Discovering anthropology for me was like falling in love. I was a freshman in college and I knew nothing about the subject. I didn’t have a major. I took one of those big introductory classes in a large lecture hall because I was curious, but I didn’t really have any idea what anthropology might be.

The very first lecture blew my mind. It was by an old-style style anthropologist talking about his fieldwork in the Amazon. He introduced us to the Yanomami, an indigenous people who were at the center of a huge anthropological debate about the nature of violence at the time: How much of human violence is cultural? How much of it is at the essence of human nature? How much of it is imposed by larger historical and economic forces? The teacher described to us their “shaman” who sniff hallucinogenic drugs to communicate with spirits and to protect their village from sickness and attack by neighbors. The Yanomami shaman are the Amazonian equivalent to our philosophers, scientists, doctors and religious or political officials. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Here is an academic discipline that sends its practitioners around the world to immerse themselves in utterly unfamiliar, foreign cultures in order to explore the meaning of human existence.

I adored the class even with all its old-fashioned faults—it did, after all, “exoticize” indigenous people as if they were not our contemporaries but lived in a bubble, oblivious to the effects of global power relations and colonial conquest. The teacher did alert us, however, to the contemporary invasion of non-indigenous settlers, miners and cattle barons who were—and still are—destroying indigenous ways of life all around the world. I quickly signed up to major in anthropology.

RB: What do you find special about anthropology?

There are a few things that I think are magical about anthropology but, what I like best is our methodology of “participant-observation ethnography”, our insight on “cultural relativism” and our multi-disciplinarity. Our methodology is extraordinarily powerful but simple. To put it commonsensically, it is the technique of deep “hanging out” in a setting to attempt to see the world through the eyes of the people or society you want to find out about. You engage with people in a friendly, empathetic way, and participate in their daily life activities so as to avoid distorting interactions or calling excessive attention to yourself. This allows you to break through appearances and simultaneously experience emotionally and document rationally life in that setting. We have developed strategies of note-taking, tape-recording and, most importantly, of self-reflexive skepticism. You have to learn to be careful not to see only what you want to see and not to confuse the way you want the world to be with the way the world really is. You try to figure out how things really work by being aware of your own biases.

Participant-observation methodology forces you to break through the barriers of status that limit people’s lives: economic class, race and ethnicity, gender, and social conventions—to name a few. Anthropology tells you: “Go out there and explore the world; open your mind to all kinds of different perspectives and settings—or take a long close critical look at your own society. Treat your own culture and its common senses as if you were an outsider confronting the bizarre logic of an exotic people for the first time. You discover that there is nothing more normal or right about your culture than anyone else’s culture.”

Anthropology pushes you to dare to break through, what we have called the “intimate apartheids” (Bourgois and Schonberg 2007) that confine us to our narrow little segregated worlds that we find most comfortable. Too often these intimate apartheids turn us into ethnocentric, or even racist individuals, who think so highly of ourselves and our way of being that we end up disrespecting and mistreating anyone who is different from us.

Respect for others is a related core value of anthropology and is reflected in our core value of cultural relativism which is not a theory, but simply a heuristic device, (a technique) that enables us to learn about others without being blinded by prejudgments. In a nutshell, cultural relativism declares that cultures are not good or bad; they all have a logic. Our job as anthropologists—and indeed as human beings—is not to judge culture along righteous moral lines, but to find out how its internal logic makes it operate. Often the first reaction of people confronted with something different is, “Ewww gross!” simply because it is different from what they are used to and what they consider to be normal, or moral, or the proper way to do things.

Anthropology tells us to throw out our preconceptions and biases and recognize our own culture’s brain-washing and instead become aware of why people do things, because those different ways of doing things inevitably have a meaning and a logic to them. All people everywhere are convinced that they too are moral, good, and normal in the same way we think we are moral, good—and for the most part normal. No matter how horrific/crazy/cool/mean or beautiful a cultural practice may appear to be at first, our job as anthropologists is to jump into its logic to see how it makes sense to the people engaging in that practice. It is this combination of participant-observation ethnography and cultural relativism that can make anthropology powerfully anti-racist, self-critical and alert to power inequalities and disparate life chances across the world, and in our own society—or even in our own families!

Finally, anthropology is also an unusual field of study because it spans the scientific boundaries that divide academic disciplines. We include multiple subfields—cultural anthropology, archeology, linguistics, biological anthropology, and medical anthropology —that transcend the academic gulfs between the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. I happen to be a cultural (sometimes called a social) anthropologist and also a medical anthropologist. The questions important to me draw from theories and methods from both the humanities and the social sciences. Furthermore, as a medical anthropologist concerned about HIV, addiction and violence I find myself in dialogue with laboratory scientists and epidemiologists who operate with very different (primarily quantitative) definitions of facts and who are often initially unfamiliar with, and sometimes fail to recognize, the value of qualitative anthropological research.

Anthropology makes you realize that academic disciplines are like cultures. They each have their logics and insights, as well as their blinders and biases. Anthropology has a long history of melding together different epistemologies—that is to say different techniques of understanding the world. We read widely in philosophy, literature, history, economics, art, architecture, poetry, biology, law—you name it. This makes our theoretical approaches to understanding why the world is the way it is especially innovative.

RB: What do you like best about anthropology?

Conducting fieldwork is the best part of being an anthropologist. I think I am happiest when I’m in the middle of a participant-observation ethnographic fieldwork project. Some mornings I have to pinch myself when I wake up. It seems like a dream that I am paid to spend my time in so many different, interesting—sometimes scary—settings and with such compelling people to learn from and about them.

Much of my work has been in the U.S. inner city. These are settings beset by social inequality, poverty, violence and substance abuse. As part of my fieldwork, for example, I lived for almost five years in a rundown tenement apartment building in East Harlem, New York with my family, right when the crack and HIV epidemics hit. I watched many of my friends and neighbors get swept off their feet by crack, and some died of AIDS. I befriended a network of crack dealers operating on my block and they invited me into their homes. I wrote a book about how they and their families made sense of their world and struggled to survive (Bourgois 2003). I also became a medical anthropologist to try to contribute usefully to policy and advocacy in the field of public health and HIV prevention.

My neighbors and friends were suffering real poverty. Most were unemployed, struggling with addiction, and engaging in violence. There was a great deal of gun violence. The mid-1980s through the early 1990s were a dangerous and stressful era on U.S. inner city streets. But on another level, it was an exciting and fun moment of history to be in East Harlem. It was the birth of hip-hop and rap. People were eager to talk, full of hope and the illusions of going from rags to riches. I tried to make their suffering, struggle, and dreams less invisible and more humanely comprehensible to the rest of America.

I wanted readers of my book to understand the historical tragedy of inner city poverty, the effects of de-industrialization, racist segregation and the loss of jobs. The economy was in shambles, because of the disappearance of factory jobs to lower wage, countries that repressed unions and human rights. The global narcotics industry flooded in to this devastated economic vacuum overwhelming all of us. These were “structural forces” that were badly managed by U.S. politicians and misunderstood by the press. The young men and women I befriended could not find legal jobs that would pay enough money to feed a single individual—let alone their families and loved ones. Schools were not working; abandoned buildings were going up in flames, and crack offered a seductive promise of sudden, easy access to the American Dream: Get rich quick through risky entrepreneurship.

Setting up a crack house at that time was not so different from founding a high-tech start-up company today except that your product was illegal and you had no access to loans from banks, or to legal protection for enforcing contracts. You had to rely on your wits or brute force to start your business, stay alive and keep off of drugs. At that moment in history, politicians and the press vilified crack dealers as public enemies, but in fact, they were the logical product of powerful social and political forces that trapped them into a destructive, violent relationship with their community. More often than not they ended up as victims themselves, becoming addicts and spending the rest of their lives rotating through prison, because this was the moment when mass incarceration was taking hold of the United States.

Since that time, I’ve done similar fieldwork in other inner city settings. I co-authored a book on homeless heroin injectors and crack smokers, called Righteous Dopefiend, with a student, Jeff Schonberg, who is also a great photographer (Bourgois and Schonberg 2009). Jeff is now an anthropology professor at San Francisco State University. We combined the documentary and aesthetic/emotional effects of photography with the analytical tools of anthropology to convey the human suffering of homelessness, social inequality, and addiction. We also critiqued the dysfunctional effects of the war on drugs and offered practical solutions such as harm reduction and “housing-first” interventions and diversified medical treatment options—including opiate prescription—for indigent addicts.

RB: What was your first fieldwork as a student?

My first fieldwork was in Central America among the Miskitu Indians in Nicaragua. They are an extraordinary people who were at the center of a terrible cold war conflict in the 1980s. A populist leftisat revolution had triumphed in Nicaragua overthrowing a brutal, U.S.-supported dictatorship that had been in power for forty years. I literally jumped on a bus heading for Nicaragua and presented myself at the New Agrarian Reform Office saying, “I’m an anthropologist. I’d like to work for your socialist experiment.” They replied, “Oh, you’re a gringo [i.e. from the United States] anthropologist. You must like indigenous people.” This is the stereotype of anthropologists. And frankly it is largely true, cultural relativism guides anthropologists to respect indigenous cultures. The revolutionaries sent me out to Miskitu territory in the jungle along Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast, and I took a leave-of-absence from graduate school. That is how I found myself among the Miskitu Indians in revolutionary Nicaragua in 1979-1980 instead of in school. Unfortunately the revolutionary leaders were just as racist against the indigenous minorities in their country as the right wing dictator had been before them. The Miskitu people were excited about the revolution, but they wanted to retain control over their culture, language, land, and natural resources and rebelled against the revolutionary central government’s racism. Unfortunately the CIA stepped in to manipulate the conflict because of its Cold War era anti-communist obsession and flooded the Miskitu territory with AK-47 machine guns. A bloody civil war erupted.

The revolutionary leadership in Nicaragua failed to recognize that the cultural demands of the Miskitu were just as legitimate as the economic demands of the poor, Latino non-indigenous population for whom they had fought and overthrown the dictatorship. Most Latino Nicaraguans viewed the Indians as being from a “lower cultural level.” But again, cultural relativism tells us there is no such thing as a lower cultural level. There are simply different ways of organizing society. All cultural forms are legitimate in their own social uniqueness. The Miskitu conflict made me realize that anthropology can have a very important role to play in changing the world for the better.

Several anthropologists with whom I was working in the agrarian reform ministry co-authored a report and published a book calling for the decolonization of the Miskitu territory and the establishment of an autonomous local government of indigenous regional autonomy (Philippe Bourgois and Jorge Grunberg 1981). The revolutionaries could not understand our anthropological perspective. Instead they pursued a hard line against the Miskitu and repressed everyone demanding cultural rights. I was thrown out of the country and returned to graduate school. Four years later, the revolutionary government realized that its policy had backfired, and it granted regional political autonomy to the Miskitu territory. They invited me back to Nicaragua in 1985 to evaluate their experiment in autonomous indigenous territorial and political rights. Unfortunately the Nicaraguan revolution foundered three years later—that often happens to populist revolutions. The regional autonomy they initiated, however, is still an interesting model for indigenous people around the world and has a great deal of potential.

RB: Have others benefited from your work?

My commitment to engaging with urgent contemporary social and political problems has taught me that it is important not to think we have all the answers, know the truth, or even ask the right questions. We have to be careful about taking ourselves too seriously as anthropologists. The crack dealers I had befriended in East Harlem came to the book opening party for In Search of Respect Selling Crack in El Barrio hosted by Cambridge University Press. They received copies of the book and liked the fact that their words were published to make a complex theoretical and policy analysis of de-industrialization, racism, and gender power relations. Nevertheless, one of the most violent, main characters in the book insightfully poked fun at me, “Oh Felipe you make us sound like such sensitive crack dealers.” Another one resisted the linearity of my argument about the impact of structural forces on the neighborhood and his life, “I don’t blame nobody but me, myself and I for the bad I’ve done.”

I still keep in touch with several of the main characters in the book and I asked my best friend from the scene, whom I called Primo, if he minded if I could publish a follow-up article about his addiction to heroin (Bourgois 2000). He was ashamed of being a heroin user and I didn’t want to embarrass him or violate his privacy. He looked at me in a super hesitant and pained way. I thought, “Oh no! He’s going to tell me I can’t publish this!” Instead, he said, “I don’t mean to disrespect you… but you can write whatever you want to write. No nobody reads the shit you write—at least not no one that I know.”

It made me realize that we have to be humble as academics. Our anthropological publications only reach a small section of college-educated people. My books on the inner city, for example, are mostly read by college students. That is frustrating on some level. But college students are at a turning point in their lives. They can open their minds up to new perspectives and transform their ways of thinking in ways that can alter the course of their lives and the future of their society.

Some of the readers of my books in college classes send me feedback through email. I also occasionally get letters from prisoners who somehow gained access to my books through crummy, underfunded prison libraries. Sometimes they tell me they see themselves or their parents reflected in the pages of In Search of Respect and in Righteous Dopefiend: “I was always so angry at my [violent or addicted or neglectful] father—or my mother—but now I can begin to understand what was going on . . .”

Working in public health on HIV prevention as an anthropologist has also been rewarding but challenging, especially with the government wasting so much money on locking people up, which simples makes the problem of violence, addiction, and unemployment worse. But frankly, we need to figure out how to reach more people more broadly and more effectively. That is where future generations can help with the explosion of digital technology and social media. The new technology offers new ways of communicating anthropological insights. It is very effective to show images and display audio at the same time that you present on anthropological analysis. It can render off-limits places and problems more humanely visible or it can help set the individual experience of viewers in the larger context of our moment in history.

Remember, an anthropologist can study almost anything. You can enter the world of stockbrokers or crack dealers, doctors or homeless heroin injectors, indigenous hunter-gatherers or suburban commuters and shed light on what gets taken for granted but may actually be problematic, urgent or complex or is simply beautiful and inspiring. New access to online technologies gives anthropology greater potential to address the urgent questions of our contemporary moment in history and reach wider audiences. But, we still have to figure out how to use these platforms effectively. We have to be wary of becoming inadvertent pornographers or manipulators of the truth like reality TV shows. I think anthropology should be at the forefront of the digital communication tide and it will be the new generation that embraces these new possibilities. Digital technology has already transformed public health and politics and most nefariously big business is enslaving us to it and monopolizing online access. It is up to the new generation to wrench back its potential.

RB: Any Closing Thoughts?

I want to end by saying that ethnographic fieldwork and theoretical analysis can help us understand the invisible negative effects of power, domination, and social inequalities. Actions that seem immoral or look horrendous—behaviors that seem to be pathological—may often be imposed on individuals by larger structural forces—harsh economic conditions, environmental assaults, repressive public policies, and discriminatory social hierarchies—that constrain the lives of the individuals we study ethnographically. In some sense we are all trapped into doing the things that we do. This is certainly the case for addiction, HIV and the violence surrounding drug distribution and mass incarceration. Anthropology’s ethnographic method gives us intimate access to people’s daily lives while simultaneously allowing us to grasp the bigger picture. The challenge is to use anthropology’s critical tools to recognize the burning issues of our moment in history and go out into the world to change some corner of it for the better—or at least try to help stop it from imploding.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bourgois, Philippe., and Jeff Schonberg. “Intimate Apartheid: Ethnic Dimensions of Habitus among Homeless Heroin Injectors.” Ethnography 8 no. 1(2007): 7–31.

Bourgois, Philippe. “Disciplining Addictions: The Bio-Politics of Methadone and Heroin in the United States.” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 24 no. 2(2000): 165–195.

Bourgois, Philippe. In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Bourgois, Philippe, and Jeff Schonberg. Righteous Dopefiend. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

Philippe Bourgois, and Jorge Grunberg. “Informe de Una Investigacion Rural En La Costa Atlantica Norte.” In La Mosquitia En La Revolucion. Jaime Wheelock Roman, ed. Pp. 89–149. Managua: Centro de investigacion y estudios de la reforma agraria [CIERA], Colección Blas Real Espinales, 1981.

Carolyn Nordstrom: I’ll start with what I was thinking about this morning. As I was walking my dog, I was reflecting on what makes anthropology so cool. I thought about all the definitions I know, the introductory texts I have read, and the various things anthropologists converse about.

All of a sudden, I thought: Wait a minute. When I think about what’s in my heart, what is it that anthropology offers to others as well as myself? I realized I needed to go back to the Enlightenment of the 1700s. The Enlightenment asserted that the world was logical, that it was linear. It portrayed people as objective, as rational. Building on this perspective, various sciences categorized, classified, and boxed people and things in the world. Our theoretical systems are based on the rational nature of existence and the rationality of people. This perspective has produced many important innovations— engineering, harnessing electricity and energy sources, medical breakthroughs.

But you know what? A whole lot of the world is defined by chaos theory. Humans are anything but fully rational beings. We create incredibly noble values. We create things that bring me to tears. I see things in the world that are so moving. But this creativity is far from being logical, far from being rational.

We are this hot bed of rationality and irrationality all mixed together like a fine stew. We’re logical as well as mystical and magical, we’re absurd as well as practical. We are all these things, often at the same time. We don’t merely live in contradictions; we embrace them. We at times deny them; we frequently argue over them. Still we embed them in our lives.

Anthropology opens these dynamics to us. It lets us touch these realities. I often ask my classes “How many textbooks have you read in your life that you loved and remembered?” The most anyone has ever answered is five, the average is one or a couple. I know it’s painful for some academics to hear. Textbooks teach us important “stuff.” But they don’t often touch the reality of how we live our lives. Anthropology gives us tools to touch the heartbeat of humanity. I think that’s anthropology’s gift to the world.

Education in the West draws strongly on this model of logical, rational reality. We keep applying it over and over again in systematic, ordered ways. It would be better to ask: How can we apply models of rationality in irrational ways? The world is embracing digital and virtual realities, globalization, chaos and quantum theory, and multidimensional solutions to pressing issues. People today are breaking down many boundaries of what we take to be ourselves, our genders, our nations. Anthropology is well positioned to help us understand this changing, fluid world.

RB: Could you share with students why you become an anthropologist?

CN: Why wouldn’t you become an anthropologist? You can go anywhere, study any issue. You are not bound to only follow it through the lens of politics and political science, or the highs and lows of economics. Your explorations can range from the offices of elites to the most remote locations on earth. You can ask any question. You can study borders and their breakdowns simultaneously. You can study traditions amid change. You can study how people love and kill at the same time. You can do research and work anywhere in the world. No other discipline lets me do that.

RB: What particularly excites you about anthropology?

CN: Obviously, the big question is what does it mean to be human? That’s fascinating. I grew up a world where everything had its “place.” People were from places and things were put in “appropriate” places. One thing was in one place and not in another. We’re now entering an era where we’re able to move beyond this framework.

It’s exhilarating because this new era is still uncharted, un-mapped. We are creating it as we go along. We know place is important; but things are also unplaced. How do you intellectually deal with holding both of those ideas in your head at the same time? It is this realization regarding migrant flows, cultural flows, and virtual flows that is reformulating how we think about place and how place affects us. We are studying something that is very much in motion.

For example, clothes are symbols. They involve values, which are full of stereotypes, morals, joys, and a range of other emotions. When I see people, if they’re wearing clothes like mine, I often feel a certain kind of affinity. I make certain kinds of judgments. I can tell you what I have on and what particular place I’m in at the moment. But how does this information get all mixed together in today’s flows? Just sitting here looking at what I have on, my clothes are a product of work from numerous countries. Clothes, indeed goods in general, flow from place to place and thus are “multiplace” and yet, at the same time, exist in very specific places. How do we understand global financial flows?

How do we understand the changing lives of people? How do we understand the experiences of Syrians, for example, given the horrors many of them are living through? What’s home for them? What’s family? What’s safety? How do they understand humanity and security as they travel from Syria into Turkey and across Europe often faced with grave dangers?

Another topic I find fascinating is “invisibility.” The world’s full of things that we can see and others we are trained “not to see”—things that societies try to keep hidden from public awareness. Anthropology offers vibrant approaches for investigating and bringing to light these “made-invisible” realities, as I call them, so we are better able to forge solutions to problems that have seemed insurmountable in the past. What really goes on at the frontlines of wars, and in the elite command bunkers—and what impact does war leave in its stead? Why did Wall Street crash; what stories aren’t they telling us? What’s it really like to be a kid living on the street—in a rich urban city, in an impoverished shanty, or in a natural disaster? Governing institutions seldom ask the kids, making their stories, their perceptions, invisible to the public realm. In sheer objective fact it makes good sense to include children representatives on city councils, national committees, development programs, and United Nations assemblies addressing children’s issues—but the idea seems ludicrous to cultures whose adults define only adults as capable of making fully informed and morally responsible decisions.

Understanding creativity is equally important to me. How do societies, advancements, beliefs get created: how do we produce social change, values, cultural ideas, innovation, new senses of ourselves? How do we create new worlds? How do we create answers to our questions?

RB: You did fieldwork in war zones. What was that like?

CN: I had no intention of studying war or violence. I was a medical anthropologist doing my graduate research in Sri Lanka, a country then often seen as one of Asia’s tropical paradises. It was one of two countries in the world that had very high health standards for a relatively lower GDP— and this in a country facing both the spectrum of illnesses associated with urban educated life, and tropical diseases in developing regions. It was anomalous because a strong link exists globally between lower economic rankings/lower health indices. Sri Lanka had created a very successfully health system, and I was intrigued to find out how.

In the midst of this research, I realized that as a student, and even as a medical anthropologist, I had never seen a definition of “illness.” I had seen thousands of definitions of different kinds of illnesses, but not of what defined the very core phenomenon of illness itself. So I started looking into what people viewed as illness.

This led me to devoting three months in Sri Lanka asking people—from urban to rural areas, doctors to patients, young to old—“What is illness?” I got some very intriguing answers. They were not what I expected. But they made sense. It changed my perspective, and helped shed light on bigger issues like why some aspects of medicine simply aren’t able to achieve desired results. I realized if we asked questions like this, we could provide better health care to people. We often seem to be treating things that people do not see as illness and not treating things that they do, or ignoring aspects of treatment patients deem important while focusing on some they find alienating.

In the middle this fieldwork, severe rioting erupted nationwide in Sri Lanka. In seven short days, one-sixth of the entire country was destroyed. Thousands died. I was in the middle of this weeklong massive slaughter; there was no escaping it. I got caught in places where entire city blocks were in flames, every building and vehicle set on fire. People were massacred in the streets, pulled from their homes, cars, and businesses and beaten to death or set on fire. I found I needed to try to make sense of what I saw: both for my own peace and mind, and to try to help correct many of the misconceptions in explanations of political and civil violence.

I had been taught about the exhilaration and glory of war all my life – in school, by public media, through books. Societies create myths about war that are widely believed. But there was nothing attractive about what I saw, nothing glorious. Seeing a body chopped up into pieces isn’t nice or wonderful. There’s no glory in burning people to death. If we show that reality, how horribly it affects everybody—victims, witnesses, and perpetrators alike—people might do a lot less of it.

I wondered why people killed each other like this? It lacked any ultimate sense. Why would someone drive a nail into someone else’s head? Why would someone see children, unarmed women, harmless grandfathers as dangerous—to be killed? This is not the exception, but the norm: today globally 90 percent of the casualties of political violence are non-combatant civilians. I began to ponder what violence involves. What motivates people to act in this way?

It’s important to stress that I also saw some amazing acts of altruism in the midst of this violence. People risked their lives in the middle of these riots for complete strangers. I witnessed the full spectrum of humanity, seeing extremes we normally do not see in our lives. It became obvious that what is portrayed in texts, media, and movies about such violence only scratched the surface, and generally presented “facts” that, as I wrote in one book, are 180 degrees the opposite of what really takes place in war.

This unexpected event in my life changed the direction of my research for decades to follow: for caught in the middle of this violence and seeking ways to survive it, I realized we needed a much better understanding of the dynamics behind how humans create and react to violence like this.

RB: Students in my introductory anthropology class enjoy reading your book, Global Outlaws. How did you come to study the illegal global interchanges you discuss?

CN: After studying political violence on several continents for more than fifteen years after Sri Lanka, I was pretty burned out with dealing with such traumas. Through the years I had collected lots of data on large smuggling systems running through war zones. I realized delving into this allowed me to continue working with war and peace while giving me a respite from the frontlines violence.

People in societies at war need smugglers because governing, financial, and economic institutions are impaired, support services are interrupted, legal systems break down, and trade routes, industry, agriculture, etc. are disrupted. People can’t get what they need to survive, from food and medicines to weapons and technology. I kept seeing a lot of the same international “players” wherever I traveled in the world—the same arms merchants, the same vendors of critical necessities, the same smugglers. I thought what’s going on here; how does smuggling, how does the extra-legal in general, operate?

Such inquiries lead to questions on a bigger level: how do these extra-legal economies surrounding smuggling and politics affect global economies in general? It’s impossible to have wars without it; and as I later learned it’s impossible to do business today at all without some extra-legal activities. But there is little written about it.

Around this time, people were talking about blood diamonds, and I thought this might be a good place to begin studying illegal economies “on the ground”—where it’s all taking place. I started in the center of Angola during one of the worst periods of the country’s civil war. It quickly became obvious that smuggling didn’t just involve diamonds and weapons. It involved a vast range of things—clothing, food, petroleum, computers, medical equipment, building supplies, vehicles, cooper wire, paint, pharmaceuticals, agricultural tools and seeds, lights, industrial supplies, textbooks, clean water—anything and everything that could transported.

This extra-legal trade is profoundly international: goods come in from and go out to countries all over the world. And it is essential: the legal markets in any warzone I’ve been in are not able to provide anywhere close to what the country’s population needs to survive. A small proportion of all smuggling is devoted to military supplies, the majority of it brings in survival and development supplies for the whole country, or carries out valuable resources (gold, diamonds, oil, timber, fish, etc.).

Smugglers seldom match the common media stereotypes of violence: young male adults (bearded, clad in leather jackets, and disenfranchised from society). Curiously, most smugglers are pretty peaceful people. Many see themselves are regular businesspeople. Some are considered noble by societies caught in war: people bringing in essential medicines, food, communications equipment, clothing, tools to make a survival living, ad infinitum. As true as the classic of “blood diamond for weapons of war exchange” is as an icon of horrendous violence, suffering, and war-profiteering—it is equally true that smuggling often involves getting critical necessities to the front lines, saving people’s lives.

Since I found goods from all over the world in the middle of a remote warzone, I decided to follow how everything from massive Mercedes transport trucks to pocket-able diamonds got in and out of a country or, on a broader scale, in and out of a region where there was so much disruption, and ultimately traverses intercontinentally. How do the things that people need or want get across borders? Across continents? Across oceans? Expensive cameras, Nike shoes, elephants, high-tech products, mega-tons of fish and tomatoes, airplanes, scissors. A whole universe of essential supplies, raw resources, and luxury goods travel outside the law. All flowing in and out of Angola, of all warzones—and because many of these raw resources and goods went to, or came from, peacetime nations around the world—in and out of all virtually all countries.

World Bank, United Nations, and government indices at that time stated only 10% of Angola’s economy was legal. 90 percent was what I call extra-legal: including informal, illicit, illegal, and unrecorded. Following extra-legal linkages globally, it became obvious that perhaps half the global economy—including both wartime and peacetime nations—involves extra-legality.

Yet there are no formal economic indices that calculate the impact of extra-legal goods, monies, and exchange on legal economies, on government and financial stability, or for development. There are no formal methodologies to research, track, analyze, and deal with extra-legal activities; no formal ways to even determine their size with any precision. The repercussions are dramatic: Angola’s development policies, like all nations, focus on the legal realm only. But if 90 percent of the country’s economy wasn’t legal coming out of war—how can any development projects that deal with only 10 percent of reality work?

Because these flows in and out of Angola link across countries worldwide—so too do the repercussions. To study this, I followed extra-legal routes, across borders, along payment and laundering systems, and then globally. I traveled to a number of ports, first in Africa, and then globally (e.g. Rotterdam, Singapore, Long Beach USA) to look at how goods were entering and leaving; and also traveled on a freighter internationally.

We don’t really understand economies if we don’t understand their smuggling networks. It’s fascinating. Perhaps a third or up to a half of the world’s economy taken in total is moving across borders extra-legally in all kinds of ways and we don’t know how to formally chart it. There are formal analyses for GDP, but none for what I call XGDP (extra-legal gross domestic product). What does this say about our economic analyses? We—government institutions, economic and development organizations, academics, alike—don’t fully understand the vast world of smuggling and the extra-legal, yet it’s critical to our survival.

RB: Yes, you make a good point. Turning to another topic, if I may, what advice would you give introductory students thinking about majoring in anthropology?

CN: I can tell you what I tell my introductory classes. I tell them anthropology is one discipline where you can study how various aspects of our lives and worlds are linked together. Anthropology is a global study not only in what it explores but also in how it thinks about issues. It looks at the big picture—not just at a single country, for example, but also at cross-cultural, international interactions. We take seriously not only understanding other cultures but the ways in which they fit together with one another to make the world we live in. We’re interested in what takes us from human to humanity.

Anthropology values both the local and global perspectives. In the twenty-first century, businesses, medical schools, and NGOs are discovering that their policies do not work if they do not understand larger cross-cultural issues, the bigger picture that ties things together. Yet at the same time they need to understand on-the-ground daily realities: What are the rationalities and irrationalities that humans display in different contexts and at different times? What are the hopes, fears and dreams that drive people forward? How do these dynamics fit into the way we perceive governance, development, legality; shape our ideas of self, belonging, emotions, human potential; influence our definitions of good and bad, success or failure, possible or impossible?

One of the things that delights us in anthropology at my university is the fact that our anthropology graduates are equally competitive in getting in medical schools and choice business jobs as those coming from the traditional medical and business majors. Our students are very successful going into development, policy, planning, and innovation work—whether local or international—and people love them because they hit the ground running with cultural sensitivities and valuable field training. They have knowledge that isn’t necessarily being taught in some of the others disciplines: they know how to cross intellectual as well as physical borders; link the micro to the macro; weave together seemingly different aspects of life to better understand societies, to problem-solve, and to gain a better understanding of why people act as they do.  

Anthropology is well prepared to address future advances. For example, if I were to work in the civilian Space X program founded by Elon Musk, I’d want to be an anthropologist. The technical aspects are critical, of course—but technology has no meaning apart from the heartbeat of humanity that animates it. It would be fascinating to explore what goals and hopes guide the people involved in long-term space flight. What facilitates space travel, ensuring it doesn’t totally disrupt the travelers—mentally and physically? What social bonds and human interactivity do people require, do societies wherever they are in space, depend on? What is human intelligence, as we increasingly turn technological control over to artificial intelligence—and what is not/human as people and digital technologies merge in more extensive and complex ways?

What other discipline studies such diverse topics—from smuggling to violence and altruism, from creativity to space travel, from local family interactions to global dynamics, from the changing definitions of what it means to be human to the vibrant ethnographies of lives being lived – and then weaves these together in groundbreaking ways?

RB: Thank you for sharing your thoughts today. It is an exciting and inspiring vision of anthropology.

An Interview with Fredrik Barth
April 18th, 2001

Fredrik Barth: Let me begin with a general preamble to our conversation. Since anthropology draws on the ethnography of the whole world—as it must and should—it has a unique potential to supplement Western science and Western humanism. It can contribute broadly to human thought, to human imagination.

Robert Borofsky: Your are referring to anthropology’s role in broadening people’s perspectives?

FB: Yes, to opening up windows of human reflection on the human condition in radically new directions, that people have never really imagined. Certainly anthropology has not been very good at doing this, at shaping an image of the diversity of how people live. But nonetheless, something is there and we must cultivate it and harvest it much more actively.

RB: Why do you think anthropology has not succeeded in this goal?

FB: Well as far as American anthropologists and American anthropology are concerned, and this probably will not be popular, I think one difficulty is the emphasis that American anthropologists have placed on an evolutionary perspective. It’s a fine perspective for some purposes, but it gives a license for others to say, “how interesting, how great, yes, if I was interested in the past I would listen to you, but I’m interested in the present.” It shunts anthropology off to the side when what we should do is speak about issues now and the human condition now. We should consider the issues people presently engaged with. Implicit in this is a view that democratic societies need a wide and public discussion of ideas.

RB: Let’s talk more about anthropology’s role in this regard.

FB: I think it’s very important, that if we want influence in the world, we should speak up about issues that are important to others, not just ourselves. Even more important than voting, though that is important, is presenting a view, a voice, on issues because that may influence public policy. One should, of course, realize the difficulties here. But speaking out is much better than only responding to the packages that the political system presents. That is part of being a citizen – finding the occasions and the places where you can have public influence.

RB: What forms do you think a more publicly-engaged anthropology might take?

FB: I think it important that we enter into as many discourses as possible that are already going on where there is an audience that is already engaged and knowledgeable. What we want to do is find ways of bringing something additional into public conversations that are already going on – thereby subverting the established position and contributing something that may catch people’s attention.

RB: Can you provide a concrete example?

FB: One example is Unni’s (Wikan) work on the new immigrants of Europe. Here is an issue that lots of people were thinking about, talking about, and in fact being quite confused about. The main discussion of Norwegian immigration policy focused on how many immigrants we should let in? Unni was allowed a two-minute statement on Norwegian public television on the topic: She said we should be talking about what are we doing for the welfare of those who are here already rather than focusing on those who might come. With this intervention, she helped redefined the entire discourse on the subject. It led to people voicing their concern about what was happening inside Norway and to developing programs that could be critiqued and argued about. It broke a political silence about the issue.

RB: A more publicly-engaged anthropology in this sense, then, would be directly engaging in public discourses about public problems.

FB: It would try to find ways of reframing publicly-articulated issues. To do this, however, you need some kind of cultural capital so that people will say, “listen, this may be important.”

RB: How do you gain such capital?

FB: You need to speak out but speak out carefully, with limited purposes in every case – not to grab the microphone to give a lecture on anthropology, but to formulate something that really pricks people’s attention regarding one aspect of the problem. Rather than disrupting the conversation that’s going on, you become a become a part of it. If you are too ambitious, and feel this is your one chance to speak out, then you start lecturing others. You become irrelevant to what is going on in the conversation. We need to develop an ability to focus and make our points relevant to others’ concerns.

RB: Would you say that there is more of this sort of public engagement, by academics, in Europe or America?

FB: There is more of an audience for it in Europe because people are more prepared to believe that academics have cultural capital. There is the idea that academics are competent to address the world’s problems. Many countries, both in Eastern and Western Europe, have cabinet ministers who are professors, not just professors of political science, but professors of other subjects as well: humanists, historians and scientists. It affirms academics are thoughtful people to be listened to while in America academics tend to be looked down upon as impractical intellectuals.

RB: To what might you attribute this dynamic of American intellectual life?

FB: Brad Shore (at Emory) once commented to me that his neighbors felt sorry for him because he do not make as much money as they did. Here is a very crude measurement of private influence and judgment. But, of course, it is reciprocal. Many anthropologists think going public is less than respectable. The public does not respect us so we do not respect them. If you want to speak to the public effectively, you have to respect them.

RB: Where in Europe do you see an active intellectual tradition, among anthropologists, that contrasts with the one in America?

FB: I guess the place were there is the most of this is in France. I think it used to be in England – Malinowski was fashionable and his seminars were famous. Intellectuals in England talked about him. In France, of course, Levi-Strauss has been very famous. But other French anthropologists also have followings and public visibility. It thus becomes interesting for a French reading public to know what French anthropologists are saying about the issues of the day. Also in India, in Mexico, in Brazil, and perhaps in Scandinavia, there is more public interest in this way than in the U.S.

RB: What specific steps might be taken to draw American anthropologists into such public engagements?

FB: The image that comes to mind is of American anthropologists, like penguins on the edge of an ice sheet afraid that something in the water will eat them. They stand on the ice and push and push each other until one falls in, and then they see what happens to him. If nothing bad happens, then they might be willing to dive in, too. I do think many people would like to have some input, and if they see that it’s possible, they would jump. But they must do it individually.

I think one of the difficulties that’s hidden somewhere in this syndrome, is that there is in America, because of the media hype that one is used to, a sense that you have to be tactical. You can’t speak as a free spirit, you can’t afford to be self-critical and honest. You must find some way of projecting some facile image, and take a tactical position, or else you will be totally ineffective. And this is contrary to academic quality and intellectual integrity. I think the way we see it constantly is in the roles played by ecologists and political scientists. When they speak on public television, they are hung up in the tactical game of trying to manipulate audiences instead of speaking honestly. They hold back things that they know are relevant but seem politically incorrect or critical of their own constituencies. At times there seems to be almost a pre-set agenda. We shall touch on these things and not on those because they are contrary to American interests. Let’s not talk too clearly about them, let’s position ourselves in ways that don’t raise ugly issues.

I think it is important to speak out in contexts that are not made up only of anthropologists. I should speak to historians and political scientists who say things about the clash of civilizations. But I would not lay out the problem as an anthropological issue. I would try to disturb and subvert their frames of reference by undermining one or more of the premises on which they base their arguments, showing how it does not make sense from a broader perspective.

RB: Could you give an example?

FB: Well I presume that’s what Boas did long ago. Boas addressed something that everybody was concerned with—race—and had a specific point he wanted to make. He had professional research supporting his position regarding the cultural, rather than genetic, basis of behavior which was highly relevant to other people who weren’t anthropologists.

Perhaps the whole controversy around Huntington’s clash of civilizations is a lost opportunity. Instead of piling abuse on Huntington for what he said, we might have undermined particular positions presented in a careful scholarly way that other scholars would take note of.

Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland (the Director-General of the World Health Organization) was on a UN commission regarding the environment and coined the idea of sustainability. Her idea was not all that well thought out at the time. Still, it changed the frame of reference. It replaced the optimistic sense that we will invent our way out of our environmental problems to asking what we can so as not to reduce options for future generations.

One final example: I’ve just written an op-ed for the main Oslo newspaper on the university’s function. There have been committees that have tried to plan and redesign universities so that they are more responsive to the specific needs of contemporary society, to make them more accountable. What I did was to say, look here, we must not forget that the university’s first task is to produce competently trained personnel for a changing world. It is not simply offering skills for today but preparing these students for the world they will find themselves in tomorrow. The point, I am saying, is to suggest new ways of looking at problems.

RB: What type of response, would you hope for, from your op-ed piece?

FB: I would hope that more of those who engage in the university debate will start saying: But the issue is not only how some established kind of knowledge or competency can be deployed in society but rather how we must secure a place where creativity and imagination can flourish for the future. We must train people who are intellectually awake. Disciplines are breaking down. We must be able to be creative as an academic community to cope with a changing world. I would hope the government’s department of education, which is in charge of universities, would review plans for reorganizing the university from a different perspective. My colleagues might also start using this argument in the defense of more money for research, more advanced training, more investment in post-doctoral students rather than simply addressing the problem as others have framed it—of being accountable.

I would not mind if I were called to argue this with others. Others might say that they have certain priorities that must be taken care of, and I would have then have to show how they could be better taken care of in the way I suggested. They might well challenge me. They might examine my arguments and find points that are factually distorted, incomplete, partial, or where the logic failed. But the discussion would change—we would be arguing over facts and logic from a shared position. Yes, we all want universities to train professionals in a better way, yes we want them to be more publicly responsible and so on. We would be arguing about different ways to approach the problem that would not follow the political packaging and rhetoric of the moment.

An Interview with Noam Chomsky
May 27th 2001

THE MORAL ROLE OF INTELLECTUALS

Robert Borofsky: You write, in Powers and Prospects, that “the responsibility of a writer as a moral agent is to try to bring the truth about matters of human significance to an audience that can do something about them.” Would you generalize that to intellectuals and academics more generally or not?

Noam Chomsky: If a person chooses not to be a writer, or speaker, then (by definition) the person is choosing not to be engaged in an effort, as you quote me, “to bring the truth about matters of human significance to an audience that can do something about them,” apart, perhaps, from some circle of immediate associates. Whether the person should then be called “an intellectual” seems to reduce the issue to a question of terminology. As for academics, I do not see why their responsibilities as moral agents should differ in principle from the responsibilities of others; in particular, others who also enjoy a degree of privilege and power, and therefore have the responsibilities that are conferred by those advantages.

RB: Long ago (1967), in the New York Review of Books, you indicated “it is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies.” Would you interpret that as paralleling the popular Foucault phrase, “speaking truth to power” or are you referring to something more inclusive?

NC: The statement quoted from the NYRB is elliptical. A more appropriate expansion is the statement you quoted from Powers and Prospects, a transcript of a talk to a writers conference in Australia in 1996, where I had been asked to talk on “writers and intellectual responsibility” – a question that I said I found “puzzling,” because I knew of nothing to say about it beyond truisms, though these were perhaps worth affirming because they are “so commonly denied, if not in words, then in consistent practice.” I then gave a series of illustrations, that seemed (and seem) to me pertinent and important.

In that talk I also made some remarks about the call “to speak truth to power,” which perhaps I may quote here:

To speak truth to power is not a particularly honorable vocation. One should seek out an audience that matters—and furthermore (another important qualification), it should not be seen as an audience, but as a community of common concern in which one hopes to participate constructively. We should not be speaking TO, but WITH. That is second nature to any good teacher, and should be to any writer and intellectual as well. Again, I don’t suggest that the observations are surprising or profound. Rather, they seem to me the merest truisms. I was not aware that Foucault had used the phrase “speaking truth to power.” I had thought it was an old Quaker phrase. At least, that is the context in which I had heard it since childhood. I don’t recall actually seeing the original source. I don’t entirely agree with the slogan, for reasons explained in the Australia talk just mentioned.

RB: You write, again in Powers and Prospects, about the moral culpability of those who ignore major moral crimes in free and open societies – especially intellectuals who “have the resources, the training, the facilities and opportunities to speak and act effectively.” Would you mind elaborating? What do you feel are the responsibilities of intellectuals—both within and outside academia—in free and open societies?

NC: Again, I don’t feel that I have anything to say beyond moral truisms. Suppose that I see a hungry child in the street, and I am able to offer the child some food. Am I morally culpable if I refuse to do so? Am I morally culpable if I choose not to do what I easily can about the fact that 1000 children die every hour from easily preventable disease, according to UNICEF? Or the fact that the government of my own “free and open society” is engaged in monstrous crimes that can easily be mitigated or terminated? Is it even possible to debate these questions? Nothing more is implied in the statement quoted.

It also seems beyond controversy that moral responsibilities are greater to the extent that people “have the resources, the training, the facilities and opportunities to speak and act effectively.” This has nothing particular to do with academia, except insofar as those within it tend to be unusually privileged in the respects just mentioned. And the responsibilities of someone in a more free and open society are, again obviously, greater than those who may pay some cost for honesty and integrity. If commissars in Soviet Russia agreed to subordinate themselves to state power, they could at least plead fear in extenuation. Their counterparts in more free and open societies can plead only cowardice.

RELATION TO SAID’S SENSE OF THE INTELLECTUAL

RB: Edward Said writes, in Representations of the Intellectual, that: the intellectual is an individual with a specific public role in society that cannot be reduced simply to . . a faceless professional . . . the intellectual is . . . endowed with a faculty for . . . articulating a . . . philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public. And this role has an edge to it, [involving] someone whose place it is publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy . . . to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments . . . whose raison d’être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely swept under the rug. Would you agree with Said?

NC: Edward Said is a very honorable representative of the “intellectual” in the sense of the term that he defines. That is his proposal as to how the term should be used. It surely does not describe those who are called “intellectuals” in standard usage, as he would be the first to agree. One can neither agree nor disagree with a terminological proposal, as long as it is clear that it is just that: terminological. As to whether those who fit the common meaning of the term “intellectual” should act in the manner that Said prescribes, that’s another question. Needless to say, I agree with him that they should, and that they commonly do not.

Intellectuals (in the standard sense of the term, not Said’s prescriptive sense) are the people who write history. If the authors and custodians of history turn out to have an attractive image, it is only reasonable to look beyond and ask whether the image they construct is accurate. I think such an inquiry will reveal a rather different picture: namely, it will reveal a very strong tendency for the intellectuals who are respected and privileged to be those who subordinate themselves to power.

To use the terms that are reserved for official enemies, it is the commissars and apparatchiks, not the dissidents, who are respected and privileged within their own societies. The observation, I am afraid, generalizes broadly. To go back to a moment of Western civilization remote enough in time so that we should be able to look at it dispassionately, ask what happened during World War I. What was the typical behavior of respected intellectuals in Germany, England, the United States? What happened to those who publicly questioned the nobility of the war effort, on both sides? I do not think the answers are untypical.

RB: Said points to Antonio Gramsci as a model intellectual. Who would you see as model intellectuals today?

NC: The people I find most impressive are generally unknown at the time of their actions and forgotten in history. I know of people whose actions and words I admire and respect. Some are called “intellectuals,” some are not.

I do not feel that we should set up PEOPLE as “models”; rather actions, thoughts, principles. I have never heard of anyone who was a “model person” in all aspects of his or her life, intellectual life or other aspects; nor do I see why anyone should care. We are not engaged in idol worship, after all.

In the case of Gramsci, the Fascist government agreed that he was a “model intellectual” in Said’s sense, and for that reason determined, in their words, that “we must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years.” Gramsci’s words and actions explain their assessment, though I think we should refrain from using the term “model intellectual” for him or others.

CHALLENGING THE MEDIA’S MANUFACTURING OF CONSENT

RB: You have noted that propaganda tends to more prevalent in democratic societies than in totalitarian ones because there is a greater demand for governments to disguise their actions from citizens. In Manufacturing Consent, you argued that the media establish and defend the agenda of dominant social groups. Is there hope to subvert this dominance in democracies? What do you think can realistically be done?

NC: The answer to subversion of democracy is more democracy, more freedom, more justice. History records endless struggles to enlarge those realms, inspiring ones; it also records painful reversals and setbacks. What can realistically be done depends on the historical moment. The same is true with regard to the agents.

In general, we should be able to agree that those who have greater opportunities and face fewer impediments have a greater responsibility to do more to help achieve such ends. Those of us lucky enough to have a share of privilege in the more free societies should not be asking this question, but doing something to answer it.

RB: Academics, as a privileged class, might be viewed as well positioned to critique the media’s messages. Yet many of their efforts seem half-hearted. Are academics mostly servants of the power structure intent on keeping their elite positions?

NC: Academics are mostly professionals, involved in their work and other concerns of their own, with no particular interest in the workings of the ideological system. I wouldn’t say that the efforts of academics to critique the media’s messages are “half-hearted.” As far as I am aware, the efforts scarcely exist: very few even pay attention to the question.

People who spend their working hours in a lab or research library or a classroom might be intent primarily on keeping or advancing their elite positions, thereby lending tacit support to power structures. Or they might not be. Some may be “servants of the power structure,” but that has to be shown. I think it often can be shown, but the burden of proof is on the critic who puts forth that thesis in particular cases.

RB: Edward Said asserts one task of intellectuals is “to break down the stereotypes and reductive categories that are . . . limiting to human thought and communication.” Is that what you feel you are essentially doing in Manufacturing Consent?

NC: Anyone in a position to overcome barriers to free thought and communication should do so. That much at least seems clear: Parents who care about their children, for example, or artisans, or farmers, or anyone who is serious about living a decent life.

The term “intellectual” is used conventionally to refer to people who happen to have unusual opportunities in this regard, and as always, opportunity confers moral responsibility. To live a life of honesty and integrity is a responsibility of every decent person. Those lucky enough to qualify as “intellectuals” have their own special responsibilities, deriving from their good fortune. Among these is the task that Said describes, surely an important one.

The book Manufacturing Consent, which I co-authored with Edward Herman, begins with a description of the structure and institutional setting of the commercial media, and then draws some rather simple-minded conclusions about what we would expect the media product to be, given these (not particularly controversial) conditions. The book itself is then devoted to a series of case studies, selected, we hope, to offer a fair and in fact rather severe test of those conclusions. We believe that the empirical evidence we review there—and elsewhere, in a great deal of joint and separate work—lends substantial support to the conclusions; whether that is true is for others to judge.

Of course, we have a purpose: namely, to encourage readers to undertake what might be called “a course in intellectual self-defense,” and to suggest ways to proceed; in other words, to help people undermine the dedicated efforts to “manufacture consent” and to turn them into passive objects rather than agents who control their own fate. Bear in mind that we did not devise the terms “manufacture of consent” and “engineering of consent.” We borrowed them from leading figures in the media, public relations industry, and academic scholarship. As we discuss there and elsewhere, recognition of the importance of “manufacturing consent” has become an ever more central theme in the more free societies.

As the capacity to coerce declines, it is natural to turn to control of opinion as the basis for authority and domination—a fundamental principle of government already emphasized by David Hume. Our concern is to help people counter the efforts of those who seek to “regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers,” so that the self-designated “responsible men” will be able to run the affairs of the world untroubled by the “bewildered herd”—the general public—who are to be marginalized and dispersed, directed to personal concerns, in a well-regulated “democracy.” An unstated but crucial premise is that the “responsible men” achieve that exalted status by their service to authentic power, a fact of life that they will discover soon enough if they try to pursue an independent path.

DEMOCRACY

RB: In various interviews, you affirm a clear respect for democracy—for the central institutions in a society being under popular control. Can you elaborate on why you feel this is so critical?

NC: It seems self-evident that we should want people to be free, to be able to play an active part in making decisions about matters of concern to them, to the largest possible extent. We should therefore be opposed to institutional barriers to that freedom: Military dictatorships, for example. Or states run by a Central Committee. Unaccountable private power concentrations that dominate economic and social life have the means to seek to “regiment the public mind,” and become “tools and tyrants” of government, in James Madison’s memorable phrase, as he warned of the threats he discerned to the democratic experiment if private powers were granted free rein. Since his day (and long before), there have been constant struggles over “democratic governance”:

Should people be mere “interested spectators of action,” not “participants,” restricted to lending their weight periodically to one or another sector of the “responsible men,” as advocates of “manufacture of consent” have recommended? Or should their rights transcend these highly restricted bounds? Sometimes the former forces are in the ascendance, and “democratic governance” is eroded, though anyone familiar with intellectual history would expect that the slogans will be passionately proclaimed as they are drained of substantive content. We happen to be living in such an era, but as often before, there is no reason to suppose that the process is irreversible. The “end of history” has been proclaimed many times, always falsely.

RB: In a interview a few years ago you favorably cited John Dewey’s assertion that “the goal of production is to produce free people.” Are we succeeding or failing at that goal in your opinion?

NC: What is failure for some is success for others. It depends on where they stand in the struggles over “democratic governance” and related rights – civil, social and economic, and broadly cultural, to adopt the framework of the Universal Declaration that is formally endorsed but constantly undermined.

The current period of regression is registering some success in “producing people” who are subordinated to external power, diverted to such “superficial things” as “fashionable consumption” and other pursuits more fitting for the “bewildered herd” than participation in determining the course of individual and social life. To that extent, it is failing to “produce free people.” Whether “we” are succeeding or failing depends on who we choose to be.

UNIVERSITIES

RB: You have talked about the conservative nature of universities, especially in the United States using as an illustration that modern linguistics developed on the academic margins rather than at the leading academic centers. Is there hope the universities might become more than servants of the status quo? What, in your most positive assessment, might be the university’s role, or the role of faculty members, in democratic societies?

NC: Universities are less constrained by authority and rigid doctrine in the United States than in most other societies, to my knowledge. But it is only natural to expect that guilds will tend to “protect their turf” and to resist challenge. The tendencies are considerably weaker in the natural sciences, which, for the past several centuries, have survived and flourished through such constant challenge, and therefore, at best, seek to encourage it. Serving the status quo in political and socioeconomic realms is a different matter.

I don’t really see what can be said about the role of faculty members, or universities, beyond the truisms voiced earlier, and their elaboration in various domains, ranging from focused intellectual pursuits to the concerns of the larger society and future generations. About specific social issues, there is a great deal to say that departs very far from truism and is, accordingly, significant and controversial. That would take us to specific issues of the highest importance, which cannot be seriously addressed here, unfortunately, in a few words.

RB: In an interview some years ago, you indicated that “corporations plainly want academic scholarship to create a web of mystification that will avoid any public awareness of the way in which power actually functions in the society.” How do you perceive academics creating these webs of mystification?

NC: The observation is much more general, and I surely can’t take credit for it. It is familiar to mainstream academic scholarship. One very prominent political scientist, in his standard text American Politics 20 years ago, observes that “The architects of power in the United States must create a force that can be felt but not seen.” The reason is that “Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate” (Samuel Huntington).

As the book appeared, he gave a good illustration in an interview in a scholarly journal, describing deception by academics and others about the roots of US foreign policy: “you may have to sell [intervention or other military action] in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. That is what the United States has been doing ever since the Truman Doctrine.”

That’s frank and honest. There is extensive critical scholarship that provides illustrations in many areas of scholarship. I’ve discussed many cases myself, while also citing and often relying on academic studies that disentangle these webs of mystification woven for the general public. It’s impossible to provide illustrations that would even approach accuracy, let alone carry any conviction, without going well beyond the bounds of this discussion. I should, however, stress again what I said before: The US is by no means unusual in this regard, and I suspect has a considerably better record than the norm.

RB: Ivan Illich has talked about “disabling professions”—or really disabling professionals—who systematically disempower others through their claims to expertise. To what degree do you perceive elite experts, and more broadly academics, being a “new class” of apparatchiks who function to reinforce rather than challenge the status quo in America?

NC: That intellectuals, including academics, would become a “new class” of technocrats, claiming the name of science while cooperating with the powerful, was predicted by Bakunin in the early days of the formation of the modern intelligentsia in the 19th century. His expectations were generally confirmed, including his prediction that some would seek to gain state power on the backs of popular revolution, then constructing a “Red bureaucracy” that would be one of the worst tyrannies in history, while others would recognize that power lies elsewhere and would serve as its apologists, becoming mystifiers, “disablers,” and managers while demanding the right to function in “technocratic isolation,” in World Bank lingo.

I would, however, question the implication that there is some novelty in this beyond modalities, which naturally change as institutions change and develop. Isaiah Berlin described the intellectuals of Bakunin’s “Red bureaucracy” as a “secular priesthood,” not unlike the religious priesthood that performed similar functions in earlier times – functions described acidly by Pascal in his bitter rendition of the practices of the Jesuit intellectuals he despised, including their demonstration of “the utility of interpretation,” a device of manufacturing consent based on reinterpretation of sacred texts to serve wealth, power, and privilege. Berlin’s observation is accurate enough, and applies at home as well, and even more harshly for the reasons already mentioned: the apparatchiks and commissars could at least plead fear in extenuation.

As usual, we are easily able to perceive the mote in the eye of the official enemy, and to condemn it with impressive eloquence and self-righteousness; the beam in our own eye is harder to detect, although—or more accurately because—to detect it, and remove it, is vastly more important on elementary moral grounds, and commonly more important in terms of direct human consequences as well. Intellectuals have historically played a critical function in performing these tasks, and Illich is right to observe that claims to scientific expertise and special knowledge are often used as a device. Those who actually do have a valid claim to such special competence have a particular obligation to make very clear to the general public the limits of what is understood at any serious level; these limits are typically very narrow in matters of significance in human affairs.

EDUCATION

RB: You have made the point that there are different types of education. Mass education, you observe, can produce docility. Is this what you perceive happening in the large public universities today? Where do you perceive the education which focuses on creativity and independence taking place?

NC: Again, I pretend no originality in observing that mass education was motivated in part by the perceived need to “educate them to keep them from our throats,” to borrow Ralph Waldo Emerson’s parody of elite fears that inspired early advocates of public mass education. More generally, independent farmers had to be trained to become docile workers in the expanding industrial system. It was necessary to drive from their heads evil ideas, such as the belief that wage labor was not much different from chattel slavery. That continues to the present, now sometimes taking the form of an attack on public education.

The attack on Social Security is similarly motivated. Social Security is based on the conception is that we should have sympathy for others, not function merely as isolated “rational wealth maximizers.”

As elite attitudes towards public education over time illustrate, simple formulas are far from adequate. There are conflicting tendencies. In the sciences particularly the large public universities must and do take an active role in fostering creativity and independence; otherwise the fields will wither, and along with them even the aspirations of wealth and power.

In my experience at least, the large public universities do not fall behind in fostering creativity and independence; often the contrary. The focus on creativity and independence exists in pockets of resistance in the educational system, which, to thrive, should be integrated with the needs and concerns of the great majority of the population. One finds them everywhere.

THE FUTURE

RB: Is there hope for the academy? Do you have hope for MIT, for example? For American universities more generally? What do you realistically think might be accomplished by writers, poets, scholars, activists—placing yourself in whatever category you feel appropriate—within and outside of academia during the next decade?

NC: Intellectuals of the categories you mention happen to enjoy unusual privilege, unique in history, I suppose. It’s easy enough to find ugly illustrations of repression, malice, dishonesty, marginalization and exclusion in the academic world. By comparative standards, however, constraints are slight. Dissidents are not imprisoned as in the domains of the Kremlin, in the old days. They do not have their brains blown out by elite forces armed and trained by the reigning superpower, as happens in Washington’s domains—with no particular concern at home—an important fact, one of many that help us learn about ourselves, if we choose. How many educated Americans can even remember the names of the assassinated Jesuit intellectuals of El Salvador, or would know where to find a word they wrote? The answers are revealing, particularly when we draw the striking—and historically typical—contrast to the attitudes towards their counterparts in enemy domains.

Given their unusual privilege, Western intellectuals can realistically accomplish a great deal. The limits are imposed by will more than objective circumstances. And about human will predictions are without value.

RB: What would your vision be for a politically engaged university?

NC: Personally, I am uneasy about the notion of “a politically engaged university,” for reasons I wrote about over 30 years ago, at the height of protest and resistance (reprinted in For Reasons of State). At the time, I felt that we could hardly improve on the conception of the university expressed by one of the founders of the modern system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, also one of the founders of classical liberalism. That seems to me true today as well, though ideals of course have to be adapted to changing circumstances.

Individuals in a university—students, faculty, staff—can choose to become politically engaged, and a free university should foster a climate in which those are natural choices. Insofar as the universities are free and independent, they will also be “subversive,” in the sense that dominant structures of power and their ideological support will be subjected to challenge and critique, a counterpart to attitudes that are fostered in the hard sciences wherever they are taken seriously.

But that does not mean that the university should be “politically engaged” as an institution. It is one thing for the institution to offer space for serious engagement, in thought and action, and to encourage free and independent use of such opportunities; it is something else for the university to become engaged as an institution, beyond a fairly narrow range where true consensus exists, and even that raises questions. The two tendencies are antithetical in significant respects. These are distinctions that should be kept in mind, however one feels that the problems and dilemmas that constantly arise should be resolved.