Retrospect

James G. Carrier is an honorary research associate at Oxford Brookes University, associate at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, and adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Indiana. He is the editor of Meanings of the Market: The Free Market in Western Culture (1997), co-editor with Daniel Miller of Virtualism: A New Political Economy (1998), and co-editor with Deborah B. Gewertz of The Handbook of Sociocultural Anthropology (2013).

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The quality and breadth of contributions to this volume speak for themselves. Here I want to consider their context, the nature of the project that E. Paul Durrenberger and Gisli Palsson put together that led to those contributions. When seen from the perspective of the more visible currents of anthropological thought over the past few decades, this project exemplifies what the discipline might become.

I will start that consideration by pointing to Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s well-known introduction to anthropology and the argument contained in its title: Small Places, Large Issues (Eriksen [1995] 2010). For a long time, anthropologists did research in small places: Malinowski (1922) on an island in the Trobriands, Evans-Pritchard (1940) in a small village on the upper Nile, and Mead (1930) on a small island in the Admiralties. For a long time, anthropology has been associated in the public mind with the study of such places. When those small places were considered primitive, the discipline could justify itself by, and be justified by, the study of human life free of the distortions that come with the rise of civilization of whatever sort. Those in the countries that produced anthropologists could use what, for instance, Malinowski said of Kiriwina to reflect upon themselves, whether to laud their own achievements or to bemoan their own inadequacies. As well, of course, the anthropologists in those countries could use that knowledge to reflect upon the nature of human existence in general (e.g., Mauss [1925] 1990) and of society in particular (Durkheim [1893] 1984).

Anthropologists have long worried about the disappearance of the relatively untouched societies in those small places that were their conventional topic of research (Münzel 2011). That worry became more insistent, and more justified, after World War II. With the fall of colonial empires, improvement in transportation and communication, and expansion of trade, the gradual disappearance of those societies turned into something like a rout. Members of the discipline knew that they were increasingly living in a “runaway world” (Leach 1967), and many lamented that their field sites were part of a “world on the wane” (Lévi-Strauss 1961). At the same time, anthropologists and many other people were decreasingly happy with the sort of grand evolutionary approaches that sought, in an island in the Pacific or a village in Africa, information about an earlier stage of Western society. Evolutionary thinking may never have been universal in anthropology, but its lingering influence was dying out, both within the discipline and in the public mind. The Primitive or the Simple, that is, turned into the Exotic or Alien, which turned into the Different or Diverse.

This change left the discipline in a difficult position. Many anthropologists may have been happy to do conventional, village-based field research, even though more and more of their colleagues were shifting their focus from villages to plantations, squatter settlements, ghettos, and immigrant enclaves. But however happy they may have been, some of them, like a growing number of their public, wondered what difference their research and writing made, why it was worth pursuing, and, crucially, whether it was worth paying for. The answer to their questions lay in the argument in Eriksen’s title. The places may be small, the field research may be restricted to a particular locality, but in those small places anthropologists could address general questions that were of interest to those concerned with social life in other places, whether small or large.

I do not mean that anthropologists of the older generations had not sought to do this, for clearly they had. Malinowski (1921) used his work on the Trobriands to reflect on common themes in Western economic thought; Margaret Mead (1949) waded into the debate about nature and culture in a work with a subtitle that clearly indicates those she sought to address: a psychological study of primitive youth for Western civilization; Lévi-Strauss (e.g., 1966) was interested in the fundamental nature of human thought. While these older anthropologists did use small places to address large issues, the discipline was able to survive perfectly well without them. When they wrote, the need to justify the discipline, either to itself or to its public, had not yet become as pressing as it would become.

Unfortunately, however, after it did become more pressing, anthropology came very close to ruling out the use of research in small places to address those large issues. That began to happen in the middle of the 1980s, with the emergence of postmodernism, associated especially with Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) and heavily influenced by the cultural turn. Postmodernism flourished at least until the end of the century, and its effects on the discipline remain strong. While the early postmodernist concern with the production of text has weakened, its challenge to the idea of anthropology as a sustained effort to learn about society and culture is still potent. One basis of that challenge emerged from the cultural turn, expressed in the work of Clifford Geertz, especially his book The Interpretation of Cultures. Geertz argued that the anthropological task was one of appreciation of people’s activities as expressions of their culture, rather than one of explanation. He rejected the more purely sociological (“functionalism”) and psychological (“psychologism”) approaches, which, he said rather dismissively, only offer “reductive formulas professing to account for” what people do (Geertz 1973, 453).

As shaped by Geertz’s arguments, the postmodernist challenge had two main elements. One was a rejection of the idea that there are such things as societies or cultures; the other was the rejection of the idea that we are equipped with the tools that would allow us to try to make sense of these things. The consequence was that many anthropologists retreated. Some retreated into a celebration of Otherness, together with a rejection of the idea that we should try to understand it. Or, as Patricia Spyer (2011, 62) put it, in terms about as dismissive as Geertz’s, “any attempt to domesticate such otherness by either explaining it away or reducing it to something already known and commonsensical is eschewed.” Other anthropologists retreated into a concern with detail, denying the reality of the forest while seeking to describe minutely the individual trees—such as “What it means to be a woman in all its complexity” (Brownell and Besnier 2013, 240).

A commentator has observed that “anthropologists have perhaps been exceptionally prone to feel that their enterprise has developed in relative isolation from the general intellectual culture around it” (Collini 1999, 280; quoted in Mills 2013, 580). However, it is important to recognize that this sense of intellectual isolation is more fancy than fact. Anthropology’s postmodernist wave demonstrates this, for it resembled what happened elsewhere in the social sciences. More intriguingly, it also reflects the emergence of a more general intellectual movement that many anthropologists saw as anathema. That movement was neoliberalism, and especially the neoclassical economics that was its intellectual core.

Neoliberalism rose to prominence around 1980 because the older reigning political-economic orientation was seen to have failed. That older orientation was Keynesianism, a variety of macroeconomics that sought to generate summary understandings of a nation’s economy and guide government policy accordingly. The failure was the Keynesian inability to predict or control stagflation, the combination of economic inflation and stagnation that appeared in many Western countries around the middle of the 1970s. The neoclassical economics that rose to replace it did not seek either to improve Keynesianism or to lay out a better macroeconomic model. Instead, it rejected macroeconomics itself, echoing von Hayek’s (1944, 204) assertion that governments and people should resist “the craving for intelligibility” about how the economy operates and why.

Like economics, anthropology was having a troublesome 1970s and a portentous 1980s (some of the trouble is described in Carrier 2013, 3–12). Many in the discipline heeded the argument, made most cogently by Talal Asad (1973), that anthropology was a creature of colonialism. They applied to themselves the argument made by Edward Said (1978) and those in the subaltern studies school (e.g., Guha 1982) about the dangers of those in the center of power producing essentialist, timeless renderings of alien and subordinate Others (e.g., Fabian 1983). These arguments were made against the background of the social ferment that existed in many Western countries: civil rights, women’s rights, protests against the Vietnam War. Together, they led many in the discipline to conclude that the predominant approaches in anthropology needed to change. One of the more influential critics of these approaches was Sherry Ortner, who saw them as being concerned with the properties of systems, whether cast in terms of structural functionalism, Marxism, Lévi-Straussian structuralism, or a Boasian cultural order. She said that this left people out, or at least people who could think and act. As she put it, the important question is “the relationship(s) that obtain between human action, on the one hand, and some global entity which we may call ‘the system,’ on the other” (Ortner 1984, 148).

The discipline’s response was a flurry of work that attempted to link the system and people’s ordinary lives, but by the end of the 1980s many in anthropology had abandoned the attempt, and the postmodernist view came to predominate. That view looked a lot like the view of neoclassical economics. We should not seek to improve our stock of macroscopic models; we should resist the craving for intelligibility. Instead, we should recognize the primacy of people over systems, of lived experience over social or cultural order, and consequently should foreswear the search for cause and effect (see Carrier 2012). For neoclassical economists, this stance took the form of a model that accounted for people’s market transactions as the consequence of their individual preferences or utility functions, which were not to be explained but taken as given. For many anthropologists, it took the form of a view that people’s actions were expressions of their personal orientation, which also was not to be explained but taken as given. One common result, as I have indicated, amounted to a fixation on the trees rather than the forest, with a principled refusal to explain how those trees came to be as they are, in other than simple narrative terms.

Both the postmodernists and the neoliberals seemed vindicated by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The macroscopic orientation, the concern with system, that the Soviet Union was said to exemplify was shown to be fatally flawed. Instead, postmodernists and neoliberals celebrated the fragmentation that allowed individual freedom, whether in the form of market choice, cultural diversity, or the liberating disjunctions that came with emerging global flows. In such a climate, Eriksen’s small places may have been useful for providing yet another example of human diversity, but appeared to lead to no large issues.

Neoliberalism became less secure by the turn of the century. The Washington Consensus was looking distinctly tattered, the promised freedom and prosperity in the former Soviet Bloc looked increasingly delayed. Even the claim that reducing state power in favor of the market would increase personal freedom looked suspect in the face of high and rising rates of imprisonment in neoliberalism’s home country, the United States (see Wacquant 2010), while England and Wales, a bastion of neoliberalism under Thatcher, had higher rates than almost all of Western Europe (Walmsley 2011).

On the other side of the disciplinary divide, anthropologists appear to have been having doubts about their own variant of neoliberalism, postmodernism. The 2009 meeting of the largest body of anthropologists, the American Anthropological Association, had as its title “The End/s of Anthropology.” That may have marked concern about the future of the discipline or uncertainty about that old question of what it is for; both concerns speak of a discipline that sees itself as being in trouble. That same view was expressed in an interview with one of the more influential advocates of postmodernism, George Marcus. He said that the discipline is “in suspension,” with “no new ideas and none on the horizon” and with “no indication that its traditional stock of knowledge shows any signs of revitalization” (Marcus 2008, 2). And just as anthropology is not an intellectual island, such a view was not restricted to it. For instance, in a recent evaluation of his own field, criminology, Steve Hall (2012, 1) said that “the restrictive intellectual current that has been dominant since the 1980s is running out of momentum.” In a review article that appeared near the end of the century, a pair of sociologists put it more starkly, suggesting that postmodernism in their discipline seems to be leading to the “dissolution of sociological theory” (Camic and Gross 1998, 466).

This loss of momentum, this sense of being in suspension, appears to mark a weakening of the hold that postmodernism has had on the discipline. That hold, however, has never been total, and some of the more visible alternative bodies of anthropological work over the past couple of decades are revealing. I said that the Washington Consensus was looking tattered by the close of the twentieth century. That was not brought about by quiet processes but by substantial shocks in the world, most notably the East Asian economic crisis that began in 1997. Those shocks, and the associated unraveling of the Consensus, led to a minor boom in economic anthropology. While some of that boom concerned itself with small places (e.g., Zaloom 2006), a significant portion of it looked at large issues (e.g., Gudeman 2009; Hann and Hart 2009). Similarly, the failure of the promised freedom and prosperity to appear in the former Soviet Bloc led to a minor boom in work on Eastern Europe, and again much of it looked at large issues (see Hann 2005; Rogers and Verdery 2013). These large shocks seem to have jarred at least some anthropologists out of their concern with small places and their rejection of large issues. They seem to have led at least some anthropologists to recognize that even if the relationship between Ortner’s system and human action may be difficult to describe, there is no warrant for ignoring that system.

The economic crisis that began in 2008 is another large shock, the biggest that most people in most Western countries have ever experienced. It, too, has led anthropologists to consider those large issues (e.g., Ho 2009; Ouroussoff 2010). That crisis affected different places in different ways, but one of the most profound shocks occurred in Iceland. That place is large compared with many of the places anthropologists have studied, but it is small compared with many of the places currently in the news because of their economic troubles. In being small in that way, scholars can reasonably hope to grasp the predominant features of its history, the way those features shape the present, how that present has been affected by the global economic crisis, and how those in that small place have responded. The results of that effort are the contributions to this volume.

I said at the outset that this project is important as an example of what anthropology might become. I do not mean by this that it should become a discipline that studies people in Western societies, for it has been doing that for some time. Rather, I mean that it should become what it set out to be, but foreswore with the ascendance of postmodernism and neoliberalism. That is, a discipline that addresses large issues, whether they loom large in the world or in the discipline. Gambling Debt is an example of that becoming.