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AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST WORLD ANTHROPOLOGY Interview Interview with Professor Hyang Jin Jung, Chair, Department of Anthropology, Seoul National University Virginia R. Dominguez Associate Editor for World Anthropology Emily Metzner Editorial Assistant for the World Anthropology section Hyang Jin Jung is a professor and the current chair of the Department of Anthropology at Seoul National University in South Korea. She received her PhD in 2001 in cultural anthropology from the University of Minnesota, in the United States. Her research interests lie at the intersection of culture, self, and emotion, with the US and North Korea as her primary anthropological sites. Her ongoing research projects include the emotional culture of contemporary postmodern US society and the psychocultural underpinnings of North Korean statehood and society. She is author of Learning to Be an Individual: Emotion and Person in an American Junior High School (2007). Virginia R. Dominguez (VRD): Can you tell us about your work? I know you study both the United States and North Korea, isn’t that so? How did you come to choose these sites? Hyang Jin Jung (HJJ): When I came to the US for a doctoral degree, I had Korea in mind for my dissertation work. To me, South Korea, where I was born and raised, was the strangest place in the world and deserved a full anthropological inquiry. After I finished my master’s degree at Seoul National University, I collected extensive field notes over several years while working as a teacher and doing participant-observation in a junior high school. I planned to use these notes for my future PhD work. Then at the University of Minnesota, I had an opportunity to do a field study in an American high school for an ethnographic methods course. That was truly my first serious “cross-cultural” experience. During the fieldwork at the high school, I kept asking questions that were very important to Korean teachers but “unfamiliar” to the American teachers. The coexistence of similarities and differences between Korean and American schools gave me a visceral understanding of what anthropology is all about, I think. So I decided to take an anthropological detour by doing PhD work about adolescent socialization in a junior high school in the US. After that, I was going to do South Korea. But then, after I returned to South Korea, I joined a research team that worked with North Korean refugees. To my generation of South Koreans, growing up under heavy anti-Communist ideological education, North Korea did not even exist on planet earth. The work with North Korean refugees presented fascinating anthropological questions, again from an amalgam of the familiar and the unfamiliar. North Korea soon became my other anthropological site. The biggest reward of researching North Korea is my realization that South Korea and North Korea may have walked a very different pathway on the route to modernity, but they are twins mirroring each other—perhaps like long-lost twins who grew up in radically different environments. I said earlier that I started anthropology because I wanted to understand South Korea, and through North Korea, I come to better understand the puzzle that is South Korea. Of course, to us South Koreans, North Korea is an urgent research topic, too. Now that I do both the US and North Korea, it is interesting that these two countries never talk to each other in reality. They don’t even have a diplomatic relationship. But they constantly talk to each other in me. Each presents theoretical questions to the other, back and forth. For example, the theatricality of North Koreans’ public behavior makes me ask questions about the theatrical nature of self-presentation among Americans and vice versa; the American preoccupation with self-realization leads me to ponder about selfhood among North Koreans under their political circumstances. VRD: You told me in person that you do not like being interviewed. I think that is probably true of many anthropologists, but you still agreed to being interviewed for the World Anthropology section of American Anthropologist. May I ask why? HJJ: I have this notion that musicians communicate with their music; politicians with their political actions; writers with writing; and scholars with their scholarly works. VRD: But you interview lots of people. HJJ: That’s for my ethnography—it’s different! But maybe, after all the interviews that I’ve asked for, I should sit for one too. VRD: So why did you agree to be interviewed by me? HJJ: Well, you asked, and it’s an honor to be interviewed and also maybe an opportunity to talk about Korean anthropology through my case. In no way do I represent Korean anthropology, but I’m based there. VRD: Is it an honor because it is American Anthropologist? HJJ: I wouldn’t deny the prestige that American Anthropologist has, but this is a forum for anthropologies from C 2016 by the American Anthropological AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 118, No. 4, pp. 838–858, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12698 World Anthropology different parts of the world to come together through this medium. If this kind of forum existed elsewhere, it would also be an honor to be included there, too. VRD: Since I know that you have done extensive fieldwork in the US, I must ask if the US is a popular area of anthropological study in the Republic of Korea (commonly known in the English-speaking world as South Korea) or if you are actually fairly unusual there. If you think that the US is a popular area of anthropological study in the Republic of Korea, how does it manifest itself? And, if it isn’t, how does that manifest itself? HJJ: My US work is not mainstream in (South) Korea. In Korean academia as a whole, the US is frequently studied, particularly in English literature, political science, international relations, and history. But it is not a popular area in anthropology. For a certain discipline or research area to flourish, there has to be demand and support from the general public. To the Korean public, the US appears too familiar and too distant at the same time to inspire, say, an anthropological romance. It is too familiar through Hollywood and the market. American pop music and Hollywood movies have long been part of “modern” life in Korea. Now Starbucks is on every corner, and the obsession with the English language (especially American English, but in addition to the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Singapore, and Philippines are frequent destinations for middle-class Koreans studying English abroad) is gripping the whole country. The political and military alliance between South Korea and the US is another factor that makes the US too familiar to the Korean public. However, it is too distant for those of us living on the Korean peninsula, whose immediate regional concerns are mainly in Northeast Asia. The result is that American popular culture and American politics are popular topics and mundane concerns among South Koreans, but American culture—culture as a way of life in a classic anthropological sense—doesn’t seem to have a place in people’s imaginations. It’s interesting, and a bit paradoxical too, that my fieldwork site is in the Midwestern US, when it’s almost as though California (because of Hollywood and Silicon Valley) and Washington, DC (because of the White House) are the two locations that matter to Koreans and the vast in-between, including the Midwest, remains very much muted and unknown to the general public in Korea. Perhaps another reason that “America” (i.e. the US) is not often seen as an object of anthropological study is that it is seen more as a force than a place where actual people live their lives in their own cultural world, a force that seems to force the rest of the world to become like America. Of course, there are the power relations of knowledge production that shape anthropological study, too. The US has historically been where the anthropologist comes from, not goes to. Korean anthropologists rarely do their fieldwork in the US. Some did their dissertation work in the US while studying in degree programs there, but once they are based in Korea, the sheer physical distance and perhaps the perceived 839 lack of public interest seem to discourage continuing fieldwork in the US. I should tell you that I struggle to maintain my research program on the US because it is very hard to find an audience in Korea. Even internationally, it’s very hard to find anthropologists based outside the US but studying it. It’s no wonder that I feel intellectually lonely. Another factor in my intellectual solitude concerns the question of the relevance of anthropology to Korean society. My work on the US presents me with ethnographic scenes and theoretical questions that are just as exciting, challenging, and fascinating as any other “exotic” culture and that are extremely pertinent to contemporary life in South Korea. But when I am faced with this implicit principle that academic research must be (directly) relevant and (immediately) useful to Korean society, I feel like I can’t really justify my US work other than saying that it is going to be useful in the long run. That’s why international relations and English literature are two dominant fields in US studies in South Korea, the former supported by the importance of the political alliance with the US and the latter by “English fever.” Doing anthropology is already a luxury, and doing anthropology of the US seems to be a double luxury. VRD: Are certain topics favored (and other topics not favored) in contemporary Korean anthropology? I was thinking of research specialties, but it might be interesting to think of this also in terms of teaching areas. HJJ: East Asia broadly conceived is the favored regional area, at least in our department. The East Asian focus has three subareas: Northeast Asia, Southeast Asia, and Korean Studies. Our department has historically emphasized East Asia since its founding, first with Northeast Asia and later expanding it to include Southeast Asia. Now that we’ve just received this state funding for graduate student training and internationalization, we want to further strengthen the East Asian focus. The funding from the Korean government is a historic feat on our part. We won it over other very competitive, bigger departments, like sociology and psychology, in both our university and other top universities, which ranked above our department in terms of the number of publications and other quantitative standards of evaluation. So we take this opportunity to really solidify our grounding in both academia and the broader public. The East Asian focus is our attempt to be relevant to Korean society and the region at large, through anthropological engagement. We also want to develop the Korean Studies component more. We think that it is high time for anthropological studies of Korea, particularly because there are international demands on knowledge of Korean culture, many thanks to K-pop and other K-culture industry. Our department is receiving more international applications for graduate training in the anthropology of Korea than ever before. Until recently we have drawn international students most often from China and Japan, but increasingly more applications are coming from other parts of the world as well. Presently we have students from China, Japan, Russia, Kazakhstan, the Emirates, Spain, and the US. International students are 840 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016 usually interested in Korean culture and society, but some study their own society, too. VRD: So they must be fluent in Korean? They take classes in Korean? HJJ: Yes, they take classes in Korean. In our department, several classes are taught in English by our newly hired Prof. Olga Fedorenko and once in a while by me, but the majority of classes are done in Korean, so international students must be fluent in Korean. The graduate school of Seoul National University allows thesis writing in English, so some international students opt to write their theses in English, especially if English is their first language or they have competency in English. Even then, if they are working on Korean culture and society, we try to train them in academic Korean, because they should be able to utilize the Korean scholarship on their chosen research topic. Outside our department, there are quite a few Korean anthropologists whose regional specialty is other than East Asia, such as India, Mexico, and Nigeria. Some of our students are doing their work on other areas, too. Uzbekistan, Catalonia, Iran, India, and Cuba are among recent past or current field sites of our master’s and PhD students, while the majority of our students do their fieldwork in various parts of East Asia. VRD: You chose to come to the US to get graduate training (and you did so at the University of Minnesota). May I ask why? And do you, therefore, tend to see yourself as doing US-style anthropology even if you are based in Korea? HJJ: My BA was from Pusan National University but in the College of Education. After my master’s degree coursework in anthropology at Seoul National University, I worked in a middle school—a junior high school—for a while as an English teacher. During that time, I also wrote my master’s thesis on teachers’ social organization. After the master’s thesis, as I became more immersed in teaching, I came to develop interests in human development, socialization, and personhood—classic themes in psychological anthropology. I wanted to come to the US for doctoral training simply because anthropology was more developed in the US at that time. Also, a practical reason was that I had some competence in American English; I didn’t want to have to learn another foreign language or a different English for my doctoral studies. Other than that, I didn’t know much. I had some ideas about what I wanted to do in anthropology, but the rest was sort of worked out for me. I was just so fortunate to have two excellent teachers in psychological anthropology, Kathleen Barlow and John Ingham, and one in educational anthropology, Marion Lundy-Dobbert, at the University of Minnesota. Psychological anthropology still fascinates me, for its ultimate concern about the intertwining relationship between the psyche and the sociocultural world. I really think that psychological anthropology sustains my youthful fascination with anthropology that I felt in my early twenties, when I first discovered it. But because this subdiscipline is a very American one indeed, it heavily relies on American concepts of self, emotion, and person as building blocks. Think about self and emotion. These are key concepts in psychological anthropology, but they are drawn from very individualistic conceptions of the person and psychic process. We all know experientially that emotion is something we personally feel but that it is also social currency. Emotion is generated in the interpersonal and intersubjective arenas and, as such, flows through persons. But the very concept of “emotion” limits our understanding of human emotional life. The concept of “person” is more useful in the Korean context, but “self” is again a heavily (American) culture-laden concept so that we have to be very careful when applying it cross-culturally. I guess any theoretical concept has this risk of being culture bound. We just need to recognize it and try to expand our conceptual tool kit beyond the concepts grounded in the American and Western intellectual and cultural traditions. Yet South Korea is a great place for psychological anthropology. Affective relationality is a core value among Koreans. There is good reason why Koreans are so adept at creating melodramas for film and television. Korea has a very rich affective culture plus a very complicated relationship with modernity after its dynastic history. VRD: Have you considered working in the US? HJJ: I am often asked that question, both by Koreans and Americans. Something about me invites that question, it seems. I always felt a little bit outside Korean culture. Korea is a puzzle to me. Other Koreans tell me I’m a little “off”—that I’m like an American in some ways. My childhood friend told me that I’ve always been this way, even before studying in the US. Maybe it has something to do with Korean sociability and my introversion. I need a lot of space. In Korea, people place a high value on being sociable. I never liked engaging in everyday sociability, but I am not reserved when it comes to intellectual debate and emotional expression. So, my general shyness combined with expressiveness and straightforwardness may be [viewed as] an interesting combination. I am feeling very reluctant to discuss this personal feature of myself. Whatever that is, my sense of being “psychoculturally” at the periphery of Korean society makes me an anthropological observer of my own society and drawn to psychological anthropology. But when I am in the US, I feel acutely that I am Korean after all—yes, psychoculturally and otherwise. I have certainly familiarized myself with some aspects of American culture, especially through my fieldwork experiences, but that has nurtured my intercultural sensibility more than anything. Also, in the US, I am seen as a “scholar of color.” I was taken aback upon first hearing the phrase “scholars of color” at a conference. Color: I imagine colors, colorful, hues. I instantly thought of pink, blue, green, so I didn’t comprehend the term at first, but then I realized that the person meant scholars of “minority” backgrounds in the US and that this term referred to me whether I liked it or not. My own preferred identification would be as an “international scholar” instead of a scholar of color. I say this, because people World Anthropology outside the US do not necessarily see the world according to the racial terms used in the US. I know that the term “scholars of color” is not meant to apply to international scholars, but in some sense it does apply. VRD: How are you perceived by colleagues in Japan? China? HJJ: In Japan, I am seen as a Korean scholar. In China, as Korean. VRD: In fact, what relationship is there, or has there been, in your country with anthropology in Japan, or anthropology in China, anthropology in Russia, anthropology in the US, anthropology in Taiwan, anthropology in North Korea, or elsewhere? Many of these are very large countries. Some have colonized or at least occupied the Korean peninsula for some years, and some are (or have been) outright enemies of the Republic of Korea (South Korea). HJJ: We talk about “East Asia” as a region, but East Asia as such seems to be a fiction when there is so much political and military tension. Yet it is becoming a reality more and more, I think, with the increasing interdependence of the countries it represents, first and foremost through the market. China, Korea, and Japan in Northeast Asia have long had a history of contestation and rivalry as well as cooperation. In the already-complicated regional dynamics, the USSR (now Russia) and the US entered the region in the early 20th century and more directly at the end of WWII, the Korean peninsula becoming the chief politico-military stage of the old and new regional drama. Korea is in the midst of all of these superpowers that seek to maintain influence there. Japan, China, and even Russia are so close by, and the US has military troops in South Korea, and we have North Korea too. I guess that regional histories can be very complex anywhere, but no other country has all the superpowers as either their neighbors (friends or foes) or allies. Historically, the challenge for Korea has been to steer its own course through the powers. Culturally, this situation leads to the Korean preoccupation with cultural identity, combined with national pride. I can only say that Korea is a fascinating place for anthropological study. Today, peace in the region appears very precarious. I think that for anyone in the region, and for Koreans in particular, regional peace is not something that can be compromised for nationalist causes or anything. Our department as a community of anthropologists views mutual understanding as crucial to regional peace building, in which anthropology should take active part. As I mentioned earlier, the East Asian focus of our department represents our attempt to be relevant to the region. VRD: Is (South) Korea not best seen as “colonized”? HJJ: Oh, you have to be careful there! It is true that US troops did not retreat from the peninsula after the Korean War, instead making permanent bases in many parts of the country, which is something that North Korea always makes an issue of. But rather than a colonial encroachment, this is better seen as a military alliance between South Korea and the US, born of mutual national interests—South Korea 841 enhances defense capacity against North Korea while the US pursues its agenda in Northeast Asia. Koreans as a nation are a people very proud of their history and identity. Just note the fact that Korea has remained to this day a people with a distinct tradition and cultural identity, in between China and Japan throughout their long history, despite the many invasions, subordination, and even colonization. As I mentioned, the US and the former Soviet Union recently entered this old historical and regional drama surrounding the Korean peninsula, further complicating the already-complicated regional situation. Most Koreans are not so naive as to believe that US troops are in South Korean territory only for the interests of South Korea, but if US troops are the price we have to pay for deterring North Korea, that’s what we pay. But to me, and I believe to almost all Koreans, it hurts to be thought of as “colonized.” Some of us intellectuals, of course, talk about Korean society being in a neocolonial situation, but “being in a neocolonial situation” is not the same as “colonized.” We know all too well what it is like being colonized. VRD: I hope I didn’t cross the line there. I posed that question more as a Latin American and (at least part of the time) a Latin Americanist than as an interviewer for AA. HJJ: Yes, any interview involves inter-viewing, so the interviewer is revealed too! VRD: I absolutely agree. Speaking of North Korea, do you or your colleagues tend to view North Korea in a certain way? You also do anthropological work that focuses on North Korea, but are you unusual among your South Korean colleagues in doing that, or is there serious widespread interest and work on North Korea among anthropologists in the Republic of Korea? HJJ: Yes, North Korea plays a big role in Korean thinking and is studied seriously in many disciplines. But doing anthropology on North Korea is not easy, if not impossible. There are several Korean anthropologists who produced great anthropological works on North Korea, mostly on the political culture. I think that I, as a psychological anthropologist, am in a better position to do anthropology of North Korea, compared to general sociocultural anthropologists. The North Korean propaganda materials, which are my main data, are like a treasure trove to a psychological anthropologist. North Korea may be an extreme case, but for this reason, it is a case in point to show how the state utilizes the psychocultural ground of the society and culturally constituted psychodynamics of individuals for its political purposes. I would love to do fieldwork in North Korea, but that is not possible at the moment. Once, on a tourist trip to Kum Gang San, although the village life was shrouded from the tourists along the roads, I could see glimpses through the cracks in the barriers. I wanted to get off the bus and walk across the barrier and talk to people. At the mountain, there were North Korean vendors. I wanted to ask them about their lives, but I couldn’t. We had to be very careful. VRD: You are now chair of your department at SNU (Seoul National University). I presume that means that your 842 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016 colleagues (or at least the deans) trust you. Do you think that you and your work are seen as examples in (South) Korea of really good anthropological work being done now and perhaps even the kind of anthropological work stressed as good for the near future? HJJ: It is our custom to have all full professors take their turn as chair, and it was my turn shortly after I was promoted. But I think my colleagues do trust me. VRD: Can you tell us about the grant you’ve been awarded? HJJ: My colleagues and I have recently been awarded a very big grant from the national government to really develop and train students in a globally oriented type of social science, this grant program being called “Brain Korea 21.” We are very excited about this. It started in the spring semester of 2016. The grant money is about 350,000 USD per year, totaling around 1,600,000 USD for four and a half years. Approximately 60 percent of the money will be spent on scholarships and fellowships for our graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, and the rest will be spent on other internationalization efforts. Our students have had some funding for attending international conferences, exchange programs, and overseas fieldwork, but now with this grant, we will be able to fund more students and more money for such activities. Along with the existing support from the university, this grant will be a big boost for our graduate students. Editorial costs for writing and publishing in academic English is another area that we will be spending the money on. We’ll be training students to be scholars in both Korean and English. And . . . oh dear. It’s difficult. We still want them to produce strong scholarship in Korean. VRD: Your own department consists largely of sociocultural anthropologists, with one biological anthropologist and one linguistic anthropologist, if I remember correctly. Archaeologists are employed elsewhere on your campus. Are these numbers a reflection of how anthropology is generally perceived in the Republic of Korea (South Korea), and is this largely the result of US anthropological influence or Japanese anthropological influence? HJJ: Anthropology in (South) Korea didn’t really develop until the 1970s, when our department at Seoul National University was established. In our university, archaeology is in a department that is joint with art history and is located in the College of Humanities. Anthropology is a separate department in the College of Social Sciences. We started as a joint department with archaeology in 1961, but we separated and moved to social sciences in 1975. Our department has one biological anthropologist (trained in the US, who does biometrics and osteology), one linguistic anthropologist, and one anthropologist in folklore studies (trained in Germany). Our predecessors decided that folklore studies should be part of our department. We are 11 in total, including an upcoming replacement hire this fall. Out of the current ten faculty members, one does biological work and the other nine are considered sociocultural anthropologists, broadly conceived. The biological anthropologist is a relatively recent addition, so we have yet to see how the subfield will “evolve” in the department. In fact, we are the only anthropology department in Korea that has the biological subfield. I think that the composition we have reflects both US anthropology (because we incorporate biological anthropology and linguistic anthropology) and the German tradition of folklore studies, the latter probably via Japan. In the early 20th century, Japan introduced folklore studies to colonial Korea, which became a nationalist enterprise to many intellectuals at the time. In Korea, [the field of] folklore studies garners more popular appeal than anthropology, due to the public’s longing for the “lost tradition.” So our department wants to capitalize on this public support for researching traditional culture and folkways. VRD: How is anthropology perceived in South (and even North) Korean universities? It is not a large discipline, right? Is it considered a social science? Is it considered a liberal–leftist or progressive discipline, a politically conservative discipline, or something else altogether? HJJ: Institutionally, archaeology is considered independent of anthropology and part of the humanities, aligned with history, art history, or cultural anthropology. Anthropology varies. In some universities, it is in the college of humanities and in others, in the college of social sciences. It is often combined with archaeology in regional universities under the name “department of archaeology and cultural anthropology.” Overall, there are ten universities and one graduate institute (Academy of Korean Studies) with an anthropology department or program, either jointly or independently. In the Seoul metropolitan area, there are five, including Seoul National University. The other six are in regional universities. In general, anthropology departments are small and constantly face the question of relevance to Korean society, the question to which major social sciences like economics, political science, and sociology have been “providing” more generally recognized answers. The number of anthropologists who are institutionally employed is around 120, while the membership of the Korean Society for Cultural Anthropology numbers over 250. Other than anthropology departments, many are employed in general divisions and some other departments like sociology, human ecology, or religious studies. Some are in research institutes and museums, too. The ideological spectrum is different in (South) Korea, at least in part because of North Korea. If you are too “leftist,” there is the danger of being seen as a Communist, in line with North Korea. People tend to be more conservative because of that, although I note that the strong cultural value placed on communalism and egalitarianism compensates for the ideological constraint to some degree. I would think that anthropologists in general tend to be on the “liberal” side in social issues. However, in the public’s perception, anthropology as a discipline is perhaps considered “something else” altogether, something that is wonderfully interesting and [that] you World Anthropology would do only if you didn’t have to worry about how to earn a living. Last semester, when we did an undergraduate conference in our department, undergraduate students staged a drama about what anthropology is to them. One student said, “Students in other departments like economics complain about how difficult their study is; well, anthropology is even more difficult, because we have to explain what it is.” It was hilarious, and I thought that line well reflected the positioning of anthropology in the university as well as in the general public. VRD: Is there an effort these days to create a specifically Korean anthropology, and would this be something you would support? Do you ever worry that such a question or movement could just lead anthropologists in the Republic of Korea to be antagonistic to other anthropologists outside the Republic of Korea or at least not very interested in what anthropologists do around the world? HJJ: At least in our department, in recent years, we have taken seriously the possibility and feasibility of “Korean anthropology” within the kind of constraints we have, like anthropology’s marginal position in Korean academia and the immense pressures for academic globalization. Since 2014, our department has held a series of international conferences to explore and promote Korean anthropology and at the same time to expose our graduate students to global trends in anthropology. By Korean anthropology, we do not mean to be antagonistic to other anthropologists or anthropologies outside Korea. Far from it. Our intention is to establish an intellectual tradition of anthropology that is open to global engagement yet reflects our particular concerns and intellectual heritage as Korean anthropologists. Just to take a metaphor: I am not a fan of K-pop, but still it sparks inspiration. Who would have thought K-pop and “Gangnam Style” would become the global phenomena they have become? Pop music as a genre was obviously imported from the West, and the US in particular, but I believe the “K” part of K-pop is what gives it global appeal, whatever that appeal may be. “Gangnam Style” is a satire on the fasttracked affluence that South Korean society has achieved. As such, it humorously and brilliantly takes issue with the kind of modernity and modernization that South Korea has so relentlessly embraced. I know that an academic discipline cannot be produced and promoted like the culture industry, but I dream of something like K-anthropology. 843 K-anthropology would be part of, and contribute to, the “global commons” of anthropological knowledge by bringing in theoretical and ethnographic dimensions salient in the Korean context yet with broader implications, such as state–society relations, affective relationality, and familism (e.g., in markets, social organization, and politics), as well as by engaging in theoretical and ethnographic dialogues with other anthropologies from global and regional traditions. We tend to think of globalization as Westernization, Americanization, but I envision more centers of influence. That’s the opportunity for Korean anthropology—moving beyond “the West and the rest.” Emily Metzner (EM): What did you mean when you said that the US is a “reference point” more than an object of study? HJJ: In scholarship, the perception tends to be that works by American scholars are the works that ought to be referred to and cited. In the real world, too, at least in Korea, in policy making and organizational structuring— for example, in education, welfare, and industry—the US model is often taken to be the model to refer to. It is difficult then to relativize American scholarship and US models, to view them as one of many possible options. This is, I think, related to the lack of anthropological studies of the US. At the heart of doing anthropology is relativizing a given cultural phenomenon in the comparative horizon, but the US seems to be located outside the comparative horizon. It is ironic that the US as a society values and promotes diversity, but “America” as a reference point to the rest of the world drives uniformity rather than diversity. I am not saying that the American people are driving this. It seems that “America” as a force, phenomenon, or condition is something that all of us on the globe face, including Americans. VRD: Are there questions you wish I had asked here? If so, please tell me and proceed to answer it (or them) here. HJJ: No, but thank you, Virginia and Emily, for your incisive and daring questions! Thank you also for being such attentive interlocutors. This was wonderful. Like any good interview, this interview compelled me to look back and forward, and in and out. Me as a psychological anthropologist, as an anthropologist of the US and North Korea, and as a Korean anthropologist, all at once. Many thanks and cheers to the World Anthropology section and world anthropologies. Roundtable: Between World Anthropologies and World Anthropology: Toward a Reflexive Critique of the Mediation Processes Anthropologies and Anthropology in Tension: A Preface Susana Narotzky Universitat de Barcelona, Spain The articles by Gordon Mathews, Yasmeen Arif, and Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima came out of a roundtable organized by the Committee for World Anthropologies (CWA) of the AAA, with the sponsorship of the WCAA (World Council of Anthropological Associations), at the 2015 AAA Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado. The idea was to revisit the accomplishments and challenges of World 844 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016 Anthropologies in the present and assess the ambivalent positionalities of those who labor to connect the various anthropological traditions. Ten years after the founding of the WCAA, with the revitalization of the IUAES (the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Societies) and the presence of the CWA within the AAA, the roundtable sought to address the practice of mediation between hegemonic and nonhegemonic knowledge traditions. It sought to clarify the experience, within academia, of anthropologists trying to mediate between knowledge practices situated in an unequal power field. The process by which nationally embedded knowledge extends outward to reach knowledge produced elsewhere in order to engage in a wider intellectual conversation is often described as “internationalization.” However, as Souza Lima brings to our attention, this process is not innocent of either internal or external power forces. The roundtable asked participants to address two sets of articulated questions: (1) What brokerage positions are developed by those who actively engage in internationalization? How are actors who are engaged in these processes positioned by their own local academic communities (e.g., as facilitators, opportunists, heroes)? (2) What new distributions of power and knowledge are produced through this internationalization process? Should they be challenged, monitored, transformed, or supported? How does this affect nonhegemonic anthropological traditions? Is a new kind of epistemological space emerging, one that embraces theory produced from very different political positionalities? In sum, what are the worldwide effects of this process for anthropological knowledge production? Forging new connections on equal terms between anthropologists in different parts of the world was part of the more general move to open the theoretical conversation to local participants and collaborators in ethnographic research. This was a move to decolonize the practice and the theory of anthropology. However, connections between different ways of producing anthropological knowledge are often mediated by individual scholars or academic institutions that acquire the ambiguous position of “broker.” They might be seen as belonging neither here nor there; they might be thought of as serving their own interests; or they might be hailed as leading their local–national anthropologies toward a better position in the global power geometries of knowledge production. There is a danger in highlighting the differences between “traditions” of anthropology instead of underlining their similarities. There is also a problem when the concept of a “national tradition” homogenizes practices within a nation that are extremely different among them (e.g., opposed methodological schools or theoretical frameworks) but that might be part of a wider international community of thought. Nevertheless, there seems to be a process for defining what “good” theory is that rests on a sociotechnical and spatial locus, making determinations about the “value” of knowledge that permeate the field. This is, I suggest, the hegemony that operates in the global knowledge field. Against the background of this hegemonic practice (British-American), there is a danger of exoticizing “the rest” or of reproducing an arbitrary division mirroring the arguably obsolete “Area Studies” model. Indeed, being defined as producers of “peripheral,” “subaltern,” or even “indigenous” theory sets them immediately in contrast to just “theory” and as external or tangential to the master matrix of anthropological knowledge. Yasmeen Arif, following Derrida’s insight, has engaged with this issue by highlighting the distinction between evidence and testimony that can be respectively assigned to hegemonic and nonhegemonic knowledge. This raises the question of the tension between “world anthropologies” and “world anthropology” that is highlighted by Arif and Mathews from different positions and different locations of the practice of anthropology. Both contributions propose the centrality of teaching anthropology for the debate on world anthropology versus world anthropologies. This is a crucial aspect in the process of deprovincialization and decolonization of anthropology, one that appears clearly when teaching anthropology in the alleged peripheries of knowledge production. Here, proposing a syllabus becomes infused by power dilemmas: one may surrender to the dominant knowledge; one may become an activist in support of the (local) subaltern knowledge; or, in the spirit of world anthropology–world anthropologies, one may attempt to create a conversation between them and address their tensions. To do so, however, we need to know about anthropological production around the world, something that ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) tools may help to achieve. The experiment of Déjà Lu, the e-journal of the WCAA, which publishes (in their original languages) articles selected by the national associations of anthropology as significant knowledge contributions, is commendable, and it would be valuable to support and expand this initiative. A different experiment is that of Vibrant, an e-journal of the Association of Brazilian Anthropology (ABA) that translates pieces written in Portuguese into other languages such as French, Spanish, and mostly English in order to expand their audience. Mediation is often a task of facilitation that requires interpreting the intended meanings of the parties in conversation. But it is also an issue of gatekeeping, as Gordon Mathews’s article points out. This gatekeeping can be observed in teaching, mentoring, grant proposals and funding, and publication. The key mechanism in gatekeeping is that of setting standards of anthropological “quality.” Standards produce a grid for exercising power. They produce a framework that appears as neutral but is in fact strongly embedded in a particular power-knowledge structure. The styles for presenting a problem and its background and proposing a hypothesis grow out of historical developments and regional hegemonies (e.g., the German style was hegemonic in Europe in all sciences at the turn of the 20th century). When teaching our students and colleagues to use a unique standard, we World Anthropology are undoubtedly helping others to get past the selection panels or reviewers, but we are also acting as gatekeepers and reproducing a hegemony that collapses quality into form. Language is also crucial. English, which has become an international instrument of communication, is not neutral to the native speaker of other languages. The English of non-English speakers is inflected by their native grammar and the “spirit of the language.” Language is also an instrument for excluding the circulation of non-anglophone knowledge production in the international arena. Indeed, as Souza Lima’s article exposes, many anthropologists cannot express themselves in English fluently or at all, which does not mean that they are not theoretically contributing to anthropological knowledge. Speaking and writing in English comes at a cost for the non-anglophone, increasing internal differentiation in national contexts between those who attend English-language international conferences and those who don’t. Therefore, mediation is generally taken on by those able to speak and write in fluent standard English or those who have the money to get their contributions translated. Internationalization of strong national anthropological practices, such as those of Brazil or Mexico, may come as a result of internal impact measurement by national institutions that adopt the ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) 845 Thomson standard (one of the strongest hegemonic tools in the evaluation of scientific production). National allocation of funding for research projects that promise to “internationalize” the dissemination of findings (which means publishing in ISI journals) has increased contributions in English by nonanglophone anthropologists, but the effort to accomplish this is considerable and goes generally unrewarded. Hence, the will to participate in wider conversations may paradoxically result from an imposition of the hegemonic benchmarking model. The three articles presented here come from a US anthropologist working in Hong Kong for over 20 years, an Indian anthropologist working in Delhi who has done fieldwork in Lebanon, and a Brazilian anthropologist both working and doing research in Brazil. Their experiences of practicing anthropology are very different, yet they present important commonalities. The most salient one, I suggest, is the rejection of a multiculturalist understanding of world anthropologies that would stress the incommensurability of different traditions. Instead, these anthropologists express a will to participate in a single world anthropology, a global body of knowledge that will engage multisited and historically embedded theories in an ongoing conversation that will need to negotiate the power effects of a multipolar world. Roundtable: Between World Anthropologies and World Anthropology: Toward a Reflexive Critique of the Mediation Processes Articles Between World Anthropology and World Anthropologies: An American Anthropologist in East Asia as Gatekeeper/Interpreter Gordon Mathews The Chinese University of Hong Kong The globalization of anthropology is no longer simply a desirable future but rather a present reality. It used to be that anthropology consisted of scholars from the United States and Western Europe studying tribal peoples within their colonies; more recently, anthropology has consisted of people from rich countries studying people from poor countries, as is still the case today, although to a lesser extent than in the past. The World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA), founded in 2004, now has 49 members, consisting of presidents of anthropological societies across the globe, including the United States, Japan, China, India, Chile, Mexico, Tunisia, and the Philippines. It holds regular yearly meetings and fosters numerous research initiatives to explore how anthropology may exert global influence. At its most recent full meeting in Manchester in 2013, the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnolog- ical Sciences (IUAES) had anthropologists from 69 different countries. The American Anthropologist now includes a subsection devoted to world anthropology in every issue; editorial boards of major journals published in the United States and Western Europe increasingly consist of anthropologists from around the world. All of this testifies to a recent explosion of interest in world anthropology as well as to the globalization of anthropology as a discipline. Ulf Hannerz (1996) defined “the global ecumene” as a world in which we all are also increasingly engaging with one another in a common forum. This is the situation of anthropology today. This globalization is inevitably eroding the power of what has heretofore been the intellectual hegemon. The more that anthropology is global, the less it is “American”— that is, from the United States—and, in a broader sense, less Anglo-American and European American. The leaders of the American Anthropological Association—its presidents, officers, and administrators over the past decade—have been 846 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016 extraordinarily welcoming toward the emergence of global anthropology. However, the rank-and-file of US anthropologists have not been interested. Panels concerning global anthropology offered at the AAA annual meetings have generally been sparsely attended over the years as compared, for example, to similar panels offered at IUAES. This is entirely understandable—your average graduate student or assistant professor in the United States probably has more immediate concerns than global anthropology, namely finding and keeping a job within the profession. Who can blame them? But this may be based on a misunderstanding of current market realities. As the United States sheds anthropological positions, East Asia adds them: I know of several dozen US- or British-trained anthropologists who have been able to find jobs as anthropologists in East Asia in recent years, having been unable or unwilling to be employed in the societies in which they received their anthropological education. Global anthropology is not only an intellectual movement but an economic movement as well, as other parts of the world, such as East Asia, increasingly begin to supersede the Western world economically. I am an American by birth and an American anthropologist by training. I attended graduate school in the United States, but I have taught in Hong Kong over the past 23 years, and I lived in Japan for some eight years before that. I am thus in an ambiguous position. My ambivalence is personal—I have no idea anymore where my home is between Hong Kong, Japan, and the United States—but it is also professional. It is rooted in my simultaneous roles of interpreter of East Asian and US anthropologies to one another and of gatekeeper, judging East Asian students and colleagues regarding the anthropological quality of their efforts. This gatekeeper role includes grading students and considering their research proposals; evaluating the research proposals and employment, tenure, and promotion applications of professional anthropologists; and, as an editor of Asian Anthropology, evaluating submitted articles, through referees, as to their worthiness for publication. All of these activities involve me, as a US-trained anthropologist, judging the quality of the work of anthropologists from other intellectual traditions. If anthropology is indeed one—that is, if there is a single global anthropology—then my judgment may be apt. However, if there are multiple global anthropologies, then my judgment, and my capacity for judgment, is questionable. On the one hand, when I, as editor for Asian Anthropology, request that a Chinese, Indian, or Pakistani anthropologist rewrite a paper, this may represent my effort to make this paper meet global standards for anthropological publication; on the other hand, it may represent my imposition of US standards on other anthropologies—my exercise of US hegemony. When I tell a mainland Chinese graduate student in my university that her research proposal is not interesting and she needs to rethink it, this may represent the universal training of anthropology graduate students everywhere, or it may represent my role as a US gatekeeper telling students from a different intellectual tradition of anthropology that they had better conform to my norms of anthropology if they want to succeed in the department of which I am chair. When I advise a candidate for promotion or tenure that she had better try to publish more in English in well-known Western journals, this may represent anthropological common sense—as well as passing down what is perceived as common sense by university administrators at my institution and in Hong Kong at large (see Faure 2001; Mathews 2009)—or it may represent the imperialistic enforcement of my own hegemonic standards on younger scholars for whom these standards may seem distinctly foreign and unwelcome. Obviously, both of these positions—that of a single global anthropology with a single standard of judgment and that of multiple global anthropologies with multiple standards of judgment—are to some extent valid. There is a common global anthropology, or at least aspects of a common global anthropology, with broadly common ideas of what the discipline consists of in its premises and methods. This is why I can teach in Hong Kong with some degree of confidence. I have never yet had a student or colleague say, “You can’t understand my vision of what anthropology is because you are US trained, whereas I was trained elsewhere.” (This is partially because so many anthropologists in Hong Kong have received graduate training in the US or the UK; in Japan and China, I have indeed received such responses from a few anthropologists, although certainly not from most.) I do not believe that this lack of critical response is only because of false consciousness on the part of my students and colleagues. Rather, there really does exist a global anthropology with standards that, while not uniform and homogenous, are also not radically disjunctive: worldwide, we anthropologists are for the most part broadly engaged in the same common endeavor. However, there are indeed significant differences in national traditions: to take just one example of many more that might be mentioned, Japanese anthropologists are sometimes seen as being wholly immersed in ethnographic data at the expense of theory, while anthropologists in the United States, by contrast, may be seen as being obsessed with theory at the expense of ethnography. I have written about “the referee system as a barrier to global anthropology” (Mathews 2010), and indeed it is a barrier, in the sense that referees, and teachers too, are gatekeepers enforcing, to at least some extent, US hegemony. Both of these views—of world anthropology, on the one hand, and world anthropologies, on the other hand—have their legitimacy; the problem is how, in particular situations and circumstances, these two perspectives can be disentangled. I have spent my career trying to understand this. World anthropology, based on the idea of a single global anthropology, necessarily involves a singular vision of what anthropology is and should be, and this tends to be Western anthropology, particularly US anthropology. Different anthropologies around the world continue to more or World Anthropology less take their cues from the theories of US anthropology. But there are ongoing features of anthropology in the United States today that make it distinctly unsuitable to be the world gatekeeper and hegemon of anthropology. The trend in US anthropology over the past 50 years, since Clifford Geertz and the postmodern wave that followed him, has been to write in a more and more complex and literary way, one that in its complexity privileges native writers and speakers of English. This has made US anthropology less comprehensible to non-native speakers of English than it once was and, thus, more provincial (see Ribeiro 2006:377–378 in his discussion of “metropolitan provincialism” in US anthropology). Earlier US anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, and Marvin Harris wrote for a larger audience, but this is generally no longer the case (albeit with a number of notable exceptions, among them David Graeber). US cultural anthropology is generally distinctly harder than in earlier eras for non-native speakers of English to understand. This is due not simply to trends within US anthropology itself but also to the tenure system, requiring “advances” in theory every few years for a new generation of junior academics. This is not the case in many other societies, where academics are granted lifelong employment upon hiring. Also, because academic publishers and university presses in the United States have enough readers within the anthropological world itself to make it largely unnecessary to reach an audience beyond the anthropological world, anthropologists typically do not pursue such audiences, writing almost entirely for themselves and their students. This is not the case elsewhere: in societies without such a large anthropological establishment, anthropologists must write for an audience of scholars in other disciplines or the general public, or else they will have almost no readers. In a globalizing world of globalizing universities, we are moving away from global anthropologies toward global anthropology. This is inevitable in the coming decades, I think, but it will also bring into increasingly sharp relief the conflicts of evaluation that I earlier described. One can only hope for the emergence of a global anthropology based not in native-speaker English but in universal English, enabling more and more of the world’s anthropologists to communicate with one another. One can also hope that world stan- 847 dards of anthropological citation will become ever broader, leading citation indexes such as the SSCI (Social Sciences Citation Index) to increasingly represent not just the West but the world, as is resoundingly not the case at present (Mathews 2015:368). I am convinced, because of the West’s relative economic decline—leading gradually and indirectly but inescapably to the relative decline of Western and US anthropology as well—that other anthropologies, particularly those of East Asia but of a range of other societies as well, will increasingly contest US anthropological world hegemony. We now live in a multipolar world of political power, and we will increasingly live in a multipolar world of anthropological power and influence. This calls for a world anthropology more than world anthropologies—but it will involve a range of competing anthropological centers, allowing for far more diversity than we currently foster. We will indeed come to live in a global anthropological ecumene, as is only beginning today but will definitely be the case in decades to come. This, I think, will be a far better anthropological world than today, and I look forward to seeing its ongoing emergence. REFERENCES CITED Faure, David 2001 Higher Education Reform and Intellectual Schizophrenia in Hong Kong. Ritsumeikan Journal of Asia Pacific Studies 8(December):80–85. Hannerz, Ulf 1996 Transnational Connections. London: Routledge. Mathews, Gordon 2009 Hong Kong Chinese Professors within the “Western” University Model. In Higher Education in East Asia: Neoliberalism and the Professoriate. Gregory S. Poole and Ya-chen Chen, eds. Pp. 99–106. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: Sense. 2010 On the Referee System as a Barrier to Global Anthropology. The Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology 11(1):52–63. 2015 East Asian Anthropology in the World. American Anthropologist 117(2):364–383. Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins 2006 World Anthropologies: Cosmopolitics for a New Global Scenario in Anthropology. Critique of Anthropology 26(4):363– 386. 848 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016 Roundtable: Between World Anthropologies and World Anthropology: Toward a Reflexive Critique of the Mediation Processes Article Anthropologizing the World and Worlding the Anthropologist Yasmeen Arif Department of Sociology, University of Delhi, India In anthropology’s immense archive, the geographical catalog is a significant one. This catalog has mapped the anthropologist onto specific geographical localized specializations, and over time it has added the contours of the global and the planetary as well. In that movement between the local and planetary, the discipline and its foot soldiers have sensed a politics as much as a challenge in knowledge production practices—in empirical, conceptual, and institutional terms. At this time, that challenge seems to formulate itself thus: on the one hand, how does a geographically located discipline encompass the planet (“anthropologize the world”) and, on the other hand, what is the imagination of a geographical “world” for a located anthropologist (“worlding the anthropologist”)? Direct as that double articulation may seem, I do not intend to simplify, for instance, the complexity of how ethnographically located epistemologies negotiate the issues of universalizing theory or how anthropological issues no longer remain located (cf. Arif 2015). But then, these are not new problems. Critical anthropology has certainly addressed them; however, I reiterate them here in order to provide a milieu for the queries and responses I develop in what follows. “Anthropologizing the World and Worlding the Anthropologist” is thus a phrasing that emerges from the title of the 2015 AAA roundtable: “Between World Anthropologies and World Anthropology.” First, “World Anthropologies” commemorates the publication, ten years ago, of Arturo Escobar and Gustavo Ribeiro’s edited volume of the same name (Escobar and Ribeiro 2006) and the concerns of anthropological knowledge production that the volume brought into focus. From that volume, I retain the importance of engaging with both the intellectual and political project of pluralizing anthropology. Second, “World Anthropology,” the title of this section of American Anthropologist (AA), underlines a label that I use (with some extrapolation) to frame a disciplinary coherence for an anthropology of an interconnected world. This is a coherence that I seek to excavate from the pluralized horizon of anthropologies in order to propose an analytical distance, but not a separation, from the politics, pluralities, and inequities of its global institutional mapping. In both of these threads, this discussion learns from the immeasurable diversity of issues that both of the above formulations have expressed, and at the least, it will be hard to disentangle my issues from those that came before. My issues are endorsements, largely, of those positions as much as they are overlaps. A brief note on my “location”—I teach in India in a department of sociology and was trained there as well in traditions conventionally belonging to sociology and sociocultural anthropology, and while both features signal particularities of institutional history and intellectual profile, my trajectories have been somewhat atypical. My dissertation fieldwork was located in another region of the “Global South” (Lebanon), and my work since then has covered India, Africa, and Lebanon. My research commitments are in questions of violence, in queries of life and affect, and in studies of the urban, money, and a few other concerns. For more than a decade, I have been engaged as a contributing member of the WAN, the World Anthropologies Network (http://www.ram-wan.net), and I have written about world anthropologies and world anthropology in relation to questions of history, theory, philosophy, and epistemology in anthropology. * * * * * The roundtable hosted at the 2015 AAA Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado, interrogated the internationalization of anthropology in a two-part question (see Narotzky, this issue), and I interpret those parts here as underscoring a basic query: What does it mean to separate and connect world anthropologies and world anthropology? The “World Anthropology” section in American Anthropologist, initiated in 2014, provides a backdrop for an engagement. I cannot adequately summarize the enormous wealth of information, views and perspectives, passions and politics, and power and positionings that have been written about by many anthropologists covering a potentially infinite range of nuance and concern in the last couple of years. Bringing them to this platform of visibility is an achievement, a signal of world anthropology’s coming of age. Yet, if I were to place these essays in front of that mirror we know from fairy tales—the one that is able to reflect how things really look—I would have to speak about a slight sense of déjà vu (quite like the child that saw the naked emperor and uttered the unsayable). The reflection that I find (yet again) is the area studies paradigm. The classificatory system of world anthropology has an undeniable resonance with that of area studies. We discuss countries, for example: Ireland, Argentina, or Mexico. We recognize regions: South Asia, Latin America, East Asia, and so on. World Anthropology Within those locations, we certainly understand a range of topics of research or issues of concern: language, identity, folklore, colonialism, and globalization, as well as history, hegemony, dominance, and the metropole. This is a reduction, yet it illustrates how anthropology has not taken us far from the cartographic imaginations that the area studies paradigm spawned. Regions, countries, and locations design the boxes in which we pack anthropological knowledge. Ethnographic fieldwork itself is a located exercise that structures anthropological ontology. Anthropological work is about embedded locations in “areas” or “regions” that have their meanings captured in the specificities that anthropologists typically frame as cultural, political, economic, and social. The salience of those factors remains without question. However, a “World” anthropology that imagines an interconnected planet invokes the complementary question of where anthropologists are to be located in an epistemological cartography and in an ethnographic imagination that circumscribes a mesh-worked world. To be sure, anthropology has long approached global interconnections and planetary links. In all respects, without a sense of a planetary imagination, the economies, politics, cultures, and socialities of the contemporary can hardly be reckoned with. But imagining an ethnography of the world requires rethinking the cartography that situates an anthropological ontology and, more specifically, the positioning of anthropologists in that cartography. For concerns limited to this article, the problem is a transparent one. We are now imagining a global stage where neither the major characters nor the script has really changed. Increasingly, however, localized anthropologists are called upon to play marginal or “supporting” roles. That is, outside of the hegemonic centers, anthropologists are mostly called upon to provide supporting ethnographic fill to bolster metropolitan theory. Critique—not just opposition, which can change the terms of that theory—is also a privilege often protected within the metropole, again to be supported by the outside. Jacques Derrida’s (Derrida and Steigler 2002:93– 94) words below suggest for us a nuanced reading of a familiar set of words—testimony and evidence—in order to lay bare the relationship between world anthropology and world anthropologies: A testimony has never been or should never be mistaken for evidence. Testimony, in the strict sense of the term, is advanced in the first person by someone who says, “I swear,” who pledges to tell the truth, gives his word, and asks to be taken at his word in a situation where nothing has been proven—where nothing will ever be proven, for structural reasons, for reasons that are essential and not contingent. It is possible for testimony to be corroborated by evidence, but the process of evidence is absolutely heterogeneous to that of testimony, which implies faith, belief, sworn faith, the pledge to tell the truth, the “I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.” I suggest that what is regarded as anthropological evidence, which for me encompasses theory as well as the 849 empirical that grounds theory, is still largely generated in the metropolitan centers.1 This power to create evidence is the power to dictate what Anthropology (with a capital “A”) is, its correctness and truth value, who speaks for the discipline and who does not, who will critique it (and how) and who must not, how roles are to be cast and played, and how others are to be structurally recognized and positioned—for example, as the subaltern, the native, the authentic, the expert, and the anthropologist of and from the “Global South.” The choice of evidence that a disciplinary journal (like AA) publishes is taken as given and technically correct. To this evidence, the other world anthropologists may pose their testimonials. This is reminiscent of our disciplinary past when peripheral anthropologists were (and are) often treated as “native informants” whose work, while providing testimony to bolster the theories emanating from the centers, cannot per se participate in theorizing. Concepts that will give meaning to description must always emerge from a centered thinking (and I might add, from those who are also located in the center). Conversely, “appointing” the native as expert does not necessarily address the problem of what world anthropology could or should be—oppositional positioning is not what I suggest here. The effect for the decentered anthropologist, whose scholarship is taken as testimonial and not evidence, is constant negotiation with faith, with “truth telling,” and with appeals to credibility—and that testimonial divide is a problem that needs attention. How can peripheral anthropologists be anthropologists without iterating the evidence is the core of that problem. That is why I still insist on taking a fresh look at the kinds of subject positions that are being cast when international anthropology mirrors area studies. Anthropology seems destined to treat geographical locality as the ontological ground that leads to classifications even when its horizons become necessarily international. World anthropology must be world anthropologies, where the plural is a list of insurmountable borders and stark outlines. There are structural reasons for this, as Derrida states above, “reasons that are essential and not contingent.” Most fundamentally, the located anthropologist who works outside the centers is mapped—that is, geographically essentialized.2 I question how much of those essentialized histories are informing the geographies of the future, and that is why I ask for another glance at what epistemological “identity” stereotypes are continuing to be sustained and what else might be created. Though many of them emerge out of the ressentiment of wounded peripheries or identities, it would be useful to reflect on whether or not we are quickly being co-opted and turned into a roster of pregiven stereotypes while we scramble for citizenship in world anthropology. The challenge for me is not so much the creation of a world map of contiguous but separate territories but, rather, the issue of sharing a common discipline that can work without a built-in sense of hierarchy and yet be sensitive to how the world map now stands in terms of the issues and research plans that fuel anthropological knowledge production. 850 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016 * * * * * This inevitably draws me to the grand question: What is world anthropology? Why is it necessary that there be a separate section of an established journal in the discipline to identify this paradigm? One answer is that this section comes out of a political recognition of the disparities involved in anthropological knowledge production. Or, perhaps, this section can begin to answer questions like the following: How do we craft an object of inquiry called world anthropology relevant to the discipline in the contemporary? What subject matter or research agendas capture the sense of lived life emerging on a horizon that differs from our conventional landscapes? What theories, methods, epistemologies, and politics are most equitable and suited to the task? How do we move on from the area studies paradigm, or what is the project of world anthropology in this vista, and how do we frame the interactions and collaborations that this horizon makes possible (cf. Arif 2015)? Tracing the above contours in the negotiation between world anthropology and world anthropologies, I turn to the concern embedded in the second query that the roundtable prompted: namely, knowledge and power in the internationalization process. While we find our places on a global map and learn to construct a world anthropology that responds to the contemporary, how do we bring the world into our classroom? How do we find our classificatory positions in terms of world anthropology? Keeping in mind the same tropes of testimony and evidence, imagine a classroom in an American or Northern university (and a few select ones in the “South”), a room full of students from across the world learning from the comprehensive syllabus on Anthropology with a capital A (the evidence I mentioned earlier alongside the testimonials from various locations) and then proceeding outward to the world, some returning to their own territories while others travel far, fitted with appropriate language training, area-focused research proposals, and reading lists. All seek to contribute to Anthropology with a capital A. Meanwhile I, in my classroom, speak to many, but they are almost always from India. Most will stay, study, and work in India, by choice, necessity, or lack of opportunity and funding to travel outside for training or research. Do I treat Anthropology with a capital A as evidence and provide local knowledges as testimony to Anthropology? Will I be a local hero if I teach Gandhi, incorporate the Vedas, or read indigenous or “foreign” anthropologists on localized topics in India, pay some selective attention to relatable ethnographies, and turn my back on the theorists from the metropoles? In everyday practice, like most in similar positions, I combine all of these perspectives but, whichever way I turn, I hear the insistence of Derrida’s words again, “I do not wish to transform myself into a diaphanous mouthpiece of eternal pedagogy” (Derrida 1988:4) if that pedagogy makes an eternal classification of periphery and center. I am drawing attention to the question of pedagogy as one aspect of the tension between world anthropologies and world anthropology in order to understand it, reflexively and expansively, and to craft and sustain an inclusive, integrated discipline and not a fragmented, disintegrated intent. In my classroom, I would want to think about and also convey the place(s) that method and epistemology have in creating the knowledges and theories that I discuss and that I aspire to make in what we can call anthropological knowledge. This is not knowledge that should be just another utterance in a cacophony of voices and languages, nor should it be a dilution of integrity (or quality) in the name of multiplicity. It should certainly not be a “diaphanous mouthpiece of eternal pedagogy.”3 The postcolonial spaces we inhabit are aspirational spaces in which some of us insist on the right and responsibility to articulate knowledge claims, more so in universities than in other places. These are spaces in which we ought to have faded away self–other binaries such as center– periphery, colonizer–colonized, and hegemonic–resistant that prevail upon us in this paradigm. These are spaces in which we could try to envision a relationship of other to other or, in more self-respecting ways, that of self to self. Through our scholarship and our pedagogies, we seek to hear, learn, know, and then speak. Most of all, we speak in order to know who will hear—namely, who our audience might be, who our collaborator might be, and who our student might be. To know our audience would mean claiming the privilege of speaking and that would imply the power and privilege of choice in what we can teach and speak about. Apart from the ignominies that market sensitivities and dictums from on high have placed on professional and institutional lives, it is not an unimportant concern that we need to question anthropological syllabi, too. We need to look at their tenets and evidence in the same way we consider the politics and positionings of anthropological knowledge production. As we consider our discipline’s future, it would seem necessary, if not urgent, to engage with how the “world” now presents itself as an ethnographic horizon. I imagine that location will remain salient and that it will need to remain salient. I admit that it is probably my work in affect, violence, and life that gives me the necessary support to speak of an anthropology of the world. But I suspect that the language of humanity, technology, money, life, law, ethics, suffering, and emotions (to mention just a few) will appear again as concepts that demand a worlding of the anthropologist. The classroom will have to be the significant place where these internationalizations and worldings take place. They will have to be the located places in, and from which, to embed the space of the world. At the same time, it will be important to imagine a “world and worldly” audience of readers and listeners who are not mapped onto essentialized categories. To end this brief reflection, I again emphasize the need to feel the texture of the anthropological fabric that the relationship between world anthropology and world anthropologies weaves and, in that fabric, the need to unravel threads that might still be making its pattern. In other words, my intent World Anthropology in this article is to underscore the theme of the AAA 2015 in Denver (and that of Minneapolis 2016), where evidence and testimony do not dictate the negotiations of the strange and familiar—where the relationship of “familiar” to “strange” is not a slash but a hyphen, not a separation but an ensemble. * * * * * NOTES 1. I note that the official theme of the AAA 2016 Annual Meetings focuses on “evidence.” Perhaps we can paint a picture of evidence with the colors of my intonations mentioned above, too. I thank Emily Metzner for pointing out this potentially fertile connection. 2. A small but potent example is when anthropologists outside the center are referred to with a qualifier like “Indian,” “Latin American,” or “African.” 3. The important question of English as the possible lingua franca of anthropology is a troubling one. The follies of the colonial past are many and, while language troubles are some of them, I would still abide by a language that allows me to speak to, listen, read, and 851 learn from as many as possible. Just in India alone, where many languages are spoken, I wonder what language I could choose as a reasonable representation. REFERENCES CITED Arif, Yasmeen 2015 The Audacity of Method. Economic and Political Weekly 50(1):53–61. Derrida, Jaques 1988 Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name. In The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation. Christie Macdonald, ed. Avitell Ronell, trans. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Derrida, Jacques, and Bernard Steigler 2002 Echographies of Television. Jennifer Bajorek, trans. Pp. 93–94. Cambridge: Polity. Escobar, Arturo, and Gustavo Lins Ribeiro 2006 World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power. New York: Berg. Roundtable: Between World Anthropologies and World Anthropology: Toward a Reflexive Critique of the Mediation Processes Articles On the Construction of (a) World Anthropology(ies): A View from Brazil Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima Professor of Ethnology at the National Museum, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Reflections regarding the role played by the World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA) in structuring an “international circuit” of (national) anthropological associations seem to me to be opportune and necessary. The project of the council is the dissemination of a more symmetrical and pluralistic view of world anthropologies. The number of affiliated anthropological associations has more than doubled during 12 years of the WCAA’s existence. World anthropologies evidently exist within global and local economic, political, cultural, and ideological, as well as institutional, frames that have changed substantially within this span of time. I situate my views in a Brazilian perspective, considering aspects of change at the national scale. If we follow Susana Narotzky’s lead, we should be addressing the effects of intra-associational power (such as within the AAA). What sorts of anthropological production and anthropologists are found within these associations? Who seeks to have their production recognized as part of the scope of world anthropology(ies)? What sort of globalization is possible and effectively desired (and by whom)? What other projects are in dialogue? Sandra López Varela (2015) quite effectively called attention to the presuppositions and consequences of internationalization as another key element of the debate, and it is on her work that I base my discussion of internationalization. The widespread use of the term in polysemic ways prevents dialogue and promotes a false and homogenized interpretation of this social phenomenon, but following López Varela’s reflexive approach has much to offer. A (SPECIFIC) BRAZILIAN PERSPECTIVE ON (NON)INTERNATIONALIZATION I was trained in Brazil, my home country, and have conducted almost all of my research here as well. As a result, I am not exactly well positioned to act as a mediator between scientific communities, whether Brazilian and US, Brazilian and European, Brazilian and African, or Brazilian and Asian. Like many other researchers, however, I have long had contacts with colleagues in other countries and, indeed, throughout Brazil, which is in and of itself a very diverse place. In the 1980s, I began studying Brazilian state formation through indigenist policies and internal processes of colonialism and imperialism and examining the role of Brazilian anthropology in nation-building processes (Souza Lima 1991, 2005; cf. Peirano 1981, 1991, 1998, 2004, 2005, 2008a, 2008b). 852 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016 But my reflections can only be adequately situated if I talk about my engagement, alongside that of my professors and colleagues, in the radical critique of the military dictatorship that then ruled Brazil and in the struggle to re-democratize our country (Souza Lima 2004). I am conscious of the fact, however, that my work has had little to no impact on the discipline’s international circles for several reasons. Some of these reasons have to do with language and the costs of translation. English is today the world’s “lingua franca,” or the “language of empire.” Brazilian anthropology has never had systematic funding allocated to translation. Other reasons involve the costs—in time and resources—of attending international events. Scholars from abroad often find they require a sort of academic (re)socialization to be recognized within US and European spaces. Indeed, we need to learn the habitus of these spaces as well as the “proper” and “appropriate” forms of self-presentation within them, both orally and textually. Moreover, internationalization was not a priority for me personally. I didn’t systematically seek to establish relationships with researchers in the United States, Canada, France (a privileged locus for Brazilian academics), or England. My relationships with researchers from these countries were created as a consequence of my research within a broader framework of internationalization that took place in Brazil as part of the financing objectives of postgraduate studies and research. Thus, as with so many of my generation, insertion in networks of “balanced exchange” with anthropologists of other countries (either intentionally or as a “natural effect” of certain patterns of interaction) was itself a circumstantial effect of how anthropology was being produced in Brazil. In the 1980s, it was quite commonplace for those of us situated in the nation’s internal hegemonic centers of learning (Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and later Brası́lia) to be wholly trained in Brazil, while colleagues from nonhegemonic institutions and regions were generally trained outside the country. Not all of these foreign-trained anthropologists, however, became part of bi- or multinational networks. None of us were obliged to do this in Brazil, and there was much that needed to be done internally in order to stabilize anthropology as a field of scientific knowledge in Brazil. No matter how much we consumed (and still consume) other anthropologies, particularly the hegemonic anthropologies of the Global North, we were conscious of the fact that our training in Brazil was comparable in quality to that offered by the centers of the discipline overseas. However, even though many of Brazil’s foreign-trained anthropologists have repeatedly returned to their alma maters, they have generally not had their own production duly recognized by these institutions either, still being perceived as “subaltern” practitioners of the discipline. A wider and more symmetrical circulation of certain anthropologists, stretching beyond national boundaries or thematic enclaves, has come about only as a result of the above-mentioned resocialization, the systematic cultivation of relationships, and a recurrent presence in the “hegemonic centers” (in institutions, networks, and journals). Rarely is the anthropological production from nonhegemonic centers incorporated as a contribution to the general anthropological theoretical corpus (but see Oliveira 2008 for a dense and critical evaluation of this type of approach). More often, and influenced by the remains of the area studies perspective, a colonial subfield of anthropology, anthropological production from nonhegemonic centers is incorporated as ethnographic data. In this case, the author presents herself as the “discoverer” of an intrinsic facet of the social life of the peoples of a given region of the planet, a facet that is then placed into dialogue with theories developed by other researchers of the same area and that is portrayed as a singularity that may be generalized. Authors who follow this path in search of recognition in the hegemonic centers are often stripped of their ethnographic data, making it speak with a degree of generality that transforms their theories from “native theory” to that of “theory built on natives” (or, as is probably more fashionable today, “theory built with natives,” although coauthorship is not granted). Without such investments, publications translated into English, an expensive task, can become obsolete. In these and other ways, many Brazilian researchers have managed to situate themselves in international research circuits and debates in anthropology and sociology. Factors related to the hierarchies of legitimacy and adequate objects of investigation within each national anthropological context must also be taken into account. As a nonhegemonic center, the anthropological field in Brazil has often only belatedly recognized and legitimized the work of those Brazilian anthropologists who fled from internationally dominant canons. This was the case even when they were in direct dialogue with the social groups under investigation and with intellectuals in other countries who also only had their works gain greater recognition at a later date. In truth, I dare say, few Brazilian anthropologists have had their work widely recognized within the discipline’s mainstream, in spite of international relations. FORMS OF INTERNATIONAL CONNECTIONS: ONE KIND OF INTERNATIONALIZATION Brazilian anthropology connected with nonhegemonic anthropologies on two occasions prior to the creation of the WCAA. The construction of deep networks of relationships between Brazilian and Argentinian anthropologists intensified when Argentinian researchers migrated to Brazil in the 1970s to escape the military dictatorship in their country. They studied in Brazilian institutions of higher education, where they completed undergraduate and graduate degrees and where some of them subsequently pursued careers. In the 1980s, the Post Graduate Program in Social Anthropology/National Museum-UFRJ (PPGAS/MN) of Brazil partnered with the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) to offer MA and PhD entrance exams for the Graduate Program World Anthropology in Social Anthropology/National Museum to undergraduate students at UBA. This has resulted in a steady stream of Argentinian researchers moving through the National Museum, a flow that has continued even after the agreement lapsed. In fact, it has expanded to other institutions. In the same period, the Brazilian Anthropological Association (ABA) organized regional anthropology conferences, such as ABA-South that in 1991 became an independent biennial meeting, organized by the anthropological institutions of the Mercosur countries. The Mercosur Anthropology Meeting (Reunión de Antropologı́a del Mercosur, RAM) held its 11th biannual conference in 2015 in Montevideo. RAM meetings are spaces for engaging in dialogue and building relationships that may be strengthened by funding for networked projects undertaken with partner countries. Today many Brazilian anthropologists do research throughout the region—but especially in Argentina. This has ensured a shared and symmetrical space for anthropological production. More recently, Brazilian and Portuguese anthropologists came together under an initiative of João Pacheco de Oliveira, then-president of ABA (1994–1996), who organized, in close dialogue with Cristiana Bastos, a seminar in Rio de Janeiro that included large numbers of Portuguese anthropologists. Some of these scholars, such as Miguel Vale de Almeida and João de Pina-Cabral, would later undertake research in Brazil. This event was inspired by research done by Portuguese anthropologists in Brazil, such as Cristiana Bastos, and Brazilian anthropologists who researched Portugal, such as Bela Feldman-Bianco and Omar Ribeiro Thomaz.4 The Luso-African-Brazilian Social Science Conferences, which began in 1990 in Coimbra, Portugal, actually preceded this initiative. A DIFFERENT APPROACH TO INTERNATIONALIZATION The same year the WCAA was created (2004), during Gustavo Lins Ribeiro’s tenure as head of ABA (2002–2004), ABA launched the Virtual Brazilian Anthropology (Vibrant) journal. Its explicit purpose was to disseminate Brazilian anthropology internationally through translation of Brazilian texts into other languages (mostly into English, Spanish, and French). Its effect on Brazilian anthropology greatly exceeded that achieved by institutional associations. It was a great success in its attempt to overcome language barriers and culturalist regionalization, and it enabled inclusive transnational dialogues and intellectual socialization beyond Brazil’s borders. The creation of Vibrant also anticipated what governmental funding agencies in Brazil would later demand: international connections and publications. This gave Brazilian anthropology a good leg up on much of the rest of our country’s academic scene in an age of increasingly compulsory internationalization.5 The training of professors and researchers in hegemonic countries and frequent visits by foreign speakers have long been some of the main criteria used by Brazilian government 853 agencies to assess Brazilian institutions’ levels of internationalization. Over the last decade, however, these criteria have changed. The presence of foreign students attending graduate school in Brazil and, especially, publication in foreign language books and journals evaluated by government funding agencies as “international” have become the most important indexes those agencies use to qualify a given institution and its programs as "internationalized." In Brazil, as elsewhere in the world, these criteria have begun to gain overwhelming importance in the institutional evaluation process. In the particular case of anthropology, nowadays the criteria currently used by Brazilian governmental agencies and potential donors as signs of internationalization include ethnographic research conducted outside Brazil and the establishment of research projects and networks consisting of researchers from at least two different countries. Being able to show this sort of “internationalization” is what leads to getting the highest marks in performance evaluations carried out by government agencies, and this, in turn, results in access to greater resources. By taking these steps, largely under pressure of Brazil’s scientific research funding establishment, and by establishing new relationships of exchange and shared production, Brazilian anthropology has stretched beyond simple participation in international meetings and events. It has begun to establish denser bi- or multilateral contacts outside of Brazil. It is in this general scenario that ABA’s presidents have participated in the WCAA. THE WAN, THE WCAA, AND BEYOND The World Anthropologies Network (Red de Antropologı́as del Mundo, http://www.ram-wan.net/) has sought to challenge the hegemonic role played by the former colonial metropolitan and US anthropologies by fostering a pluralistic and heteroglossic anthropological scene through coalition and the exploration of new political-epistemological possibilities (Ribeiro 2006; Ribeiro and Escobar 2006). This movement has gained strength through the leadership of researchers who are situated outside of the United States but who were often trained at doctoral programs in anthropology within the United States. A key moment for this movement was the establishment of the World Council of Anthropological Associations during the meeting of the ABA in Recife in 2004. I believe that the movement launched by the World Anthropologies Network, together with the WCAA, has been very important and has helped lead to the creation of the AAA’s Committee on World Anthropologies (CWA). Solidarity among associations and the formation of joint positions regarding questions that have come up in various countries have effectively demonstrated that the WCAA has fulfilled its role as a macroinstitution linking national associations. What it has not done, however, is to create effective changes in epistemologies or in the balance of symbolic power between the anthropological production 854 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016 of hegemonic and nonhegemonic members, even within its members’ national contexts. If anthropological associations share a global stage more often today, with researchers and research projects moving with greater ease among nations and growing transnational interdependence in the production of anthropology, this is, I believe, mostly due to mounting global pressures for internationalization. Internationalization, however, does not necessarily result in a more equitable distribution of anthropological power. A decade is not enough time for a small group of actors to put in place enormous changes (even within the narrow field of anthropology) and, through said changes, to overcome disparities, especially across different national anthropologies in their national contexts and in the global division of labor and power among nations and among anthropologies. Nevertheless, Gordon Mathews (this issue) has shown us how much has already been done. The World Anthropologies roundtable at the 2015 AAA meeting in Denver that spurred this series of articles and the World Anthropology section of American Anthropologist in which they appear are clearly manifestations of these first steps. Thinking about the situation from a Brazilian perspective, I am under the impression that the WAN began with a strong intellectual drive. As an institutional space within which national associations of anthropology are supposed to meet to pursue similar objectives, and largely due to its expansion from 14 to 49 associations, the WCAA leadership has been mostly dealing with operational and institutional challenges and has been doing so on a voluntary basis, on top of demanding academic posts. How to maintain and expand this critical coalition in the face of a growing crisis of internationalization and lack of resources is a challenge that must be met organizationally, theoretically, and epistemologically. It will be necessary for us to go beyond the standard reflections and begin working with common research agendas. We need to engage and integrate students and professionals from multiple nations in these projects, taking as our cue the global ecumenical trend currently being preached by multilateral institutions and international technical cooperation programs in developing transnational corporations. This has to be done both in the hegemonic centers of decision making and in the places where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. This engagement and cooperation should not only take in the selection and investigation of research objects but also involve the intersection of critiques and dialogues with activism. Finally, let me say that if ethnography is the main force for change and theory in our discipline, perhaps these new movements will be important for the development of plurinational and collaborative ethnography. We can see some of these mechanisms already functioning in large projects undertaken with EU financial support and, thus, foresee future possibilities for these on a more global scale. But for all this to work out, we must first surmount some of the real obstacles to these projects—which always comes back to financing and sponsorship. NOTES Acknowledgments. I’d like to thank Susana Narotzky for her invitation to participate in the stimulating roundtable that she organized during the 144th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association: “Between World Anthropologies and World Anthropology: Toward a Reflexive Critique of the Mediation Processes.” I would also like to thank Bela Feldman for suggesting me as a possible roundtable participant, Monica Heller for the AAA’s support, and Carla Fernandez for providing last-minute aid before my presentation. Also, I am extremely grateful to Susana Narotzky, Virginia Dominguez, and Emily Metzner for their careful and generous reading and editing of the text, first translated into English by Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette. 1. Both Feldman-Bianco and Bastos did their doctorates in the United States. To see some of their shared work from later years, consult Bastos et al. 2002. 2. Vibrant has been produced with resources ceded by the Brazilian government’s support for scientific journals. Toward the end of 2015, in spite of its unquestionable success and its role in internationally disseminating the anthropology produced in Brazil, Vibrant had its financing cut due to a supposedly technical problem: the journal was not indexed in ISI-Web of Knowledge or in Scopus, a criterion that was waived for other Brazilian journals. Vibrant is currently in the process of being indexed, but the delay is enormous. What resources are available are very limited, in any case, and continued publication of the journal wouldn’t be possible without the inestimable dedication of its principal editor, Peter Fry (and the no less important fact that he is an English anthropologist living in Brazil since the 1970s), and of Carmen Rial, aside from ABA support and contributions. Through a call for aid, it received (as in other situations) numerous letters of support and temporary financial aid from Critique of Anthropology, via the good services of Stephen Nugent. This has been an example of the more important aspects of Brazilian anthropology’s recent global interconnectedness, which has deepened with Carmen Rial’s important participation in publishing WCAA’s quarterly newsletter. REFERENCES CITED Bastos, Cristiana, Miguel Vale de Almeida, and Bela FeldmanBianco, eds. 2002 Trânsitos coloniais: Diálogos crı́ticos Luso-Brasileiros [Colonial transits: Critical Luso-Brazilian dialogues]. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais. López Varela, Sandra L. 2015 Internationalization for Economic Growth: Aspiring to a World-Class Mexican Research and Education Environment. American Anthropologist 117(4):768–776. Oliveira, Luis Roberto Cardoso de 2008 Dialogical and Power Differences in World Anthropologies. Vibrant 5(2):268–276. Peirano, Mariza 1981 The Anthropology of Anthropology: The Brazilian case. PhD dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Harvard University. World Anthropology 1991 The Anthropology of Anthropology: The Brazilian Case. Série Antropologia 110 [Anthropology Series 110]. Brası́lia: University of Brası́lia. 1998 When Anthropology Is at Home: The Different Contexts of a Single Discipline. Annual Review of Anthropology 27:105– 129. 2004 “In This Context”: The Many Histories of Anthropology. Série Antropologia 352 [Anthropology Series 352]. Brası́lia: University of Brası́lia. 2005 A Guide to Anthropology in Brazil. Vibrant 2(1):54–87. 2008a Brazil: Otherness in Context. In A Companion to Latin American Anthropology. Deborah A. Poole, ed. Pp. 56–71. Malden, MA: Blackwell. 2008b Anthropology with No Guilt—A View from Brazil. In Other People’s Anthropologies: Ethnographic Practice on the Margins. Aleksander Bošković, ed. Pp. 186–198. New York: Berghahn. Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins 2006 Antropologias mundiais: Para um novo cenário global 855 na antropologia [World anthropologies: Toward a new global stage in anthropology]. Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais [Brazilian Journal of Social Sciences] 21(60):147– 185. Ribeiro, Gustavo Lins, and Arturo Escobar, eds. 2006 World Anthropologies: Disciplinary Transformations within Systems of Power. London: Berg. Souza Lima, Antonio Carlos de 1991 On Indigenism and Nationality in Brazil. In Nation-States and Indians in Latin America. Greg Urban and Joel Sherzer, eds. Pp. 237–258. Austin: University of Texas Press. 2004 Anthropology and Indigenous Peoples in Brazil: Ethical Engagement and Social Intervention. Practicing Anthropology 26(3):10–14. 2005 Indigenism in Brazil: The International Migration of State Politics. In Empires, Natives and Nations: Anthropology and State-Making. Benoı̂t de L’Estoile, Federico Neiburg, and Lygia Sigaud, eds. Pp. 196–222. Durham: Duke University Press. Roundtable: Between World Anthropologies and World Anthropology: Toward a Reflexive Critique of the Mediation Processes Comment Anthropology as Discursive Space Monica Heller University of Toronto This collection of articles raises some important questions and identifies some important gaps. The questions it raises are at the core of the problematics of world anthropology or anthropologies—and so, I will argue, are the gaps. But let’s tackle the questions first. The first question has to do with the tension between the singular anthropology and the plural anthropologies; this is, indeed, the central point of Susana Narotzky’s introduction. To what extent can we—and should we—be orienting our efforts to building a discursive field that bridges difference? Should we instead be trying to find ways of recognizing forms of knowledge (and modes of knowledge production) that may well be incommensurable and possibly conflicting? The first, as Gordon Mathews poignantly notes, risks turning a movement that is meant to decolonize into one that is all about gatekeeping. This is, of course, inevitable in any effort to define a common frame: someone’s idea of what counts as anthropology ends up being institutionalized, as does someone’s idea of what counts as a good way to express and debate anthropological knowledge. The second risks depriving us of access to what arguably counts most in anthropology: ways of being in the world that most of us had no idea existed or could exist. The tension between the two opens up a space for reflection. If we can accept that discursive production (in this case, production of anthropology as a discursive space) is always going to have to deal with real-world inequalities, then perhaps our attention ought to be focused on managing those inequalities. We might just have to be content with the in-between space of struggle. Or, better, we can see building a space to struggle as a positive contribution not only to the decolonization of knowledge and of knowledge production but also to understanding the conditions of inequality that make decolonization necessary both for social justice purposes and for the realization of the full potential of the discipline. Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima offers one path in this direction: pick a research agenda, any research agenda, and try to make it work. Stop focusing on the institutionalization of world “anthropology” or “anthropologies” (as important a step as that has been) and turn it to some substantive objective—to answering some shared question. See what happens, and struggle with it. Meanwhile, Yasmeen Arif offers two paths. The first is to use teaching as a way to bring new voices and positionalities to bear on what we might want to imagine anthropology could be. Teaching, she argues, allows for the locating within fields of power/knowledge that a good struggle needs to understand and take into account. (I think research does that as well, if perhaps slightly 856 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016 differently, but that is open for discussion.) Arif’s second path is understanding the importance of navigating accepted social categories critically: it may well be that relations of power have created specific social categories as a means of legitimizing who gets to be in the center and who gets marginalized. As we know, such categories may well be socially constructed, but that doesn’t make them any less socially real. Grappling with how to take their social reality into account without reproducing the ideologies that naturalize and reify them is yet another space we can enter in order to build a new mode of anthropological knowledge production. Arif’s point leads to the second question that this set of articles raised for me. Who actually are the interlocutors here? Who are the actors with skin in the game? Arif asks why we blindly reproduce the same divisions as Cold War area studies (in which, I note, somehow the United States always gets to be an area all on its own). Mathews alludes to university job markets; Souza Lima discusses the evaluation mechanisms behind contemporary audit culture internationalization and demonstrates out that current forms of institutionalized world anthropologies still use national or areal associations. He also shows how Brazil, as a state, shapes the construction of “Brazilian anthropology”—an anthropology that turns to the rest of the Portuguese-speaking world as a way to decenter the field, thereby reinscribing itself in even older imperial formations. Clearly, older imperial and newer nation-state formations are materially important: our associations run along those lines, as do our funding agencies (yes, even the European Union) and our education markets. But perhaps it is time to consider what is gained and what is lost in reproducing them, as well as what might need to happen so that alternative modes of materially constructing the market can get some purchase. Here I wish to point to two gaps. The first is that all these articles, it seems to me, are really talking about one subfield of anthropology: the sociocultural one. This is perhaps not surprising insofar as outside of the United States and Canada, that is pretty much what anthropology is. Of course, far be it from me to suggest things should be otherwise. Indeed, as a linguistic anthropologist, it actually does me a lot of good to have to engage with sciences du langage in France and the world it influences; with various philologies in other parts of Europe; or with applied linguistics in Britain and much of Asia and Latin America (to suddenly get all area studies on you). At the same time, it also does me a lot of good to engage with archaeology, biological anthropology, and even sociocultural anthropology. In particular, for the purposes of our discussion here, some of these are fields with a long tradition of transnational teamwork, with a great deal to say about what it takes to make such teams work and what kinds of knowledge gets produced as a result. Parenthetically, it could also be enlightening to take a look from this perspective at transnational anthropological efforts that are currently in place, such as the rather large teams the European Union tends to favor. Mathews points to the second gap I want to highlight: the absence of real engagement with what it means to have to speak (or write) to each other across the divides of the discursive spaces into which we are socialized—some of which get to impose their rules on others. This is, of course, an old, old, debate in science, politics, commerce, and culture. We have used, for example, Latin and Sanskrit as scientific linguae francae. “Vernacular” (read nation-state) “languages” (that is, the named and codified forms produced by national elites) challenged them. At the end of the 19th century in Europe, Germany, France, and England competed for top spot, while many intellectuals spent time inventing International Auxiliary Languages (like Esperanto) to get around that problem (depending how you count, about 500 such languages are thought to have been proposed in Europe between 1870 and 1915). Computer languages are another such solution. English has been characterized as the contemporary lingua franca of scientific knowledge production, with all the attendant debates one might expect about just how equitable access to it really is. Much of that debate centers around the power of the native speaker to act, as Mathews says, as a gatekeeper to the sacred realm of publication and conference presentation. But we do not need to accept the terms of the debate. We concocted the notion of national languages, of mother tongues, and of native speakers—and we can unconcoct them. They belong to the category of things that we have invented in order to legitimize inequality and to mask the real reasons why some people (so-called native speakers) get to judge the communicative performance of others. Let us not fall into the trap of reproducing naturalized ideologies of language. Let’s cut to the chase of what kinds of values we are actually debating and what kinds of tools we need in order to do so without the smokescreen of language as a naturalized object getting in our way. Put differently, let’s not confuse language with discursive space. If I offer that concept as a way to think through the pitfalls and affordances of the idea of world anthropology– anthropologies, it is because I think it allows us to both imagine what conversations we want to be having with whom and how the space itself is traversed with relations of power that we need to take into account. We can look at the conditions of its existence, the resources that circulate there and across its boundaries, we can look at how the boundary works and who gets to decide. This is in many ways simply another step in the reflexive turn. World Anthropology 857 Roundtable: Between World Anthropologies and World Anthropology: Toward a Reflexive Critique of the Mediation Processes Comment Global Anthropology versus Anthropologies Junji Koizumi Secretary-General at the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES), and Osaka University, Japan The question of anthropology versus anthropologies is essential. Yasmeen Arif puts it in the context of Jacques Derrida’s distinction of evidence and testimony. This is enlightening, and the notion that “the process of evidence is absolutely heterogeneous to that of testimony” is intriguing. Still, we can also argue that, even if “the power to dictate what Anthropology (with a capital ‘A’) is” is decided by a position of centrality, it also comes from the testimony of those who believe in a unified anthropology. Similarly, though pluralistic “anthropologies” may derive from the testimony of those in a marginal, subaltern, and native position (among others), the notion of “anthropologies” may also be based on the evidence as to the plurality of anthropologies whose existence is undeniable. Anthropologies are anthropologies whether or not there is someone who “swears to tell the truth.” Another way to address this issue of anthropology versus anthropologies may be to place it in the context of the question of anthropological universalism and particularism, even if it may look less interesting and perhaps almost banal. On the one hand, the orientation toward a singular anthropology comes in part from a universalistic sense that without an integrated notion of anthropology we may eventually lose the base on which world anthropologies get together. The orientation toward anthropologies, on the other hand, derives from a particularistic sense that we inevitably underline a hegemonic anthropology at the center of knowledge production if we share a singularized notion of anthropology. The question of anthropology versus anthropologies seems to represent this tension between a universalist orientation for having a single voice in anthropology, often anti-relativistic and implicitly hegemonic, and a particularist orientation for seeking a more horizontal formation of world anthropologies, often explicitly counterhegemonic. This opposition of universalism and particularism is related in a complex way to the issue of center and periphery, which often comes up in the argument over world anthropologies. The notion of center and periphery tends to be put in a dichotomous frame in regards to the world system of knowledge production—the “Western” anthropology at the center and anthropologies of the Global South and other regions at the periphery. Even if the current situation is close to this center–periphery (or center–peripheries) model, the center is not necessarily single either—and, more importantly, centers and peripheries always exist in relation to each other. Many peripheries are also centers in relation to peripheries surrounding them, although the existence of a center of centers and the reach of its global power are critical issues we need to focus upon and clarify. This succession of center–periphery chains does not unilaterally proceed from the center of centers in the Global North toward the peripheries. This is clearly shown by Antonio Carlos de Souza Lima’s discussion of “Brazil’s internal hegemonic centers of learning” (Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Brası́lia). According to him, scholars in these centers are wholly trained in Brazil while those in nonhegemonic positions are generally trained outside the country. Examples of these reverse relations of center and periphery in local and global terms may be found elsewhere, even if the opposite is the case in many countries in East Asia (except Japan), where doctoral degrees from one of the preeminent universities in the “West” play a major role in positioning a scholar in internal academic systems. This suggests that the world of anthropological knowledge may not be organized in a bipolar dichotomy with “center” and “periphery” at its two extremes. Gordon Mathews argues that the “West’s relative economic decline” will lead “gradually and indirectly but inescapably to the relative decline of Western and US anthropology as well” and that other anthropologies “will increasingly contest US anthropological world hegemony.” I am not sure if this economic determinism holds because, while the economy may provide one of the necessary conditions for academic development, it is not the only determinant. Mathews goes on to point out that we will increasingly live in a multipolar world of anthropological power and influence with a range of competing anthropological centers. This is probably true, and we need to act to make this happen, but just as important is to think about the nature of such competition and concomitant cooperation among diverse anthropologies in such a multipolar world. At the present stage, a diversity of anthropologies is only beginning to come into sight, as the global journal Déjà Lu of the WCAA, now in its fourth issue, best illustrates. The journal, even if it is edited and published by only a handful of colleagues, including Gordon Mathews and Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, is a potent tool for expanding the scope of anthropology and bringing ideas, concerns, data, and scholars together in a way that previously would not have been possible due to lack of communication. New lines of 858 American Anthropologist • Vol. 118, No. 4 • December 2016 communication and a stable basis for strengthening anthropological diversity were established by the founding of the WCAA in Recife in 2004. At the same time, the revitalization of the IUAES that Narotzky mentions started with the 17th World Congress of the IUAES in Manchester in 2013, and it has been accelerated by subsequent Inter-Congresses in Chiba, Japan, in 2014; Bangkok, Thailand, in 2015; and Dubrovnik, Croatia, in 2016. The revitalization will surely continue and become more conspicuous through the InterCongress in Ottawa, Canada, in 2017, and the 18th World Congress in Florianópolis, Brazil, in 2018. Along with these regular events, the IUAES and WCAA, two complementary organizations growing ever closer to each other, agreed to conduct a simultaneous vote among their respective memberships on proposals to consolidate their mutual relationship. Ballots were cast this summer, and both memberships approved a proposal for an integrated bicameral organization with IUAES and WCAA chambers. With these vote results, serious talks and intense joint activities will inspire further collaboration, leading to a more effective, rational, and powerful formation for the world anthropologies movement. So far, the IUAES and WCAA have worked together to organize global conference panels on topics of global interest and to collect and disseminate news significant to global anthropology, as well as to support endangered anthropological programs and beleaguered institutions, oppose budgetary cuts, protest undue arrest and imprisonment, protect indigenous rights, and so forth. Déjà Lu delivers anthropological articles throughout the world, and a new WCAA project called the Global Survey of Anthropological Practice (GSAP) is gathering rich information on histories, institutions, problems, and practices of anthropologies in individual countries, exposing the reality of anthropologies in specific settings and positions. The world anthropologies movement can count these among its achievements of import. Still, the real debate for world anthropologies has hardly begun. Clifford Geertz (1983:16) once wrote in a famous elegant phrase that “to see ourselves as others see us can be eye-opening,” and world anthropologies seem to be largely at this “eye-opening” stage. Geertz went on to describe “the far more difficult achievement of seeing ourselves amongst others, as a local example of the forms human life has locally taken, a case among cases, a world among worlds.” If we could begin to see anthropology as “an anthropology among anthropologies,” we could escape the dichotomy of a single global anthropology versus multiple global anthropologies and instead build momentum for global anthropology as opposed to global anthropologies. This global anthropology would represent something constantly new, born only from multiple anthropologies with an orientation toward a world anthropology—“a global body of knowledge that will engage multisited and historically embedded theories in an ongoing conversation that will need to negotiate the power effects of a multipolar world,” in Susana Narotzky’s words (this issue). If we enter into this process, we necessarily enter into debates and negotiations. We may encounter contradictions, irreconcilable differences, and even conflicts, not only among anthropologies but also among anthropologists, but such a process may provide a way out of the static “cartographic imaginations that the area studies paradigm spawned,” as Arif puts it. A relativist stance toward multiple global anthropologies with a simple attitude of tolerance or curiosity for different anthropologies will not do. Anti-relativism for a single global anthropology that actually tries to impose a supposedly shared universal value can be more problematic than present hegemonic anthropology. What we have yet to obtain is an “anti anti-relativistic” (Geertz 2000) world anthropology, which would simultaneously embrace diversifying anthropological ideas and practices along with a marked propensity for a global anthropology that will always be in the making. REFERENCES CITED Geertz, Clifford 1983 Introduction. In Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. Clifford Geertz, auth. Pp. 3–16. New York: Basic. 2000 Anti Anti-Relativism. In Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Clifford Geertz, auth. Pp. 42–67. Princeton: Princeton University Press.