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Super Model Epilogue with Savage: War in the Depths of Humanity A set of micro-plays on Anthropologies born(e) by Tragedies

 

 

Super Model Epilogue with Savage: War in the Depths of Humanity A set of micro-plays on Anthropologies born(e) by Tragedies 1

Abstract ...........................................................................................................................2

Allegorical Intro & Setting of the Play: Is there something rotten in the state of Anthropology?......................................................................................................................2

The set of figures and metaphors ....................................................................................7

German Anthropology - The Philosopher, the Savage & the Beast..............................10

War against rival collectives & the tragedy of defeat ...............................................12

Leipzig 1 (Weule): The Anthropologist and the War of Beasts....................................12

The Grey Period (Èshu): moral twilight at dawn or The Imperial Anthropologist...13

Micro-Play: The Anthropologist missing his chance to meet the Savage.................14

Leipzig 2 (Reche): The Beast as Providence or Anthropology searching for the Super-Model (alias Anthropologist Idol) ......................................................................................15

The Black Period (Ogún): electric light in the nightmare or The National Anthropologist ................................................................................................................16

Leipzig 3 (Lips & Lips): Anthropologist & Savage fighting the Beast or The dialectical Tragedy of ‘Evolution’ and Extermination – ....................................................17

The Rosy Period (Òbba & Oyá): Morning Flowers blossoming or The Romantic Anthropologist ................................................................................................................17

Leipzig 4 (Treide): The Sacred Super-Model & the Anthropologist as Avatar............19

Growing up in paradise .............................................................................................19

The Red Period (Shangó & Obatalá): eternal fires, external & internal or The Party Anthropologist ................................................................................................................20

Leipzig 5: St. Bernhard’s Diversitism shunning the Super-Model or The Savage Philosopher .........................................................................................................................20

The Orange (or White) Period (Oshún & Obatalá): the inclusive Pantheon of Humanity or The Anthropologist as Artist ....................................................................20

The Anthropologist as Painter, Dancer and Writer ...................................................24

War against ourselves or The Tragedy of Success & Happiness .............................24

Leipzig, Halle & emergent parallel anthropologies ......................................................25

Halle 1 (Schlee): Avatars & Beasts or The eternal return of the Savage in War ......26

Leipzig 6 (Rao): The Model Anthropologist researching the Beast or Suffering as Avatar .................................................................................................................................28

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The Blue Period (Olòkun & Olodumáre): the Sky and the Ocean ahead of Us or The Futurist Anthropologist ...........................................................................................28

The Futurist Anthropologist, the Savage & the Beast...............................................29

Paradise LOST? The Future: The Anthropologist and / as Providence ........................30

Anthropological choices and directions ....................................................................32

Habitus, Taboo & Convenience: “Structure” & “Practice”, for example .................32

Again: choices and directions ...................................................................................34

Closing song..............................................................................................................35

Abstract

In his epilogue to the series of papers of the centenary symposium, Immo Eulenberger, a native of Leipzig who had his first encounter with the city’s anthropology as a child and followed its developments over the last twenty years, takes up some of the metaphors used in the papers to reflect on how an interplay of personal inclinations of anthropologists with their environment informs choices regarding emerging anthropologies, as well as on questions posed by their evolving diversity. In “War in the Depths of Humanity: A set of micro-plays on Anthropologies born(e) by Tragedies” he discusses anthropologist dilemmas in relation to social dilemmas of a shared world of common problems and contrasting approaches. He uses different periods of the Institute’s history to draw this connection as a blog play of ontological actors.

Allegorical Intro & Setting of the Play: Is there something rotten in the state of Anthropology?

(Dedicated to my first born son

And all the things I should have done)

I just received a mail from a dear friend and colleague in which she stridently demands that her photo be removed from an online news article1 calling anthropology “the most pathetic college major that doesn’t end in the words “studies”” and accusing ‘their professors’ of having “voted overwhelmingly against a resolution voicing opposition to a possible boycott of Israel” at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) in December 2014. The full title is “Now America's Most Pointless, Useless Professors Threaten Academic Boycott Of Israel”.

The photo shows her, a fair-haired young lady in some kind of ‘safari attire’, sitting in the midst of a bunch of ‘half-naked’, ‘black’ ‘native’ children with curious hairdos and ‘abnormally’ enlarged earlobes, which bear witness to their ‘primitive customs’. This photo, originally published on the

                                                                                                                     1  Original by Eric Owens, December 8 2014, in The Daily Caller, http://dailycaller.com/2014/12/08/americas-

anthropology-professors-threaten-academic-boycott-of-israel/.; reposted on sites like www.lockerdome.com, The News Commenter, and Conservative News.

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website of the South Omo Research Centre in Southern Ethiopia, where she has conducted fieldwork among the Mursi for over a decade, a group famous for their enormous lip plates and their ‘enduring primitiveness’, ‘her tribe’, about which she had just presented at the AAA conference, this photo was chosen, without her consent, to represent what anthropology is. And it was used as an accessory to unleashing a –maybe foreseeable but still astonishing– shitstorm. I quote the voices of the thread of commentaries in The Daily Caller at some length for being such a neat illustration of what kind of issues some people have with (what they imagine) anthropologists (are) and how they feel about them:

“#who's next in your war against literacy, knowledge and education, engineers? #Any tenured professor. #Tenure = a license to steal from schools, students and tax payers. #And sweet sabbaticals. Do you suppose the prof in the picutre [sic] was looking for a husband? #"Yes, grasshopper, libtards really are this stupid." #Sorry, but "anthropological studies" are not the most useless professors in college. That distinction goes to any professor teaching "gender studies". #One thing is absolutely certain: these "Anthropology professors(sic)" serve _very_ little purpose in America, except to undermine it. So name names, fire these mongrels and make them feel unwelcome where ever they wander in this country. Don't assist them, don't serve them, humiliate them at every opportunity. Drive them out of your neighborhoods. They are a cancer to academia and America and need to be destroyed.. #Antropolgy [sic], study of dead culture...Like Air America. #Useless AND brainless. A frequently seen combination in faculty lounges these days. It almost explains the Khmer Rouge practice of taking "academic parasites" out into the country side and working them to death to salvage some social utility from them. #Most intellectuals ABHOR free-market capitalism because they cannot always sell their own product of labor without the help of government coercion. Clearly, intellectuals bring less benefit to mankind than others. #all these clowns in one spot, and NOBODY sent a drone? … missed opportunities... #Just think of the eugenics that would have done! #Don't forget Dovid [sic] (Devoid) the Progressive child. # The British Society of Anthropologists several years ago passed a resolution that Anthropology is not a science. Look it up. #Anthropologists? Who listens to them anyway? All they do is train patty flippers for McDonalds. What else can an anthropologist do? #The Communists are no longer hiding in the shadows. They are boldly asserting themselves and their policies. #They're looking for their own relevance, which is simply hard to find. #These guys are Irrelevant unless they explode #The kind of behavior to be expected of leftist indoctrination camps, aka Universities.”

… and so it goes on. Now, why might the author have chosen my friend’s picture? Probably because it was fitting so well the cliché of the ‘savage slot’2. Why did the author not depict one of the promising young cutting-edge anthropologists studying research labs or legal organisations? What causes him to (dis)qualify anthropology as epitome of uselessness? Is there something wrong with us, or with what people think about us? If yes: why? And what is it? (Not to mention the question: Does it have anything to do with Israel?) Certainly, school book cases of othering.

There was one among the commenters who was clearly a misfit in this otherwise rather jolly casual crowd of right-leaning cyber savages bare of ingratiating ‘civilised’ restraint. He (or she?) expressed, as the only one, “hope we can have a meaningful dialogue”. His or her post is easy to find because

                                                                                                                     2 See e.g. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Anthropology and the savage slot: The poetics and politics of otherness, In: idem,

Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World, New York 2003:7-28 (first 1991); Katharina Schramm, Kommentar im Symposium „Zukunft der Ethnologie“, symposium paper published in this Allegra blog series (2014); Diane J. Austin-Broos (1998), Falling Through the ‘Savage Slot’: Postcolonial Critique and the Ethnographic Task, Australian Journal of Anthropology 9 (3): 295–309;, Laurence M. Carucci & Michèle D. Dominy (2005), Anthropology in the ‘Savage Slot’: Reflections on the Epistemology of Knowledge, Anthropological Forum 15 (3): 223–33, as well as the discussion further below.

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s/he is also the only one who used “I am”, easily put into the search function, followed by “an anthropologist”, which s/he also chooses as alias. Not only Anthropologist’s admission to have ended up on this site by coincidence, the whole style of his/her engagement, his/her concern that “There seems to be a very negative, and very misguided, understanding of what anthropology is and what academic social scientists do”, his/her sincere consternation, explicit and conciliatory readiness to be seriously open, vulnerable and caring demonstrated Anthropologist didn’t know the rules of the game, or was just too trapped in his/her internalised version of humanity to join the playfully raving maenad horde intoxicated by hallucinations of importance and power.

If this was an attempt at participant observation, it thoroughly failed. Nobody talked to Anthropologist in any way, let alone on his/her wavelength, in spite of his/her efforts to demonstrate relevance and belonging to the useful part of North America’s human population. In this context, it was painful to read, even if –or maybe indeed because– it sounded so familiar, as if Anthropologist had written it, first in a somehow official, than in a tangibly apologetic tone, for another of his/her kind.

“My own research focus is in North American archaeology. I work to protect cultural resources in the United States, to involve the public directly in the conservation of the past, and to understand our history and the history of Native peoples on this continent. I study how past peoples interacted with and modified their natural environments, and I try to find ways to apply that knowledge of the past to contemporary environmental issues. Ultimately, I hope this sort of work can improve our environment, our country and our larger world. I realize, of course, that such is not always the case.

I work multiple jobs. Most of my research time is unpaid. In fact, I often pay out of pocket to travel, to engage in research, and to share that research with the public. Working for twelve plus hours a day is not uncommon for me. I get by, but I'm certainly not ever going to get rich at this. I live in an apartment. I don't own any property other than an eight year old car. I do this because I love it and because I think my work can help people. I think this includes people like those of you in the comments who take issue with my discipline, or who think that I should be "destroyed."”

I think these are all issues we are familiar with. But apparently nobody in the crowd of non-anthropologist ‘normal people’ cared a fig about ‘protecting cultural resources’, the ‘conservation of the past’, ‘understanding history’, ‘Native peoples’, how they or anyone else ‘modified their natural environments’, or about ‘contemporary environmental issues’, or about the honest admission that intended improvements do not always work out.

The only post of ‘the opposing side’ that could be read as something like an engagement says:

“# Both of my grandchildren went to a local community college. One is an RN(CICU) and the other has an AA in computer science and a string of computer certifications. Both are making 70+K per year. Screw four year universities, whose graduates can not find a job, and have a boat load of debt. OBTW, neither of the two had to listen to left wing indoctrination each day.”

Anthropologist was clearly an outsider.

I remember that back in elementary, I was already entertaining interests similar to those of Anthropologist, and that this made me an outsider, too. That was hurting at times but ultimately not a stringent correlation and, for me, worth the price. Things got considerably better in high school and really great studying anthropology in college, i.e. at Leipzig University. Later on I switched to history and philosophy but although that was very exciting too, I never felt as much at home there and never developed that kind of community life I enjoyed with my anthropologist peers.

However, from a bird’s eye view, the stages of increasing social and intellectual satisfaction were accompanied by something we could call ‘socio-cultural seclusion’. Though fortunate enough to be part of a lively and professionally mixed mainly Latino+German circle of friends plus an exuberant

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social live along friendship networks, almost everyone was a college student, most of them from social sciences and humanities (plus a good number in medicine), and especially the times I was a student or junior scholar at the Institute saw anthropologists making up a huge faction. Almost everyone was basically ‘leftist’, although on different and normally rather ‘moderate’ levels.

Relevance of interests and activities was not much of an issue where the common ground was so solid and so widely shared, and independent of financial issues. Our ‘objective’ economic ‘marginality’ and relative income ‘poverty’ did not bother us very much as the wealth of the country and its remarkably reliable system of resource redistribution and social security gave us a feeling of safety and comfort, in spite of the fact that 10% of the German population own over 2/3 of all net capital but 60% own only 1%3. We were content with the hope that our coming degrees would provide for a reasonable income later on.

However, I can relate very well to Anthropologist’s somewhat ‘romantic’ and ‘heroic’ revelations; ‘romantic’ because they emphasise the importance of ‘what is good and right’ (and might, as Julia Eckert describes this academic species in the little blog series at hand, secretly want to “save the World” [at least a bit] and / or its proverbial Wretched [or at least some of them]), in an arguably somewhat naïve manner, and ‘heroic’ because they underline -very much in contrast to the obstreperously romping and impertinently griping lot of rightists around him and their “nasty, brutish” (Hobbes) ‘savage’ redneck demeanour- his/her readiness to sacrifice chances of personal material gain for these higher goods, a kind of rebel stand. What he describes is very much how I myself survived over the last twenty years, i.e. half of my life, and enjoyed my freedom to follow intellectual interests and existentialist convictions and do what I most ardently wanted to do. I am well aware that this makes me part of an economically marginal cultural minority which others, including former class mates from elementary, are likely to see, at least at its present stage, as a kind of failure, and that what I am doing, as an anthropologist with special interests in some remote parts of Africa, patterns of collective violence and pagan religions, must look utterly exotic to most people.

Does that mean that I am “useless”? I don’t think so. I know how much expertise and capacities I have accumulated over the years, and that they are quite specialised does, in my view, not diminish their value. On the contrary, one of the great things I enjoy most about the extremely complex global society in which we live is how you can go for a very individual path, be it through urban jungles or outback remoteness, and be very relevant not in spite but because of the extreme specialisation your self-determined choices have given you. And I care precious little about what malignities a random bunch of chauvinist jerks on desktop mad rush have in store about it.

Some people might say I am omitting a maybe important detail: that all the ranting and sputter was about the threatened boycott ‘on Israel’ (whatever that might mean). Well, I don’t think so. Very little of it referred actually to Israel or that part of the article, instead most of it was bulging and blazing with apparent hatred against everything ‘leftist’, ‘intellectual’, especially ‘anthropologist’, and to encore with: Afro-American (look it up). Apart from that, no-one ever cared that most anthropologists (some 90%) at the AAA conference, including ourselves, had not even attended (or been aware of) the meeting.

Personally, I only learned about the whole boycott drama in the taxi from the conference back to Washington airport, which I shared with the friend on the photo, another friend and colleague from home and an anthropologist from Israel who brought our attention to the matter. For most of the five days conference I had struggled with a long-term chronic lack of sleep, a consequently fierce and stubborn flu blocking my ears and concerns of our upcoming panel on the rapidly worsening plight of

                                                                                                                     3 See e.g. ver.di TV 2013. “umFAIRteilen: Wie wird man Reich? Vermögensverteilung in Deutschland“.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLl43qbSk_w&feature=youtube_gdata_player.

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‘our people’ in our (neighbouring) field(s). (We were a group of friends and colleagues all based at the Max-Planck Institute (MPI) for Social Anthropology in Halle / Saale, Germany, reporting, analysing and rebelling against the evolving fate of people we know and feel close to, an emerging tragedy reminding remarkably of the fabulous Pandora scenario of Avatar (2009), with the important difference that the here contested Unobtanium, fertile irrigable land, isn’t actually rare4 and that our weapons are purely discursive, a tragedy of people who for many others, including the Daily Caller website zealots of political ethnocentrism and direct opponents in the part of Africa we all study, are ‘primitive, savage, backward tribes in need of socio-cultural re-engineering to become useful inhabitants of the planet, or to at least get out of the way for more useful ones’. Thus, all thoroughly irrelevant.)

So, already handicapped by all these factors, I had lost hours skimming the 600+ pages of the printed program for personal highlights, sometimes missing the session because I had to examine the descriptions of too many parallel sessions, and I remember to have seen something with “Israel”, “Palestine” and possible “boycott”, three keywords which, especially in their combination, immediately triggered the automatic skip function that had evolved over the years in reaction to the experienced near-impossibility of participating in public discourses on that topic without being immediately dragged into a labyrinth of accusations and counter-accusations, suspicions and counter-suspicions where attempts at balanced, well-meaning discussion get irreparably poisoned with extremist partisan stereotypes. So there was no way I would lose precious time on a lost cause like that while there were so many much more appealing topics around and so much I could do furthering my personal research and ‘activist’ agenda, i.e. the cause we presently care for most. I know it was similar for my friend on the photo and very possibly for many of the over 6000 participants of that conference, of which a vast –and perhaps less biased– majority had not come to the voting session.

So when our Israeli friend alerted us on our way back home about the ‘boycott meeting’, we were so unaware that, although she was visibly irritated by the incident, I expected, coming from Germany where that was the by far most likely outcome, a clear vote against a boycott, and had not understood that it might have come the other way round. If the vote was however indeed as reported in the article (which I first seriously doubted), this vote in favour of anthropologists boycotting Israeli academia was, in my view, something extremely stupid to do if mounting pressure against unjust and unhelpful practices was the aim of it.

As our Israeli anthropologist friend reminded us, with that carrying coal to Newcastle, the immediate victims of the boycott would be Israeli anthropologists, who in their vast majority are critical of possible hard-line, populist or reckless Israeli government policies themselves and so certainly not among the darlings of ruling and system-sustaining hawks. But not only is collectively boycotting Israeli academics of our discipline in the name of fighting injustice like shooting at friends, it remains absolutely unclear what good it could possibly do instead of being a silly invitation for all kinds of predictable stereotypic suspicions and accusations.

                                                                                                                     4 See e.g. Bertram Zagema, Land and Power: The growing scandal surrounding the new wave of investments in land.

Oxfam Briefing Paper n° 151 (2011) http://www.oxfam.org/en/grow/research/land-and-power.; Human Rights Watch, “What Will Happen If Hunger Comes?” Abuses against the Indigenous Peoples of Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley. (2012) http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/ethiopia0612webwcover.pdf.; Oakland Institute, Development Aid to Ethiopia: Overlooking Violence, Marginalization, and Political Repression. (2013) http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/development-aid-ethiopia.; Jon Abbink, Kelly Askew, Dereje Feyissa, Elliot Fratkin, Christina Gabbert, John Galaty, Shauna LaTosky, Jean Lydall, Hussein A. Mahmoud, Giannēs Markakēs, Lands of the Future: Transforming Pastoral Lands and Livelihoods in Eastern Africa, ed. Günther Schlee, Ivo Strecker, David Turton, Halle (Saale) 2014 http://www.eth.mpg.de/cms/en/publications/working_papers/wp0154.html.; The Guardian, Where’s the Evidence That Land Grabs Are Good for Economic Progress?, 2014.11.04. http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2014/nov/04/land-grabs-rights-economic-development.

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But this is not the kind of dilemma I want to address here. It would require a different article that I am not inclined to invest in, due to the mentioned conditions around the topic. The only connection I will draw is the fact that, on both sides of the widely ideological discursive conflict around Israel and Palestine, as in the similarly constructed virtual conflict between of the supposed entities “Islam” and “The West”, self-styled opponents denounce the respective Other as savage in a (although not the only) sense in which I want to use this metaphorical term here, too: as discontent of ‘true humanity’, something or someone outside (or rebelling against) the ‘right’, ‘useful’ and ‘conducive’ order of things, hard to control, dangerous, driven by passion, ‘wild’, the very epitome of The Other.

On that note, I want to return to topics closer to my main points in this paper and away from known swamps of unhealthy polemics, as this is –including in the case of the quoted right-winger shitstorm– not about Israel5.

So now: Is there something rotten in the state of Anthropology?, as an anthropological Hamlet might ask… Two apologies: (1) I will have to come back to this question later. And (2): This is not only a blog but also a stub. I conceptualised and wrote it in 7 days and nights and had to leave many of the details, thoughts and figures I intended to use to ‘make it round’ for later redrafts. It is therefore more fragmentary and sketchy than it would have been with more time to perfect it. I decided to release it anyway to not miss out the chance of ‘giving light’ (dar luz6), as devotees of Afro-Cuban religion say, to some thoughts I thought might be pertinent in the context of the centenary of Leipzig and German university anthropology to which this little series of papers is dedicated.

The set of figures and metaphors

A century ago, in 1914, a year marking the beginning of a German tragedy, the first anthropological institute of a German university was founded in Leipzig. Under the impression of this synchronicity, its first chairman, Karl Weule, wrote his magnum opus Der Krieg in den Tiefen der Menschheit. No English version of that book has ever been published but its title would translate as something like “War in the Depths of Humanity”. I will borrow this image from him to twist and squeeze it, as post-modernism demands, although perhaps not in a style from amongst the most popular in deconstructivism.

At the centenary symposium on “The Future of Anthropology”, one contributor, Prof. Julia Eckert of the University of Bern, Switzerland, who had, alongside the present chair of the celebrating institute, been working and living for years in the wider Leipzig area, gave a paper, “The Birth of Anthropology from the Spirit of Tragedy” (above in this thread of blog papers), with this title neatly closing an emerging semantic circle. A third friend and colleague from that socio-spatial context, Andrea Behrends, introduced her long-time theme of Travelling Models with a reflection on research as collaborative endeavour, and the discussant of the tetralogy of symposium papers, Katharina Schramm, a fourth friend, added the images of the Savage Slot7 and the Belly of the Beast to summarise the suggested perspectives on past and future of anthropology in Leipzig, Germany and elsewhere.

                                                                                                                     5 I predict those who disagree will be those for who everything is about “Israel” or “the Jews” or “the Jewish Question”,

thus making their reactions liberatingly predictable. 6 Not confuse with, but related to, dar a luz, which is a rather conventional expression for “give birth to”. 7 As one might note, the first chair of Leipzig Anthropology of the communist era, Julius Lips, with his name happening

to form a strange coincidence with the city name’s own etymology from Slavonic Lipsko for Place of Linden Trees, was the first to introduce The Savage as distancing term into its academic history with his bestseller The Savage Hits Back (see below).

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I take the liberty of seizing these and adding some other metaphors, and in the following lines I will introduce them as a set of motives and characters. In concord with the vast current of constructivist epistemology that has long come to dominate socio-cultural anthropology, I use them, as flexible, multidimensional and polyvalent symbols semiotically constituted by their interrelations, for my own brief reflection on the state of anthropology and the virtues and dilemmas of some of its directions.

The curtain rises. There is Tragedy, giving birth to something, borrowed from Nietzsche, the contradictory metaphorist from the Leipzig countryside. With “Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik” (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music), first published in 1872, a century before my birth, he departs from scientific philology and theology in Bonn and goes to Leipzig to become one of the most sophisticated, celebrated and notorious philosophical gadflies. He uses art and mythology of Greek Antiquity, a hugely popular Travelling Theme in ‘the Western World’ by the time, to reflect about the inner strife characterising the human condition between the demands of sober reason here and deep-rooted passions and desires there, Apollo and Dionysus. He depicts Ancient Greek society as a world full of fierce and desperate wars between selfish rulers, collectives and individuals in need of both unrelenting will and balanced reflection to succeed and survive. The Human Being, in the cloak of the Greek, sketched out in an ontology revolving around a dialectic dichotomy, is portrayed as in need of an intensive interplay of the two that energises art, thought and life and is able to transcend pessimism and nihilism in the face of the injustices, cruelties and absurdities with which the human world is infested. I will hold here that this necessity, epitomised by The Philosopher and The Savage, applies to Anthropology as much.

Julia Eckert invokes Nietzsche’s title in her paper, with Anthropology as Tragedy’s child. In English, Tragedy has no gender, in German it is female. And as Tragedy is not only the unintended outcome of a cacophonic multitude of contrasting intentions but something unfortunate producing suffering, and because the intended expression of Suffering (which could be seen both as child and parent of Tragedy) is in many cultures assigned to female gender8 while the males, who are often the culprits causing the pain, are expected to avoid expressing affectedness, that association seems fitting.9 To remain in the picture, we have to ask for the father. With Nietzsche’s title as puerperium, we have actually two fathers. Is either only Apollo or only Dionysus the progenitor? Or do we deal with one of the contra-conventional turns mythologies are generally famous for and it was, as Nietzsche claims, their interplay, a dialectical miracle of conception?

Be that as it may, another figure, The Beast, is adapted from Katharina Schramm’s paper. We can also call it “The Great Beast” and understand it, probably, roughly, as representing what preceding generations used to call “The System”, or “(Global) Capitalism”, or something in that direction. In German, System is of neutral gender, and for many Great Beasts of human mythology the gender is also unclear or unimportant. If we use it to play The State, we can call it more specifically The Leviathan, and if it is about The People or The Masses or The Society, we can as well call it Behemoth10, like the somewhat less familiar journal*.

Then we have, from the first metaphor, the child, Anthropology, so far a less familiar name as well, one overflowing century young, which would be female in German, but which we just convert into The Anthropologist, gender unknown or unimportant. As The Anthropologist is our central theme here, I shouldn’t forestall myself to forestall the market by defining what or how (s)he is. At this point it might be conducive to borrow from Geertz’s approach to ‘human nature’ as to a great extent

                                                                                                                     8 A beautiful portrait of one such case is Benedicte Grima’ “The Performance of Emotion among Paxtun Women: “The

Misfortunes Which Have Befallen Me.””, Oxford etc. 2004. 9 See e.g. the contributions of Glatzer and Orywal in E. Orywal, A. Rao & M. Bollig, eds. “Krieg und Kampf: Die Gewalt

in unseren Ko ̈pfen“, Berlin 1996. 10 This figure from Thomas Hobbes’ mythological ontology was, by the way, the dissertation subject of Julius Lips, the

first chairman of the Institute after the fall of Nazism, i.e. under ‘Communist’ rule.

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constituted by its very diversity. And a central part of this play is the changing role and appearance, air and nature of The Anthropologist under changing circumstances but also under the differential influence of contrasting choices.

Talking about figures like The Anthropologist implies a level of abstraction that reduces the practically unlimited empirical diversity to a small set of ideal-typical models, not dissimilar to other kinds of models. From Andrea Behrends, who applies it mainly to forms of organisation, I want to borrow The Travelling Model, which provides us with a ready second sense*, The Travelling Super-Model, whose kin affiliation is yet unclear, but which we could expect to be offspring of the Great Beast, itself very much defined by –and thus ‘child of’– structures of organisation, as the semantic realm of The Beastly Family with their Leviathans and Behemoths includes a range of plausible parents known to have created that kind of progeny. As the characteristics of the Travelling Model are both its renown beauty, which qualifies it as model, carrying Tragedy as Beauty’s seed, and its flexibility, which allows it to abruptly change its appearance, its strategies of evoking liking and favour11, we can see it as shapeshifter, producing The Avatar as specific and temporal shape.

The Avatar is thus both the local embodiment of The Model and a new model of structure and action in itself. It can be both a devoted agent of the Beastly Model (interpreted as Divine Model by its devotees) or an agent or traveller, e.g. an Anthropologist or adventurer, gone native, Rebel against the (Brave New) Model Order of the Beast. Taking a diversitist approach to the semantic spectre around the notion of The Avatar, we should include as much the Indo-Aryan origin with Sanskrit avatára, “descent” as incarnation, descending from the spiritual realm of ideal being(s) into the world of limitation and difference; its 1985 introduction into the world of computer games through Quest of the Avatar12 and the following proliferation into the mother world of IT and contemporary media as virtual representation of the self (in this text also of The Model) in the world wide web’s mega-play of masks; as well as the block busting romantic 2009 movie saga that formed the understanding of the notion for millions across the globe, with figures and plots centring around The Savage, The Beast, The Rebel, Tragedy and, I would say, The Anthropologist.

There was no epiphany emerging when I read Patrick Eisenlohr’s text but I want to use his extensive excurse into linguistic philosophy to conjure up The Philosopher, son of head-born Minerva, the virgin patron of the arts, schools and commerce. Like Minerva’s owls, which in many cultures are the night bodies of witches, The Philosopher takes off for spirit flights at dusk and so naturally transforms into The Vampire, not least because that figure has recently pest-like proliferated in the tele-visionary branch of the entertainment industry13. It lives of the notional blood of its victims and transforms it into the beauty of its flight, the fascinosum of its rapacious power and the tremendum of the eternal threat of its attacks. As the Philosopher is a bow-wielding Apollo, a shining sun of intellect, he is a stone-hard nationalist of the realm of (a specific kind of) Reason, a royalist of its kingdom, hard-headed in its calculations and ready to go to war for The Realm (which is in fact an Avatar of The Beast or The Model) if they add up. Clad into an Apollonian aura, this Knight in Shining Armour has banned his (or her) Dionysian nature into his (or her) Mr. Hyde, The Vampire, going about its bloody business under the cover of expressional darkness and magical shape shifting.

Finally, from somewhere, no-one knows from where, as is often the case with tricksters, pixies and witches, Providence (female in German) came into play; and so far I have no idea what it will do.

                                                                                                                     11 A field of topics I discussed, using the trans-Atlantic Yoruba deity Olòkun, in „Die Macht der Schönheit – mythische

Ästhetik und Moderne“ in B. Streck & M. Münzel, eds., Ästhetik und Religion, Marburg 2007, to do already the indispensable self-promotion.

12 “Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar” by Origin Systems (Richard Garriott, Ken Arnold, Seiji Toda. 13 See the pertinent websites offering streams of block-busting Anglophone shows in the net.

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German Anthropology - The Philosopher, the Savage & the Beast

In my experience as well as in a common cliché, Germans have a very particular relationship with their ethnic identity. There is always this shadow lurking behind a collective past ‘we’ can’t somehow get rid of. “We”, as in “our tribe as a community of generations”, have painted a picture so dark of what humanity is capable of on the walls of global public memory that everyone, including ourselves, cannot uncouple it from the cloud of associations swirling around that picture when you name this “ethnic” We. The core of its darkness is the escalation of asserted difference into a lethal idea, a tool of mass murder and dehumanisation. It is the war pole of the human universe, the abyss of indifference towards the suffering of The Other that we find in all times but rarely as concentrated in an elaborated idea, a sophisticated cataclysm model, the Apollonian armour of a giant predatory industrial Beast. There are whole movements defending the uniqueness of this horrific episode as historical phenomenon against any attempt to relate it to other historical and contemporary occurrences, and most of their zealots are themselves Germans. And yet, thrown into ‘being German’ by Providence, in most things I see myself more different from most Germans than from a number of non-Germans I know, and the other way round.

Anthropology is the science of human unity and difference. Given that images of “Germans” have come to symbolise the eerie Gewalt (German for both “power” and “violence”) of ‘ethnic’ identification as ethical paradigm all over the world, could that give anthropology in Germany –here often identified as Ethnologie– a special significance?

It is difficult to find this as prominent theme before the historical watershed of the World Wars, e.g. at its academic roots in the 18th century, the “Enlightenment Age”. However, we find strong correlations with Nietzsche’s dichotomist mytho-ontology (or metaphysics) of society. If anthropology in a more narrow sense started in Germany with Herder (1744-1803), as is often held, it might be seen like an omen that his two most renown teachers represented opposed sides of the theoretical battle lines of the day: Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), towering as maybe the most brilliant and powerful protagonist of the idea of enlightenment and the cult of Reason, and, today nearly forgotten in the transnational discourse, Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788), one of their by then most remarkable critics.

Kant had perfected the sublation of Christianity in rationalist ethics and made most of the important points constructivist approaches would from then on, but especially in the 20th century, inject time and again into academic discourses, all during an extensive lifetime of walking up and down the esplanades of Königsberg and drinking tea by the clock. Hamann, a man of letters from Eastern Prussia like Kant, received his enlightenment as epiphany moment when he had a nervous breakdown in the streets of London at his first visit to the time’s Capital of the World, Beacon and Headquarters of Progress. It was a revelation of the abyss of human misery and the fundamental uncertainty of all existence. It debunked the pretentiousness of the high priests of the belief in ultimate rational certainty about the things of the world and exposed the self-delusion of their devotees. It rescinded the modernist assumption of the measurability and reliable systematic conception of the cosmos, of history and the human being, as well as the Endsieg (final victory) of Reason over all Ills after a successful intellectual and social engineering war on them. He found the mystery of understanding and hope in the Sacred Suffering of the Crucified God under the cobbles of his time.

While Kant lays out the structurally limited, but within these limits practically unlimited, potential of the human being to organise his world as perfect as possible, Hamann draws our attention into the oceans of ignorance in which the individual is condemned to swim, the existential uncertainty that

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constantly engulfs us, the Persephone of the Hades of Suffering14, the explanation-proof mysteries of this world, the dependence of the human being on its sensations, passions and imaginations. Both Kant’s incredible Apollonian construction and Hamann’s Dionysian proto-existentialist philosophy were humanist in the sense that they placed the focus of attention on an anonymous, culturally apparently neutral but of course contextual image of the human being as an individual.15 Herder, as the first Anthropologist, drew attention to the ordered diversity of human world views, understandings, approaches and conceptions.

As my post-socialist teachers of anthropology at the institute in Leipzig reminded us in my first year, the first outright ‘leftist’ of the discipline in Germany was Georg Forster (1754–1794)16. Born in the countryside near Kant’s and Hamann’s Prussia as son of a scientist-cleric, he did his first fieldwork as a child in the Asian fringes of Tsarist Russia, learned the language, got into conflict with the authorities and the censorship of the regime, published his first book, a lauded translation of Lomonosov's history of Russia, became a companion of James Cook in Oceania, interlocutor of Benjamin Franklin, academic role model of Alexander von Humboldt, leader of the German Jacobin Club and the Parliament of Mainz, the first modern German republic. The latter’s delegate in revolutionary Paris, he got trapped there when the troops of the Austro-Prussian counter-revolution took over. He died there shortly afterwards, ‘on the run’ as a wanted outlaw to his ethnic proto-nation’s most powerful regimes. While much of his political anthropology is close to Rousseau, he was much less protected by discursive prestige than the parallel French Avatar of The Scientific Savage and consequently became a more tragic figure.

A passionate Dionysian Rebel fighting The Beast with Apollonian ethics strengthened by compassionate and open-minded ‘field experience’ with the Savage Other, Forster’s takes a strong anti-racist and anti-evolutionist stance against the defamation of other cultures, models, societies and their humans as ‘inferior’ or marking ‘lower levels’ on an evolutionary ladder with the scholar’s respective assumed ‘nation’ or ‘(sub-) race’ at the top. This is an ethical radicalisation of Herders Diversitism carried on by over the decades growing, multiplying and increasingly blurred ‘leftist’ currents of anthropology (which in these issues have practically won the victory within the confines of the discipline, even if not at all outside it).

Its dialectical opponent is, at that time, personified by Christoph Meiners, an anti-Kantian tenured professor of “World Wisdom” and influential pioneer of “Scientific Racism”. Postulating the “polygenic” origin of human “races” from different species, indicated by the fundamental “ugliness”, “viciousness” and “animality” of the “Black Race” as opposed to the “beautiful”, “virtuous”, “sophisticated” and “sensitive” “White Race”,17 a view (likely to secure him the (more or less silent) sympathies of the commenters of the Daily Caller article) that shaped not only the approaches of the anthropologist servants of the German Beast of the World Wars period but of much of the evolutionist

                                                                                                                     14 Hamann was somewhat biased by his emotional affair with Christianity and thus in his mythological choices not

particular fond of what a Man of (his) Faith might understand as “neo-pagan” like the fashionable referrals to Ancient Greco-Roman imagery, so I apologise to his Spirit for my unwarranted bricolage.

15 In Über die verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen (On the Different Races of Man, 1775) Kant outs himself as racist attributing inferiority to Non-Europeans like his contemporary Voltaire, but this has practically no influence on the main body of his work as it simply refers to a universal ‘standard human’ as we do to today, just not in our explicitly de-racialised fashion.

16 See e.g. Martin Braun, "Nichts Menschliches soll mir fremd sein" : Georg Forster und die frühe deutsche Völkerkunde vor dem Hintergrund der klassischen Kulturwissenschaften, Bonn 1991; Thomas P. Saine, Georg Forster, New York 1972; W. Schmied-Kowarzik, Georg Forster, Kassel 1988; Hans Hübner, ed., Georg Forster (1754 - 1794): Ein Leben für den wissenschaftlichen und politischen Fortschritt, Halle (Saale) 1981.

17 See e.g. Christoph Meiners, „Untersuchungen über die Verschiedenheiten der Menschennaturen (die Verschiedenen Menschenarten) in Asien und den Südländern, in den Ostindischen und Südseeinseln. Nebst einer historischen Vergleichung der vormahligen und gegenwärtigen Bewohner dieser Continente und Eylande“, Tübingen 1811; idem. “Ueber die Natur der afrikanischen Neger und die davon abhangende Befreyung oder Einschränkung der Schwarzen“, Hannover 1997; Sabine Vetter, „Wissenschaftlicher Reduktionismus und die Rassentheorie von Christoph Meiners“, Aachen 1996;

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mainstream of the long heyday of colonialism that could only be forced into academic hiding with its repugnant exposure in the “scientifically” sacralised atrocities of fascism. In this radicalisation of Hobbesian Beast cults, we, as today’s leftist ‘good guy’-anthropologists and unacknowledged romantics on the sly, find our negative other, the Evil Avatar of ‘savage’ beasts of our evolutionary past.

With this double breakout of violence into visibility as string-puller of ostentatious intellectual aggressiveness and overawing (Imponierverhalten), we return to Gewalt and War as themes and arrive at a point where the landscape of German anthropology becomes too wide to be sketched out in such archetypifying fashion and thus prompts us to choose, as looking glass in which we can catch sight of Avatars of the mentioned ‘original’ Models, a specific site, in this case of course Leipzig. I had extensive looks into it over the course of its last era (1994-2012) and glimpses of both the period preceding and the one succeeding it, as well as the opportunity to benefit from the work of researchers here who spent years examining and reviewing the earlier past18. And as this year’s centenary makes, again, Leipzig the oldest anthropology department in Germany, a speedy –and so necessarily ‘impressionist’– tour through its history seems fair, an exercise the papers by Katja Geisenhainer and Bernhard Streck carried out on the first day of the celebrations on an incomparable level.

War against rival collectives & the tragedy of defeat

As even the maybe currently most popular hero of anthropological discourse, Bruno Latour, noted, the capitalist order is inextricably bound to growth as expansion. Yet in a world of limitedness as is our physical universe, this necessarily pits rivals for resources against each other. The war of human collectives against one another that Weule reviews for a wide range of contemporaneous and historical forms might in indeed show many traits at the roots of key dimensions where the then so-called ‘wars of the primitives’ are not so different from the war of empires that inspired his review and gave it its overtly tragic turn.

As the jubilee speeches repeatedly noted, the year of foundation of the department was the year World War 1 broke out, an event frequently dubbed a tragedy. A currently popular reading of its outbreak corresponds to the understanding of what makes a tragedy as Julia Eckert describes in her ‘future of anthropology’ symposium paper published on this blog: “dilemmas arising from the collision of irreconcilable goods, … the inescapable entanglement of contradictory actions, … pathways along which intended action produces unintended outcomes”. The mentioned popular historiographic interpretation says, conveniently for a now pacified and unifying Europe, that no-one actually wanted that war, yet contingent courses and logics of action, rooted in partly similar but in effect antagonistic figurations and orientations, brought it about anyway.

Leipzig 1 (Weule): The Anthropologist and the War of Beasts

“The capture of slaves or enslavement of prisoners of war is tied to the discovery that alien human labour can be exploited. Only a minority of peoples has made this discovery”

                                                                                                                     18 See e.g. Katja Geisenhainer, Lothar Bohrmann & Bernhard Streck, eds., „100 Jahre Institut für Ethnologie der

Universität Leipzig: Eine Anthologie seiner Vertreter“, Leipzig 2014; Uwe Wolfradt, Ethnologie und Psychologie: Die Leipziger Schule der Völkerpsychologie, Berlin 2011; Claus Deimel, ed., Auf der Suche nach Vielfalt: Ethnographie und Geographie in Leipzig, Leipzig 2009; B. Streck, ed., Ethnologie und Nationalsozialismus, Gehren 2000; some of the work of Udo Mischek, etc.

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W.E. Mühlmann, War and Peace (1940)19

The Grey Period (Èshu): moral twilight at dawn or The Imperial Anthropologist

Karl Weule, founder and exponent of Leipzig’s university anthropology of that early phase20, was not only deeply attached to the imperialist project that drew Germany and the World Powers of the day into an agon of science-powered Beasts, of Leviathans devouring millions with the unprecedented power of fully industrialised mega-states, his magnum opus was, as mentioned, a treatise on “War in the Depths of Mankind” (1916)*. It is his attempt to make sense of this new version of the apparently eternal clash of collectives in which his exemplary nation was to prove its supposed superiority against culturally inferior competitors and grab a larger portion of the world’s ‘underdeveloped’ savage lands. In his analysis, and in the national(ist) narrative he reproduces ‘scientifically’, the uppermost position of Germany in the process of civilizing evolution was confirmed by the acts of savagery of its imperialist competitors, like the British “hunger blockade” and the “Russian atrocities”, which paralleled the ‘cowardly cruelty’, ‘notorious treachery’ and unrestrained ‘lowest instincts’ of the pre-colonial savage, thus presenting an ‘evolutionary relapse’ of the nations with weaker foundations of cultural advancement.21 That sounds like an Avatar in the line of Meiners but is a so significantly moderated that it was much easier to digest and in principle not incompatible with Kant and Herder, especially as the Critique of Reason had stopped at assumptions about the Savage Other for which matching rigour in the pursuit of empirical evidence, in the awareness of one’s limits of knowledge and understanding (which Hamann was preaching against scholarly hubris), and in analysis at a level Kant reached in other fields was not mustered. . Weule was not to change course for the lesson of his time. He just found himself, astonished, on the losing side, the one his ideology would have attributed to ‘the weaker nation’ or ‘culture’ or Model and had to make sense of this contradiction to his nationalist complacency turned academic stance.

More than the years after the failed revolutions of the 19th century, those that followed the shock of (for some) embarrassing failure in the 1910s shattered Germany’s ethno-nationalist self-certainty. Deprived of the chance of demonstrating asserted capacities of modernising transformation of ‘backward’ lands and people (which it had demonstrated with a vigour including genocide as tool of ‘social engineering’ in its Africa colonies), science became a field for compensatory assertiveness of a supposed ‘defeated nation’, itself now stained with accusations of savagery (not because of the genocides against Non-Europeans, which other ‘civilised’ nations had as well committed without losing status, but because of the new weapons used in the trenches of the western front) in this war of the giants, the Global Mega-Beasts fighting for the purported Place in the Sun. Two decades later, a catastrophic crisis of the global capitalist system triggered an even more disastrous and atrocious outbreak of destructiveness, an even greater tragedy in which Germany outpaced all other Beasts in the predatory production of horror and the shamelessness of its official justifications, unmistakeably the most radical (and for some obviously convenient) further development of Avatar Meiners’ tenets.

Until that point, there had been a widely shared consensus underneath the propaganda wars of the imperialist foes upon which all their self-images were founded and in which the work of Weule and most of his colleagues on both sides of the trenches remained embedded. Informed both by the particularistic approach of Friedrich Ratzel’s anthropo-geography and the dominant evolutionist view of the time on the historic unity of humanity, Weule saw German anthropology as contribution of a

                                                                                                                     19 „Krieg und Frieden: Ein Leitfaden der politischen Ethnologie“, Heidelberg 1940, p.109 (translation IE) 20 See e.g. Uwe Wolfradt, Ethnologie und Psychologie: Die Leipziger Schule der Völkerpsychologie, Berlin 2011, or the

contributions in Geisenhainer et al 2014. 21 For a discussion of this in the trans-national context of anthropologist entanglement with wars of their own time and

societies in B. Streck, Ethnologie in den Kriegen des 20. Jahrhunderts, in „Krieg und Frieden  : Ethnologische Perspektiven“, ed. by Peter J. Bräunlein and Andrea Lauser, Bremen 1995:1–10.

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talented and reputed nation (still free from the stigma of incarnate collective evil with which the next war would brand it) to the systematic exploration and ordering analysis of mankind’s amazingly diverse past and present. In his attitude he represents most of contemporaneous anthropology’s self-perception, independent from national affiliation, as servants of the honourable and indeed sacred project of diligently and objectively recording and reviewing the facts making up this world and its history, but with that task ultimately serving the dignified reformation of the reviewed human diversity by the ‘leading civilisations’, i.e. the ‘white man’s burden’.

At the other end of the intellectual spectre, authors had long started challenging this narrative by associating humanity’s development from “primitive” and “savage” to our supposed ‘heights’ of civilisation with a process of corruption and alienation, as Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality of 1754 or the German Romantics of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, or with a dialectical journey through a long historic vale of tears, departing from the original communism of early man’s grass-roots democracy and finally, with the ultimate collapse of the oppressive and exploitative class orders at their climax in the modern imperialist project, evolving into the science-powered resurrection of communism as the order of equality, justice and self-fulfilment that matches the temporarily misled, submerged and enchained yet indestructible positive essence of the human condition.

Micro-Play: The Anthropologist missing his chance to meet the Savage

Imagine The Anthropologist is a venerable man of letters from the upper middle class, from a moderately conservative political background and, like many others of that social faction, ‘national’ or ‘patriot’ in his approach to the position of his country in the world of late imperialism. Embedded in a nation in the fast lane of economic development, scientific and technical progress, a nation of laureates in all fields of culture and of a remarkably efficient social organisation, he feels his country, re-united too late to be among the shock troops of colonial partition of the world, is constantly demonstrating that it is capable of, and deserves to, play a more prominent part in the development of humanity’s now quasi fully globalised political world.

Knowing the Savage is a necessary task for the Great Nations, the Noble Oligarchy of Steam-Powered Beasts, and anthropologists have proven time and again that they are the right crew to accomplish this task for The Nation as their Sacred King.

Now there are opposed perspectives. Strong currents among the emerging movements of social democracy and communism proclaim analyses declaring the War of Nations giant predatory diversions from the actual War fought in the depths of Mankind, The War of Classes. The declamatory ‘national idea’ is a trick to rally masses with actually converging interests against each other –for the sake of political, economic and social profiteers and their emergent oligarchies– into wars for shares in the gains from systematic exploitation and oppression. These movements find articulate voices like the ‘left-wing’ socialist Karl Liebknecht, a son of and student in Leipzig, the only German MP to oppose the decision in favour of the impending war in parliament and in spite of persecution its undeviating objector, later co-founder of the first German communist party, and ‘finally’ tortured and assassinated, together with Rosa Luxemburg, by militarist ultras.22

For Marx and his intellectual heirs, the Savage, the Rebel and the Suffering Slave, the oppressed, disenfranchised and exploited of all nations, all continents and all cultures are on the same side: they

                                                                                                                     22 His place in the political genealogies of the country is probably the reason why even to date; with Leipzig’s main pub

mile and shopping boulevard continuing to carry his name, the state TV (ARD) news remind of the recent 95th anniversary of this event yet doesn’t call that political crime by its name but instead just talks of “killing”, as if one cannot really be sure if it was right or not to torture and kill Rosa and Karl. They should read her letter from prison where she describes the silent suffering of a water buffalo absorbing a rain of ‘(in)humanly’ cruel blows in front of her cell’s window – or stop duplicitously quoting her “Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters”.

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are the prey and, therefore, the natural opponents of the Beast. They are, thus, allies. They should support each other in defeating the enemy.

Anthropologists of the ‘Karl Weule type’, however, don’t fall for calls from outlawed corners of society. They feel assured in their stance by the concurrence with the vast organisation of authority and power that has made and kept The Nation strong, self-confident and daring. The suspicion is: there might be truth to the allegation that those noisy Gadflies are unscrupulous agents of destruction, revolution and anarchy, which will ultimately favour the (external) Enemies of the Nation, to which they therefore belong, thereby externalising themselves, i.e. separating from the (healthy) Body and becoming noxious elements. The constitution of the Body, the ruling order is justified by its success and the wide consensus it enjoys. While rebels are vermin, the savages are potentially useful parts of mankind; given careful exploration and integration they are generally capable of doing an important job in the process of progress that sees the Empire of Man tap more and more of the abundance of dormant resources.

The Tragedy of this scenario is not only that intentional bias of perspective rooted in both arrogance and self-serving hierarchicist ideology that prompts Weules to act as soldiers in a War which will, unexpectedly, convert them into losers of history, it is also the incapacity of intelligent and highly educated Men of Science to adequately appraise the merits of the perspective of their ideological opponents, and to conceive and (not least emotionally) realise the dimension of both victimhood and shared, equal humanity with The Savage and The Rebel. Without truly looking for that brilliance of capacity and knowledge we find in people (and their achievements) from cultural worlds ‘very far’ from our own if we come close enough while slowly entering these fuzzy spheres, without sincerely and persistently making that effort we will not see any of this. And then it remains easy to be condescending.

The colonial era, as much as it is rightfully accused of a sea of abuses, breathtaking arrogance and predatory selfishness, gave, nevertheless, birth to an unprecedented boom of knowledge production on (and management of) the patterned diversity of mankind and the vast discontents of the orders of the imperial Beasts. The Savage emerged as exactly that: the unintegrated human material, the not GDP producing kind of mankind. That astonishing diversity and expanse of otherness emanated, however, at least to those confronting it most intensively and holistically, as a tremendous power of fascination. It fuelled the work of many generations of scholars and led to the sprouting and blossoming of hosts of directions of the emerging discipline of anthropology.

After Weule’s death in 1926, with the intermezzo of Fritz Krause* as chairholder, a different attempt of ‘liberating re-direction’ had a brief guest performance as spiritus loci. A diligent ethnographer, he challenged the evolutionist narrative as corrupted by false certainty and unscientific tendentiousness. Somehow reflecting the political and cultural liber(alis)ation of the decade, a decade as ‘roaring’ in Germany as anywhere, he took up the cudgels for a plurality of developments (plural) as the unique and unforeseeable evolutions (plural) of cultures and peoples. However, those cudgels retreated quickly into the locker when a mighty tide of pseudo-scientific identity politics rose in German society, using an understanding of ethnicity echoing (transnationally popular) contemporaneous syntheses of cultural, physical and evolutionary anthropology to manipulate the country into the abyss that became its most memorable turn of eras.

Leipzig 2 (Reche): The Beast as Providence or Anthropology searching for the Super-Model (alias Anthropologist Idol)

“Illness, as potential death, does not concern only the person’s individual destiny, but also the future of the community. That is why the therapeutic undertaking aims, beyond curing the sick, at

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protecting the society, and this is also why the medical act, by the theory of illness that it implies and puts into effect, is an essentially religious practice.”

Pierre Clastres, Archeology of Violence, New York 1992 (1980):62

The Black Period (Ogún): electric light in the nightmare or The National Anthropologist

As the new chairholder, the anatomist Otto Reche, who changed the name of the department first into “anthropological-ethnological” and 1933 into “Institut für Rassen- und Völkerkunde”, thus establishing the paradigmatic merger of race and ethnicity right into the label of the institution, became the local exponent of this spirit.23 “Criminal biology”, “racial hygiene” and “eugenics” echo what (some of our Daily Caller readers like to play with and) we use to decouple and dissociate from our collective selves and identifications by calling it “barbarity”, while it was and is nothing less than the culmination of the common Western self-conception as supreme part of humanity.

Some of the social anthropology of the colonial era was directly serving the beast, assisting in the submission of additional human ‘material’ under the exploitation by the oligarchies of the imperial powers, the big business, politics and administration interwoven into a self-serving hierarchical system of Holders of Sway, giving academia a position as, at least in its higher ranks, culturally rewarded, economically privileged and politically protected auxiliary force in the intermediate strata of an apparatus geared to maintain class rule at home and abroad. Even today, participation in reformatory projects, as good as their intentions may be, means anthropologists may serve a system that permanently reproduces power structures perpetuating inequality and exploitation. We do, however, measure our choices of support or dissent in regard to policies, strategies and their visible results against a different code of acceptability.

This was, generally speaking, also true for anthropology in fascism. There we find apparently the highest levels of support for views that we will have to unmitigatedly reject, both on empirical and on ethical grounds, and for practices like systematic mass killing as ‘scientifically advisable’ (eugenics, ‘scientific’ racism etc.), justified by the alleged ‘inferior quality’ of the human material. This inferiority was defined as of physical nature, regardless if referring to the handicapped, ‘inferior races’, politically or culturally deviant, entarted, i.e. “abnormal”, including communists or any other kind of leftist, creators of “perverted” (entarted) art, or homosexuals. This Beast behaved like the incarnation of the zealous and merciless guardian of a uniform standard, set as the only possible by a political class governing the entire powerful machinery of a fully developed industrial Western mega-state, ruling through the permanent threat of violence but also very skilful and clever PR the cooperative action of tens of millions of ‘normal’ people, many of them scientists and academics. The percentage of emigrants was higher among them, many went into the fuzzy realm of ‘internal emigration’, some just riding on the time’s coat-tails, others marching, like Leipzig Anthropology’s chairman Reche, firmly onward.

If the ‘religious’ paradigm of binding for scientific activity in the belly of that kind of Beast was that inferiority in the human realm, as it was specifically defined, had in all cases to be treated as ultimately a matter of physical nature, and, forgetting about all the ethical problems, if the yardstick for this inferiority was the degree of deviance from the average of The German Nazi, an anthropologist was not only confronted with the task to explain how the inferiority of citizens of neighbouring states manifested itself physically (while there was a vast amount of physical communality with the empirical population of Germany, which made that very difficult) but also why people so much more

                                                                                                                     23 See e.g. Katja Geisenhainer, “Rasse ist Schicksal”: Otto Reche (1879 – 1966), Leipzig 2002 or idem, Rassenkunde

zwischen Metaphorik und Metatheorie - Otto Reche, In: „Ethnologie und Nationalsozialismus“, edited by Bernhard Streck, Gehren 2000:83–102.

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physically different as Africans were also to be considered inferior (and therefore destined for a serving role in the envisioned ‘Aryan World System’) but as far less harmful or dangerous than “The Jews”, which had –empirically evident– incomparably more commonalities with the raciologically constructed Aryan. Apparently, the most popular –and probably indeed most successful– strategy of dealing with this problem was not to confront it, i.e. to omit it altogether. (And that remains a key strategy for dealing with fundamental dilemmas in science to this day.)

From a number of perspectives, this does not look very ‘scientific’, but playing the scientist, dancing the scientist was achieved by ostentatiously using scientific method, something discursively constructed as “scientific method” within and beyond science; different but not entirely different from what any of us does today. This was what Reche did with the game of science as ‘auxiliary force of improvement’ in the service of the Great Beast in the Guise of Big Brother. Already by then, ‘hard science’, i.e. the kind that counts and measures, had the self-purported reputation of being the ‘more scientific’ kind of science. So measuring skulls and counting countable facts on human physique and behaviour needed to serve as interpretation material for what scientists and their patrons wanted to prove. (The problem with that, as in today’s anthropology, is not that the method as such is inherently useless but that it is always only as good as the set of questions you ask, how you interrelate them and the answers and how well you connect this with other available knowledge.) […]

Leipzig 3 (Lips & Lips): Anthropologist & Savage fighting the Beast or The dialectical Tragedy of ‘Evolution’ and Extermination –

Once through the forest / Alone I went; / To seek for nothing / My thoughts were bent. I saw in the shadow / A flower stand there / As stars it glisten'd, / As eyes 'twas fair. I sought to pluck it,--/ It gently said: / "Shall I be gather'd / Only to fade?" With all its roots / I dug it with care, / And took it home / To my garden fair. In silent corner / Soon it was set; / There grows it ever, /There blooms it yet.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Found, 1815.24

The Rosy Period (Òbba & Oyà): Morning Flowers blossoming or The Romantic Anthropologist

Deeply involved with the translation of this conception into the lethal praxis of the Third Reich, Reche and others were purged from the Institute after the war and, with Leipzig becoming part of the Soviet zone, the new communist regime brought the ethnologist Julius Lips (1895-1950), a charismatic heir of Georg Forster’s line, from his exile in the U.S. where he had had his breakthrough with the “anti-fascist propaganda bestseller” The Savage Hits Back (1937) in which he uses ironic images of The White Exploiter and Oppressor in ‘native’ art to underline the critical subversive agency of the systematically vilified colonised, i.e. of the ethnically defined subaltern of the cultural-racial kaleidoscope.25 When he died a year later, his wife acceded to the chair from him. Without

                                                                                                                     24 Im Schatten sah ich / Ein Blümchen stehn, / Wie Sterne leuchtend, / Wie Äuglein schön.

Ich wollt' es brechen, / Da sagt' es fein: / "Soll ich zum Welken / Gebrochen sein?" Ich grub's mit allen / Den Wurzeln aus, / Zum Garten trug ich's / Am hübschen Haus. Und pflanzt' es wieder / Am stillen Ort; / Nun zweigt es immer / Und blüht so fort.

25 See e.g. Ingrid Kreide Damiani (ed.), Julius Lips und die Geschichte der „Völkerkunde“, Wiesbaden 2010 or Lothar Bohrmann, Julius Lips, In: 100 Jahre Institut für Ethnologie der Universität Leipzig, edited by Katja Geisenhainer, Lothar Bohrmann, and Bemhard Streck, Leipzig 2014:125–26; or Eva Lips, Savage Symphony: A Personal Record of the Third Reich, New York 1938

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academic training, frustrating the secret service’s attempts to co-opt her and even arousing the protest of up-and-coming party zealots among the student body, her almost two decades long directorship of the “Julius-Lips-Institute for Ethnology and Comparative Sociology of Law” may seem rather surprising and might point to an extent of leeway in the academic cosmos of the time far larger than common imagination would conceive.

With Mr. and Mrs. Lips commences, chronologically, my personal relationship with Leipzig anthropology. The German edition of Julius’ ‘retaliating savage’ was in my parents’ bookshelf and one day they bought me another lastingly inspiring book authored by his wife. By that time, I had already acquired a pronounced taste for the colourful pluralistic realm of culture and history beyond the confines of our narrow industrial world with tales from across the globe, Kipling, and a multitude of historical novels. Now this book, “Sie alle heißen Indianer”, “All of them are called Indians”, described with both a pleasant narrative flow and passion for well-researched detail the astonishing socio-cultural diversity and wealth as well as the tragic fate of the First Nations of North America. And its painted illustrations were of such overwhelming romantic beauty that they enchanted my heart forever. Their seeds opened, their wistful force took root in me and my silent corners, and they continue sprouting, growing and flowering.

Not only in our time has Being in Love with The Savage been difficult in anthropology, as has been being in love with other motives (like class or gender) in other social sciences. “Love is constituted through the dual process of mutual exposure (between lovers) combined with concealment (from everybody else)”26, but it seems safe to assume some ‘Dionysian’, trans-rational element in every passion, including in Anthropologist’s relation with his or her field. In spite of some experiments with exposure, concealment has remained a standard approach to emotional involvement with segments and fractions of one’s field of interest in the Dance of the Scientist. Charges made against that reach from deficiencies in epistemological integrity to hidden biases based on self-interest and hypocrisy. Yet among the most frequent practices there is much simple disinterest in that question, and contributions can certainly be very valuable even if these dimensions are never explicitly addressed. From our widely shared constructivist point of view, when applied consistently, we only have to reject attitudes imputing opponents with emotional involvement while insinuating oneself to be basically free of this kind of affliction. That is notwithstanding that for a number of genres this kind of exposure is not part of the convention, and does probably also not need to be. For the subject I have chosen here, however, it seemed to be useful.

While terms like “savage” were, except as object of critique, consistently shunned in the ‘anti-imperialist’ anthropology of ‘communist’ (East) Germany, the practically universal subjacent affection for the besieged and dispossessed, i.e. for the struggling but commonly outgunned victims of the Great Beast on all continents, merged with the rebellious impulses and revolutionary sentiments reflected in songs, movies and discourses of the post-WWII era to an image of the suffering but good-hearted oppressed to whom all good people, like ourselves, are tied by bonds of ethical and political solidarity against the armies and agents of The Beast. This is the narrative and sentiment I grew up with and that shaped my self-understanding as ethical and political being in a world full of selfish cruelty, abuse and injustice. It infused me with a persistent preconception of sympathy for the non-European, non-absorbed and non-coopted, militant or non-violent freedom- and liberation fighters, or simply incarnations of fascinating and enticing cultural and geographic difference, imaginary friends who became the heroes of my juvenile phantasy and of my evolving world view. […]

                                                                                                                     26 Gell, Alfred. 2015. “On Love by Alfred Gell «  Anthropology of This Century.” Accessed January 9.

http://aotcpress.com/articles/love/. Thanks to Zoe Cormack for drawing attention to this text.

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Leipzig 4 (Treide): The Sacred Super-Model & the Anthropologist as Avatar

Who built seven-gated Thebes? In the books stand the names of kings. Did the kings drag the boulders there? And Babylon, destroyed many times-- Who rebuilt it all those times? In which houses Of gold-shining Lima Did the builders live?

Bertolt Brecht, Questions by a workman who reads, 1935

Growing up in paradise

This period of Leipzig anthropology is one that coincides with my childhood. I grew up in a positivist paradise. Our State-of-Workers-and-Farmers (Arbeiter-und-Bauern-Staat), solidly built on the unadulterated truth of science and its sober point of view (almost like in a Richard Dawkins commercial), was in the process of leading us into happy and prosperous communism in which the maxim of Really-Existing Socialism (Realexistierender Sozialismus) “Everyone according to his capacities, to everyone according to his accomplishments”27 would be replaced by “Everyone according to his capacities, to everyone according to his want”28 of Realised Communism.

The anthropology of this period had in common with history as academic discipline that it was supposed to trace the ‘scientifically proven’ evolutionary path, the sequence of forms of social organisation, from the ‘original communism’ of the earliest ones through the vale of tears of class societies to the re-birth of communism by a mankind liberated in realisation of the Law of History, superior Organisation, Science and Technology (LOST). This was the Grand Narrative everyone had to subscribe to in exchange for a teaching and researching position. It was an intriguing and somehow appealing narrative which, with the deduction of “communism”, the majority on the other side of the iron curtain shared. And the utopian character of communism as idea of a fair and happy society after the resolution of the remaining problems with selfish factions and behaviours made it agreeable in principle even to many who had their doubts about the way that beautiful idea was converted into authoritarian reality.

Over the years of my childhood and adolescence, I developed into one of those sceptical friends of utopia as well. I learned the hard way, starting with the tender age of ten, that there were questions in class that I was not supposed to ask if I wanted to avoid taking lots of punishment, and that in many situations speaking one’s mind about the issues under discussion was not a good idea. I learned my lesson slowly and with continuing aversion, but for the sake of preserving my emerging dream of travelling faraway countries and studying other cultures, I protected my niche, my imaginary world of wonders.

As I understand from the recollections of Lothar Bohrmann, to whom I owe most of the following chapter, so did, apparently, many members of the Institute who were confronted with basically the same dilemma. Their niche was an as rare and endangered one as the sociotope of unprogressive Savages conventionally falling into to their professional slot, as the party/government had, following a more sympathetic phase in the 1950s, serious and persistent doubts as to the relevance and usefulness of a discipline occupying itself with outdated and backward forms of life whose details could be at

                                                                                                                     27 “Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Leistungen” 28 The common translations is „From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” (German “… jedem

nach seinen Bedürfnissen”)

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best illustrations of what mankind left or is about to leave behind. Was it, from that point of view, actually justifiable to spend scarce resources on something so necessarily doomed to make way for forms of society with far more advanced and progressive structures of organisation (like revolutionary parties and states) and far more efficient and rational (national and trans-national) economic arrangements (like industrial production and the community of Socialist People's Republics)? The new chairman, Dietrich Treide, had to struggle again and again with this today (in spite of radically altered terms of reference and defaults) strangely familiar question.

The Red Period (Shangó & Obatalá): eternal fires, external & internal or The Party Anthropologist

Consequently, the introduction of the first ‘scientific’ anthropology book, “Völkerkunde für Jedermann” (Anthropology for Everybody), the showpiece product of the Institute of that period, sounds painfully self-apologetic today, parroting the time’s versions of prescribed set phrases, evolutionist plot structures and justificatory claims on usefulness: […], yet apparently most of all because this was necessary to justify one’s own passion for what oneself found thrillingly interesting. What follows became my first global garden for stroll amongst the astonishingly diverse beauty and genius of Mankind, and I know it was similar for many East German reading lovers of fascinating stuff.

[…]

Leipzig 5: St. Bernhard’s Diversitism shunning the Super-Model or The Savage Philosopher

“…cultural alternatives to total integration…”

Mark Münzel, Bernhard Streck: in die Mitte, 200529

Dear reader, I hope you will forgive me for being a bit more extensive in the depiction of this episode, as it is the one I know best from my own experience. I also apologise for the possibility that this chapter mutates into a nostalgic obituary for a period, now relapsed, that concurs with some 90% of my time with the institute and some of the best years of my personal and academic life. It is, thus, impossible for me to pretend to have a neutral and dissociated view on it. It was a very moved and moving time, one in which nothing has ever destroyed the emotional closeness I felt to the multi-level ‘crew’ and their pleasant sociality.

The Orange (or White) Period (Oshún & Obatalá): the inclusive Pantheon of Humanity or The Anthropologist as Artist

The transition from prescribed eternal partisan epigonism and avatarism of the One True Supermodel of social organisation and world view to the vibrant multi-polarity, conflictive pluralism and self-confident innovation of the Western academic world of the late 20th century was impressively incarnate in the new chairman, Bernhard Streck30, or just Bernhard as we long-time students and friends call him. This epochal change was admittedly not contingent on the personalities and capacities of the ‘old’ staff, as those who remained had hardly any trouble fitting in. It was rather the new political era of intellectual liberty combined with the remarkable charisma of the New King. With

                                                                                                                     29 In: Geisenhainer & Lange, eds., „Bewegliche Horizonte: Festschrift für Bernhard Streck“, Leipzig 2005:9 30 See e.g. Katja Geisenhainer & Katharina Lange, eds., Bewegliche Horizonte: Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von

Bernhard Streck, Leipzig 2005.

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his appearance of ‘old-school scholar’, ready with pointed beard, classic ‘sage profile’, slow, mild and patient manners and shockingly vast reading, he became, unconsciously, an ideograph of the new openness and tolerance which, together with his motto of diversity as the actual subject and ward of anthropology, we could call the emergent paradigm of “Diversitism”. At the same time, both his aura and his teaching culture and writing style had something of ancient venerability, underlined by the impression of changelessness of both his physique and his intellectual person over the last twenty years. Recollecting the beginning, he seemed to have been exactly the same, which further illustrates the vibe of eldership he had always about him. I therefore hope that he, who had an intensively ambiguous relationship with religion, will forgive me the well-meant badinage of calling him St. Bernhard in the course of this text, for the sake of remaining in style.

The intellectual direction of this period is neatly laid out in the auto-descriptive chapter of Bernhard’s “Fröhliche Wissenschaft Ethnologie” (Wuppertal 1997), a title obviously borrowed from Nietzsche as and well commonly translated as Gay Science (Anthropology) (I can hear the Daily Caller crowd jeering and hooting), fröhlich meaning something like joyful, happy, bright-eyed, etc., an anthropological journey through the Vales of Fascinosum and Tremendum with a closing chapter “Return to Laughter” paraphrasing Laura Bohannan, where he says (p.66) about the occurring paradigm shift of Leipzig anthropology that it is ‘no longer understood as historical or socio-geographical ancillary science but a fundamental, basic science. Its subject are not past or outdated conditions but contemporary alternatives to the industrial way as they continue to exist in the vast peripheries of the global economy or emerge in its centres. Ethnology addresses main themes of human life and sociality as they prevailed during the millennia before unitary modernity and as they will persist after its decay’31.

A paradox of this new direction was that, on the one hand, at its core was the value of cultural diversity, a treasure to be defended against powers aiming at profiteering uniformisation, not least against the Great Beast of capitalist Human Squaring (Zurichtung, Horkheimer & Adorno32) and servient creatures like the missionaries of universalist ideologies and religions, but that simultaneously, on the other hand, there was a complementary ‘romantic’ intuition of fundamental human unity that we can be lucky to grasp and experience in the encounter with The Other, in Anthropologist’s common fields usually the already so-defined Savage, even if never debased by such profane explicitness. This transcultural semi-intellectual / semi-emotional communitas does supposedly make Anthropology one of the most enticing professions that have ever been invented. In the contact with Dreaming Cultures we could start dreaming ourselves, not least of a deep caliginous and enigmatic fundament of our condition, a secret concealed by labyrinthic web of differences, the forest of institutions, tools and technologies, by ideologies, ‘modernisation’ and acculturation, but occasionally glimmering in the myth-enshrouded Depths of Mankind, at the fringes of the Human Realm where the Bush, the world of spirits, wild beasts and man-eating savages begins; where other-people(s) do things very differently; in what we miss or ‘have forgotten’ or never learned; in the communitas with which William Sax exemplifies33 the illuminating commotions ‘field researchers’ can experience when they ‘open up’; in mystic rituals and the expressiveness of those living them, possessed by deities and spirits; as well as in dotty scholars immerged into their studies and obsessed with certain phenomena and ideas; in strange arrangements; in things appearing absurd, irrational and silly, in a word: ‘savage’.

Forcing such trans-intellectual issues into words can unfortunately surrender it unwittingly to ridicule, contempt and malevolent accusations. Should it therefore be left to poetry or the empiricist

                                                                                                                     31 my translation 32 See Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, „Dialektik der Aufklärung“ Frankfurt, M. 2000 (1944) 33 In U.Rao “Current Debates in Anthropology”, 2014:7-22

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safeguards of ethnographic work and comparative analysis? In a diversitist perspective, the virtue, advantage and relevance of The Anthropologists lies, if nothing else, in that he looks into directions most others don’t and that (s)he knows and cares about things and people they don’t, that (s)he doesn’t follow the hype but asks why others do and what they miss. And a good part of that is about the brilliance other-people(s) have developed in fields we rarely think of, or easily ‘instinctively’ dismiss, as they have (at least discursively) lost relevance in our world. And yet that foreign and widely unrecognised brilliance has, as we have thanks to Mother Anthropology gradually learned to see, created amazing beauty and complexity, happiness and satisfaction for billions and uncounted generations of humans without the kind of suicidal resource consumption frenzy our Super Model is bringing to the boil.

The intuitive interest in The Savage of classical anthropology is not least an epitome of a Hamannian conscience of the narrow limits of our grasp of reality and of how to do things best, and how our ‘civilizational’ complacency and irresponsibility is producing countless human tragedies and ecological disasters. In spite of our collective technological wealth and organisational power there are uncounted things cultures lacking them have a better handle on, better understanding of or sense for. This kind of anthropological conscience rebels against ethnocentric and ideological conceitedness and asks what Others do or understand better than ‘we’.

In its use of the at first glance absurd to approach a world beyond our routine perceptions and instant explanations, Diversitism resembles Sartre’s philosophy and writing. People feeling post-modern and deconstructivist vanguard might be surprised to see how much Diversitism is also an exercise in destabilization of the taken-for-granted. It is an attack on privileged patterns of ordering (to paraphrase Julia Eckert’s ‘privilegierte Ordnungsmuster’) and on cultural self-certainty. Yet ‘progressists’ might find it suspicious because they consider it a ‘turning back’ to a supposedly outdated and unsalvageable (even if in its perceived marginality ‘still’ living) ‘human past’, forms of life older than our own but less technologically sophisticated and infinitely less pan-martially powerful.

Diversitist critique does not dismiss achievements and is still a liberation from the ‘bad faith’ and anguish in view of the apparent necessity and inescapability of the socio-political and cultural order around us, epitomised by Margret Thatcher’s mythical TINA credo (“There Is No Alternative” [in her case mostly referring to neo-liberalist policies]). It strives for the fundamental freedom to understand relations beyond the paradigms of today’s hegemonic ideologies and their system-serving instrumentality, and for the freedom to perhaps decide against them, much as Sartre’s existentialism wanted. As the latter, it attacks the Giant Machine that tries so persistently to infuse us with that sense of necessity of the now capitalist (but actually considerably older) project of transforming the planet into a resource pool worked by an increasingly efficient labour force constantly expanding the reach of the human mega-metabolism into its still (relatively) ‘untouched’ spheres and ‘subdue the earth’ (Genesis 1:28) as sacred task, much as ‘the West’ and other conquering imperialist forces went forth to subdue the savages of this world and ‘lead’ and ‘square’ (Horkheimer & Adorno: “zurichten”) them to being rack-wheels of the Great Beast.

Like good old Plato, deep anthropological Diversitism does not stop at praising diversity. It is an exercise in ideology critique aimed at destroying destructive ‘certainties’. Yet while Plato suggests philosophy (as careful personal introspection) as the cure, anthropological Diversitism turns the gnôthi seauton (“Know yourself!”) into an exercise at the species level. It thereby indeed teaches us to ‘turn back’ and learn from ‘The Old’, both in culture and in academic discourse, instead of discarding it without having achieved a respectable understanding of what it is and says. Progressists often feel they shouldn’t ‘waste time’ on what is ‘dead and gone’, much as one of the DC commenters mocking anthropology as ‘study of dead things’, and that ‘being up to date’ (in whichever sense they choose)

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and ‘making the most’ out of what is at hand is what really counts, opening the way to fashion –or old ‘vested interest’ in fashionable attire– as ruling idol. “There is no alternative” is the credo used to justify the ongoing destruction of existing alternatives.

In Leipzig Diversitism, pursuing this path was very exciting, full of surprises and discoveries. The amplification of factual knowledge was delightfully spiced by an entertaining change of perspectives and contexts, horizons and questions. It generated waves of passion our mind could ride and surf. It was always enticing and fun, never a dull affair. The Diversitist Era was the first in which Leipzig Anthropology was largely free from the internalised and / or external compulsion to be useful to the Beast. It did not need to serve the War of the Nation nor the War of the Proletariat. It was a radiant example of the liberty of research and teaching in a wealthy liberal democracy and did not have to prove the usefulness of its products to anyone. This was one of the strongest attractive forces in its aura. ‘It’ was actually free to follow its instincts, passions and desires, a Dionysian trait in something as Apollonian as any science is anyway. It was a shining time, and shine emerges in acts and processes of unproductive consumption and luxurious expenditure, as Bataille has most vigorously expounded in “The Accursed Share” (1946-1949), his term for the necessity to burn energy in acts of cultural grandiosity, intensity and delight, or in the terrible consumption by Beasts hurting and destroying one another. The glamour of all cultures is deeply rooted in their specific forms and practices of unproductive expenditure, and geopolitical strategists have long realised the power-sustaining potential of cultural radiation force. But we didn’t think in such apologetic categories and enjoyed the bliss of the feeling of sovereignty over our choices, the freedom to follow a magic call without having to explain ourselves or apologise.

Of course there was also a solid introduction into the classics and the astonishing erudition of the new chairman –an erudition that left us frequently wondering how on earth this man had managed to read that much plus, on top of it, remembering all of that; wondering if we would ever come anywhere near that level and if the unlikeliness of such prospect was not a sign that we could also just give up already. So we were regularly showered with a stream of names and deeds of authors that seemed to have made all kinds of important and surprising points, researched an astonishing range of questions we had never thought about and innumerable peoples and times we were utterly unfamiliar with. Another Hamannian Ocean.

Simultaneously, however, in retrospect, there appears a curious and somewhat paradoxical juxtaposition of (a) a general opening of the academic perspective and teaching to the vast diversity of directions, trends and schools of thought within the cosmos of socio-cultural anthropology that came with the 1990s’ (system change) deliverance from the politically induced constriction of perspective where, before, Big Brother would only allow a minimal range of rather harmless ‘classics’ for instruction to keep up the necessary appearance of professionalism on an internationally respectable level but preclude enticing involvements with hot cutting-edge stuff, with (b) a certain ‘inward orientation’ favouring the engagement with particular German works and trajectories of anthropological thought and research, not least those originating from Leipzig, in conscious opposition to the general trend in (including German) anthropology to go with the hype and the fashions of the day and join those crowding around the stars of Anglophone (and occasionally translated Francophone) academic production, thereby neatly reproducing dominant trans-academic power relations.

As a result, our open and marvelling minds travelled into, among other things, the mysteries of archaic cult and thought on the wings of the likes of Leo Frobenius, Adolf Ellegard Jensen and Fritz Kramer, became acquainted with, for example, the expressionist ethnology of Bruno Gutmann and his ‘Law of the Jagga’, plus uncounted others hardly anybody knows ‘out there’ in the discipline’s global mainstream, but also with an intriguing mesh of ideas by more widely influential thinkers like Max

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Weber, Georges Bataille, Jacob Taubes and Theodor W. Adorno. This kept the flames of our enchantment with anthropology alive, although on the ‘downside’, due to a near absence of arguments with local challengers of the Diversitist paradigm or exalted intellectual hipsters among the institute staff to promulgate more fashionable recent vogues and chic, the academic cults, crazes and bandwagons outside our little realm, we were largely left to our own devices – and became thus endangered to accumulate an air of odd nostalgia or attract imputations of provincial fustiness and exoticism, a reputation of airy-fairy small-town romanticism or the stigma of holding fast onto the savage slot out of hillbilly crudity.

This was matched and furthered by the burgeoning research on gypsies at St. Bernhard’s. With that term being an epicentre of discursive conflict in itself34, it culminated in the constitution of the Forum Tsiganologische Forschung (FTF), the “Forum for Gypsiologist Research”, which for quite a while comprised a vast part of the most active student body at the institute, held loads of seminars, events and excursions and brought about much of the field research and degree-oriented knowledge production of especially the second decade of the Diversitist Era. Although I stuck with my two long-term subjects, (a) collective violence and (b) heterodox religiosity, I had a crush on ‘everything Gypsy’ (and Southeast European) myself and only too willingly joined the jolly crowd in its endeavours. A 2007 title of Mattijs van de Port, “Gypsies, Wars and Other Instances of the Wild: Civilization and its Discontents in a Serbian Town”, illustrates nicely how that fitted into my and the institute’s grand scheme of themes.

The Anthropologist as Painter, Dancer and Writer

[Roma vs “Gypsy” controversy*] [‘exotic’ themes] [to be completed]

War against ourselves or The Tragedy of Success & Happiness

We didn’t care much about the Seven Seas of ‘current debates’ and the cutting edges of their imperial and pirate fleets. We were happy with our beautiful coral reef, had our own research archipelagos, friendly battles and exchanges of intellectual goods with international travellers. Apart from that, in our harbour there were loads of excellent rum, Russian and Romanian booze, Gypsy music, Caribbean beats and Latino ska, and nobody knew better how to transform them into unforgettable bacchanalia of our insubordinate faith. A wild band of anthropologist romantics, we took the Diversitist gospel literally, created a lovely swirl of intellectual luxury production and sincere, passionate debates on –from a rationalisation point of view– dispensable subjects, dancing around the fire of our jovial humanity, and celebrated snubbing the Great Beast we knew lurking beyond the walls of our temporary paradise (from Old Persian pardàus, the walled garden) waiting to devour us, to digest and transform us, and egest us tamed, domesticated, uniformed as white-collar soldiers of the Grand Army of the Beast, pioneers of its further expansion into the undeveloped expanse, ready to do our part in the further Great Transformation of the Planet into the capitalist Production Machine of Man and His boundless Knowledge – or to just release us into the little boxes of the pacified Western petit bourgeoisie.

                                                                                                                     34 That conflict centred around the chauvinist history and problematic notions of the term “Gypsy” / “Tsigan” /

“Zigeuner” which, on these grounds, was strongly rejected by a strident lot of activists and scholars who would insist associating its use with those chauvinist historical undertones (comparable to the use of “gay” for homosexuals) while unable to resolve the dilemma that there is no alternative term to encompass all concerned ethno-social groups between India, Mexico and the Sudan, of which only a minority fits the category “Roma” or identifies with it, not to talk about the tiny faction referring to themselves as “Sinti”.

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As far as I can see, St. Bernhard never created a ‘school’ in the actual sense of the word, as his Diversitism is rather an attitude than a theory. And if anyone asked, I would not be able to name any one particular school of thought that he followed. His strength and genius lie in his extraordinary capacity to oscillate, and thereby mediate and creatively produce unforeseen cognitions, between a vast number of different perspectives and approaches, while never losing sight of the Wars of the Rebel, the Beast and Providence with their suffering, their atrocities, and the hope of beauty and recompense.

The Bernhardian Anthropologist, as ‘ideal type’ in the micro-cosmos of clichés I construct for the purpose of this paper, is not so much a brain worker of some project of technical improvement but an artist capable of luring the spectator into a strange world of curious apparitions of very familiar issues in very unfamiliar colours, patterns and shapes. Its brushstrokes make foreign worlds alive and set the stage for epiphanies of timeless insights in the Depths of Humanity. Its tunes bridge our hearts with The Other through conduits of transparent quartz, waking the delight and pain of the Savage, Dionysus’ zest for life and the fervour of the Rebel’s struggle for survival in the Realm of the Beast and in its porous, patchy thorn bush-, mud brick-, cobblestone- and concrete peripheries. Certainly, The Savage is a product of our imagination. This is a basic epistemological fact with no escape. The question remaining is how much we choose to invest in filling this image with first- and second-hand reality, knowledge and experience. How much time, energy and trouble is that mining of sensations, expressions and translations worth to us?

My lyrical jabbering might, however, mislead the reader about the intellectual quality of Leipzig Diversitism. (Apologies.) While that might not strike the observer at first glance, Bernhard Streck’s anthropology is deeply post-modern, not just because of its insistence in the principle of pluralism but also because it is deeply self-reflexive. It is a permanent reminder on the position of the anthropologist between the Savage and the Beast, in which it unswervingly takes the side of the Savage, the Rebel and the Sufferer, much as Lipsian Romanticism did.

It appears, however, that some anthropologists, including from amongst the far larger and therefore very powerful, but also far more divided and fragmented scene emerging in neighbouring Halle, shared concerns over a possibly unhealthy aura of this kind of anthropology, one that resembles and so includes the aura of the Savage and thereby poses a risk of contamination for those taking issues with Him (or Her) and His (or Her) slot. It sometimes looked as if ‘St. Bernhard’s Realm’ was seen as very far away, at the other end of the anthropological spectre, maybe even in a corner close to the edge of extinction, together with the other, non-academic subjects clinging stubbornly to the doomed abode of savageness. I sensed that expressed interest in the inhabitants and issues of this corner could raise eyebrows of suspicion and trigger gestures of exclusion. While my engagement with this particular local direction was rather limited and I want to rest that issue here, I feel I still need to dedicate some lines to Halle, not only because my decisions and the tricksters brought me there myself where I came to join and appreciate a quite different but not actually opposed kind of anthropology, which I want to quickly sketch out below for the sake of comparison, but also because the influence of this unique powerhouse of anthropology was felt in Leipzig very soon, has grown ever stronger and is likely to be crucial in a future of hopefully joint and shared endeavours.

Leipzig, Halle & emergent parallel anthropologies

“… there is an interplay between calculated economic interests and social processes of inclusion and exclusion. These factors color every political decision regarding alliance and opposition.”

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Günther Schlee, How Enemies Are Made (2007)35

The relationship between Leipzig and Halle as locations of Anthropology in Germany is noteworthy in a number of respects. Only 30 train minutes away from each other, making that distance shorter than the one between hundreds of universities officially belonging to one and the same town, Leipzig has the oldest institute in the country while Halle became home to the largest local community of (practicing) anthropologists probably not only in Germany but in all of continental Europe. (Could there be maybe more in London?)

Founded in 1999, the Max-Planck Institute (MPI) for Social Anthropology has come to host hundreds of researches and guests from across the globe, meetings, workshops and conferences, and spends –at least in Germany unparalleled– loads of money on cutting-edge research. I was lucky enough to become, after three years of junior scholarship at the Leipzig institute and two years of fieldwork in Africa, a PhD researcher at Günther Schlee’s department “Integration & Conflict” in 2010.

Not enough with the heavy academic weight of the MPI, in 2002 the University of Halle opened an Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology across the street and was staffed with three professorships (in contrast to just one in ‘ancient’ Leipzig, which continued having far more anthropology students but was even threatened with closure by a Saxon government that seems to have similar levels of sympathy with it and other arts and social sciences as the Daily Caller cyber bullies), presently divided regionally into Africa (Richard Rottenburg), Indic (Burkhard Schnepel) and Europe / Mediterranean (Thomas Hauschild), while professorships at the MPI apart from Schlee are with the long-time chair of the Eurasia department, Chris Hann, with Keebet and Franz von Benda-Beckmann of the department for Legal Anthropology, now chaired by Marie-Claire Foblets, and recently with Christoph Brumann. (This begs, however, mentioning that “professor” has a far narrower meaning in Germany than, say, in the U.S. where a large part of ‘our’ lecturers and post-docs would probably have some kind of professor in their title.)

It would be very interesting to delineate the contrastful diversity of Halle’s anthropological landscape but for the moment I cannot do more than draw a rough sketch of the direction I joined here.

Halle 1 (Schlee): Avatars & Beasts or The eternal return of the Savage in War

 

The idea of identity has long been one of the targets of postmodernist critique. MPI co-founder Günther Schlee, however, expressly declared he would “not follow academic fashions” and thereby give up researching phenomena he found to be still of utmost importance in the empirical reality we deal with when looking at vital issues like integration and conflict, the twin theme of his department. His version of anthropology is very ‘down-to-earth’, asks ‘what added value would we gain’ and ‘does this become nonsensical somewhere’ when considering a new theoretical approach, term or argument, and places value rather on thorough fieldwork, sound ethnographic knowledge and tangibly plausible straightforward arguments than on virtuosic violin solos of theoretical sophism. While appreciating the kind of micro-analyses Julia Eckert recommends, he doesn’t question the value of larger analytical and comparative endeavours either, be it e.g. concerning ‘classical’ reference frames like ethnic communities, or regional ethno-political clusters, or trans-cultural and trans-continental examinations of certain phenomena. His settlement with the seemingly unending tides of deconstructivist critique polemics washing over Anthropology Island was to put his house on stilts with the use of “processes

                                                                                                                     35 Max Planck Research Magazine 3 (interview) http://www.mpg.de/944636/F004_Focus_038_043.pdf

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of identification” as complement to the more ‘structuralist’ notion of “identity”, with this conceding the unsurprising finding that the latter can be understood as implying standstill or reification. With this defining theme he brought, to remain in the mythological picture, an at first glance quite Apollonian direction, in its soberness of rather ‘Roman’ than ‘Greek’ appearance. And yet, the Savage has always kept a tangible place in it. How is that?

It has to do with the consequences of its strong empirical focus and the close relation of identity and identification with the eternal Wars in the depths of observable societies which in large parts of the regions Schlee’s department has specialised in have long been, and prominently continue to be, violent. It has also to do with the manifest decisions of vast populations there to insist in their continued cultural and economic autonomy, decisions contradicting mainstream expectations of ‘everyone able is trying to jump on the development train’. That this ‘Empiricist Conflictology’ has come to side with the desire of our ‘native’ friends and research partners to keep pursuing their own course of organisation, practice and ‘development’ –even against high-level know-it-alls, entrepreneurs of transformation, ‘reallocation’ and ‘structural adjustment’ or profiteering government agents– is just a matter of evidence, thorough assessment and practical reason. The emerging consensus between down-to-earth scientists –from a wide range of disciplines far beyond anthropology and often building arguments on solid quantitative data–, having recourse of a sound understanding of their field, and those ‘stubborn savages’ clinging to their ‘traditional ways and convictions’ is epitomised by a title by Simon Levine (2010) on one of my own research fields, “An unromantic look at pastoralism in Karamoja: How hard-hearted economics shows that pastoral systems remain the solution, and not the problem” (Nomadic Peoples 14 (2): 147–53).36

Tracing tracks of romanticism in the MPI department “Integration and Conflict” is difficult, as it focusses on, in comparison to some of Leipzig’s Diversitist works, very unromantic subjects –like economistic and functional logics of (often violent) group conflict– in a commonly unagitated and thoroughly ‘unromantic’ fashion. By topic, it is the distanced and mostly impartial analysis of Beasts reshaping while overpowering, fighting or taxing each other and chances of gain and survival. At the same time it is un- but not anti-romantic as the terror and the tremendum (R.Otto) of the topic itself generate a complementary fascinans fused with the terrible of the permanent threat to existence itself. Mythologically speaking, The Savage appears as both Dionysian force and as limits to unilateral control of the tremendous powers of human community. Although order –as function and result of power– often rests on violence as ‘its ugly leg’, violence remains an untrustworthy pillar. A literally violent emotionality and dynamism, the permanent risk of violence, as ‘fire-like phenomenon’, to get out of control, to encroach in, spread across, engulf and consume human collectivities37 is maybe the most fatal power humanity has known, and known for a long time.

I do not want to talk more about this field of anthropology here, as both my philosophy graduation thesis “Violence as social function – anthropological perspectives” and much of the work I am currently engaged with in the context of my emerging PhD thesis on a notoriously violent cross-border region of Northeast Africa lies in that direction, and l would seriously run the risk of adding far too many more pages at a point where that text has already become far too long.

                                                                                                                     36 A text on a related note by Günther himself would be e.g. Schlee 2013, “Why states still destroy pastoralism and how

they can learn that in their own interest they should not.” Nomadic Peoples 17 (2): 6–19; my own recent publications go into a similar, even if differently argued, direction: “Gifts, Guns and Govvermen”, In: Sandra Calkins, Enrico Ille & Richard Rottenburg (eds.), “Emerging Orders in the Sudans”, Bamenda 2014; “Pastoralists, Conflicts and Politics”, In: Christopher Vaughan , Mareike Schomerus & Lotje de Vries (eds), “The Borderlands of South Sudan: Authority and identity in contemporary and historical perspectives”, New York etc. 2013.

37 For more detailed explorations of these and related phenomena in mythological cosmology see also my articles revolving around Yoruba religion, “Ogún – Die Gewalt in Person”, In: L. Rossbach de Olmos & H. Drotbohm, eds., Kontrapunkte, Marburg 2009; and „Die Macht der Schönheit – mythische Ästhetik und Moderne“, In: B. Streck & M. Münzel, eds., Ästhetik und Religion, Marburg 2007.

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Leipzig 6 (Rao): The Model Anthropologist researching the Beast or Suffering as Avatar

“The burgeoning production and use of indicators has not been accompanied by systematic study of and reflection on the implications, possibilities and pitfalls of this practice. … How do the conditions of production influence the kinds of knowledge that indicators provide? How does the use of indicators in global governance change the nature of decision-making? How does it affect the distribution of power among and between those who govern and those who are governed?”

Sally Engle Merry et al, Indicators as a Technology of Global Governance38

The Blue Period (Olòkun & Olodumáre): the Sky and the Ocean ahead of Us or The Futurist Anthropologist

If you start a journey, you need a direction. With Ursula Rao as young, energetic and winsome steerswoman and captain, the little ship of the 100 years young institute has taken off to new shores. While some of the old crew remain in the harbour or part for other journeys, a new, mainly young and dynamic team has set the sails, and a fortunate tail wind, together with an excellent coordination with other ships in the fleet and across the sea, promises a long voyage. The destination is the shores, cities and settlements of the Beast along the way, contingent knots and crossroads where the details of its metabolism become apparent under the microscope of localised research. It studies the technical and social anatomy of Suffering in the emergence of scenarios, the shapes it takes, together with the Will to power, in the web of practices and interactions, organisations and technologies.

Learning how suffering and Gewalt are produced to help finding better strategies of intervention is, in my view, a very favourable ideal and task. Confronted, in my faraway field much more intensively than in the safety of home, with injustices and abuses, recklessness and ruthlessness of those striving for power, pretence and predation, I came to ‘fully’ conceive how important the symbolic and relational force of law can be, how organisation matters, and what technologies can do for or to people. I also do like towns, especially the beautiful ones, and enjoy their comforts, opportunities and their diversity. Alas, I miss too much of what I like and long for in the labs of urban and organisational ethnology, in the discourses of technical problems and technical improvements, of reforming regulations and semiotic accidents. I miss the bonfires of the wild interior too much, the singing bush, the sea of grass and the labyrinth of mountains with its scents of herbs and heat. I miss sitting with the herdsmen in the tender breeze of the evening while the flocks stream back into their light-skirted kraals of branches, drink milk and hear the dancers in the chirping and silent distance. I miss the talk of spirits and the dances of the Gods.

I like the Savage too much, his open realm under his sky without smog and the Rebel in the Mountains, the Hunter in the Forest and the singing of the girls grinding sorghum. I like the peace of their lively, social homes too much to leave them to study the company that has started to destroy them, to convert their precious and irreplaceable abode into a plantation for the crops of someone else’s cash, or the clinic that could take care of their new diseases if it would work properly, or the insurance that could pay for this up to some fateful point, or the folks in town who have a bunch of more familiar problems. I refuse to be ashamed of my romantic inclination to enjoy, search and defend what I feel makes the world more beautiful, richer and insured with a so much wider range of well-tested options of how life can work, with or without coltan, washing machines and hierarchies set out

                                                                                                                     38 Kevin Davis, Benedict Kinsbury, Sally Engle Merry in International Law and Justice Working Papers, New York

2010:1; http://www.nyudri.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/indicatorstechnologygovernance2011.pdf

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in writing. So I hope in the voyage of the pale blue ship under the deep blue sky of chance on the colour-shifting ocean, on the way to different shores where the crew will fan out, the magic of The Savage might lure some hearts into his/her realm, maybe like in the experiences William Sax describes in Ursula Rao’s “Current Debates in Anthropology” (2014).

The Futurist Anthropologist, the Savage & the Beast

What does or can ‘Anthropology of the Future’ mean? Do we have reliable conceptions and assessments of what belongs to the future and what to the past? While it is indisputable that everything is constant change, panta rhei, is it then not more interesting to search for and focus on permanences, as on resilience as Chris Hann’s MPI department and the diverse scientific ecologies call them? Personally, I feel that the ‘old fashioned’ idea of (relatively stable) structure will never be outdated because it is anyway indispensable. Deconstruction has been entertaining but it covers only a very small part of what is of interest for all kinds of people. To avoid misunderstandings, my previous comments do not imply that I am generally opposed to considerations of usefulness. I take a rather pragmatic stand that, nevertheless, remembers that many later on important innovations emerged by back then luxurious and –from a (if that is possible) strictly economical perspective– apparently useless activities.

A further complication is to whom we should cede the authority to determine what counts as “useful” and what not. My quick solution is: To ourselves in the first place, because we know ramifications of our motives and interests and the main requirements for a ‘correct’ decision are sincerity combined with a certain amount of “intuition, gut feeling” (Sax 2014:12), backbone, altruism, ethical consequentiality, diligence and resolve. Needless to say, high levels of knowledgeability come in handy, but they can of course be built where the ground is still too flat. This seems to be a larger set of demands than one of those required in more paternalistic settings, but, well, appearances can be deceptive.

There is also nothing wrong with being responsive to articulated needs and explicit demands of assistance and action on specific issues. Being relevant is crucial, and want crucially defines relevance. But we should at minimum keep sovereignty over the question who we decide to assist in what and if these choices are the best we can make, and that not primarily financially or career-wise but in reference to the above requirements, even if that makes us Romantic Mavericks. I feel one of the best compliments the Daily Caller’s surfing discourse goon squad makes us as the socio-cultural species called Anthropologist is to actually assume that all of us are (in a way they dislike as much as they can’t stand Obama Negroes or Gay Science). We cannot allow ourselves to be ruled by discursive harassment, economic intimidation, levelling pressure and other forces of the resentful One-Dimensional Man in Government or in the mediated public, in the Financial Administration of Science or among the mobs and gangs of ‘the street’, including those targeting scientific Charlie Hebdo blasphemy against the sacred tools and symbols of a wreckful model. We need to be The Savage here in not being externally controllable, especially by The Beast, its Models, Armies and Avatars, including as a tribute to ethical integrity, an indispensable resource sustaining The Rebel. This vital deposit of nurturing Pandora Unobtanium (“Avatar” 2009) should remain out of reach for them, and as their victory over our defences would lead to the terrible demise of our wonderful Anthropological world, our Na’vi tribes and Avatars should unite in its protection.

An approach like this also implies a carefully critical relationship with a number of ubiquitous and extremely powerful notions that are taken for granted by global majorities and permeate practice in uncounted places, spheres and instances, like e.g. development which has become a main reference point of justification for all kinds of interventions, restructuring redistribution and predation. This issue alone is, of course, a vast and fiercely contested field with innumerable players from all kinds of

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sciences and backgrounds, and Anthropologist would have to fight fiercely, too, to make a difference. But I feel that –thanks to our particular relation with The Savage and His/Her enormous critical potential as Guardian of a magnificent Looking Glass to our species’ treasure of options, understandings and resilience– this is one of those fields where a very tangible chance for robust relevance lies.

Paradise LOST? The Future: The Anthropologist and / as Providence

“…centralism makes it possible to unite greater numbers of people in a permanent political community. It also creates the preconditions for more lastingly destructive divisions inside it. … Rivalry does become harmful when the pretenders to the throne surround themselves with a following and use their father's kingdom as an arena for competition.”

Simon Simonse 1992, Kings of Disaster, Chapter 15: The Spear and the Bead: the vulnerability of kingship39

“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said “This is mine”, and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civilisation. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are lost if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1754

The main accusation of the article quoted in the beginning of the text is that anthropologists are “useless”. I understand that it looks that way for many, given their take on things. But what does that mean for us? Again: Which uses qualify as useful? And who or what decides about that? How useless are we allowed to be?

Answers from explicitly ‘progressive’ approaches oscillate between a rebellious gesture of general critique, the cliché of the leftist Philosopher questioning ‘everything’, and Beast metaphors on the one side, and on the other assertions of tangible practical benefit in reformist and technical processes of social engineering, aspirations to reduce suffering by assisting the work on obstacles of the production flow, such as underemployment and social conflict, sub-optimal arrangements and unnecessary idleness, etc.

Answers of Diversitism had Diversity as a value in itself that, in addition to aesthetical and emotional motives, can refer to ecology as demonstrating in ‘hard science’ currency how diversity can be important for keeping a system relatively stable, rich and sustainably productive. This perspective might be good to emulate by the sciences in their internal affairs, too. It can refer to human forms of life and preferences for less inequitable ones than those of ‘our own society’ or of those modelled on it or meddled with in its name, forms of sociality less divided by hierarchies, power asymmetries, exploitation, injustice and structural violence, older models many of which are more ecologically sustainable and thus, depending on the perspective, more reasonable than the machines of linear growth devouring the planet’s resources, its treasures of diversities, both of myriads of species, developed by evolution over millions of years and overkilled ‘by man’ (following ‘our’ Model) in a few decades, and of forms of human life as beautiful, dignified and happy as our own, whose

                                                                                                                     39 Re-presented at the MPI workshop „Azomia 1“, Halle (Saale), February 2013

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evolution was shorter but whose disappearance from the garden of humanity, in order to clear space for more GDP production units increasing the relative satisfaction of their differential beneficiaries, is as sad as the so equally tragically evitable extinction of non-human species.

Need these approaches be mutually exclusive and hostile towards one another? And if so, why?

According to Julia Eckert’s paper, “the future of social anthropology lies in a perspective of tragedy … which engages in micro-analyses of entangled courses of action and their polyvalent orientations”. She herself and many others prove with their work that this can be a fruitful and rewarding course of research. While the expression of interest in “not only ‚what should have been’ but rather ‚what would have been possible’” could be complemented by ‘what was and what would be possible’, “to trace the relationality of difference” is certainly an inescapable endeavour for anthropologists, and for scientists in general. Now, what does it mean that the “the future of anthropology lies in micro-analyses”, or that the analysis of contingent emergence from conflicting intentionality is the approach to power configurations and conflict moralities, for other interests anthropologists might have?

Among the anthropological books I read with enthusiasm and, I believe, benefit, were ‘conventional’ ethnographies, ‘conflict ethnographies’ and ‘problem ethnographies’, cognitive studies, studies of regions and cultural clusters over certain periods, studies of large movements, of human eco-systems, of conflicting intellectual debates, of particular rituals, religions and mythologies, of the question what anthropology is about, specific historical developments, the question why humanity has developed to such diversity and why it has developed so strongly contrasting approaches to similar challenges, or about how much fun difference can be. I can’t see why we should assume that anthropologists would not also in the future be able to do magnificent work of all these kinds, maybe (who ‘knows’ or ‘objectively appraises’ that?) even better, not least with the help of new representation media and other technologies. I don’t believe Eckert means to say that the mentioned and other kinds of anthropologies will be superseded by micro-analyses of local entanglements, like ‘inferior strategies’ by the invasion of a more successful one in a game-theoretical model or experiment. Heisenberg, Kuhn and Feyerabend have long made hard-to-rebut points on the epistemological consistency of pluralist approaches to research methodology questions. And I feel we can consider ourselves lucky that anthropology is a discipline with a privileged chance of understanding that scientific ‘progress’ –like socio-cultural ‘evolution’– does not need (and does not seem) to be the kind of evolution where ‘more advanced’ species relentlessly overkill and replace supposedly ‘inferior’ ones but the kind where increasing diversity of viable models builds a richer world, a more adaptive, flexible and conducive pool of possibilities and thus a more stable (human/non-human) ‘eco-system’. We don’t have to take side in a renewed Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, as both epigonist submissiveness and compulsive intellectual novelty prospecting are less convincing than the happy medium of hermeneutic respect for the ancestors combined with a critical sense for emerging needs.

The new chair of the Leipzig Institute concurs (Rao 2014:2) with the most recent German introduction into anthropology (Bierschenk, Krings & Lentz 2013), whose authors again agree with the former chair’s pleading for a “Denken in beweglichen Horizonten”40, in seeing “the commitment to studying multiple perspectives as the most salient marker of professional identity of the discipline” (Rao 2014:2). I have taken that here as license for playing with perspective refractions from an ironic, and thus ‘post-modern’ point of view, while asserting that ‘the main thing in the room’ are very tangible, moving and often tragic aspects of a reality in view of which their epistemological intricacies shrink to accessory comedies.

                                                                                                                     40 B. Streck, Fröhliche Wissenschafte Ethnologie, Wuppertal 1997; K. Geisenhainer & K. Lange, eds., Bewegliche

Horizonte: Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Bernhard Streck, Leipzig 2005.

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Anthropological choices and directions

In my view, Anthropological choices and directions are not least very much about personal inclinations, interests and differences. Subscribing to ‘Diversitism’ also means respecting them, in a very similar way many of us respect other cultures and forms of life.

If, for example, I would do research mainly in India, I would most probably look for experiences with and knowledge about spirituality, as W. Sax (op cit) did but also many romanticist Western pilgrims do, only that I would at first not discriminate between Hindu, Sufi or ‘aboriginal’ religion, my approach would be slightly different, and I’d prefer local versions over commercialised ashrams, although still aware of the latent stigma of exoticist romanticism wafting over me. I would, as I actually very briefly did some years back and as e.g. Ursula Rao and Julia Eckert did very systematically and successfully41, take interest and try penetrating the jungle of entanglement of religious and cultural difference with political ‘wars’ that pervade Indian society. Or I would, as I currently do in Africa, go and live –embodiment of the ‘old-school’ anthropologist– with ‘tribal people’ (Adivasi), see what intrigues me the most and certainly join them in struggles for threatened rights and the like, out of a conviction that this is the most important thing I can do as the very specific person I am in this life, regardless if I could be seen as tapping into some ‘savage slot’.

I would most probably not go for studying bus companies, science labs or cricket grounds, not for some kind of ideological aversion but simply because none of this appeals to me emotionally and I feel I am best when I have my full interest, passion and attention on what I am doing. This does in no way mean that I would be judgemental about or belittle anyone with opposed interests, thematic and methodological choices. I fully accept this as a function of human diversity and believe that the broader the variation, the better our chances to find ‘the right things to do’. I only expect from others, especially fellow anthropologists, reciprocal fair-mindedness, acceptance and a pluralist attitude that takes the value of a multiplicity of perspectives and horizons to heart.

Talking about the future of anthropology is also talking about how anthropologists will interact with each other in the future. One dimension of that runs along a continuum between, on the one side, (almost) unprejudiced collaboration with anyone, especially when subjects overlap or border each other, across disciplines and ‘schools’, choices of methodology and perspective, a happy science of partly disagreeing friends with pluralities of interests, and, on the other side, a War of coteries and networks where inclinations and interests, terms and choices become markers of antagonistic identities and trigger hostile behaviour, forming little Beasts and new demand for intellectual loyalty along lines of both ideological and personal affiliation. Although we always had and will supposedly always see considerable diversity in any discipline on this graph, the position on it remains a personal choice for everyone to make, and a factor of asymmetric influence of those in structural key positions.

Habitus, Taboo & Convenience: “Structure” & “Practice”, for example

As the subdivisions and directions of a discipline create a social field (in Bourdieu’s sense), habitus emerges as signal of belonging, inclusion and exclusion. This does not only become apparent in patterns of citation (Calkins & Rottenburg in Rao 2014:99-129) but also of favouring and shunning certain terms. I was increasingly reminded of this basic fact when I left the harmonious little Gaul village paradise of St. Bernhard's Leipzig anthropology and moved to the far more fragmented and conflictive arena of Halle. While so much could be said, I want to just touch one micro-snippet of this

                                                                                                                     41 See e.g. Ursula Rao, “Negotiating the Divine: Temple Religion and Temple Politics in Contemporary Urban India”,

Delhi 2003; idem., “Kommunalismus in Indien“, Halle/S 2003; Julia Eckert, “The Trimurti of the State: State Violence and the Promises of Order and Destruction”, Halle/S 2005; idem, “Partizipation und die Politik der Gewalt: Hindunationalismus und Demokratie in Indien”, Baden-Baden 2004.

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vast field and look at two –in the past decades somehow indicative–terms as they appear in the symposium presentations.

In Katharina Schramm’s paper “structure” does not appear even in a single instance, the adjective “structural” twice, first for ‘imbalances of academic knowledge production’, then for ‘conditions of collaborative research’. The different derivatives of “practice”, by contrast, figure 14 times on 7 pages. Julia Eckert's text uses the element “structure” twice, both times in negative references to the idea. In Andrea Behrends’ presentation, the radical appears 6 times as “construction” or “to construct” and two times as “structures of relevance” (of “knowledge” and discourses), thus restricting it exclusively to the realm of ideas and communication where it emphasises the momentary and elusive, man-made and somehow arbitrary character of a phenomenon and helps avoiding notions of features ‘heavier’ than the flexible activities of the human mind. The only point where it somehow slides into the text in the more ‘classic’ sense is a response to critics of its lead figure, Elisabeth Povinelli (who gets 18 matches) where Behrends acknowledges that her ideal of equitable collaboration of anthropologists with their, as they are still frequently called, ‘informants’ (or ‘informing collaborators’) can be tainted with differential intentionalities and resources. Apparently uncomfortable with using the once ubiquitous term, she, remarkably, cushions it with the apologetic phrase “…, one could say, structural conditions...”. “Practice”, on the other hand, features 11 times.

To avoid any misunderstanding: It is very obvious from the work of Andrea Behrends, Julia Eckert, and so forth, that they are in close contact with the very real problems and suffering, the tragedies and dilemmas of the people in their respective fields of research, problems which are of high importance for these local partners, reflecting on that “micro-level” crucial macro-level issues. The ‘micro’-question I want to raise, by way of illustration, is if a shunning of a notion like structure, perhaps in relation to deconstructivist reservations towards terms conceivably connoting staticness, and entirely replacing it with the supposedly less problematic “practice(s)”, can actually be expected to prove helpful if (subjunctive mood) it would be applied as a principle (and I am not saying this is the case here, as the numbers can well be coincidental). What would the ‘Father of Practice Theory’ likely say about that?

While appreciating Bourdieu’s sublation of structuralism in his ‘praxeology’, a proscription of both term and notion of structure would, in my view, not only run contrary to his intentions, I am also so far unable to see how it could improve anthropology, or any other science for that matter. In the end, “fields” consist of social structures, and there is no way of analysing a strategy, a habitus or an “actor network” without the conception of structure at least in the background. In the end, it is essential to any science as a specific practice of abstraction. On the macro-level, constructivism has long freed us from the pitfalls of positivism. It does not require ideological taboos on expedient ‘language games’ (Wittgenstein) and provides us with an epistemological base for all the important work on ‘real-world problems’ that call for urgent action. In my personal view, “structures” and “systems” are as useful heuristic tools in these endeavours as “models”, “flows” and “strategies”.

I am frank about the arbitrariness of my example. It does not claim any objective importance for its observations. The figures might well be coincidental side effects of something far more important not touched in my discussion. But I noted that the use of certain terms, of which “structure” and “system” are random examples, can in academic encounters arouse sometimes irritating amounts of irritation, and I have so far been unable to find a convincing reason for this other than the subjective discomfort of a possible majority about them which spreads amongst ever larger numbers of academic and student practitioners of anthropology without being a matter of dialogue or discussion. In my experience, terminological affairs can be quite vexatious although they need not be. It is as if experiencing hermeneutics of suspicion –e.g. positions or attitudes treating the use of concepts like “structure” and “system” or “traditional” and “modern” or an interest in cultures at ‘maximum’ distance from the

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global mainstream (i.e. easily associable with ‘the’ / a Savage Slot) like symptoms of a disease– leads to reactions of inverse suspiciousness. That’s why I lay emphasis on my admitted ignorance about the significance of my rather accidental lexical observation. It is neither an opinion on merits nor on hypothetical theoretical coordinates. My point lies elsewhere and the bean counting is not more than the spontaneously constructed random example for a more general dilemma, one for which my little ad hoc analysis itself could, who knows, even be a better case than the object of my ‘micro-quantitative’ experiment.

Again: choices and directions

So let me say that without side-eye in any particular direction: If I would be allowed a plea, I would plead for a strictly ‘pragmatic’, convenience-oriented use of terms and against conceptional trench warfare for camp allegiances’ sake, for which I have arbitrarily constructed stereotypic images of “Diversitism”, “Deconstruction” and “STS” as allegorical contrast ideograms (not as reifications for which I could claim any existence outside discourses or language games using them). Scientific argument as gesture in Deleuze’s sense* might be fun. But I feel it gets too often in the way of collaboration and draws energies into teapot tempests that could be used in synergy to tackle ‘real’ problems. If we, the global minority community of anthropologists, are too busy fighting, excluding and discriminating one another, we waste scarce resources that might otherwise be important to others than ourselves.

I like Andrea Behrends’ discussion of Dialogue as collaboration in mutual investigation. At the known roots of Western scientific thinking, Socrates proposed Dialogue as ideal way of getting closer to a rational understanding of things. Searching sincerely in the words of the other and one’s own conscience the most plausible truth, searching 'the point' by persistent asking, 'digging deeper', even when you have no idea what you are looking for; and especially cautiously if you have. In a Socratic perspective, it is the efficiency in the production of understanding, not even primarily an ethical issue that recommends inquisitional dialogue. But it is a mutual inquisition, and in a social anthropologists’ ‘field’ experiences it is often (and fortunately), as Stefanie Mauksch and Ursula Rao expose in their contribution to “Current debates in Anthropology”42, a quite ‘holistic’ affair. But also at home, Dialogue with people from one’s own discipline or direction and especially with people from others remains a royal road.

Misunderstanding and limited knowledge are issues in both the dialogue across cultures and across academic fault lines. Socrates suggests the 'What is X?' question, the debate on definitions and doubts, with The Ideal Anthropologist adding convictions and resentments to the material of analysis, assuming like the philosopher that this will yield better and more interesting results than sophistic code games of club-like insider circles. Definitions will often appear too narrow or too wide, and in ethnography they will always have to include a multiplicity of etic and emic points of view, but struggling with them remains rewarding. Discussing, as Julia Eckert suggests here, how these views interrelate and how their interplay makes sense can be complemented with showing in which sense it doesn’t, thus living the humility Hamann recommends at the 18th century roots of German anthropology. Going through the discussion step by step, regardless if in direct oral or semi-direct written dialogue, would be a Socratic advice for The Anthropologist in service to The Truth, his profession, Humanity, and The Reader. Even finding no solution is according to Plato’s Socrates not really a problem but an honourable result provided the analysis has been diligent, merciless and unbribable. Fortunately, Anthropology is one of the few sciences who can embrace and appreciate such an outcome. In any case a proper ‘dialogue’ will provide the reader –as much as a candid, fair-

                                                                                                                     42 2014, “Fieldwork as Dialogue: Reflections on Alternative forms of Entanglement”, pp.23-38

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and open-minded discussion on disagreements provides the participant– with a better understanding of the matter, including about why the question / phenomenon under discussion is so tough and intricate.

As I feel as uncertain about my grasp of ‘the important things’ as a Hamann, it is less a prediction than a hope I have for the Future of Anthropology. I hope that we will continuously come together as people struggling for a common cause. A central element is (or should be) the liberation of The Savage from his (or her) slot. But it is not only about stressing the commonalities between humans across cultures to make a (positive) difference, it is also about us focusing either on the differences between ourselves and our colleagues or on the commonalities in our interests, aspirations and sense of responsibility for what we deplore in this world. There are real Wars going on ‘out there’, tragedies and hells of injustice, suffering and senseless destruction. If we look for a place as anthropologists, i.e. Those Studying Humanity, the Wars in Her depths should pale our differences. We can counter them with accounts of alternatives, beauty, peace and success or with dissections of disasters, maladaptations and Beasts. But we should not get caught up in intellectual mirror-fighting.

Where walls of resentment cannot be taken down, dialogue doesn’t have a chance. The article and its thread of comments quoted in the beginning illustrate well how much there is to do. Slur and slander of that kind cannot really be appeased, not even by the most eager quest for relevance and adaptation to the latest game. They spring from a source probably as old and as nondisposable as mankind itself and find their way to you however much you try as long as you don’t become what they are. Care for people of the wrong country, the wrong colour, the wrong class, the wrong religion or the wrong position and they will throw you into their personal ‘savage slot’, and you will have their hatred, contempt and spite at your throat again.

The Savage and His Slot turn out to be as uncontrollably mutable as modernity, conflict or peace. As much as fairness and caring humanity will never be outdated, malice and conceit will never go out of style. We can only counter this with persistence and beauty, with diligence and love for what is good and true, as uncertain and ‘romantic’ as these terms might be. This is a fundamental dilemma of anthropology. Does it need to be a Tragedy? In my view, more than a century has shown that it is worth the trouble, regardless of what the future might bring.

By the way, my friend’s protest had worked. Her photo was removed and replaced with one of another anthropologist, also female and ‘white’, only now much older, and standing in what could be a lecturing pose, with another bunch of ‘blacks’, this time adult men in ragged clothes, cowering around her, looking at her in what could be suspicious ways, thus enabling a similar set of stereotyped phantasies – a nice episode for an anthropological micro-analysis. Any interest?)

Closing song

I am very happy that this texts ‘gets out’ as blog and not something more ‘formal’ or ‘traditional’ as I feel using a rather ‘new’ medium increases my ‘post-modernist’ liberties against dominant conventions of anthropological text- or ‘knowledge’ production. So please also allow me to close with a popular song of semi-Western background, whose beauty and sentiment can supposedly –and unfortunately– only be fully grasped by Spanish speakers (thus a form of ‘ethnic exclusionism’, apologies); a song I chose anyway, because it gets straight to the heart of what I feel could give us, or remind us of, common ground, and of what I think The Anthropologist should remember about his or her relation to that human world (s)he studies and shapes, even if it contains some terms that need not be taken too literally as this would distract from what is important:

I only ask of God That I won’t be indifferent to the Pain, That Death won’t find me Empty and alone, without having done enough.

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I only ask of God That I won’t be indifferent to Injustice That they won’t slap my other cheek, After a Claw has hurt this Lot of mine.

I only ask of God That I won’t be indifferent to Deceit, And if a Crook can overpower many People, That those People won’t just forget.

I only ask of God That I won’t be indifferent to the Future; In Despair is who is forced to part To live a different Culture.

I only ask of God That I won’t be indifferent to the War, That Mighty Beast that tramples on All the Poor Innocence of the People.

León Gieco43

                                                                                                                     Sólo le pido a Dios / que el dolor no me sea indiferente, / que la reseca muerte no me encuentre / vacío y solo, sin haber hecho lo suficiente. // Sólo le pido a Dios / que lo injusto no

me sea indiferente, / que no me abofeteen la otra mejilla, / después que una garra me arañó esta suerte. // Sólo le pido a Dios / que el engaño no me sea indiferente, / si un traidor puede más

que unos cuantos, / que esos cuantos no lo olviden fácilmente. // Sólo le pido a Dios / que el futuro no me sea indiferente, / desahuciado está el que tiene que marchar / a vivir una cultura

diferente. // Sólo le pido a Dios / que la guerra no me sea indiferente, / es un monstruo grande y pisa fuerte / toda la pobre inocencia de la gente.