary Louise Pratt's
complaints about boring ethnographies: "How, one asks constantly, could such
interesting people doing such interesting things produce such dull books? What did
they have to do to themselves?"
I'm sensitive to this -- I left my first stint in graduate school to become a journalist
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in 1980, and for years newspaper editors broke up my complex sentences, replaced my
erudite prose, with commonly understood words, always driving home the virtues of
both clarity and brevity. As a poet, I appreciate the power of sparse language and
carefully chosen words, as a scholar I realize how fine the line may be between a deft
turn of phrase and jingoistic sloganeering. When I entered graduate school at UNC in
anthropology I was told the discipline needed more scholars who could write for a
popular audience, but my first carefully crafted essay for an anthropology course came
back with a note asking not for clarified ideas, but for longer paragraphs. Five years of
longer paragraphs later, what a hybrid animal I've become.
But how much of this is elitist. An unwillingness to stoop to the less sophisticated
terminology thatless educated, or less specialized folks use to make sense of the world,
or to waste time in tasks that won't earn prestige from one's peers. And, there's the
danger Kurt Vonnegut warned about, (no doubt having read Bourdieu), that "We
become what we pretend to be." Thus, Campbell argues that academics' dismissal of
the popular is frequently no more "than a prim defense about etiquette. The main
reason many scholars don't write popular work is not that they have some conscientious
objection to it, It's that they can't do it. He goes on to venture that "if it were demanded
of academics that to be taken seriously, every one had to produce a piece of work for
the popular market or an introductory textbook, the exercise would be found to be
enormously challenging."
Which brings us to the question of how to write for the public. Leo Chavez is
again on the money with his insight that good writing develops a common frame of
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reference with the reader. Jeremy MacClancy, also writing in Popularizing
Anthropology, reminds us that, unlike scholars, "the public are not paid to read, but pay
to read, in their free time. This audience cannot be assumed. It has to be won. . . .
Obscure prose has no place, and simply signals scholars' inability to express
themselves clearly.
Mead's advice to those unskilled in the art: "Begin w/ something startling prove
that it was wrong, say something outlandish, and be alliterative." I don't know if I'd insist
on shock value (after all this is North Carolina), but presenting a new angle of some sort
certainly helps you pitch an article or idea to an editor and makes it interesting to a
reader. If you think academics are above pandering to novelty, count the allusions to the
erotic in your latest sales brochure from Routledge or Duke University Press.
Alliterative writing is writing that sounds good when read out loud. Try it. Next
time you write, read it to yourself out loud. It the words don't roll off the tongue easily,
they may not stick in the mind of the reader either.
What I know is writing for the print media, which I did fulltime for 10 years. I was
very proud of my work, and my profession, until I re-entered academia and learned that
my former colleagues and I were reputed to be a scurrilous pack of ne'r-do-wells, who
get their ya-ya’s butchering the prose of hard-working scholars. I want to share a few
tidbits I learned about getting articles into newspapers. And since these horror stories
you have heard are partly true, I must temper my advice with qualifiers. First, unless
you are a VIA -- Very Important Anthropologist -- (someone like Jim Peacock . . .
Micaela??) don't spin your wheels too long shooting for the New York Times or
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Washington Post. They're hard nuts to crack. I twice was given free lance assignments
by the Post, and twice they abused me. I worked part time as a researcher for the
Times in El Salvador and North Carolina from 1989-91. I valued the relationship, but I
will never forget being told I would need twice as many sources to verify a human rights
violation by the US-allied Salvadoran military, as I would need to write up an abuse
attributed to the opposition. And their rising threshold for news was disconcerting, on
the third day of the 1989 gueriilla offensive on the capital, when the foreign desk called
to say, "Yes, they knew about the ongoing government air attacks on civilian
neighborhoods, but that was yesterday's story, what's the news today?"
I'll also warn you off of Time and Newsweek, which are editor-written magazines
where reporters files are dumped into a blender with pop slogans and sterotypic
generalizations. Not a good place to risk your research.
But here's the secret, I had a dozen other newspapers and a couple of
magazines where I had permission to call collect and talk intelligently with an editor who
knew my name about story ideas. Editors and reporters have a culture. It's peculiar.
You have to make contacts and ask them what they need. Anthropologists who want to
should be good at this. It's supposed to be what we do best.
Editors do need good stories (but when they say this they put the emphasis on
"good." And reporters need sources and story ideas. I worked at a weekly paper in Oak
Park, just outside Chicago, for a year, and I had to come up with 4-5 stories every week.
I would have jumped at the chance to interview an Oak Park anthropologist fresh from
the field. Why don't academic departments do more PR to alert local newspaper
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reporters to such story possibilities? The key with any community paper, is finding a
local angle, but every researcher is local somewhere.
Before you pitch your story idea, make sure you figure out what the "angle" is -whether it's a local connection, or an issue that's in the news, or simply an interesting
feature story about your subjects, or your research findings. Practice pitching to a nonanthropologist, preferably your Mom, or someone who isn't sure what you do for a living.
Make it short, and pithy.
Leo also talked about another form of public advocacy -- his experience
functioning as an expert witness in immigration cases. I suspect many academics have
these opportunities, although many may not value the experience as highly as they
should. How do you get called to such service? By being seen by your subjects and by
advocacy organizations working on their behalf as a responsible and fair scholar and
spokesperson. What many may not realize is that this can provide you material to write
about for the public. In 1990 I was invited to testify as an expert witness in a Dallas trial
of anti-war activists who had held an illegal sit-in in a senator's office. I used the
occasion to propose a 1st-person account on the op-ed page of the Dallas Morning
News. The editor readily agreed, and so I spent part of the trip preparing a story on one
of the defendents, a very sweet, middle-aged nurse who had given up her career to run
a half-way house for Central American refugees. In the op-ed piece, I segued from my
own experience as a reporter in El Salvador to the story of this amazing lady and the
Salvadorans to whom she gave sanctuary. They assigned an artist to illustrate it and
ran it on the front page of the Sunday Viewpoint Section.
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It's true we could do a better job of promoting ourselves. But we must not forget
there are also political reasons why intellectuals have relatively little impact on
public policy:
In reflecting on George Orwell's novel 1984, Raymond Williams, noted that in the
novel Big Brother is most concerned with controlling the intellectual minority, neglecting
the ignorant 85% of the population. But in reality, the opposite has happened, says
Williams, "in capitalist democracies there is intense and continuous attention to the state
of mind of the 85%, and a relative indifference to what intellectuals -- already marked off
as peculiar-- believe or do."
Williams' comments are in line w/ Foucault's analysis in "discipline and
punishment" linking the rise of intellectuals to their collaboratory role within the
European state as they replaced the jailers and torturers as the agents of social
regulation, marking a shift from "seizing upong the body" to the "soul."
But neither Williams' dismissal of dissident intellectuals as irrelevant to the
powers-that-be, nor Foucault's analysis of intellectuals' compromise with the state hold
much relevance outside of the First World.
In Latin America many post-colonial states, heavily reliant on US-sanctioned
military rule during the Cold War, have not until recently sought non-coercive
relationships with civil society. The small professional class in these settings, unable to
look to the state for patronage, sought constituencies in the working classes. In such
coercive states, where hegemony, in the Gramscian sense, is thin, intellectual
subversion does indeed pose a threat to the dominant social order. In Central America,
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the death squads targetted not only the labor leaders and the politicians, but the
psychologists, the sociologists, the doctors, the priests and the journalists.
The
closest I ever felt to despair in El Salvador was November 16, 1989, when I learned of
the assassination of the six Jesuit professors at the University of Central America. It
was during the guerrilla offensive in the capital. I was edgy anyway, because two nights
before an unidentified man had phoned to tell me to leave the country "or kiss my family
goodby." It was a Wednesday about 7 am. I'd just come into the Camino Real to go to
work when word of the murders came in. I had known two of them personally. We
were all in shock. No one wanted to speak. I sat down hard on the edge of a planter in a
sick stupor, terrified both at the immense loss to El Salvador of these internationallyrenowned humanitarian thinkers, and at the realization that if they could be killed, no
one was safe. Later we learned they were referred to by the army officer who ordered
their deaths as "intellectual leaders" of the revolution. The soldiers aimed their machine
guns at the priests' heads literally spilled their brains out on the grass in a grotesque
symbolism. The crimes that earned them this fate were subversive things like the
practice of critical sociology, social psychology and theology.
The price of intellectual courage is so much lower for us than in an El Salvador or
Indonesia. Scholars in the First World, still enjoy considerable privilege, and safety.
Why are we silent in the face of gross inequities.
As anthropologists we know that in small scale societies where social sanctions still
applied, such privilege always came with responsibilities. Privilege and social
responsibility have become unhinged, and social and economic change in our world, is
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ever more rapid, and socially blind. If not anthropologists, then who . . .
To cite just one example, how will our children's world be when, if John Bodley is
correct, fossil fuels are almost depleted 60 years from now?
Shortly before her death Ruth Benedict wrote: "We hope a little, that whereas
change has hitherto been blind . . . it will be possible gradually, insofar as we have
become genuinely culture-conscious, that it should be guided by intelligence." (In the
nineties, we must qualify her use of intelligence with a concern for the power-relations in
which decisions are made).
As a society we will never be able to achieve the kind of reflexivity we write
about, if our intellectuals shirk public responsibility. The possibility of making a
difference in small, but significant ways, is very real. We have to try.
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