Rethinking the Public

CARETHINKING PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY THROUGHEPISTEMIC POLITICS AND THEORETICAL PRACTICE

MICHAL OSTERWEILUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

We need to take the opening which [the cry] “another world is possible”presents very seriously. For another world to be possible, really possible, thereality of that possibility effectively implies that we don’t quite know how torespond, how to continue, how to inherit.

—Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers

In recent years there has been a marked increase in the literature on engagedor public anthropology; moreover, definitions of engagement have been opened upto include a multiplicity of ways and forms that anthropological work can be seen tobe politically engaged—ranging from direct activism, to critical deconstructions ofdominant categories, to teaching (Low and Merry 2010; Checker, Vine, and Wali2010; Brondo 2010; Mullins 2011; Lamphere 2004; Lassiter 2005; Peacock 1997;Borofsky 2011; Juris and Khasnabish 2013; Hale 2008; Speed 2008a). However, wehave yet to sufficiently explore the ways in which epistemological and ontologicalcritiques of representation, the real, and the political can also participate in redefiningsuch forms of engagement and impact. By combining insights from new visionsand forms of political action emerging from contemporary social movements, inparticular actions that involve and produce forms of knowing in which complexity,uncertainty, reflexivity and criticality are key, I believe we can enrich our visionof the public and political potential of anthropology, as well as of knowledgeproduction more generally.

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 28, Issue 4, pp. 598–620. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. C© 2013 bythe American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/cuan.12029

RETHINKING PUBLIC ANTHROPOLOGY THROUGH EPISTEMIC POLITICS AND THEORETICAL PRACTICE

In what follows I develop an argument for augmenting anthropology’s scopeof what counts as engaged scholarship, moving toward an epistemic definition thatunderstands the relationship between knowledge and action as inherently politicaland at the heart of current work needing to be done both by social movementsand academics alike.1 This means moving beyond an intellectual recognition of thepolitical nature of the relationship between knowledge and action (c.f. Foucaultand Gordon 1980; Haraway 1988), to a more thorough and practical understandingof the ways in which critical intellectual and theoretical work, including analysis,deconstruction and critique, are themselves material and potentially politicallypowerful practices. This in turn requires seeing our writing, research, and theepistemological and ontological frameworks and categories we use to performthese, as themselves both productive and politically charged.2 Without dismissingestablished forms of engagement such as doing advocacy, performing public service,or participating in policy-making on behalf of those we study, I argue that weshould also employ anthropology’s particular methods and forms of knowledgeproduction to expand our understanding and our practice of political engagement.This includes its access to reading and engaging alternative cosmo-visions, practicesand epistemological frameworks as well as recognizing that these alternatives canactually traverse worlds and realities, potentially transforming the anthropologist’sown world(s)—as well as his/her understanding of it.

Recent debates in anthropological theory and method make for a particularlyrich point of departure for the kind of epistemic and ontological politics I arguefor.3 In particular, forms of what Marcus (1999) terms “critical anthropology”concerned with post-representational ethnographies of complex, emergent, andcontemporary sites or interlocutors (Rabinow et al. 2008; Tsing 2005; Fischer2009; Mol 2002), which evade bounded or ontologically realist demarcation, canoffer crucial tools for, and insights into, an epistemic and ontological practicethat enables or augments alternatives worlds and alternative forms of efficaciousaction.

While social movements are exemplary of the kinds of complex, emergent,and recursive objects anthropology has begun to develop tools to apprehend, as ofyet critical anthropology has paid relatively little attention to social movements,struggles, or politics more broadly (see Law 2004; Casas-Cortes, Osterweil, andPowell 2013). In fact, for this reason (among others), critical anthropology is oftenpitted against, or seen as opposed to, public, activist, or engaged anthropology. Thisopposition poses one of the major obstacles to the expanded notion of engagementI want to pursue. In this essay, I argue that moving beyond this divide is absolutely

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crucial for arriving at a more holistic and effective vision of engagement. Thisinvolves understanding how our assumptions about politics, action, and intellectualwork help to perpetuate such unnecessary distinctions.

I make this argument drawing on ethnographic research with activist networksof the Italian alter-globalization movement—a movement that became visible withthe 300,000-person strong, 2001 protests against the G8 in Genoa and is oftenknown as “Movimento dei Movimenti”(MoM). Central to this movement are aseries of material practices involving analyses, deliberation, research, investigation,questioning, thinking, and theorizing—what I call “theoretical practices”—donethrough the production of texts, reflexive discourse, and more subtle or virtualforms of intervention. A great deal of contemporary activism is constituted byexperimental, reflexive, critical knowledge-practices, all of which are meant toreflexively, and even recursively develop “better” or more effective politics. This isdone largely through producing subjectivities that know, think, and do differently(Osterweil 2010; Casas-Cortes, Osterweil, and Powell 2008), often through whatone might think of as a non-dual or open-ended epistemology, in which processand resonance are as if not more important than Truth, objectivity, and end-points.As such, and counter to traditional perspectives that treat activism or politicalaction as constitutively distinct from academic or knowledge-work, the centralityof these theoretical practices suggests that today epistemology is a crucial terrainof political struggle and transformation; however, not in the ways we usuallyassume.

To explicate these points, I begin by discussing the “activist research v. culturalcritique” debate on engagement. I seek to reframe the valid concerns raised by Hale(2006) and others by considering the ways in which an opposition between thesetwo approaches establishes false divisions between the “real world” and academiaand prevents us from seeing important parallels between the work and world ofacademics and those of activists. Having pointed out my concerns about the divide,I then argue that knowledge is a crucial political terrain, and that social movementslike the Italian MoM are involved in sophisticated forms of knowledge productionthat resemble some of academia’s most sophisticated theoretical practitioners. Iconclude by suggesting that since a good deal of work done by social movementscan be considered theoretical, analytical, and critical—mirroring many academicpractices and values—the divide between academia and activism blurs, creating anovel space for rethinking the boundaries of engaged or political anthropology, inturn broadening our view of efficacious political action.

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“ACTIVIST RESEARCH V. CULTURAL CRITIQUE”

Interestingly, both activist research and cultural critique emerged as responsesto the increasing recognition of anthropology’s role in maintaining systems ofoppression and colonization that were unintentionally harming the marginalizedcommunities anthropologists were working with (Hale 2006, 2008; Speed 2008b;Scheper-Hughes 1995). Whereas proponents of cultural critique responded to thisidentity crisis by advocating that these political and epistemological problems shouldbe addressed almost exclusively in the realm of the textual and theoretical, evenarguing against direct forms of activism or engagement to avoid well-meaning yetflawed and simplistic impacts, proponents of activist research went the other way.They saw the crisis as pointing to the need for anthropologists to work explicitlyon behalf of marginalized and subordinated communities in order to address theselegacies through the process and relationships of research, actively decolonizingmethodologies and by more directly orienting the work of anthropologists to theneeds of the community (Hale 2008; Speed 2008b; Smith 1999). In other words,both groups were concerned for the communities anthropologists traditionallyworked with, but whereas activist researchers felt they had to do something onbehalf of these communities, and felt that it was unjust not to, many cultural criticsbelieved that more intervention would likely lead to more harm.

While there is more to say about the differences, what I am interested inhere is considering the charged nature of this divide, particularly from the sideof those advocating more engagement. Proponents of activist-research are trou-bled by the suggestion that deconstructive critical interventions and sophisticatedanalyses are sufficiently political, believing that it is a self-serving justification fordisengagement. I am sympathetic to the concern underlying this position, and alsowish for more explicitly political engagement by scholars. However, opposingcritical anthropology to political work doesn’t resolve the problem of engagement:instead it perpetuates a number of false oppositions between political action andintellectual work that in turn rest on an ultimate cynicism about the substantialpolitical potential of critical knowledge.

If we consider quotes from of a seminal piece by Charles Hale (2006), titled“Activist Research v. Cultural Critique,” we can begin to see core tendencies andassumptions underlying much of this work. Two that I will highlight are an emphasison working with people in the field, and the division between analytical work andpolitical action. According to Hale the difference between the two can be summedup as follows:

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By activist research, I mean a method through which we affirm a political

alignment with an organized group of people in struggle and allow dialogue withthem to shape each phase of the process, from conception of the research topicto data collection to verification and dissemination of the results. (2006:97,emphasis added)

For Hale, and other proponents of activist research, true engagement assumes, evenrequires, a relationship to a community or group of people in struggle. This is notonly premised on a definition of a field of struggle outside of the academy, it in a senseimplies that the absence of such a relationship essentially removes the possibilityof substantive political intervention. While an anthropologist’s relationship to agroup of people in struggle, or to their field-site, certainly can be an important sitefor political intervention, questions about whether it should be limited to such arelationship, as well as what constitutes the “field,” remain (see Marcus 2002).

A second concern exemplary of this division is the distinction between com-plexity and political action. Hale writes:

Proponents of cultural critique, driven by the search for ever-greater analyt-ical complexity and sophistication, object to the politically induced analytical

closure that activist research often requires. . . . Both these differences—howpolitical commitments transform research methods and at times prioritizeanalytical closure over further complexity—make activist research difficultto defend in an academic setting, especially when the arbiters of academicvalue tend to be proponents of cultural critique. (2006:100–101, emphasisadded)

Although what Hale means by the “analytical closure” required of activistresearchers—on the ground and in the heat of the everyday life of socialmovements—makes sense on a visceral level, it rests on some problematic as-sumptions about the kinds of knowledge and truth claims we associate with politicalaction and activism. It is often presumed or implied that values and logics highlyvalorized within academic practice—complexity, critique, questioning, investi-gating, deconstructing, and writing (text)—are somehow opposed to, or at oddswith, those valued and needed in movements. Conversely, it is assumed that theraison d’etre of movements or activists is to suspend complexity in order to takeaction. Such views rest on a limited or positivist conception of action, subsequentlyoverlooking forms of action that involve thought, complexity, contemplation, orproblematization (Stengers 2005).

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Ultimately, both the assertion that engagement requires a relationship to agroup of people in struggle and the call for analytical closure as a prerequisitefor action, rest on false assumptions. First is a notion that academic and activistpractice(s) are constitutively or essentially distinct; or more precisely, that action,associated with activism and politics, is essentially different than thinking, anal-ysis, critique—which are in turn associated with scholarship. This correspondswith the presumption that there is a clear-cut boundary between “the real world”where struggles take place and the academy, a detached realm where textual andknowledge production happen. These ideas in turn rest on a particular and limitednotion of “the political” and a modernist or realist ontology that takes the politicalfield and its constituent elements for granted, consequently neglecting possibilitiesfor radically different ontologies, political entities, and forms of subjectivity andaction. In other words, this division, often justified by calls for pragmatism andrealism, continues to treat action as that which takes place within the “existing”political terrain—working within the dominant ontological and theoretical under-standings of politics, premised on solid measurable outcomes. Moreover, states,NGOs, parties, and individuals are the kinds of entities assumed to exist therein.The implication is that on another plane—the textual—analysis, critique, andknowledge-production are free to participate in imagining other possible ways ofbeing, other possible social arrangements, other possible worlds, but these alterna-tives remain relegated to the space of the imaginary, never really taken seriously,never given a chance to take hold or flourish.

The Italian MoM challenges many of these assumptions. In what followsI will introduce the MoM and the centrality of theoretical practice, showingmany connections, similarities, and symmetries between these supposedly separateworlds and discussing what this means for politics and engagement today.

THE ITALIAN MoM: THEORETICAL PRACTICE AND EPISTEMIC

POLITICS

During fieldwork with the Italian MoM—self-named for its internalheterogeneity—my own aspirations of being a politically engaged ethnographerwere confounded many times over. I found myself faced with an ethnographic fieldthat was more like a barely assembled puzzle than a unified whole, and I was thrownby the contradictory desires and aims of those with whom I worked, and what thatmeant for my own ethnographic choices and questions. The epistemological andmethodological difficulties crystallized for me through a particularly rich and com-plicated moment during my dissertation research. On January 29–30, 2005, Italian

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philosopher Giorgio Agamben participated on a panel as part of the first seminarof the “Nomad University,” held in an old gymnasium in Venice. In a speech latertitled, “What Is a Movement?” Agamben spoke of a certain “malaise” and difficultyhe had when dealing with the concept of social movements:

I realize that I did not know what the word “movement” meant: despite itslack of specificity, everyone seems to understand it but no one defines it. Forinstance . . . why was a politically decisive instance called movement? . . .It is not possible to leave this concept undefined, we must think about move-ment because this concept is our “unthought,” and so long as it remains suchit risks compromising our choices and strategies . . . nor do I want to do thisbecause it is my job to define concepts, as a habit. I really do think that thea-critical use of concepts can be responsible for many defeats. I propose tostart a research that tries to define this word. (Agamben 2005)

I listened to this speech via webstream as part of my fieldwork and out ofmy own political and theoretical interests in Agamben’s views on politics. I hadreturned from Italy a few months before, having spent one year of pre-dissertationresearch trying to make sense of the power, in both presence and absence, ofItaly’s alter-globalization movement. As I sat at my computer, perched aboveand far beyond the heads of the hundreds of activists physically seated in theold gymnasium, Agamben’s words resonated quite strongly and unexpectedly—triggering one of those slowly unfolding and rare “aha!” moments. My first reactionwas to feel a sense of relief that someone of Agamben’s stature would publiclyadmit to confusion with respect to the disparate field of actors and practices calledMoM, validating my own difficulties in delineating this “movement” historically,geographically, sociologically, and politically. At the same time, this instantiationof the basic question “What is movement?” in this specific context and with this levelof philosophical sophistication, became a particularly important instantiation of amaterial practice of questioning and reflexivity I had observed and would continueto observe countless times throughout my research.

Since I had arrived in Italy in June 2002 to begin studying this immensething that everyone was then calling “il movimento dei movimenti,” I had beenalmost overwhelmed by the task. On the one hand I struggled to find ways todraw conceptual borders around what everyone called a “movement” but wouldnot fit into any of the conceptual, theoretical, or even commonsense frameworkswith which I was used to thinking about and understanding social movements.On the other, I was continuously struck by the fact that so many participants

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seemed to share this confusion, and expressed this by repeatedly asking questions,or making enigmatic statements, about what this movement was, or should be.They simultaneously seemed awed and puzzled by it.

For example, the owner of a popular bar where many informal movementgatherings took place explained, “It’s strange, I don’t know how to explain it. .. . What moves is like nothing I have seen before, it’s a sensibility, an affinity.”Another leader expressed his awe and puzzlement in a large meeting, statingperformatively, “I believe that this movement is a woman” referring to the fact thatthe movement seemed to function according to logics of difference, emergence,and complexity. Perhaps most poignant was the declaration “We don’t understandthis movement!” expressed by a perplexed yet exuberant leader from the south ofItaly to an auditorium of thousands the day after a wildly successful march.4

Despite these mutual uncertainties and questions, however, it was also unde-niable that this “movement” was there and very real. It was comprised of concreteevents and people and even had substantial political clout. It had brought over300,000 people to the streets to protest the policies and legitimacy of the G8 inGenoa in July 2001. It was a major cause of unprecedented levels of social mo-bilizations filling Italy for two years following Genoa. It sent hundreds/thousandsof participants to World Social Forums in Brazil, making Italians second only toBrazilians and Argentineans in attendance. It saw local social forums spring up inalmost every Italian city. It convened hundreds on an ongoing basis in numerousseminars, meetings, and other events, making it one of the most vibrant alter-globalization hubs in Europe. Moreover, it changed the political vocabulary andhorizon of political possibilities, within Italy and beyond.

The Nomad University seminar in which Agamben spoke was an event inwhich movement as concept, idea, and aspiration stared the material movementcomprised of activist bodies, marches, and organizations in the face, simultaneouslyembodying and arguing the political nature of thought and concepts and rejectingany neat separation between the two. It was also an event in which the divisionbetween fieldwork and my own life and worlds were confused: taking place incyberspace, but also in Italy and the United States; situated within a movementcontext, but looking very much like a university lecture, and even named as part ofa “nomad university.” This was an empirically and epistemologically complicatedfieldwork moment. But it was also intellectually and theoretically productive ona personal level. I have joked that I was not sure whether my notes on this eventbelonged in the academic notebooks I used for class, my field-notes, or my personaljournal. Agamben’s malaise, and his own iteration of what I began to term the “What

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is movement?” mantra, traversed empirical, political, and philosophical terrains. Itnot only confirmed how difficult it is to speak of a social movement as an objectivelyreal entity existing in the field—i.e., “the real world”—it also demonstrated howmutually intertwined and similar the worlds and practices of movements are withthose of academics.

THEORETICAL PRACTICE

The more time I have spent studying the Italian MoM and other autonomistand Zapatista or neo-zapatista networks,5 the more I have been struck by howmuch movement activity is constituted by a set of practices that in diverse andmaterial ways can be considered analytical and theoretical. Such practices pur-sue knowledge about the political and social context in order to arrive at betterunderstandings of the present while also working to theorize, create, and positalternatives to this present. Moreover, many MoM activists I spoke with see inmovement the call for a positive and ongoing practice of investigation, experimen-tation, and imagination. The open-ended, experimental nature of these theoreticalpractices are not only opposed to ideas of analytical closure, they also stand in starkcontrast to the ideological dogmatisms of past leftist paradigms, with their rigidcategories and expectations of the vanguard, revolution, etc. At the same time,these practices emphasize and focus on the theoretical and investigative momentof political practice. In other words, many MoM activists pose problems to thatwhich is considered politics, experimenting, evaluating, and reflexively theorizingalternative possibilities as they go. By this I mean that central to what these activistsdo on a day-to-day basis are a series of material practices of analyses, deliberation,contemplation, and research. Materially, this means many activists produce texts,participate in spaces aimed at the collective or multi-vocal production of mean-ing and political discourse, and engage in cultural and virtual actions that offeralternatives to what people consider reality and possibility to be.

The texts produced for MoM are too numerous to count. They range from themore formal or polished, such as those published in journals or books, and othersthat are more tentative and informal, such as interventions on listservs or web-chats or newsletters handed out at protests. In addition to texts are the theories andanalyses produced collectively in public spaces. For example, key to movements aregatherings and “encounters” (encuentros), meetings, and informal group discussions,where analysis, deconstruction, and political readings are rendered public, thendiscussed, debated, refuted, embraced. As with the texts, they also range frommore formal gatherings, such as the Uninomade seminar described earlier and

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myriad conferences on various political themes, to more ordinary, small-scaleactivist meetings that take place regularly, as well as large meetings held aftermajor protests where thousands attend. Beyond Italy, World and Regional SocialForums, originating in 2001, are excellent examples of this last sort of space andpoint to the political importance and centrality of collective, reflective technologyfor the larger alter-globalization movement as well. Notably, to my knowledge,Italy is the only country where nearly every city and many towns created its ownsocial forum.

In addition to the more or less clear-cut production of theory and analysis,a great deal of day-to-day activism can be understood to be part of an extendedtheoretical or experimental moment in which the object is to test out or makevisible the possibilities of new arrangements or imaginaries of the social, as well asto think within and against current formations—including the market, the state,and the university. Success, then, is achieved by impacting people’s imaginationsand desires: making imagining “other worlds” and other institutions possible, ratherthan creating immediate or actual transformations in the present. Much as post-structural interventions interrupt hegemonic arrangements (Gibson-Graham 1996,2000), activists chip away at the hegemonic or totalizing vision of social andpolitical reality, instigating experimental or spectacular actions that have semioticor prefiguring effects on people’s imaginations and impinge on their way of engagingwith and perceiving society as it currently stands. Examples of this virtual theoreticalpractice range from experimental interventions in daily life and the city, such asthe self-reduction of supermarket prices performed as a rite to San Precario (Saintof Precarity), to the occupation of an abandoned space to create a laboratory forre-imagining the city, as with a temporary squat in the center of Bologna, 2004.6

Finally, key to this theoretical practice is privileging a kind of theory andknowledge more interested in opening up questions and processes of becomingthan promoting a particular program or goal. Against formulaic, ideological, anddogmatic forms of knowing implicit in traditional forms of leftist practice, thetheoretical practice of these Italian activists points to the emergence of a newpolitical ethic based on a different kind of epistemology—one founded on a com-mitment to critical reflexivity and an open-ended, processual trajectory. Thesepractices help create the conditions of possibility for new ways of being in theworld, challenge what we consider to be valid or viable knowledge or truth claims,and reconceptualize the kinds of “real” entities that populate the socio-politicalterrains.

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Take, for example, these words of a Bolognese activist, who explained theimportance of the MoM, and the broader alter-globalization movement:

[It] in a sense resituates all of a series of classical polarities of the 20th century,challenging precisely their polarity: Reform/Revolution; Vanguard/Class;Seizing Power/Classical Reformism; Violence/Non-Violence. . . . This per-forms a grand “squat” of the imagination in which I am the vanguard, but I amnot the vanguard, rather I am just one part. (Interview, Bologna, July 2002)

Interestingly, these movements not only embrace the uncertainty, complexity,and partiality of their own knowledge; they also see sophisticated theoretical andphilosophical interrogations as a key part of real political work. This includesgrappling with notions of “the political” and political action that push againsttraditional, more modernist conceptions of these, struggling to discover durableforms and institutions outside the figures of the political party and the state. Asthey do this, they work to develop new language(s) and narratives that can moreeffectively grasp and describe these forms and the different political logics they arepremised on. As this activist from Naples, also part of the Disobbedienti network,describes the purpose of the MoM, the goal is not to win elections or take up theseat of power:

[We are more interested in] the need to de-authoritize power, to disarticulatepower, to progressively break the mechanisms of traditional political repre-sentation. While today in Italy and in the world there exists a real crisis ofthe political . . . we are the only possible anti-body, the only possibility fora rethinking of the political in terms of, precisely, real political participation.(Interview, Porte Alegre, January 2003)

There were many echoes to this sentiment. Following the third European SocialForum, a network of Italian activists published an open letter on several inter-national websites as well as on their own listserves in an attempt to evaluate thecontemporary situation and prospects of the movement. In the letter, following alonger written assessment of the Forum, the activists conclude:

There are no shortcuts and if there are they are only “table tricks.” There isonly experimentation as method and substance of the “becoming-movement.”(www.globalmagazine.org, October 20, 2004)

In all of these, the novelty and importance of the MoM is not about finding new“solutions” or Truths for organizing social change, nor about effacing complexity

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in order to take action. Rather, in the case of the Bologna activist, politics becomesabout questioning all of the assumptions or taken for granted categories of thoughtthat accompanied older modalities of pursuing social change. Similarly, in the caseof Global Magazine, movement activists recognize the movement as a sort of puzzlewith no clear-cut solutions. However, rather than see this as a problem to be fixedor solved, they identify in this inexplicability the call for a positive and ongo-ing practice of investigation, experimentation, and imagination—what they term“becoming.”

Similarly if we look at the geography and architecture of the movement,we find that key spaces and practices including assemblies, seminars, and journalsare premised on the aspiration to open up debate, discussion, even imaginations,rather than simply win a political or ideological battle. The seminar from whichAgamben’s quote comes is itself a good example. It is part of a project defined asan

itinerant laboratory of critical thought; Researchers, teachers, studentsand activists give life to a “free university.” A practice that is theoreticaland political in contrast to the misery of the forms of action of the university,and the smug cultural self-sufficiency that often characterizes the “movementof movements.” (Mezzadra and Bascetta 2005)

One interviewee even drew my attention to how one could tell the peak periodof movement was in decline once the large protests were no longer followed bywell-attended assemblies where all that was done was talk, review, critique, etc.Interestingly, according to him, it was in those assemblies—rather than on thestreets or in the parliament—that things “really happened.” While certainly onecan dismiss him as being overly optimistic about the role of debate and intellectualproduction, I believe it points to the centrality of these interrogative and theoreticalpractices.

As such, the concept “theoretical practice” not only recognizes an importantfunction of social movements, but also expands our own notions of what “theory”and “knowledge” are and do. In a present defined largely by uncertainty and theabsence of hegemonic frameworks for social change—for academics and activistsboth—recognizing that auto-ethnographic theoretical work is a common socialmovement practice can point to ways in which academic and activist practice sharea great deal in common and can potentially be seen to participate jointly in makingthe way for new worlds.

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RETHINKING ANALYTICAL CLOSURE TOWARD AN EPISTEMIC

CULTURAL POLITICS

Interestingly, many of the theoretical practices I have described enact andvalorize several of the characteristics Hale (2006) implicitly contrasts to truly activistor political practice. Returning to Hale’s concern about the discrepancy betweenactivists’ needs for “politically induced analytical closure” versus cultural critics’desire for “ever-greater analytical complexity and sophistication,” it is importantto confront not only limited conceptions about social movement knowledge, butalso dominant assumptions about the ways that knowledge and action are linked inour dominant culture.

Contrary to many depictions of activism, my research suggests that ratherthan suspend complexity, questioning, and uncertainty in order to act, movementsare often seeking forms of action that work with and through uncertainty andopenness. Rather than decry analytical complexity, they work to remake botha politics and sociality in which complexity and reflection (reflexivity) are bothacceptable and productive. In contrast to the absolutist, positivist, and legalistnorms of much policy and political thinking (not to mention traditional science),Italian activists seemed to be discovering and promoting a form of practice based inpartiality, open-endedness, and uncertainty. Taken together, these activist practicesrefute the importance of analytical closure, arguing instead for a more nuanced,contingent, even messy form of political practice. As one activist articulated to meone year after the Iraq war had started:

If in the past it was acceptable (and expected) for the movement to have theslogan, “No to War with no ifs or buts!”; today it is better to say, “No to Warwith many ifs and many buts!” (Interview, Bologna, 2004)

As the quote above suggests, this does not mean erasing or ignoring uncertainty,or suspending complexity, rather, it means acting—demanding “No to War”—infull acknowledgment of the complexity.

While Hale contrasts “politically induced analytical closure” of groups ofpeople in struggle and the “analytical complexity” preferred by cultural critics,it is important to acknowledge that “politically induced analytical closure” is notparticularly unique to the space of social movements. On the contrary, the overallassumption in our political culture is that in order to act complexities need to be, atleast momentarily, suspended. Analytical closures—the suspension of complexityin order to take a position or make a move—are, then, the dominant conditionor modality by which claims, propositions, facts, and knowledge-claims in general

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are made, whether they belong to natural sciences, social sciences, economics oreven policy worlds. That is to say, the expectation for making any truth claimsor doing politics in our society is that we bracket complexity (and then bracketthe fact that bracketing takes place) (Latour 1999). We are not only expectedto ignore or hide any uncertainties or alternative possibilities present at the timeof taking action—in policy, science, or economy—we are actually supposed tobelieve that the elimination of these complexities and ambiguities is a good andnecessary condition for acting in our world. The question becomes: What kinds ofactions are enabled or disabled by this presumption?

While Hale is by no means suggesting activists are simple-minded, or thatthey eschew complexity, the concept of analytical closure seems to leave the largerepistemological frameworks intact and misses the opportunity to push further hisown recognition that it is in the “tension between utopian ideals and practicalpolitics” that activist practice and activist research can thrive (2006:100). In this,perhaps a more radical and politically productive approach might push the questionof whether political action needs to presume such closure. In other words, we canacknowledge that movements have to take political positions and make concretedemands even when they know full well that the situation is complex and thatcauses may not be simple, fully knowable, or transparent.

Another aspect of this dominant epistemic culture is a fear that post-structuralism and other forms of anti-foundationalist intellectual work are in-herently opposed to action, or worse, will lead to inaction—a concern shared bymany activists as well (see Dempsey and Rowe 2004; Maeckelbergh 2009). Assuch, truly taking on an understanding of the epistemic as a political terrain ofstruggle requires shifting our understanding of what constitutes both the criteriafor action, and what constitutes action. While we should certainly be weary ofany paralysis or nihilism incessant critique may provoke in an academic (or anyoneelse), critique is not necessarily disabling or opposed to action. Moreover, ourfear of inaction can lead us to assume that taking action is always best. (One needonly look to the current discourse on what we “know” and don’t know about theeconomic crises to recognize that certainties aren’t necessarily better.) It also tendsto suggest that doing something—despite complexity—always constitutes the bestform of political commitment to one’s field site, or the world. The truth is that sucha political modality is part of the “modus operandi” of contemporary politics, verywelcome in traditional political spaces and discourses. As Foucault (1994) argues,one of the key problems of politics today is that it operates polemically, denyingthe sincere questions, uncertainties, and problems facing the field of politics, and

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those working for social change. I am not advocating doing nothing, but insteadsuggesting that what and how we do something might look different than traditionalnotions of both politics and action.7

Social movements—like many individuals and organizations involved in pro-ducing both action and knowledge today—are themselves seeking more ethicalcriteria and conditions for making claims and taking action. In the process, they areproducing new subjects and new forms of doing politics that embrace rather thaneschew uncertainty, reflexivity, thought, highlighting how our epistemic cultureis itself a key site for political struggle (Osterweil 2010). Reorienting our notionsof what action is enriches both our understanding of the role of the epistemic as amaterial terrain of struggle as well as the epistemic practices we might employ inopening up our own forms of political engagement.

EPISTEMIC AND ONTOLOGICAL POLITICS: New Forms of

Engagement

One of the key criticisms of “cultural critique” is that its deconstructive,post-structuralist approach actually takes away from “real” political work, andtherefore contributes to the problem. However, I believe the problem is lessabout the political potency of tools such as deconstruction and critique—tools thatby recognizing the historical specificity and contingency of things or interruptinghegemonic arrangements can help enable the existence and growth of alternatives(Gibson-Graham 2000, 1996; Escobar 1995; Grossberg 1992)—and has more todo with the fact that we still do not fully take on the consequences of employingsuch epistemological and methodological tools more consistently and thoroughly.Instead we continue to presume a division between the textual and the real, politicalaction and intellectual work, failing to take seriously the other worlds, ways ofknowing, and alternate realities deconstructing dominant entities such as the state,economy, and the individual both entail and require.

For example, many scholars will describe and acknowledge the limits of thestate form, market society, traditional conceptions of power, and the individual,arguing for a networked, micro-political understanding of social reality in theiracademic work. However, when acting politically ourselves, we seem more reticentto use the insights of these theories to shift our own forms of political action. Ibelieve that this is largely a result of the strange bracketing of the real world (withreal politics) and our own material lives, as well as a compulsion to a form ofpragmatic realism that pushes for expediency over desirability. These tendencies

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contribute to a limited and often counterproductive understanding of engagementthat ends up reinforcing rather than undermining the current political arrangement.

Take, for example, the following quote from Nancy Scheper-Hughes exhort-ing young anthropologists to go against the grain and become engaged:

So how does one survive in the academy as a militant anthropologist? Ironically,by keeping one’s public engagements fairly private and very much like thefirst generation of working mothers, you do double-time, keeping up withexpected home-front duties, with the expected rate of scholarly productionof books, articles, and graduate students, participating in academic meetings,etc., while simultaneously doing human rights work, serving on internationalpanels, giving keynote speeches in places and at events that don’t matter ahoot to one’s peers. (Scheper-Hughes 2009:3–4)

As a young, aspiring-to-be-engaged anthropologist, I empathize greatly withScheper-Hughes. However, this paragraph captures many of the ways currentconceptions of engagement may unintentionally undermine progressive politicalintervention. First, the suggestion that to be a public anthropologist one needsto “take on a second shift” [outside waged labor] “but not complain about it,”re-instantiates the notion that academia is not in the real world, or that politicalstruggles such as those over labor in academia are not as political or vital as thework on behalf of other communities.

Moreover, it misses foundational cultural logics of productivity and work assites for political intervention. This is particularly troublesome given the contem-porary political and economic climate within universities—recognizing of coursethat those universities (and the culture of work) are themselves part of broadercultures, systems, and processes. In so doing, we essentially condone or tacitlyaccept the foundational ideologies of capitalism and liberal modernity: the market-ized environment overtaking universities, and the meager notions of democracycurrently being peddled. We might appeal to radical deconstruction of capital, andthe state in texts, but when it comes to our own practice we tend to move from arather traditional political place.

This leaves a series of unanswered questions, with substantial political impli-cations: If we work with a social movement/group of people in struggle who arethemselves propping up what some have coined the “nonprofit industrial complex”(INCITE 2009) and preventing more fundamental critiques to emerge (see Fer-guson 1994; Escobar 1995; Alvarez forthcoming), are we truly acting to the bestof our political potential? Similarly, if our definitions of politics fall in with the

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liberal state-centered vision of politics and the current world order, are we helpingthose in struggle, or reinforcing the political status quo? Finally, and as I alreadymentioned, if we so directly claim our engagement on behalf of others sufferingatrocities while remaining silent or complicit with respect to crucial issues of laborpolitics, racism, and freedom within the academy, what kind of politics and worldare we helping to make?

Ultimately, the debate on engaged scholarship tends to fall back on an ontolog-ical (and epistemological) privileging of a realist and modernist version of politicsand of social reality. This privileging denies the political possibilities of other formsand contents. There are substantial political implications of recognizing that ourown ontological frameworks determine what kinds of entities can and do exist. AsPolanyi (2001) showed, part of the power of the Market Society rests on the factthat it not only appears to be disembedded from society, but that this disembed-ding appears the natural and the only form possible. When we start to recognizethat the kinds of things that exist for us politically—states, citizens, movements,NGOs—are not natural, universal, or immutable, we can start to more seriouslyconsider other possible contents to the political, and move beyond the form ofrealistic pragmatism that always confronts us with “infernal alternatives” (Pignarreand Stengers 2011).

Presently, our political intervention seems constrained and defined by thecurrent set of actors and institutions, as well as what is seen as politically and“realistically” possible. This means our political interventions depart from an as-sumption of the liberal individual, the sovereign nation-state, and the forms ofbeing attributed to these. As a result we miss the more radical potential of theknowledges and worlds our ethnographic engagement often encounters or bearswitness to—worlds that already exist, but maybe small, nascent, and barely visible,as well as worlds that are real, but may not yet be actualized (Escobar and Osterweil2010; Boellstorff 2008). As one of few disciplines in the Western academy privyto these virtualities, or at the very least to a plethora of examples that challengeuniversalizing assumptions, anthropology has an important potential contributionto make here.

Can we imagine a kind of anthropological knowledge production that movesbeyond engaging people in struggle within the terms prescribed by the currentdominant worldview that defines both the political and the real as already knownsites? A worldview where the political refers only and necessarily to states andmacro-political entities that have formal decision-making and governing powers,and a real that corresponds to an objectively verifiable mind-independent notion

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of reality in which cause and effect are clearly and simply related. Might wenot be more coherent in thinking with some of the theoretical, philosophical,epistemological, and methodological innovations offered to us by the turn in socialtheory and anthropology to relational approaches in which the subject/object divideis not presumed, and in which the realness of virtual and micro-political terrains ofbecoming are taken seriously?

Rather than allowing our theorizing and analysis of radical alternatives toremain locked in the troubled dichotomy between textual practices and practicesin the real world, we need to develop a better understanding of how these practicesintersect and overlap. In doing so we have the potential to recognize, in a muchmore radical and symmetrical sense, the theoretical or conceptual alternatives weencounter in “the field” with entities such as the MoM. It is here that I believemany of the epistemological and methodological contributions of cultural critique,in particular critical anthropologies of the emergent, complex, and contemporary,offer possible ways out. Several components of these critical anthropologies offerpoints of departure for a radical epistemic politics. These include their critiquesof positivism, and their recognition that many important objects and sites evadeontologically realist demarcations. These can in turn be better understood asassemblages that at times participate in the production of emergent forms of life,often involving textual or writing practices (writing machines) similar to those ofacademics (Marcus 2002; Fischer 2005).

This takes us back to the initial division between activist research and culturalcritique. How does one reconcile traditional notions of activist research when itcomes to contending with heterogeneous, recursive, and networked structures thattraverse supposed boundaries between objective reality and ideational potential?How can we allow a movement or a group of people in struggle to determinethe research in such a situation, and to whom is the anthropologist accountable?While of course there are many cases where the parameters of a movementare more clearly defined, as in Hale’s own experience with the Awas Tingni inNicaragua, ultimately we cannot take either the delimitation of a social movement,nor the kind of relationship between said movement and researcher for granted.As my own experience with the Italian MoM demonstrates, there are times whenanthropological knowledge cannot simply be at the service of, or determined by,the desires of activists. This is both because a movement is not a clearly delimitedentity, and because in its internal differentiation it may be comprised of diverse,even conflicting desires over the kinds of action to take. These contradictions andhesitations are also a natural product of pursuing change in a period in which the

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failure of traditional leftist approaches have not been replaced by new dominantnarratives or approaches.

In other words, our interlocutors in the field are themselves parts of projectsengaged with the not-yet or emergent (Povinelli 2011; Fischer 1999), trying tobring into being other possible futures, other possible reals, for which terminology,let alone actions may not yet be known. As such, actors within a movement fieldare themselves often involved in questioning, analyzing, and figuring out what amovement is—and that figuring out is absolutely part of the action and natureof being movement, being in struggle. Here naming or theorizing something as amovement, or a movement of movements—as opposed to political party, union,revolt—is itself political work. In such cases, co-laboring to understand the powerin the name or term—often through practices that are presumed to be academicsuch as recording, writing, deconstructing, and analyzing—can become a form ofcollaboration and deeply political engagement.

The key is getting beyond the narrow understandings of theory as immaterialand abstract—things that we merely discuss in scholarly texts and lectures—to aplace where we can take these theories seriously enough to allow them to transformour practice, to actually transform the kinds of entities we see as real and possible,and thus our ways of being, behaving, and striving in the world. The goal is tounderstand the work of both movements and academics as trying to create theconditions of possibility for radically different forms of politics and sociality.

CONCLUSION

At a very basic level academics and activists alike cohabit a world in whichwhat it means to pursue social change does not have clear-cut or obvious an-swers. Despite claims to their radically distinct locations, then, both activists andacademics inhabit in common a world where they engage with this political prob-lematic. I believe that a large part of why we find so much resonance betweenactivist and academic practice is because transformative political practice todayrequires epistemological and ontological frameworks that are radically differentfrom the Cartesian modernist ones that have been dominant, involving a differentunderstanding of the relationship between how we know and how we act. It isno coincidence that both academics and activists are struggling to articulate newforms of knowing-being-doing; they are both products of the same episteme andare constantly coming up against its limits, whether in positivist methodologies orMarxist scientism. As a result, both are involved in a terribly confusing struggle toidentify and undo the legacies of this episteme while still being part of it.

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It is at this intersection—of knowledge and practice, the recognition that agreat deal of political practice today involves such work, and the crisis of liberalmodernity—where our potential for new forms of engagement lies. However,rather than continue to see engagement as something we do “out there,” it is crucialthat we revision—topographically and ontologically—how we see ourselves inrelation to our “objects of study.” And that we recognize the common political andepistemological space in which we are situated. While there is much to celebratein traditional forms of engagement, it is crucial that we also move away fromunderstandings of engaged or political action in which sites, spaces, and forms arealways and already thoroughly constituted by and of liberal-modernist notions of“the political” and “the real.” Given the critical times we live in, helping to revisionand rethink the terrain of the political and the social more broadly might be someof the most helpful forms of engaged knowledge production to which anthropologyand other disciplines can contribute.

NOTES

1. This piece builds on two pieces I coauthored (Casas-Cortes, Osterweil, and Powell 2013,2008). While I take responsibility for the arguments I make here, I am very much indebted tomy coauthors and the social-movement working group at UNC–Chapel Hill for many of theconversations and arguments that have contributed to the arguments I make here.

2. While I was only made aware of Stoler’s argument regarding this term as the piece had goneto press, we coincide in noting a marked absence of attention to epistemic habits or cultures inmaterial, political practices (see Stoler 2008).

3. See also Graeber (2004:11–12).4. Turnout for the march exceeded the expected ten- to thirty-thousand by over fivefold.5. Since the EZLN’s 1994 uprising many groups, in Mexico and transnationally, have been inspired

by the Zapatistas, as well as the cultural politics of zapatismo. See Callahan 2005; Leyva Solano2003.

6. The virtual is a severely understudied aspect of social reality and the majority of work on itremains at the level of theory; ethnographies like Boellstorff (2008) are important moves in thedirection of more empirical engagement.

7. Shannon Speed has also critiqued this uneasy dichotomy between cultural critique and activistresearch, arguing for a critically engaged activist research—where the critical and activist “canbe practiced together as one undertaking” (2008b:215). I agree with her premise that thetensions produced in dialogues between research subjects and anthropologists are rich andpotentially fruitful, not to be avoided by remaining in the realm of the textual. This gets closerto what I am advocating; however, it does not acknowledge the direct political effects of workin the realm of epistemology and ontology.

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Rethinking the Public

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