Contrarian Anthropology: The Unwritten Rules of Academia

PREFACE

Anthropologists study anything that relates to humans, yet they often make willful use of blinders to narrow the scope of their scholarship. Contrarian, as used here, refers to abrogating unwritten rules of academia and the ensuing consequences. Critique of entrenched mindsets are embedded in many of the essays. My examination of mindsets as impediments to good science began with the challenge of Reinventing Anthropology (1969), a collaborative volume that reverberated strongly in anthropology and allied social science disciplines. I continued writing and speaking about mindsets (dogmas) in other disciplines in invited talks and in conferences following the publication of Reinventing Anthropology.

Shortly after my tenure began at the University of California at Berkeley in 1960, I received an invitation to address the College of Engineering. Their invitation was partly spurred by their desire to reinvigorate their curriculum. My talk was a critical analysis of what was missing in the education of engineers. There were already multiple critiques on engineering education, some written by engineers themselves, a self-awareness not often characteristic of professionals. For this reason, the reception at the college was positive—an outsider was saying some of the things that insiders had been saying and wanted to hear said. This early experience with engineers foreshadowed later interactions with engineers in the course of my work on energy. For me, the interaction reinforced the importance of questioning disciplinary assumptions.

The talks I gave outside my discipline over fifty years had some interesting results. The majority of these were to members of the legal profession—lawyers and judges, circuit court judges, state Supreme Court judges, lawyers focused on comparison, intellectual property, and more. At a judges’ conference in Reno, Nevada, the participants carried out an experiment that could not happen today for ethical reasons. A group of judges were arrested by police in a bar and taken to jail. One judge yelled from the cell, Where’s a chair, where’s a goddamn chair? Clearly a judge could sentence a defendant not knowing anything concrete about the jail cell he is sending him or her to. When asked after the ordeal what they learned, they quoted the inmates, What are you guys doing here? You’ve got money. The other judges, who were not part of the experiment, were outraged. But the participants acknowledged the change that had occurred in their mindset as a result.

My talks to physicists were in national laboratories—Los Alamos, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore Lab—and at the Mitre Corporation. Much of the interaction was gratifying, although sometimes startling. The occasion of speaking at a Gordon Research Conference on nuclear war and nuclear power illustrated how unselfconscious scientists can be. Not shy about expressing their values since they tended to believe that science is objective and detached from personal viewpoints, they often made unpredictable comments. In speaking about nuclear war, one physicist commented, The trouble with you, Dr. Nader, is that you don’t see the beauty in destruction. The American Association of Physics Teachers, for their part, asked me to focus on attracting the young to science. At a major conference in Hawaii, again on nuclear power, one scientist casually noted that the trouble with nuclear power is that we haven’t had enough accidents so we can learn more. Another said he was the father of the breeder reactor. I asked him who the mother was. Casting discovery in a patriarchal frame took me back to my early training in graduate school, though few anthropologists at that time were looking at scientists the way we looked at cultures traditionally. At the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, a note passed under my nose as I spoke about academic freedom for lab scientists, Can’t you shut this lady up? I was arguing that scientists at the national labs should have tenure so they could speak their minds without losing their jobs. There is certainly nothing boring about studying mindsets.

Other groups of professionals, including medical doctors and psychiatrists, mental health associations, physical therapists, and others, wanted new ideas. The American Medical Association even sought critiques. What happens when you have an unhealthy culture? Other audiences were also not only interested in what anthropologists had to say, but also invited a more cultural, comparative approach. All of these engagements were a great way to learn about professions beyond my own discipline, a different kind of fieldwork from that traditionally associated with anthropology both from within and outside the discipline.

This collection makes available essays less known to the discipline at large. Controversy is embedded in most of them. The essays are diverse and scattered in various publications. About a third of the materials are published in anthropology journals, another third in law journals, and a final third in energy science publications. What made the publications of these essays possible was the diversity in cultural values and the variety of editors and reviewers who were receptive to contrarian perspectives, whether in the United States, Belgium, England, Canada, Brazil, or Italy.

INTRODUCTION

This book of selected essays is about the study of mindsets, rooted in wider cultural practices that intertwine with what I call a Contrarian Anthropology. In particular, the selection of essays for this volume focuses on professional mindsets—in anthropology, in energy science, in law, and in gender studies. Although the first essay starts out with academic mindsets in anthropology, chiefly a preference for studying down, rather than up, down, and sideways, the essays that follow cover mindsets well beyond anthropology while employing an anthropological lens that continues to be an inherent comment on anthropology itself. Though anthropology as a discipline is comparatively open to crossing boundaries in ways contrary to expectations, it is critical to consider the historical context in which these essays emerged.

Anthropology has been called the uncomfortable discipline and an institutionalized train wreck caught between science and humanities, thus inherently contrarian, I argue. It is the anthropological perspective that sees what other disciplines often do not see, that makes connections that are not made elsewhere, that questions assumptions and behavior that is contrary to cultural expectations. In the nineteenth century, archaeologists replaced short chronologies of biblical origin with ones of longer time depth, while cultural and physical anthropologists questioned the idea of physical inequalities as innate (as the continuous study of contemporary racist attitudes informs us). Fieldwork dislodged anthropologists from their armchairs. We came to recognize the ideological nature of beliefs that science and technology provide us with the only source of truth, the ethnocentricity of Western science—even some anthropology—as it pertains to the future of life on this planet. The selected essays on nuclear and alternative energy science examined the idea that the mindset of experts might be part of the problem, something novel and contrary to expectations. As did many others before me, I asked, when is science scientific? The human dimensions of the energy problem, other than simple consumption, have been slow to sink in to this day, so deep is the ideology that technology will eventually solve all our world’s problems.

Although earlier anthropology adhered to the notion of progress, bent on documenting a move from savagery to barbarism to civilization, today such notions are considered pseudoscience—at best—though they may still be believed by development experts. In 1948, Kroeber noted that the concept of progress has a powerful hold that is more religious than not and should not be taken for granted (pp. 297), that it is an assumption adhered to with considerable fervor of emotion … something to be analyzed (pp. 296–97). Progress as a concept driving planning is scrutinized by the public in areas as disparate as climate change activism, the nuclear arms race, or the happiness index. Other civilizations, from Tokyo west to Gibraltar, do not equate technological development as the measure of civilization or progress. Indeed most of the world’s civilizations see Euro-American societies as superior in technology but inferior in spirituality—a quality essential to non-Western ideas of what it means to be civilized. After all, the major monotheistic religions were borrowed by the West and originated in the Middle East.

Among economists, a hidden ideological premise necessary for the spread of the free market is the concept of nature as a bottomless resource or raw material, an example of materialism eventually causing shrinking biological diversity. Conceptual categories are at the core of political struggles over biological diversity. It is obvious that the loss of native languages means loss of knowledge. The fact that we are losing knowledge needed for survival, even as we are gaining knowledge, is contrary to the prevailing belief that knowledge is always incremental. With such observations, anthropologists make new discoveries often contradicting expectations. We cross boundaries of acceptable truths—an anthropological habit—even if it means criticizing the anthropological discipline itself, as some of the essays illustrate.

Anthropology, we say, is the study of humankind, past and present, here and there, us and them. Mirror for Man (1950), by Harvard anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, was a prize-winning book written for the general public that makes such an argument, which was not necessarily accepted by many anthropologists who confined the discipline to the study of others. This tension made graduate work at Harvard in the fifties particularly exciting. Also, with the return of many veterans to graduate school, there were among us even richer perspectives formed abroad. At Harvard, we were taught rules were made to be broken. But, in keeping with traditions, graduate students were encouraged to do their first fieldwork in places different from our own. I went to the Rincon Zapotec of the Sierra Madre in Oaxaca, Mexico, and I wrote my dissertation comparing law in two contiguous villages. I became a comparatist. It would take about a decade for me to turn my anthropological eye to here and us.

In the 1960s Berkeley was full of ferment, much different from the McCarthyism that was much felt while I was at Harvard. The Free Speech Movement came together with other movements that had been building—the civil rights movement, the Native American movement, the feminist and consumer movements, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and more. Looking back now on this ferment, it is not surprising that Dell Hymes brought together a group of anthropologists to rethink their field in Reinventing Anthropology (1972). Thomas Kuhn was at Berkeley and had written his book on paradigm shifts, The Structures of Scientific Revolutions (1962), in which he distinguished normal science from nonhegemonic or a paradigmatic open-ended science. In Reinventing Anthropology, the usual rules were indeed made to be broken. My contribution was Up the Anthropologist: Perspectives Gained from Studying Up, the first essay in the volume. With the publication of Reinventing Anthropology, we were continuing the anthropological tradition of challenging assumptions, this time our own disciplinary assumptions. Even though the published reviews at the time were mixed, today we do examine power up, down, and sideways both in the United States and elsewhere (Stryker and Gonzalez 2014).

But within anthropology, as in the larger society, there are always trends and trendiness. First, functionalists were fashionable; so were Marxists, interpretive anthropologists, and later European social philosophers like Foucault, Gramsci, or Derrida. In the wider society there is political correctness, Islamophobia, American exceptionalism, love of technology for its own sake—all of which might also be found in the academy. Trends are often initiated as new framing for reconsideration of issues of power, gender, and challenging political landscapes, or the desire for more theory to enhance mere description before becoming dominant. Trendiness or dominant positions can be intimidating and affect funding possibilities and tenure, but can also be a challenge to thinking new, open-ended science. Kuhn’s ideas about normal science and scientific revolutions were inspiring for many beyond any specific interest in the history of science, and certainly beyond his intended audience. The word paradigm began to appear in varied publications. In this context, dogmas and mindsets begged for scrutiny, setting the stage for thinking that challenged the status quo.

My own understanding of mindsets was crystalized in the essay I wrote for Reinventing Anthropology after encountering a serious boundary-setting reaction to having two Berkeley graduate students collaborate with two Harvard law students in a study of a powerful Washington, D.C., law firm. This caused a short-lived furor among our faculty. Studying power was off the table, several of my colleagues felt. I argued that power is central to anthropology, but the matter was tabled and the students defunded, over my protest. Why had anthropologists limited their ethnographies to the colonized rather than the colonizer, the ghettos rather than the banks that redline poverty areas? Why did we focus on powerless people with no access to law rather than the powerful Washington, D.C., law firm of Covington & Burling?

As Eric Wolf wrote in Reinventing Anthropology, anthropologists are a reflection of their own culture. Secrecy during the Cold War obscured the full history of anthropology, which we now know was gathered by the intelligence-gathering state. The Phantom Factor: Impact of the Cold War on Anthropology was a start towards understanding the underside of the discipline. There in the wings, influencing funding, publications, and the status of colleagues, were the dual uses of anthropological research: independent knowledge production and complicity with the national security state (Price 2016). It is difficult to understand power without understanding how control works as part of the dynamics of power, a point central to my Mintz Lecture on Controlling Processes: Tracing the Dynamic Components of Power. Anthropologists, having been granted the widest of discipline autonomies to understand the full context of the work, were simply blind to this large outside influence.

A more diffuse control on the field, exceptionalism is an assumed normative standard challenged by nonhegemonic anthropology. A. L. Kroeber thought that the eradication of this pervasive sense of exceptionalism to be a most critical challenge of our field. It is important to employ Kroeber’s scrutiny now more than ever. Anthropologists slowly overcame this part of our cultural heritage early on by challenging anthropological theories of social evolution, which held that humans moved from savagery (them) to civilization (us). More recently, anthropologists began by questioning the history of the close alignment of anthropology with colonialism and imperialism. In the arena of human rights, mainly a U.S. invention after World War II, the United States ostensibly takes human rights to the so-called Third World. Focusing on violations of human rights elsewhere gives the impression that they have violations of human rights, whereas we do not. Yet true comparison is critical to improving human rights everywhere. We now have easy access to Chinese and Russian documentation of human rights violations in the United States, which certainly puts the shoe on the other foot, especially spotlighting political motives similar to our own. My one and only comparative essay on human rights, In a Woman’s Looking Glass: Normative Blindness and Unresolved Human Rights Issues, was published in Brazil, where I found a much less restrictive mindset.

Notwithstanding its internal inconsistencies, the anthropological perspective was much sought after as critique in the 1970s. I was invited to join the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Nuclear and Alternative Systems (CONAES). In a talk at the Mitre Corporation to report on my CONAES publication, Energy Choices in a Democratic Society (1980), I asked whether the energy experts themselves were part of the problem. In my essay, Barriers to Thinking New About Energy (1979), I focused on the mindset of scientists and engineers that ignore human frailty. Nuclear power accidents most often result from human error and expressed emotion. After all, scientists calibrate their instruments, and the scientists themselves are part of the instruments. I argued, and still argue, that energy is a social problem primarily and that mindsets stand in the way of good science. My observations were validated by dozens of letters that I received from heads of laboratories, physics professors, and Nobel Laureates, who wrote about professional blindness, overspecialization, workplace bureaucracy, self-censorship, and the mind cage. These distinguished scientists felt unable to alter conditions, although time and changing public attitudes have partly changed the work of energy scientists and engineers working today. Meanwhile, back in my department, the chair advised me to get off this energy kick, Laura; you won’t get promoted for that in this department. Boundary maintenance.

For an anthropologist, a fundamental examination of science mindsets would start with the comparative assessment of science quality in Western and other cultures. Having been drilled in grammar school through college that science was objective and autonomous from culture and society, in graduate school I took notice of Malinowski’s work Magic, Science and Religion (1926). There are parallels between the Pacific islanders, as they practiced magic, science, and religion, and modern-day Western science practices, both in the national laboratories and in academia. Scientists such as Ludwig Fleck ([1935] 1979) wrote about thought collectives and thought styles in relation to his work on syphilis. It was Fleck who influenced Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) analysis of paradigmatic changes in science (see Gonzalez, Nader, and Ou 1995). In this context, there is contemporary relevance of Malinowski’s 1926 work (see Leach 1957) for both Trobriand practices of science and magic in the lagoons and open seas, and predictions about the long-range consequences of nuclear power.

Outside academia, there were groundbreaking happenings in energy initiatives. Through bricolage, people in business and science and just plain citizens made shifting gears possible (Nader 2004). By 2010, energy work had gone past bricolage to include a wide range of people from the sciences, humanities, journalism, politics, and citizen action (Nader 2010). A movement had taken off. Power had shifted in energy choices. Notions of power were being reinvented by scientists who considered themselves citizens first. The longue durée was front and center.

In contrast to the flexible mindsets engaged in the study of energy science, policy, and culture, those concerned with the status of women showed (and continue to show) a great deal of intransigence. Cultural beliefs about the status of women go back centuries (Khan 1801). In primary school I was taught that Arab men do not treat their women well, to which my mother responded, When you grow up you will find out that American women are treated worse than anywhere in the world, a perception contrary to American popular beliefs most certainly. Even sophisticated anthropologists preferred not to use comparative framing (us and them) in research on genders. Such research might suggest that American women may not be number one on questions of status and choice.

My essay Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Control of Women, about the means used by Eastern and Western patriarchies for control of women, was rejected for publication by several American anthropology journals. Reasons included questioning the use of comparison to rationalize Islamic women’s status. The paper was published in Belgium. The hesitation to publish was also true for The Subordination of Women in Comparative Perspective, which questioned American ideas of exceptionalism. Again, on the question of the status of women, a global comparison is indispensable. My hypothesis is that comparison and contrast are strategies of control, strategies in male-dominant societies to control women in their own societies by pointing to the lower status of women in other societies. Islamic women are repressed, but which Islamic women and as compared to what? The Islamic clerics point to repression of Western women and argue that Islamic women are more respected, citing the very literature of Western feminists. Western imperialism enters in—We need to invade Iraq or Afghanistan so that we can save their women—while in the United States today, an average of three women a day are murdered by their partners. We need more research on this topic worldwide.

Professional mindsets, within and outside of anthropology, tend to exclude a look in the mirror. If we consider the Other as mute, we cannot benefit from their possible insights. I was once invited to deliver a college talk on a New Yorker cover which showed two women, one covered and the other showing much of her nakedness. The question about each in turn was Why do her men make her cover herself? Why do her men make her go naked? A challenge to insular thinking can yield discoveries that are contrary to expectations, by recognizing that the Other is not mute. This question of parity in dress is certainly one that deserves more attention from anthropologists. In the Amazon, if he is uncovered, she is uncovered. In Saudi Arabia, if she is covered, he is also covered. But in Euro-American culture there seems to be no parity. He’s covered, but she is nearly uncovered. There is as yet no fundamental explanation for these patterns. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Roger Cohen (11 August 2016) calls to our attention two Olympian volleyball players at the Rio de Janeiro games in Brazil. One Egyptian, the other German, one in a hijab, the other in a bikini, reaching for the ball between them—two women, two dress codes, both reflective of two contrasting beliefs about emancipation and subjugation. And Cohen asks, Who is to say which of the women is more conservative, more of a feminist, or more liberated?

While my interests in Western science practice came later, early in my work the ethnography of law had been my central specialty (Nader 1965). In thinking about legal decision-making in my own country, questions included examining the very concept of judicial-made decisions, which were viewed as if the judge was practicing an autonomous law separate from culture and society. Here the contrast with Zapotec practices could not have been clearer: Zapotec knowledge of law was ubiquitous: they knew their rights and how to exercise them. I taught and observed at several law schools—Boalt Hall at University of California at Berkeley, Yale Law, Harvard Law, and Stanford. I taught that categories are artificial, made by humans and not hard-set, although sometimes unrecognized due to thinking that is professionally rigid. What is a crime and what is civil action? Perhaps we should consider a plaintiff as having the dominant position in decision-making because it is the plaintiff who initiates the case (Nader 2002). In many countries the distinction between civil and criminal is not recognized. In my own society, the powerful party may determine the label. In the case of contaminated water supplies in Woburn, Massachusetts (Harr 1995), the case was considered a civil case, but it might have been a criminal action. If corporate crimes are preferentially treated as civil actions while street crimes are labeled criminal, then an understanding of corporate crime by the average citizen is impeded, to say nothing of justice.

For example, at a Yale conference on Mirrors of Justice (Clarke and Goodale 2009), no mention was made of injustice. Justice as a concept has an interesting history no matter where anthropologists might choose to look. However, upon examination of the comparative use of the categories justice or injustice, we find that in my own culture there is a widespread professional preference for the word justice, rather than injustice. If we prefer to use the concept of justice over injustice, the research becomes abstract, ideal, and above the fray. If the murder of Osama bin Laden is accepted as deliverance of justice, we discard the importance of due process, key to what we think of as civilized law. Similarly, we think of the Islamic concept of jihad as unique to Islam when we in fact are presently in the midst of religious wars of several stripes today. Yet even in academic circles, many people hold the belief that jihadism is only found in Islam, although there is excellent historical literature about jihadi rabbis, for example (Shahak 1994).

The final essay, Whose Comparative Law?, covers much of my work on law from the start. Anthropological errors in evolutionary and cross-cultural formulations were recognized as soon as anthropologists began ethnographic studies of particular societies, early in the twentieth century. Decontextualized facts or broad observations were considered unusual by most anthropologists conducting research outside the United States. But anthropologists also became isolated in bounded ethnographies as new nation states made their appearance after decolonialism and an ever-expanding globalization process accelerated. Western legal paradigms saw the newly developed peoples as lacking law. Following the end of the European colonization and the development of new states, legal missionaries were sent to Africa and Asia in the 1950s and 1960s, followed by decades of legal development moves in Latin America (Gardner 1980). The legal development movement continues to this day. Promise or Plunder? A Past and Future Look at Law and Development was the title of a talk I presented at a World Bank Conference. In a later article, I noted that an example of new states that gain monopoly over unofficial law is the region of Waziristan: both in Afghanistan and in Pakistan legal boundaries were drawn by colonial powers running roughshod over local Waziristan cultures (Ahmed 2013). Legal development has its twenty-first-century dark side, too, no better exemplified than by Paul Bremer’s one hundred edicts after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. The Iraqis lacked law according to the American invaders, although they have well-developed systems of law—from civil to criminal codes, customary and religious law, and tribal and state law—that had coexisted for many years of Iraqi state development before the American invasion.

The majority of essays selected have implications for American or Western professional dogmas as they relate to how American anthropologists are conducting ethnographic research in a rapidly changing world. This was not so in my earlier bounded fieldwork among the Zapotec of Oaxaca, Mexico, or the Shia Muslims of southern Lebanon. I was not able to return to southern Lebanon for continued research because of the Lebanese Civil War and the Israeli invasion in 1982; however, I have continued to revisit the mountain Zapotec. My last primary contact was to make a documentary film, Losing Knowledge: 50 Years of Zapotec Change in 2005. The earlier PBS film, Little Injustices, was about comparative access to disputing forums in the Sierra de Juarez and the United States. Increasingly, however, it became impossible to disentangle the state from local cultures like that of the Zapotec. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) undercut Zapotec farmers. Cheap corn was brought in from the United States, displacing local production. Outmigration increasingly became an imperative, facilitated by ideas of progress, road building, and NAFTA. Much of this was contrary to modern expectations among the Zapotec and even among many anthropologists. The idea that local courts might provide more access and justice as compared to dispute resolution in U.S. disputes between people in face-to-faceless disputes was an open door to understanding the real impact of little injustices that weren’t so little, especially in our country with no access to law Americans.

There were reactions in and out of anthropology to the focus on access to justice, especially during the debates about President Nixon’s appointee, Chief Justice Warren Burger. His attack on the American civil justice system was ferocious as he promoted Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) as a substitute for litigation. The ADR Explosion: Implications of Rhetoric in Legal Reform examines the Chief Justice’s techniques. A recent history of the Burger court as one that moved the Supreme Court to the right (Graetz and Greenhouse 2016) left out Burger’s destructive tactics beyond what he did in cases heard by the court. Burger’s rhetoric was powerful, widely accepted, and spurred the ADR movement to happen earlier than Burger himself predicted.

If my work had been along lines of normal science, as Kuhn might call it, reactions might be subdued or it might be referred to as building on past work, as much work on the ethnography of law has been. If the research appears contrary to expectations, reactions were often more controversial, eliciting more reaction. The essays on issues pertaining to nuclear power generated an oral talk published by the Mitre Corporation, then republished in Physics Today, Chem Tech, and some forty years later in the Industrial Physicist. Controversy is thought to be key to the basic values of many science organizations.

The law, according to Oliver Wendell Holmes, is one big anthropological document. Most nineteenth-century anthropologists were lawyers. I was invited by Warren Burger, then Chief Justice of the United States, to address the Pound Conference in Minneapolis in 1976 because of my work on Zapotec harmony and conciliation. My observations on the overall conference are being republished forty years later! Our critique of Western Rule of Law, Plunder: When the Rule of Law is Illegal (Mattei and Nader 2010), was turned down by two American university presses, but when published was translated into Italian, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, and more.

The study of paradigms and scientific revolutions is a rich academic subject for philosophers and historians of science. But historians and philosophers of science are usually examining Western science. In the contemporary world, the anthropological study of professional mindsets is increasingly urgent, particularly in bridging indigenous and scientific knowledge systems which are increasingly complementary. Such knowledge is context specific and adaptive to changing environments. Climate or ecological holistic solutions are thought by some scientists and many lay people to increase resilience. Western worldviews are not enough to expand the range of problem-solving options. The sciences of the other extant civilizations—Japan, China, India, Middle East—require respectful acknowledgment of their distinctive epistemology related to health and sustainability, as in the case of water and the management of drought, particularly in the Middle East.

A developing subfield of anthropology on comparative issues in the study of professional mindsets—which is already robust for numbers of anthropologists who study NGOs, agricultural experts, medicine, gender, and more—would be timely for all divisions of anthropology. The extant research itself needs to be brought together as a field worthy of specific attention. The selected essays that follow outline a field of study. Although they barely scratch the surface, my hope is that this collection is a book for everybody in and out of the discipline, stimulating argument and counterargument; there is much need for such critical thinking as remedy for contemporary increased specialization and narrow demarcation of knowledge production.

The essays that follow are presented in chronological order from 1969 to 2016, indicating that, with time, unraveling mindsets becomes as natural an academic concern as if working within demarcated subjects, only more stimulating.

REFERENCES

Ahmed, Akbar. 2013. Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam. Harrisburg: R.R. Donnelley.

Clarke, Kamari, and Mark Goodale, eds. 2009. Mirrors for Justice: Law and Power in the Post–Cold War Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cohen, Roger. 2016. Olympians in Hijab and Bikini. New York Times op-ed, 11 August.

Fleck, Ludwig. (1935) 1979. Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Gardner, James, A. 1980. Legal Imperialism: American Lawyers and Foreign Aid in Latin America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Graetz, Michael, and Linda Greenhouse. 2016. The Burger Court and the Rise of the Judicial Right. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Gonzalez, Roberto, Laura Nader, and Joy Ou. 1995. Between Two Poles. Current Anthropology 36, No. 5 (December).

Harr, Jonathan. 1996. A Civil Action. New York: Vintage Books.

Hymes, Dell, ed. 1972. Reinventing Anthropology. New York: Pantheon Books.

Khan, Mirza Abu Taleb. 1801. Vindicating of the Liberties of the Asiatic Women. Asiatic Annual Register.

Kluckhohn, Clyde. 1949. Mirror for Man: The Relationship of Anthropology to Modern Life. New York: Whittlesey House.

Kroeber, A. L. 1948. Anthropology: Race, Language, Culture, Psychology, Prehistory. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Kuhn, Thomas. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Leach, E. R. 1957. The Epistemological Background to Malinowski’s Empiricism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Mattei, Ugo, and Laura Nader. 2010. Plunder: When the Rule of Law is Illegal. Oxford. Blackwell Publishing.

Nader, Laura. 2002. The Life of the Law. Berkeley: University of California Press.

———. 2004. The Harder Path: Shifting Gears. Anthropological Quarterly 77, No. 4 (Fall).

———. 2010. The Energy Reader. Malden, Mass.: Wiley Blackwell Publishers.

Price, David, H. 2016. Cold War Anthropology: The CIA, the Pentagon, and the Growth of Dual Use Anthropology. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Shahak, Israel. 1994. Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years. London: Pluto Press.

Stryker, Rachel, and Roberto Gonzalez, eds. 2014. Up, Down and Sideways: Anthropologists Trace the Pathways of Power. New York: Berghahn Press.

CHAPTER 1

Up the Anthropologist

Perspectives Gained From Studying Up

In this essay I shall describe some opportunities that anthropologists have for studying up in their own society, hoping to generate further discussion of why we study what we do (Nader 1964). Anthropologists have a great deal to contribute to our understanding of the processes whereby power and responsibility are exercised in the United States. Moreover, there is a certain urgency to the kind of anthropology that is concerned with power (cf. Wolf 1969), for the quality of life and our lives themselves may depend upon the extent to which citizens understand those who shape attitudes and actually control institutional structures. The study of humanity is confronted with an unprecedented situation: never before have so few, by their actions and inactions, had the power of life and death over so many members of the species. I shall present three reasons for studying up: its energizing and integrating effect for many students; scientific adequacy; and democratic relevance of scientific work. Finally, I shall consider some frequent obstacles and objections and try to answer them.

Indignation as Motive

Many of our brighter students look at the anthropology journals of recent times and conclude that anthropology appears to be phasing out, content to make a living for the most part by rediscovering what has been discovered or by selling our wares to other disciplines and professions. The audience is too narrow, the nitpicking too precious. Making a living by selling one’s wares is not an inappropriate way to subsist; it is, however, in this case, symptomatic that a talent, the perspective of a Mirror for Man, is being underused.

Today we have anthropology students who are indignant about many problems affecting the future of Homo sapiens, but they are studying problems about which they have no feelings. Some think this is the only appropriate stance for a science. Yet the things that students are energetic about they do not study. I think we are losing something here. The normative impulse often leads one to ask important questions about a phenomenon that would not be asked otherwise, or to define a problem in a new context. A rapid growth in civil rights studies is directly attributable to activities whereby the victims of the system made their victimization visible. By a process of contagion, this visibility spread moral indignation into the law schools and the legal profession, which in turn led to research into civil rights questions and the related area of poverty law. In anthropology, we have the example of Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), an effort to understand opponents in war. The normative impulse here, generated by patriotism and loyalty, considered appropriate in World War II, was responsible for an insightful book and the development of new techniques for studying culture at a distance.

Looking back to an early founder of American anthropology, L. H. Morgan (the first anthropologist to become president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS]), we discover that he broke new ground in science as a result of having been interested in a social problem (Resek 1960). Throughout his career, Morgan was indignant at how American Indians were being treated, at how they were being pushed off the land. It was his initial indignation which led him to study American Indians, and his indignation preceded his curiosity about kinship systems and social structure. In Morgan’s case, indignation had an energizing effect. As Jules Henry (1963, p. 146) put it, To think deeply in our culture is to grow angry and to anger others; and if you cannot tolerate this anger, you are wasting the time you spend thinking deeply. One of the rewards of deep thought is the hot glow of anger at discovering a wrong, but if anger is taboo, thought will starve to death.

I see among young students at Berkeley an energizing phenomenon in studying major institutions and organizations that affect everyday lives, such as the California Insurance Commission, the Better Business Bureau, air pollution agencies, and the like. The following extended excerpts illustrate something about what motivated these students to study what they did:

I chose to study the insurance industry primarily because it is one of those things (there is no term) which is made of vast networks of people who have effects on many aspects of the lives of all people in California. Most are affected in a direct way, by owning an insurance policy. All are affected in other ways, such as by the vast political influence of the insurance industry and its tremendous economic influence over our personal lives.

For example, one drives to the market in one’s car, which is itself insured. The market one arrives at is insured for loss, theft, damages and liability. The food was delivered by trucks which were insured for the cargo they carry, which is also protected against various problems. The price of these coverages also affects the price of your food. Incidentally, the factories where the truck and your auto were manufactured are insured with various policies (as are all the employees). One of these, termed pollution insurance, protects the company for liabilities incurred if they are sued for pollution damages. The price of this affects other prices, as mentioned, but the ownership of the insurance permits the factory or the network of people who control the factory to pollute the air without economic risk to themselves. To extend this further, the auto company is probably owned in large part by insurance companies. To get an idea of the tremendous wealth of the insurance industry, consider that California owners of insurance policies paid over $6 billion in insurance premiums in 1970, which is over $300 per person in the State of California. This is greater than the per capita income of most of the world’s population. As a matter of fact, the annual amount of premiums taken in the U.S. by the insurance industry is greater than the gross national product of all but five nations in the World. (Serber 1971, pp. 2–3)

Another student had the following to say about her study of the Oakland Better Business Bureau:

In our complex society, we obtain many goods and services in a prepackaged state. Like the proverbial city child who grows up believing that milk grows in paper cartons, most consumers know little about what their purchases are made of, how they work, how to evaluate their potential before buying them, and how to repair them if they break down. This ignorance is not limited to goods but extends to services, investments, charities, to say nothing of the legal and medical professions. We rely on [Pacific Gas and Electricity] to install gas equipment, to check it for safety, even to relight the pilot if we cannot locate it when it is accidentally extinguished. We take our special garments to a dry cleaner. When the transmission on an automobile doesn’t work, the car must be towed to a transmission specialist. Goods are ordered by telephone or through the mail. Appointments at a photographer’s studio, cosmetics, magazine subscriptions, and investments may be sold and contributions to charities collected by door-to-door solicitors. When a carpet is desired, the consumer depends on a salesman to explain the qualities of the constituent fibers, to calculate the number of yards needed to cover a given area, and to make sure that incidentals like matting, tacks, and labor are included in the quoted installation cost. We depend upon specialists to provide services and often even to give us the criteria by which we are to judge their work. Many of our transactions take place infrequently, which means that the consumer may be totally inexperienced in evaluating what he pays for when he buys a large appliance, an insurance policy, or a vacation trip.

Likewise he may find himself incapable of obtaining redress of his grievances when he thinks he has been misled or cheated. Most contacts with businesses are limited to the disembodied voice of the switchboard operator, to the secretary or public relations representative in the front office, or to the salesman who happens to be on the floor when the customer walks into the store. The consumer phones the company to see what it will do for him, or he writes to a newspaper complaint column or a broadcasting station’s hotline program. The services of these expediters are also packaged: the complainant sends in his story and waits for the machinery to grind out an answer. This situation extends even to the law enforcement and consumer aid organizations to which the irate customer may eventually refer his problem…

I began this project on the BBB in total ignorance of what it is, what it does and does not do, and why. Like the typical citizen, I began with the simple knowledge that there is a business-supported organization called the Better Business Bureau and that it is customarily contacted by telephone when a person has a question about the dependability (or existence!) of a firm or has a complaint against a business that has failed to give satisfaction. Few people go beyond these facts to ask who the voice on the other end of the line is, where she gets her information, or what actually happens to the complaint form which arrives, is returned, and whose results are relayed back to the consumer by mail. And yet thousands of people use the BBB every year. (Eaton 1971, pp. 2–3)

Maybe these are attempts to get behind the facelessness of a bureaucratic society, to get at the mechanisms whereby faraway corporations and large-scale industries are directing the everyday aspects of our lives. Whatever the motivation, the studies raise important questions as to responsibility, accountability, self-regulation, or on another level, questions relating to social structure, network analysis, library research, and participant observation.

Scientific Inadequacy

If we look at the literature based on fieldwork in the United States, we find a relatively abundant literature on the poor, the ethnic groups, the disadvantaged: there is comparatively little field research on the middle class and very little firsthand work on the upper classes. Anthropologists might indeed ask themselves whether the entirety of fieldwork does not depend upon a certain power relationship in favor of the anthropologist, and whether indeed such dominant-subordinate relationships may not be affecting the kinds of theories we are weaving. What if, in reinventing anthropology, anthropologists were to study the colonizers rather than the colonized, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless, the culture of affluence rather than the culture of poverty?

Studying up as well as down would lead us to ask many common sense questions in reverse. Instead of asking why some people are poor, we would ask why other people are so affluent? How on earth would a social scientist explain the hoarding patterns of the American rich and middle class? How can we explain the fantastic resistance to change among those whose options appear to be many? How has it come to be, we might ask, that anthropologists are more interested in why peasants don’t change than why the auto industry doesn’t innovate, or why the Pentagon or universities cannot be more organizationally creative? The conservatism of such major institutions and bureaucratic organizations probably has wider implications for the species and for theories of change than does the conservatism of peasantry.

If, in reinventing anthropology, we were principally studying the most powerful strata of urban society, our view of the ghetto might be largely in terms of those relationships larger than the ghetto. We would study the banks and the insurance industry that mark out areas of the city to which they will not sell insurance or extend credit. We would study the landlord class that pays off or influences enforcement or municipal officials so that building codes are not enforced. Slums are technically illegal; if building codes and other municipal laws were enforced, our slums would not be slums (if enforcement were successful), or they might be called by another name which would indicate that they were results of white-collar crime. One might say that if business crime is successful, it will produce street crime. With this perspective on white-collar crime, our analysis of gang delinquency might be correspondingly affected, and in developing theories of slum-gang behavior we might ask, is it sufficient to understand gangs as products of the value systems of that subculture alone? We might study the marketing systems or the transportation system which, as in Watts, makes virtual islands of some ghetto areas. We might study the degree to which legal practices, or the kind of legal services, mold the perceptions of law that are present in the ghettos.

The consequences of not studying up as well as down are serious in terms of developing adequate theory and description. If one’s pivot point is around those who have responsibility by virtue of being delegated power, then the questions change. From such a perspective, one notices different facets of culture—the ghetto may be viewed as being without law, lawless. The courts are not geared to the complaints of the poor (which would fall in the $20 to $80 range); furthermore, they are not geared for cheap and quick resolution of conflict—crucial features for the poor. From this perspective, ghetto communities may be said to be shut out of the legal system except as defendants, and indeed they are often shut off from other municipal services ranging from garbage-collecting to police protection. From this orientation, then, the question may be raised again: in our studies of delinquency, is it sufficient to understand gangs as products of the value systems of that subculture alone?

Let’s ask another question: what have been the consequences of social science research on crime? By virtue of our concentration on lower-class crimes, we have aided in the public definition of the law and order problem in terms of lower-class or street crimes. Let’s assume that the taxpaying public in a democracy, after listening to a presidential speech calling for more tax money for enforcement and protection from street crimes, decides to see for itself. No matter what library they went to, the most they could get is some information on crimes committed by the lower class. They would have no way of evaluating, given present descriptive materials, whether, in a situation of limited money, they would do better to put their money on street crime or on white-collar crime, both of which, after all, imperil the lives of all taxpayers every day in many ways.

As Clyde Mitchell has noted, it was with such problems in mind that anthropologists first introduced the concept of social field:

The classical anthropological study takes a unit—a tribe or society or community—and presents the behavior of its members in terms of a series of interlocking institutions, structures, norms, and values. It is not only anthropologists working in urban areas who have found this sort of assumption difficult to maintain, but also those who have been conducting tribal studies in modern Africa (and presumably also elsewhere). They have found that the effect of groups and institutions not physically present in the tribal area influences the behavior of people in it. The unit of interacting relationships, in other words, is larger than the tribe. (Mitchell 1966, p. 56)

Lowie may have studied the Crow, and Llewellyn and Hoebel the Cheyenne, as if they were islands unrelated to the wider society and even unrelated to the policies and actions of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but there has ranged a whole literature since the fifties challenging the limited ethnographic community view of the world, and a recognition of methodological need has been, as Mitchell noted, what has perhaps stimulated the development of network theory and the development of nation state studies (Adams 1970).

If anthropology were reinvented to study up, we would sooner or later need to study down as well. We are not dealing with an either/or proposition; we need simply to realize when it is useful or crucial in terms of the problem to extend the domain of study up, down, or sideways. If we become interested in the determinants of family patterns (rather than the poor or the rich as such) then studying this problem across class, or at least on a vertical slice, would be a way to test hypotheses regarding whether certain aspects of lower-class or upper-class plight are somehow due to a particular kind of family pattern (serially monogamous matrifocal, father-absent), whether poverty, for example, is generated by certain types of employment patterns or external factors. At least posing the problems in a comparative frame would help improve our chances for understanding the forces that generate excessive poverty or affluence and the origins of those forces, whether intrusive from the larger society or determined by cultural transmission within the group Gladwin 1969; Valentine 1969). Depending on one’s view of the processes that generate behavior, one would seek solutions to social problems either by a policy directed to reforming the society as a whole or by one directed to modifying the behavior of the subculture, or both (Gladwin 1969; Valentine 1969).

On the basis of such work in our own society,¹ we could rewrite the books on American society, whose indexes make no mention of the advertising, insurance, banking, realty, or automobile industries, which most people on the street know have played a major role in forming modern American society. Ethnographic reports would describe the communications industries, the agencies which regulate them, the institutions that undergird the industrial sector, such as the legislative bodies, the universities, and professional organizations, and such descriptions would be from the point of view of the users as well as the managers. It is appropriate that a reinvented anthropology should study powerful institutions and bureaucratic organizations in the United States, for such institutions and their network systems affect our lives and also affect the lives of people that anthropologists have traditionally studied all around the world.

It is particularly appropriate that anthropologists should lead the way in this work by virtue of a number of characteristics of our discipline. The study of humanity has had to be eclectic in its methods, broad in its vision of what it takes to understand human beings—their past, their present, their culture, their biology. We have specialized in understanding whole cultures in a cross-cultural context. We should, for example, be at home in studying the law firm as a secret society, in finding and analyzing the networks of power—which on paper may not be there—in describing those unwritten customary behaviors that are completely indispensable for understanding, for example, what makes Congress tick. The anthropologist should, above all, by virtue of his or her understanding of the principle of reciprocity, be able to analyze why it is that decisions of federal communications commissioners may not be rational, or the cultural dimensions involved in the failure of national programs ostensibly geared to reintegrate society. It is the anthropologist who, by virtue of his or her populist values, may be able to define the role of citizen-scholar—a science of humans for humans.

Democratic Relevance

Studying up seems to be one track for integrating paramount social concerns with the goals and aims of the science of humanity. The service function we have performed in the past could be amplified to include another service, social as well as scientific—that is, writing ethnographies for the natives. A monograph that should be taken into account by managers for the benefit of people concerned is Colson’s (1971) book on The Impact of the Kariba Resettlement upon the Gwembe Tonga. She writes, Massive technological development hurts. This is a fact largely ignored by economic planners, technicians, and political leaders. In planning drastic alterations in environment that uproot populations or make old adjustments impossible, they count the engineering costs but not the social costs. After all, they do not think of themselves as paying the latter … This book is a study in the impact of forced change upon some of its victims. Another example is Spradley’s You Owe Yourself a Drunk, an ethnographic description of the interaction and the consequences of the interaction that drunks have with the legal and enforcement systems. This monograph is already serving to educate managers of that system about the consequences of specific legal decisions and procedures. This is not a novel role for social scientists to play, and unfortunately our findings have often served to help manipulate rather than aid those we study. Another role, however, is related to the concept of citizenship in a country that is to be run on a democratic framework and the control that citizens must have to harness managerial manipulation. We cannot, as responsible scientists, educate managers without at the same time educating those being managed. A democratic framework implies that citizens should have access to decision-makers, institutions of government, and so on. This implies that citizens need to know something about the major institutions, government or otherwise, that affect their lives. Most members of complex societies and certainly most Americans do not know enough about, nor do they know how to cope with, the people, institutions, and organizations which most affect their lives. I believe that anthropologists would be surprisingly good at applying their descriptive and analytical tools to a major problem: How can a citizenry function in a democracy when that citizenry is woefully ignorant of how the society works and doesn’t work, of how a citizen can plug in as a citizen, of what would happen should citizens begin to exercise rights other than voting as a way to make the system work for them? But first, as we know, we have to describe the bureaucracy and its culture.

Love and Eaton (1970) began their study of the Bay Area Air Pollution Control Agency with questions about the functions of the agency: How does the agency perceive itself? Who uses it? How do the users perceive the agency? Public access was a key question:

Our approach was, at first, guarded due to our doubts. We pretended innocence, and in fact found out that we really were innocent. We then began to realize that we were outsiders. We were the public who did not understand the professional language being spoken. The avenues we approached were those the public generally approached. Gradually, a picture of the agency and its position in the legal system emerged. Its structure, the personalities of the decision-makers, the limitations reality places on any ideal system, and finally the kinds of uses made of it became clearer. (pp. 2–3)

When the citizen goes to the agency, he is translated into statistical data which separate him from the actual procedure or use of the agency. … Assumed in this is the notion that since the agency is supposed to protect the public interest, the public will seek access to it. The reality of the situation is very different. The agency acts as autonomously as possible to combat air pollution and in so doing, comes into close contact with the industry officials who speak the same technical and legal language. It is industry which has the greatest access to the agency, especially at the legislative level. It is industry which makes the greatest use of the agency to protect its interests. (pp. 32–33)

This same study notes that, in the legal division of the agency, violation notices are treated like parking tickets—after so many are collected the violator is prosecuted. But what does prosecution consist of, given the intimate patterns of social interaction described above? These were not ordinary criminals. "In the legal division, the agency lawyer emphasized that the principals of criminal law were not a solution, hence the civil fines. The type of ‘responsible’ official being put in jail with ‘prostitutes and muggers.’ … An interesting footnote to this procedure is Regulation 1, which does not apply to most large industries but to private citizens and land developers, is treated as a misdemeanor where the violator can be put in jail with the ‘prostitutes and muggers’" (Love and Eaton 1970, p. 33). Apart from being a useful report on bureaucratic culture, this thirty-seven page report is the kind of ethnographic information that citizens need prior to an attempt to gain access to, or attempt to use, a public agency. Such reports would introduce them to the structure and culture of the subgroup in such a way as to allow them to gauge whether the cards are stacked and in what direction they are stacked in terms of real access to, and use of, a public agency.

The study of the California Department of Insurance, and in particular the processing of complaints by the Policy Services Bureau of that same agency, is another attempt to describe the workings of an organization whose acts of omission or commission affect the lives of many (Serber 1971). Serber concludes that the Department of Complaints does not meet the needs of the people of the State of California because the vast majority of the people are not aware of its existence (p. 627). He adds, by means of a quote, a further insight which has been noted by other student studies of governmental agencies (and it is not much different for private agencies that purport to serve the public) and which suggests that such public institutions are not structured for public access: ‘It is much worse to deal with someone in the public because you know that you are very limited in what kinds of answers you give them and the results you can get for them. They expect more and often get impatient. With the industry, it’s different: they are usually friendly and polite, at least to our faces; we always know where we stand and how far we can go. It’s less stressful because I feel less responsible for the outcome of the conversations.’ (Insurance Officer III). The report goes on to note that there is a qualitative difference in the nature of the interaction between the complainants and the Insurance Officer and the representative of the industry and the Insurance Officer and gives another quotation as an example: "‘It’s not very pleasant to arrive here at a quarter of eight in the morning after battling to cross the Bay Bridge for forty-five minutes and before I can finish a cup of coffee some hysterical fat bitch who can hardly talk, she’s so stupid and excited, will come in, and they will call me. When I catch sight of her my stomach tightens and my mouth gets dry; sometimes the burning in my pipe starts before I can even get up to the desk, and I’ll have to take a sip of water.’ (Insurance Officer IV)."

This same report makes a set of predictions as to what might happen to this Department of Complaints were access by the public easily available; the structure and function of the department would move more closely in line with a major goal of the Department of Insurance to enforce insurance laws so as to achieve the highest possible degree of protection for the public in general and all policy holders and beneficiaries in particular (Serber 1971, p. 64). The above-stated goal raises a more general question: Who is to decide what is good for the public? Eaton’s paper on the Better Business Bureau of Oakland illustrates the dilemma of a value conflict:

A major limitation in the value of the BBB to the consumer lies in the very fact that it is an organization designed to further the interests of legitimate business. The movement assumes