1
From World Anthropology to World Anthropologies:
Continuities in the Project of Decolonizing and Internationalizing Anthropology
Greg Acciaioli
Anthropology and Sociology
The University of Western Australia
<Gregory.acciaioli@uwa.edu.au>
Preliminary draft for oral presentation
Not for quotation without permission from the author
Abstract
In evaluating the claims of the World Anthropologies movement as a moment in
the “reinvention of anthropology”, this paper seeks to emphasize not the novelty
of this movement’s efforts to decolonize anthropology, but instead the
continuities with an earlier project formulated as a critique of dominant
anthropology. Specifically, it argues that the both the enunciations and practices
of the anthropologist Sol Tax prefigured many of the World Anthropologies
critiques. In order to recover these continuities, the paper investigates the roots of
the World Anthropology publication series that he edited in the rationale and
organizational apparatus of the 9th International Congress of Anthropological and
Ethnological Sciences, as enacted by Tax in Chicago in 1973. The role of the
‘action anthropology’ paradigm formulated and put into practice by Tax in
catalyzing this event and in serving as the basis of the publishing practices of the
journal Current Anthropology, also founded by Tax, is evaluated as an attempt to
decenter the production of anthropological discourses from Western centers of
knowledge production. The paper proceeds to investigate the accomplishments
and failures of action anthropology as a paradigm for conducting ethnographic
field work and then traces the influence of this paradigm upon various
formulations of current anthropology – public, militant, advocacy, etc. – that
emphasize engagement, a key ideal of World Anthropologies as well, as a central
aspect of methodology and accountability. The paper ends by comparing and
contrasting Tax’s vision of World Anthropology with the goals of the project of
World Anthropologies, as enunciated by Ribeiro, Escobar and others.
Since its enunciation in the first years of the new millennium, the World Anthropologies
project has sought to shift attention away from an exclusive focus on the production of
anthropological knowledge in metropolitan centres of the West to numerous peripheral sites
throughout the world. Billing itself a self-organising collective, the World Anthropologies
Network (WAN) has attempted to instill a new pluralism that promotes dialogue among
numerous anthropological traditions without privileging the epistemic parameters of any one.
After initial programmatic statements of intent and scope in the journals Social Anthropology
(WAN 2003) and Critique of Anthropology (Restrepo and Escobar 2005), its first book
publication (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006b), a collection of essays issuing from a Wenner-Gren
Foundation conference in 2003, proclaimed a new moment in the “reinvention of
anthropology”, this time mostly linked to changes in “the relationships among
anthropologists located in different parts of the world system” (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006a, p.
1). With a strong emphasis upon the plural form Anthropologies in the book’s and the
collective’s title, the editors foreshadowed a “post-anthropological era”, following the calls of
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such Southern anthropologists as Archie Majefe (2001), that transcended previous efforts to
construct (and impose) a single or universal anthropology as a hegemonic disciplining
apparatus. While the very notion of “reinvention” harked back to previous moments in
reflections upon the discipline, most notably the call in the late 60s and early 70s to reflect
upon the discipline’s ties to colonial and imperialist policies epitomized in the volume
Reinventing Anthropology edited by Dell Hymes (1974), the editors emphasized that the
current endeavor was nevertheless different due to a convergence of such circumstances as:
the heterodox opportunities now opened to anthropology by globalization; the possibility of
creating through concerted action a more heteroglossic, democratic and transitional
community of anthropologist; the examination of writing from no particular national
viewpoint; and the relating of the dominance of certain styles of anthropology to unequal
power relations (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006a, p. 2). Anthropological production had to be
conceptualized as constrained by coloniality, “the subalternization of knowledge and culture
of oppressed and excluded groups that necessarily accompanied colonialism, and which
continues today with globalization” (Restrepo and Escobar 2005, p. 104). The World
Anthropologies project offered a platform to transcend this condition of modernity by
revealing the operation of Eurocentrism and valorizing ‘Other Anthropologies and
Anthropologies Otherwise’ as a mode of interculturality that would bring other
nonmetropolitan anthropologies, particularly anthropologies of the Global South, into a
relation of ‘diversality’, a constructive tension between anthropology as a universality and a
multiplicity (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006a, p. 3).1
Certainly, in many respects (not just the rhetorical) this movement does constitute a novel,
more radical, and incipiently more successful endeavor to pluralize anthropology. It has
managed to institutionalize its vision through establishing its own e-journal
(<http://www.rem-wan.org/e-journal>) and fostering an organization, the World Council of
Anthropological Associations (WCAA), to further the project of ‘linking anthropologies and
beyond’ (Koizumi n.d.). However, it has not arisen ab nihilo, and an examination of its
antecedents may help understand how it constitutes a moment of reflexive self-evaluation of
the discipline that builds upon earlier efforts to critique dominant (and sometimes hegemonic)
lines of thought in anthropology. This paper cannot claim to constitute a complete genealogy
of the World Anthropologies project as a disciplinary moment of self-critique. What it does
attempt to do is to trace one line of influence that has received little positive attention in
relation to World Anthropologies. While explicitly acknowledging such ancestral moments as
the critique of anthropology of the late 1960s and 1970s, as well as various versions of
Indigenous Anthropology, anthropological praxis sensitive to Third-World struggles, and the
postmodern critique of anthropological representation, World Anthropologies has explicitly
positioned itself in opposition to the ideals and institutions of an international anthropology
(Nash 2003), which are seen as continuing to impose a universalist (as opposed to diversalist)
framework that reproduces the privileging of metropoles of anthropological knowledge
production. However, often what is set forth as the alter in opposition to which a movement
develops is also a predecessor to which it is beholden.2 In that spirit I wish to emphasize here
The term ‘diversality’ in this publication elaborates the earlier terms ‘pluritopic’ and ‘pluriversity’ introduced
earlier by Restrepo and Escobar (2003, p. 114) to characterize the epistemic, institutional, social and political
transformation at which the World Anthropologies project aimed. In contrast to these earlier terms, diversality
connotes the tension of pluralist efforts with the possibility of synthesizing some of the universalist aspects of
earlier versions of international anthropology (Nash 2003).
2
The vitriol heaped upon the interpretative anthropology of Clifford Geertz by some of the proponents of the
postmodern turn in anthropology betrayed their debt to Geertz’s rendering possible many of their own
innovations in writing Anthropology.
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the continuities that link rather than the discontinuities that disrupt the relationship to one
particular style of international anthropology, the project of World Anthropology that was
spearheaded by the University of Chicago anthropologist Sol Tax (1907-1995). In many ways
Tax’s own attempts to expand the horizons of anthropology beyond the Eurocentric were less
than wholly successful, as well as being blinkered by his own commitment to certain
(universalizing) epistemological and political tenets of the Western tradition in which he was
educated. While labeling Tax’s basic approach “a mix of liberal democratic enthusiasm,
relativist humility, and universalist hubris”, Stocking (2000, p. 172) also notes that “his
evolving vision of liberal democratic anthropology was directed to the creation of a
multivocal world community for which anthropology would provide both model and
dynamic, and within which traditionally disempowered peoples might effectively sustain
their cultural independence in a rapidly changing world.” While this vision may fall short of
the more radical pluralism of World Anthropologies, many of Tax’s innovations in the
conceptualization and practice of anthropology certainly foreshadow the transformations
called for as part of the World Anthropologies platform and deserve re-evaluation in that
context. While the heritage of Tax’s work, especially his championing of the practice of
action anthropology, has certainly already received critical attention (e.g. Daubenmier 2008;
Stanley 1996; Stocking 2000; Weaver 2002), my more modest aim here is to evaluate to what
extent his work may be seen as a precursor to a contemporary movement whose aims I think
he would have appreciated, however much he might have found problematic its more radical
epistemological formulations, though not I think its political claims.
I have labeled Tax’s vision as the project of World Anthropology in reference to the
volumes3 using that series title he edited issuing from the ninth International Congress of
Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (ICAES), which he organized and over which he
presided in Chicago in the summer of 1973.4 Tax’s intent for the congress and the series of
publications issuing from it was to provide not only a global overview of the state of the art in
anthropology at the time, but also to provide a signpost to the future of anthropology in which
scholars from outside the Western metropolitan centers would play an ever larger role.
Following a format he had first applied in the organization of a seminar on Middle American
ethnology preceding the 1959 International Congress of Americanists in New York (Stocking
2000, p. 181)5, Tax arranged for papers to be sent in before the Congress and pre-circulated
so that actual panel times could be devoted to discussion. These discussions were
simultaneously translated into English, French, German, Russian, and Spanish, with
3
Tax (1988, p. 8) himself put the number of volumes in the World Anthropology series as 91, while Stocking
(2000, p. 211) gives 92 as the number, but the most comprehensive listing I have found, on the NACSIS Webcat
website, actually lists 94 volumes in this series (<http://webcat.nii.ac.jp/cgi-bin/shsproc?id=BA00321518>).
$200,000USD of the expected royalties from sales of this series were obtained as an advance from the Dutch
publisher Mouton in order to fund aspects of the congress. However, even fifteen years later the volumes had
not sold sufficiently to compensate the advance on royalties that the publisher had provided (Stocking 2000, p.
211). Indeed, this doubtless contributed to the bankrupting of Mouton and its absorption by the German
publisher Walter de Gruyter & Co in 1977 (< http://www.degruyter.de/cont/serv/presse/
geschichteEn.cfm>).
4
Having just completed my first year as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I worked as a volunteer
in the Congress Service Corps during that congress. That was my first encounter with a truly international
assembly of anthropologists, and perhaps the lingering charm of the occasion is what partially motivates me to
link the heritage of Tax’s work with the World Anthropologies project that I am encountering now.
5
Ten of the thirty-two participants in this Congress were drawn from Latin America, a proportion that was quite
high for its time, signaling Tax’s commitment to building an international anthropology that would include
those outside the Western metropoles (Stocking 2000, p. 181). The volume that resulted, Heritage of Conquest
(Tax 1952), largely concentrated on issues of acculturation, a concept that Tax would later interrogate and
largely reject.
4
translators for other language “entering the system through intermediary translation”
(Stocking 2000, p. 210, quoting Tax). While the European bias of this choice of languages is
evident, it still constituted a partial attempt to decenter English as a hegemonic language of
transmission, and some of these languages of simultaneous translation did render the
conference more accessible to delegates from former colonies in the Global South. Although
82 percent of the papers delivered still were by authors from the “industrialized world” (47%
from North America, 16% from Western Europe, 15% from Eastern Europe and 4% from
Japan, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand), the participation from other parts of the
globe far exceed that of any previous ICAES, with 9% of papers from Asia-Oceania (not
including Japan, Australia and New Zealand), 5% from Latin America, and 4% from Africa
(not including South Africa) (Tax 1976a, p. vi; cf. Stocking 2000, pp. 211-213), amounting to
ten times the number of papers in any previous ICAES from the “Third World” (Tax’s term).
Tax announced at the Chicago ICAES that the next congress would be held in New Delhi,
and indeed it was not until twenty years after that congress that an ICAES was held again in a
city in Europe or the USA.6 Tax’s influence in globalizing anthropology through the
organisation of this conference is undeniable; in many ways the Chicago ICAES was a
realisation of his vision of a global community of scholars that would increasingly become
oriented to anthropological knowledge production beyond the West. As he wrote in his
General Editor’s Preface7 to the volume Changing Identities in Modern Southeast Asia from
the World Anthropology series, “In contrast, this volume presents a ‘people’s perspective’
from within and was not surprisingly inspired by a Congress of scholars from the whole
variety of the world’s cultures” (Tax 1976b, p. v). His identification of these scholars in terms
of their cultures rather than their nation-states evoked a vision of greater diversity than was
the norm at that time, though it also indicated as well his failure to problematize the signature
concept of culture upon which that period of American Anthropology focused.8 However, it
could still be argued that even this achievement could be seen as an encompassment of nonWestern scholars within a distinctively Western project, given the Western European origins
of the ICAES and its (later) sponsoring organisation, the International Union of
Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES). After all, this ICAES was still held in
Chicago! Yet, an examination of how Tax attempted to constitute this community through
another channel – one whose purpose he himself labeled as identical to that of the ICAES
(Tax 1973, p. 175) – reveals the more radical conceptualisation of a multivocal international
anthropological community.
Perhaps Tax’s most lasting legacy was his founding of the journal Current Anthropology and
his serving as its initial editor for fifteen years. In fact, the New York Times obituary
(Kennedy 1995) for him was entitled “Sol Tax, 87, Anthropologist Who Founded Journal,
Dies”, while the entry on Tax published on the Minnesota State University, Mankato,
6
The International Congresses of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (ICAES) actually predates the
International |Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES), which was only founded in 1948
under UNESCO guidance. The inclusion of venues away from Western European and North American centers
that began after Tax convened the Chicago ICAES, a movement in part due to his influence, is evident in the
complete list of dates and places for congresses to date: 1934 - London, 1938 - Copenhagen, 1948 - Brussels,
1952 - Vienna, 1956 - Philadelphia, 1960 - Paris, 1964 - Moscow, 1968 - Tokyo & Kyoto, 1973 – Chicago,
1978 - New Delhi, 1983 - Québec City, 1988 – Zagreb, 1993 - Mexico City, 1998 – Williamsburg, 2003 –
Florence, 2009 – Kunming, 2013 – Manchester (IUAES).
7
Tax provided a General Editor’s Preface to all of the 94 volumes of the World Anthropology series. Although
the vast majority of the text was the same in each preface, the last paragraph or two always made a few points
specifically about the contents of the particular volume, as in the case of this quotation.
8
As Tax (1975, p. 514) stated in his clearest exposition of action anthropology, “Culture is our central concept,
and everything else depends upon it.”
5
eMuseum website labeled him as “best known for founding the journal Current
Anthropology” in its opening sentence (Nusser 1995). Current Anthropology was founded
not simply as a new journal dedicated to the publication of high-quality articles across the
four fields of Anthropology; what distinguished it from the beginning was its distinctive CA*
format, featuring articles published alongside a set of comments sent in by international
scholars who were associates of the journal, followed by a rejoinder by the author. In fact, in
its original incarnation, comments were sent to the author before publication based on
circulation of a “provisionally accepted” version and then some of these comments were then
incorporated into the article, though others could be included separately with a rejoinder. This
experimental mode of publication had to be modified due to the time and expenses involved,
as well as the resulting complexities of attributing authorship (Stocking 2000, p. 206), but the
format embodied Tax’s faith in the notion of the journal as a community of anthropological
voices. In fact, he had earlier declared that the very notion of the “integration” of
anthropology was to be seen primarily in terms of “a group of intercommunicating scholars”
and only secondarily as “more than and less than a rationally organized system of thought
and operations” (Tax 1956, p. 315). This orientation was furthered by the mutual reflexivity
of the editorial process. Beginning with its preview issue, Current Anthropology contained
Reply Letters for its Associates to send suggestions, reactions, and replies to the editor’s
requests (Stocking 2000, p. 206); the contents of these were dutifully incorporated in the
Editor’s Reports of subsequent issues. This interchange constituted a more participatory
editorial policy, one based on mutual feedback – today in the wake of Bhaktin we might label
it more dialogical. In fact, although ultimately it was up to the editor’s discretion to decide
which replies should be discussed, subsequent sections included in the journal, such as that
on Urgent Anthropology, were indeed results of this dialogue.
Current Anthropology as a forum of scholarly interchange has certainly not fully attained the
ideal of diversality later foregrounded by the World Anthropologies project. After all, it was
and continues to be published in the Western metropole Chicago using English as its
medium, its basic principles were established at a conference of exclusively Western
European scholars at Burg Wartenstein castle in 1958 (though after a punishing series of
visits throughout the world by Tax to consult with local scholars), and it has been edited by a
string of academics working at North American and European universities. Yet, the CA*
format certainly registered as an attempt “enabling more horizontal communication among
anthropologists” (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006, p. 5). Tax himself saw Current Anthropology
not so much as a printed journal, but as “a co-operating group of scholars who interchange
knowledge and ideas by means of this journal” (Tax 1960, inside front cover). The journal
was only a means; the actual object was the global community of scholar sustaining
communication by these means. In Tax’s view, Current Anthropology was only an
instantiation of this dialogue, what the World Anthropologies movement might now label a
harbinger of the “common spaces in which anthropologies have met and can meet in the
future in order to foster the pluralization of the discipline” (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006, p. 11).
Yet, Tax’s very commitment to this forum for the “all the sciences of man” – “physical
anthropology, prehistory, archaeology, linguistics, folklore, ethnology, and social
anthropology” – betrayed a sustained commitment to the Western version of anthropology as
an integrated vision of a scientifically accessible humanity that had been the basis of the
compendium Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory (Kroeber et al. 1953), one of
the grand “normalized and normalizing” (Restrepo and Escobar 2005, p. 101) documents of
post-war Western metropole anthropology that established the “order of the anthropologically
thinkable, sayable and doable, configuring thus not only their horizon of intelligibility, but
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also their possible transformations” (Restrepo and Escobar 2005, p. 103).9 Indeed, Tax’s own
contribution to the inaugural Yearbook of Anthropology, intended as an annual update of that
compendium in which Tax had been involved, had been entitled ‘The integration of
anthropology’ (Tax 1955). Tax’s own statement of the basic principles of Current
Anthropology underlined his notion of anthropology with this journal as its vehicle as
“unitary, a single set of cross-cutting materials available to all” (Tax 1960, inside front
cover). His conception of Anthropology was thus one that was indeed multivocal, but linked
to a singular discursive universe of conception rather than a terrein of intellectual tension
composed of communicating, competing and contesting discourses and practices from a
variety of nonhierarchically organised locales, as a concept of ‘diversality’ would posit.
However, in attempting to assess the basic ethical and epistemological stances underlying the
participatory, dialogical mode of organisation that Tax sought to foster, admittedly not
always successfully and perhaps with more limitations than he himself acknowledged, it is
important to treat a more basic conceptual and methodological innovation of Tax: action
anthropology. Tax had always been leery of the practice of applied anthropology, staying
conspicuously clear of the endeavours of other anthropologists, including Margaret Mead,
Gregory Bateson, Ruth Benedict, and Geoffrey Gorer, to assist the United States war efforts
against Germany and Japan. In the ensuing Cold War period he remained aloof from research
projects that fostered the global spread of US military, economic and political power, unlike
such colleagues as Clyde Kluckhohn (Stocking 2000, p. 172, 250-253; cf. Wax 2008).
Throughout his life he battled for the autonomy of anthropologists to conduct their research
without being subjected to the agenda of any agency, corporation or other management body.
Likewise, throughout his life he refused to accept a “field” of applied anthropology as
coordinate with the four fields that had defined the American approach to Anthropology since
Boas (Stocking 2000, p. 190). However, when the first cohort of graduate students he sent to
the new field school he established at the Meskwaki10 settlement near Tama, Iowa, returned
to the University of Chicago after their first summer there, they insisted upon the need to help
the community rather than maintaining a “pure science orientation” (Stocking 2000, p. 191).
After some hesitation, Tax agreed with them, granting them permission to do “action
research” (Stocking 2000, p. 191). Acknowledging in accord with the Observer Effect in
particle physics that any observation was also a form of interference, he reasoned not only
that this circumstance cast doubts upon the very possibility of “pure research”, but that this
insight might very well be harnessed to institute what he called a new “interferer-observer
method” in Anthropology:
Let us simply recognize that we want to do something about our society and get
ourselves into positions of relative power.. and start doing it, observing what
happens as we do it, and thus learning about the society in a way that is
9
Although the conference resulting in that volume did include participants from outside American and Western
European locations – including from Latin America, Japan, India, Thailand and Indonesia – the vast majority of
published contributions were from the North American and European participants, and even in the cases of
pieces by Latin American and other authors from “peripheral” locales, the theoretical consensus on which they
had based their contributions had been developed in Western metropoles. Nevertheless, Tax attributed his
involvement in “world anthropology” to his participation in this 1952 Wenner-Gren symposium (Stocking 2000,
p. 203).
10
The endonym for this group has been variously spelled in publications. I choose the spelling Meskwaki, rather
than Mesquakis or others, because it is the spelling adopted by Daubenmier (2008) in her recent re-examination
of the action anthropology experiment among them. The exonym Fox has often been used as well to label them,
even as late as Gearing’s (1970) monograph, The Face of the Fox, which reflected upon his experiences working
with this group as one of the more than thirty graduate students who participated in the field school.
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comparable to a controlled experiment. (in Gearing et al. 1960, pp. 32-33, as
quoted in Stocking 2000, p. 192).
Two aspects of this assertion deserve noting. Firstly, it conceptualizes action anthropology as
an experimental method, thus allying it even closer to the methods of natural science than the
more normative participant observation method. Ultimately, action anthropology was
expected to contribute even more incisively to the construction of anthropological theory than
so-called “pure research” precisely because of its experimental methodology . In many ways
Tax continued to espouse a scientific anthropology – including within it action anthropology
– as an ideal, in keeping with the orientation to anthropology as a generalizing science in
classic works of the period, such as the compendium Anthropology Today (Kroeber 1953)
which he so admired and whose appraisal he edited (Tax et al. 1953). Secondly, he had by
this time come to reject the notion of anthropology as a value-free social science in contrast
with his earlier espousals of the transcendent value of a “pure science anthropology” in his
undergraduate thesis and in the early publications of his anthropological career (Stocking
2000, p. 174). Although adopting a somewhat different solution than Weber’s in addressing
the value issue in his theorising of action anthropology as an interventionist social science,
Tax’s mature position in enunciating action anthropology did admit as well that all social
research proceeds from a value stance, and that this needed to be recognized and explicitly
articulated. However, Tax was also leery concerning using that stance in order to guide
efforts at assisting others. In his pronouncements he accorded the agency to initiate projects
to the peoples with whom anthropologists worked, not to the anthropologists themselves. The
members of the community with which the anthropologists were working should assert what
they wanted, leaving the anthropologists to act as facilitators and catalysts in the carrying out
of these projects. This role was rooted in the ultimate goal of improving community welfare,
as the members of the community themselves defined (and desired) it. The people themselves
needed to articulate (or at least adumbrate) what they wanted, and goals of research needed to
be subordinated and guided by that desire:
...the action anthropologist[‘s]...work requires that he not use people for an end
not related to their own welfare: people are not rats and ought not to be treated
like them. Not only should we not hurt people; we should not use them for our
own ends...Community research is thus justifiable only to the degree that the
results are imminently useful to the community and easily outweigh the
disturbance to it...One may characterize action anthropology by saying that the
community in which it works is not only its subject of study but also its object
(Tax 1975, p. 515).11
In Tax’s view action anthropology proceeded first of all from the recognition of “cultural
difference” (Tax 1975, p. 514). He asserted its cornerstone to be the assumption of cultural
relativism: “We take for granted that wherever in the world we are likely to work we shall be
faced with the probability that the value systems of two peoples in contact are very different.
We use this theory and our object to help develop it.” However, this was a descriptive and
only to some extent a normative relativism, but certainly not at all epistemological relativism
(Spiro 1986). Action anthropology recognized as a descriptive fact that cultures were
differently structured, particularly as value systems, but that did not mean that they were
incommensurable. While action anthropologists had to guide their own actions in terms of the
Tax’s concept of “object” in this phrasing refers not to the community as the target or focus of study, but to
the goal of recognizing the community as the recipient (and agent) of improved welfare.
11
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value systems of the people they were assisting, in its very value assumptions Action
anthropology built upon not only the possibility of cross-cultural understanding (as in any
project of generalizing anthropology), but also the practical necessity of recognizing and
acting upon cross-culturally shared notions of undesirable and desirable social states, as in
any activist form of anthropology. As an approach it thus implicitly rejected both the
solipsism of strong epistemological relativism – we can never really know other cultures12 –
and the ethical incommensurability of strong normative relativism – we can never evaluate
what is good for other peoples as well as ourselves. As numerous evaluations of the approach
have noted (e.g. Foley 1999, p. 172), although Tax himself was less inclined to elaborate
upon the philosophical origins for his program than some of his students (e.g. Peattie 1968;
Polgar 1979),13 action anthropology had its philosophical roots in American pragmatism, and
as in many formulations (e.g. Dewey 1971[1919]) of that perspective the notion of
“usefulness” was not subjected to an epistemological interrogation that might question the
universality of its application as a criterion of truth. But it was the use of a pragmatic stance
that allowed Tax to offer action anthropology as a type of “clinical science”, one that
proceeded by “diagnoses” of particular problems in specific communities rather than by
deducing how these communities operated on the basis of predictive theoretical principles.
Action anthropology did not seek to resolve questions of value conflict in general; rather, it
addressed specific problems and answered particular questions in the context of addressing
concrete issues – what Tax (1975, p. 517) labeled a principle of “parsimony”.
The situation in which action anthropologists worked was one of the encounter of two
cultures, what other anthropologists had labeled “acculturation”, a concept normalised in
American cultural anthropology by the famous memorandum authored by Robert Redfield,
Ralph Linton and Melville Herkovits (1936). Tax labeled this situation as “the
syndrome...where peoples of radically different cultures are in contact, with a relatively small
community under pressure of a power-laden larger society which has technical and political
advantages” (Tax 1975, p. 514). However, Tax denied that the direction of change was
necessarily the linear one of the smaller community altering in the direction of the technically
more sophisticated and politically more powerful society. At times Tax rejected the term
acculturation entirely, but at others he was willing to use it as long as it was understood that
cultural change in this context could proceed in any number of directions. In fact, his
rejection of the unilineal directionality of acculturation was a major rethinking of that
situation, one that not only challenged the assumptions of his former graduate supervisor
Linton and his University of Chicago mentor Redfield, but also accorded much more agency
to such groups as Native Americans, who he regarded as quite resolutely making their own
decisions about the directions and rate of their own cultural change. Tax’s reorientation of
this concept thus could be seen as prefiguring later notions of interculturality in its
identification of this “syndrome” as a space in which various parties negotiated
multidirectional change based upon both converging and clashing conceptions and
orientations. In prescribing action anthropology as a method, Tax also foreshadowed the
contemporary concern with multi-sited field work, as he noted the need for field research not
only in such contexts as Native American reservations, but also with bureaucrats at county
and state levels, as well as with the policy makers in the national capital in order to address
the social problems on which action anthropology focused. Policy-relevant work demanded
research in all the sites in which policy was formulated and implemented, as well as directly
12
However, some of the more sombre musings of Gearing (1970) concerning the inability to understand the
Meskwaki in The Face of the Fox border on epistemological relativism.
13
Tax (1975, p. 515) did cite John Dewey in his exposition of action anthropology when justifying why he
rejected the stance that the (scientific) end justifies the (methodological) means.
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among those experiencing its impact. However, Tax differentiated action anthropology
sharply from applied anthropology, which he largely identified with contract anthropology or
similar jobs in which the parameters of what was to be accomplished were dictated by an
employing or funding body. He saw action anthropologists as researchers from the academic
community who were not answerable to any corporation, government agency or other similar
organization. They were accountable to the desires of the community with which they worked
and to the academic goal of formulating theoretical propositions based on the outcomes of
their experimental interventions, but not to any management mandate.
However, the accomplishments of action anthropology did not always match the ideals Tax
and his students formulated in their programmatic statements. Although most evaluations of
action anthropology by anthropologists have been sympathetic,14 particularly regarding how
it was used to guide Anthropology students’ activities at the field station on the Meskwaki
reservation in what came to be known as the Fox project (e.g. Gearing 1970),15 they also
point to numerous shortcomings in the actual achievements of the project. Foley (1999)
presents one of the most comprehensive enumerations16 of the project’s failures to fulfill the
enunciated ethical and methodological guidelines of action anthropology, though in most all
cases accompanying these with hedges that reduce the force of his criticisms. For all his
rhetoric concerning being guided by the desires of the community being studied, in the case
of the Fox Project Tax never sought permission from the elected tribal council (Washburn
1985), although he did discuss beforehand locating a field school with several old friends and
informants, including contemporary tribal leaders, from his earlier doctoral field work period
(Foley 1999, p. 173). In fact, the students who went into the field under Tax’s auspices
continued to concentrate their consultations upon traditionalist spokespersons rather than the
more assimilationist-minded members of the elected council. Thus, despite Action
anthropology’s programmatic concern with what Tax labeled the value of freedom –
“freedom for individuals to choose the groups with which to identify, and freedom for a
community to choose its way of life” (Tax 1975, p. 517) – in undertaking projects the
students engaged in a certain calculated naivete regarding the actual complexity of
community among the Meskwaki (cf. Agrawal and Gibson 1999). Although the papers
resulting from the project, some of which were included as part of the historical
documentation of the project (e.g. Gearing et al. 1960), include treatments of factions and
gangs by some participating students (Lloyd Fallers and Stephen Polgar respectively), when
it came to general characterizations of the projects undertaken for the welfare of the
Meskwaki, these tended to be phrased in terms of a general community will rather than as the
wishes of particular individuals or factions. Foley (1999, pp. 174 ff.) also claims that rather
than acting merely as catalysts and facilitators, the action anthropology researchers actually
initiated most all the projects – organisation of cooperatives for farming and vegetable
gardening, production of pamphlets and other media materials for the surrounding non-Indian
Washburn’s (1985) account, much of which concentrates upon Tax’s role in organizing the 1961 American
Indian Chicago Conference, is the exception here. Straus et al. (1986) present a counterview that defends Tax’s
involvement in that event and in the process defends an action anthropology perspective.
15
One circumstance that has facilitated evaluations of the Fox project is the documentary history of the project
that was published (Gearing et al. 1960), as well as the availability of the Fox Project field notes in the National
Anthropological Archives at the Smithsonian Institution and of Tax’s personal papers in the University of
Chicago’s Regenstein Library (Foley 1999, p. 171). These resources validate Tax’s imperative for the project to
be transparent and accountable not only to the community under study, but also to the general anthropological
community. As noted later, Tax’s insistence on transparency and accountability prefigure the importance of
these criteria for public anthropology (Borofsky 2001).
16
Given space limitations, I can only treat some of those criticisms, i.e. those that are particularly pertinent to
my focus upon anticipations of concerns of the World Anthropologies project.
14
10
Tama community, a scholarship program, production of handicrafts under the Tama Craft
brand, and others – though Meskwaki often enthusiastically participated when the projects
were launched. In so doing, the students acted according to their own views as to what
activities could most assist the Meskwaki out of a situation of “structural paralysis” (Tax
1988, p. 11; cf. Gearing 1970). This structural assessment was one with which many
Meskwaki would have disagreed; indeed, it was somewhat belied by the Meskwaki people
later successsfully transforming their economic situation once enabling legislation allowed
them (i.e. the legal possibility of establishing a casino on their land). Yet, during the years of
the Fox Project the students acted to usurp much of the agency of the Meskwaki:
Once programs were initiated, they [the action anthropologists] seem to have
done all the conceptualization and project development. They raised all of the
scholarship money and set up local committees to help select the recipients. They
planned, wrote, and revised all the mass media materials to represent Mesquaki
culture to whites. They were the chief fund raisers and business agents for the coop farm and the handicrafts projects. In short, they were consistently the tribe’s
cultural/power brokers with prominent local, state, and national whites (Foley
1999, p. 176).
Indeed, by attempting to act as cultural and political brokers with the surrounding
community, the action anthropologists may have re-enforced the very dependency that they
were attempting to reverse through their efforts (Daubenmier 2008, p. xii). As a final
assessment, Foley notes that most all the projects, with the possible exception of the
scholarship fund, were in the long run successful and had little long-term impact on the
Meskwaki settlement:
Listening to the reflections of tribal elders, the project is obviously a tiny blip in
the long flow of Mesquaki history...Consequently, there is little to say about the
impact of action anthropology. Even though some of its efforts in education
appear to have been quite successful, the project barely makes it into Mesquaki
oral history. A|s one old-timer asked wryly, “Look around, do you see any signs
that they were here (Foley 1999, p. 180).
However, in some contexts the Meskwaki did manage to assert their agency in a fashion more
in accord with the programmatic pronouncements of action anthropology and the conference
presentations trumpeting the action anthropologists’ achievements. When the Bureau of
Indian Affairs attempted to hand over the Meskwaki school to the Iowa state school system
as part of its policy of termination of special services for Native Americans in order to force
assimilation, Meskwaki took the initiative to oppose this move. In that effort they were
assisted by the action anthropologists; eventually the Meskwaki were able to take control of
their own school. In her reconsideration of action anthropology, Daubenmier (2008) has
recast some of Foley’s evaluations, arguing that a re-examination of the documentary record
and interviews with former participants reveal how many of the projects that were successful
(at least in the short run) actually were initiated due to the suggestions of individual
Meskwaki inhabitants. To give but two examples, the Meskwaki Fred Arrow suggested the
University of Chicago students give a party for the Meskwaki community, thus indirectly
informing them of the importance of giving in exchange in Meskwaki culture (Daubenmier
2008, p. 127), while the idea for the Fox Professional Education Scholarship program was a
response to the inquiry of the council leader Ed Davenport concerning the opportunities
available for a scholarship for one of his daughters (Daubenmier 2008, p. 219). In fact,
11
Daubenmier (2008, pp. 1-2) traces the germ of action anthropology itself to a comment of Ed
Davenport to Sol Tax when the latter made an visit to the settlement to assess the viability of
an anthropological field school there: “Then why don’t you work out some sort of a plan to
fix things up, instead of just studying people.” Thus, in her account it was the agency of
Indigenous Meskwaki rather than the wishes of the first cohort of Western students that
“nudged” Tax into formulating the aims and methodology of Action anthropology – a genesis
that exemplified the very aims of the approach it fostered (Daubenmier 2008, pp. 115 ff.).
Indeed, Daubenmier (2008, p. 6) views the methodology of action anthropology as
anticipating contemporary calls to decolonize how research is conducted among Indigenous
peoples (e.g. Smith 1999).
However, Daubenmier’s re-evaluation proceeds much further: “The inclusive intention of
Tax’s action anthropology provided a baseline for much of the applied anthropology that
became more visible in the 1960s and 1970s, leading in turn to the more reflexive public
anthropology of today” (Daubenmier 2008, p. xiii). Tax’s attempt to address this concern of
inclusiveness by formulating action anthropology could then be seen as a precursor to a range
of allied contemporary approaches – some of them spawned by Tax’s own students – that
have sought to overturn the privileged position of a purely academic Western version of
Anthropology: engaged anthropology, anthropology of engagement, committed
anthropology, emancipatory anthropology, public interest anthropology, and public
anthropology itself. While the World Anthropologies project has often appeared to emphasize
more the epistemic transformation required for Anthropology to accomplish diversality, it has
also not neglected the political dimension, calling for a radical anthropological praxis as a
necessary complement in the decolonization of the discipline (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006, p.
16). Such proponents of the World Anthropologies project as Setha Low have invoked a
paradigm of engaged anthropology, for example, to interrogate the Minerva project and the
“human terrein system” initiative of the US military to incorporate anthropologists into
military operations in such war zones as Afghanistan
(<http://culturematters.wordpress.com/2008/08/05/engaged-skepticism-about-minerva/>). It
is perhaps not insignificant that the publication of the most incisive collection of articles to
date treating the range of issues encompassed by the paradigm of engaged anthropology has
appeared as a supplement to Current Anthropology, the journal Tax founded (Low and Merry
2010b). Remarkably, Tax merits only a minor mention in the issue’s introduction in relation
to the uses of anthropology by the US military (Low and Merry 2010a, p. S205), although the
introduction as a whole is presented with comments in the very CA* format Tax pioneered.17
Yet, the very foci structuring the argument of the article, including such topics as
collaboration, advocacy, and activism, were part of the nexus that Tax sought to promote in
his conceptualization and realization of action anthropology. Tax’s spectral presence does
manage to permeate the article indirectly through the discussions of the perspectives of his
students such as June Nash (Low and Merry 2010a, p. S205), who has elsewhere (Nash 2003)
noted the impact of Tax upon her practice of anthropology. Other treatments of engaged
anthropology illustrate a more direct connection to action anthropology and its pragmatic
grounding, as in Curtis’s admonition that “getting it right” descriptively is not a sufficient
justification for anthropological research; rather, actually exerting an impact on public policy,
Only one other article in the collection mentions Tax, noting his “call for a socially relevant action
anthropology” (Johnston 2010, p. S245). However, tellingly this article also expands the signature term of the
collection into the form “engaged action-oriented anthropology” (Johnston 2010, p. S245) , which may be read
as an indirect incorporation of Action anthropology into the genealogy of Engaged anthropology. Interestingly,
in neither Johnston’s nor Low’s and Merry’s mention of Tax is a work by him directly cited, only other works
that treat Action anthropology.
17
12
such as successfully instituting a syringe exchange program for addicts, can be the only
justification for an engaged anthropology
(<http://www.sfaa.net/committees/policy/curtispolicy.pdf>). Borofsky’s exposition of the
allied public anthropology perspective (Borofsky 2001; cf. Low and Merry, p. S207)
rehearses the shortcomings of action anthropology in the Fox Project enumerated by Foley
(1999). However, Borofsky notes as well that the “publicly open, publicly accountable”18
discussion of action anthropology’s failures in Foley’s critique was made possible by the
CA* format that Tax pioneered, an innovation that he saw as realizing the practice of action
anthropology in the discursive domain. In fact, Borofsky’s (2001) entire discussion of the
differentiation between public anthropology and applied anthropology echoes eerily the very
differences that Tax (1975) introduced to distinguish action anthropology from Applied
anthropology. Tax himself might not have used such phrasing as “understanding the
hegemonic structures that frame and restrict solutions to problems as a way of more
effectively addressing these problems” (Borofsky 2001), but his very interrogation of the
notion of acculturation – certainly an hegemonic anthropological conceptualisation of the
Anthropology of the immediate pre- and post-World War II period – realized that focal
criterion of public anthropology.
Yet, it is perhaps in Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s version of an engaged and public anthropology
that she assertively labels a “militant anthropology” (Low and Merry 2010a, p. S207) that the
link to Tax’s Action anthropology ironically emerges most clearly. In treating other aspects
of action anthropology, I have already emphasized two of the three principal values that Tax
felt guided action anthropology ethically, methodologically, and theoretically: the espousal of
the value of freedom and the principle of parsimony. The former constituted a pioneering
declaration of the “right to self-determination” among Native Americans and other
Indigenous peoples in acculturative situations (Tax 1975, p. 516). The second was an
assertion of the focus of pragmatism upon resolving concrete issues without seeking to derive
these solutions from comprehensive abstract theorisation beforehand. However, the first
guiding value that Tax posited was simply Truth. In part, this was a lingering positivist
allegiance to “verifiable fact” on Tax’s part, as well as a directive to bracket off one’s values
or emotions in conducting action anthropology research – a directive that in fact was
constantly unheeded by students following their own beliefs and feelings as a matter of
principle in reacting to what they perceived as the anomie of the Meskwaki community and
the need for particular social welfare projects. Yet, perhaps such actions were more precisely
aligned with Tax’s further explication of this value of Truth: “...we also feel impelled to
trumpet our truth against whatever falsehoods we find, whether they are deliberate or
psychological or mythological” (Tax 1975, p. 516). Such an assertion could have been
penned by Nancy Scheper-Hughes herself in her conceptualization of a “[p]olitically engaged
anthropology – what I have called a ‘militant anthropology’” (Scheper-Hughes 2009, p. 2):
the moral imperative to “speak truth to power” (Scheper-Hughes 1994, 2009). Indeed,
Scheper-Hughes’s notion of an engaged and militant anthropology converges with Tax’s
action anthropology not only in their shared concern with the proclamation of ethnographic
truth, but also in her espousal of “good enough ethnography”, which restates the need for a
pragmatically based practice of anthropological field work conducted in reciprocity with our
informants and oriented to improving their welfare. As Tax (1975, p. 515) stated in his major
exposition of action anthropology:
18
Public accountability is the first of the criteria that Borofsky (2001) introduces to distinguish Public
Anthropology from Applied Anthropology.
13
The philosophy of action anthropology is on the less scientistic side. We try to
learn, and we try to be as exact as possible, and to know why we think we know
something. But we could not do what we call action anthropology if we did not
have a great tolerance for ambiguity. One simply cannot wait to act until he
knows enough to calculate the statistical probabilities that he knows what he is
doing.
Stocking (2000, pp. 254-256) concludes his assessment of Sol Tax’s position in the history of
anthropology – an essay pointedly included in a volume on figures marginalized in
normalized histories of Anthropology entitled Excluded Ancestors, Inventible Traditions:
Essays Toward a More Inclusive History of Anthropology (Handler 2000) by invoking the
notion of “resonance” rather than “impact” or “influence”. He does recognize Tax’s
contribution to the emergence of the Native American movement and his role as a propagator
of “world anthropology”, earlier labeling him, perhaps somewhat condescendingly, in the
context of his tireless international consultations before the launch of Current Anthropology
“the Johnny Appleseed of World Anthropology” (Stocking 2000, p. 205). However, Stocking
is dubious about any general disciplinary recognition of any substantive contribution on
Tax’s part to anthropological theory or method, given his marginalization during the major
period of his writing due to the resurgence of (pure) scientific (what Tax himself labeled
“scientistic”) theory-construction (think neo-evolutionism, structural anthropology, etc.).
Even for contemporary activist anthropologists, Tax is asserted by Stocking to be only a
“kindred spirit”, not an acknowledged ancestor (Stocking 2000, p. 217).19 In her
reconsideration of action anthropology, Daubenmier (2008, p. 283) contests this
characterisation, arguing for a substantial “impact” of Tax’s Fox Project upon the
anthropological critique of the 1960s and 1970s and beyond:
At the time the project seemed to have little transformative effect on the
discipline of anthropology. The effects were more impressive in the emergence of
native American radical politics in the 1960s, again with the aiding and abetting
by Sol Tax. Over the course of more recent decades, anthropology has moved
much closer to Tax’s vision than to that of most of his contemporaries...The
Meskwaki project also showed Tax’s determination to internationalize the
anthropological voice to include those who had formerly been the studied
populations (Daubenmier 2008, pp. xi, xiii).
Not only were many of the essays that set forth the program of a new forms of engaged
anthropology published in Current Anthropology, promulgated dialogically by the very CA*
format Tax institutionalized in this journal he founded, but many of the anthropologists
espousing these radical forms of anthropology had been participants in the Fox Project
mentored by Tax: Stephen Polgar with his “committed anthropology”, Lisa Redfield Peattie
with her “advocacy” anthropology in urban planning, and others. In his (1969) article
“Colonialism: Classic and Internal”, Tax’s PhD student Robert K. Thomas, a veteran of the
Fox project, was among the first to apply the model of (internal) colonialism to the
experience of Native Americans, and in so doing sparked a newly militant Native American
movement to demand decolonization – insisting on enforcement of their treaty rights and
recognition of their peoples as sovereign nations rather than merely seeking equal civil rights
Stocking (2000, p. 255) did note that Tax’s (1956 [orig. 1955]) article “The Integration of Anthropology” was
repeatedly cited in the introduction to Reinventing Anthropology (Hymes 1972), but emphasized that only one of
the essays in the volume mentioned him further (i.e. in regard to the notion of “relevance”), though not even the
article on Native American cultural change and resistance cited Tax.
19
14
within a unitary political system (Daubenmier 2008, pp. 16, 298-299). The term Action
anthropology has remained in currency in much anthropological writing, including as a basis
for PhD theses at such universities as Southern Florida, and in anthropological practice, as in
Leonard Borman’s work on the role of self-determination in forming patient councils in
mental health hospitals and in the Self-Help movement more generally (Daubenmier 2008,
pp. 287-296). I would add that the term remains very much alive among activist
anthropologists working with NGOs in Europe, as evidenced by the book series “Action
anthropology/Aktionsethnologie” published in Vienna (e.g. Haller et al. 2007).
What I have attempted to do here is to extend that position, arguing that Tax’s influence
continues today in the theoretical and practical formulation of the World Anthropologies
project. Despite his sidelining of Tax’s formulation as having only a “resonance” with more
contemporary formulations, Stocking (2000, p. 213) does accord Tax a prominent role in
orchestrating an internationalization of the field: “Insofar as world anthropology exists today
as an organized entity, it can safely be said that Sol Tax did more than any other individual to
bring it into being.” However, such a characterization in effect relegates Tax to a position as
an impresario of a universalist anthropology, one that could be seen – to invoke the phrasings
of the World Anthropologies project – as hegemonically seeking the adherence of peripheral
theorists and practitioners, disciplining and normalising them to produce only variations that
ultimately replicate the universalist vision of the center. Certainly, Sol Tax never fully
relinquished his faith in the Western scientific project of Anthropology, though he himself
perhaps never fully realized how destabilizing an influence action anthropology was upon it.
Tax’s practical organisational endeavours in fostering international dialogue, as
acknowledged by Stocking, certainly established a space for the exchange of perspectives, as
in his convening of the ninth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological
Sciences (ICAES) and editing of the World Anthropology series that issued from it.
However, what I have argued here is that his ethically guided theoretical practice also
prefigured and established the enabling parameters for a World Anthropologies project,
beginning a more thoroughgoing epistemic – not simply organizational – transformation that
located and decentered the dominant knowledge paradigm, thus enabling other epistemic
paradigms to become apparent (Restrepo and Escobar 2005, p. 113).20 Tax’s insistence on a
dialogical structuring of Current Anthropology, both with regard to the CA* format and his
editorial interchanges with international Associates, opened up an interdiscursive space that
Tax never limited due to his own reticence to intervene as editor to limit speakable
perspectives. His conception of anthropology as primarily “a group of intercommunicating
scholars” (Tax 1956, p. 315) rather than as an integrated knowledge system not only provided
the foundation for his editorial practice in Current Anthropology, as well as his Herculean
efforts in conference and symposium organization, but operated even more extensively and
subversively in his own and others’ efforts to establish precisely those “new conditions and
terms of conversability among anthropologies on a global level” that Ribeiro and Escobar
(2006, p. 1) have asserted as a major aim of the World Anthropologies project. Tax’s
formulation of action anthropology not only sought (though admittedly not wholly
successfully) to decolonize the methodological practice of anthropological field work, calling
into question the privileged position of classic participant observers, but its basic pragmatism
also established a creative tension with the theoretical formulations of the scientific
Anthropology of his day. In many ways it constituted a decentering of the then hegemonic
paradigm of metropolitan Anthropology, as evident in his interrogation and partial rejection
Rubenstein (1986) has also argued that Tax’s pragmatic perspective anticipated many of the postpositive ,
postmodern critiques of anthropological theory and practice (cf. Foley 1999, p. 172).
20
15
of the key normative concept of acculturation. In so doing, action anthropology and the
perspectives it spawned (e.g. Thomas’s “internal colonialism”) not only facilitated the
emergence of a militant Native American movement in political action,21 but also the
discursive possibility of writing alternative histories of colonial dispossession. In that regard
action anthropology catalyzed the very decolonization of anthropological knowledge that
Restrepo and Escobar (2005, p. 107) emphasize as one of the enabling moves for “Other
Anthropologies and Anthropologies Otherwise”.
The World Anthropologies project has recognized the debates concerning Anthropology’s
role in colonialism and imperialism in the late 1960s and early 1970s as one of the
predecessors of its own moment of re-evaluation. Concentrating on one of the focal texts of
that period, Restrepo and Escobar (2005, p. 106) applaud the reflexivity of that self-critique:
In short, Reinventing Anthropology did include a call to turn the ethnographical
gaze toward the cultural grounds on which this gaze itself had been rooted; it
engaged in a critical “anthropology of anthropology”, and to this extent we may
find in it the idea of “world anthropologies”, albeit in statu nascendi.
Perhaps it is time now to acknowledge as well the formulation and realization of action
anthropology by Sol Tax and the students he influenced for its contestation of dominant
anthropological theory and practice as an ancestral moment of theoretical, practical and
political de-colonization that has enabled the space of interculturality (Ribeiro and Escobar
2006, p. 5) in which the World Anthropologies Project can operate.
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