On 'possibility' - SAGE Journals - Sage Publications

Anthropological Theory Copyright © 2009 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC) http://ant.sagepub.com Vol 9(4): 355–370 10.1177/1463499609358143

On ‘possibility’ A response to ‘How Is Anthropology Going?’ Jane I. Guyer Johns Hopkins University, USA Abstract The article originates in a response to discuss ‘How Is Anthropology Going?’. Perceiving a new pattern in the almost 90 years looking backward and forward from my own undergraduate training, I concentrate on the recurrent concept of human ‘possibility’. Its changing referents are traced over four 20-year cycles, starting with Malinowski and Benedict (1920s and 1930s), moving to Gellner’s Thought and Change (1965), Marcus and Fischer’s Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986), Graeber’s Possibilities (2008) and Rabinow’s Marking Time (2008). Particular attention is paid to the temporal horizons implied in the term and the forms of ethical, political and aesthetic agency one can infer from the orientations, tensions and attractions that horizons of possibility have inspired. Key Words history of anthropology • possibility • temporality INTRODUCTION: ANTHROPOLOGY AS ‘ART OF THE POSSIBLE’?1

One great advantage of the inexorable advance of age is the ever-lengthening range of a particular kind of knowledge that it provides. It is not a magisterial ‘view from afar’ nor from a polemic ‘position’. Neither is the kind of knowledge that interests me here precisely captured by the concept of experience, because experience is indexed to one’s own subjective life cycle, lived over temporalities and situations that have been partially under one’s own control and certainly infused with one’s own temperament. ‘Time passing’ within a discipline is less amenable to these interventions and less permissive with respect to selective memory and instrumental interest. Each moment has had other participants to whom accounts have to be accountable in some objective sense. And yet the sequence of intellectual and historical contingencies that have arisen over the temporality of ‘time passing’ can, quite suddenly and at a certain tipping point of cumulative living, throw into relief features and patterns that strike one’s mind in an original way. It remains to be seen how they may be shared by others. 355

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It was a small conjuncture of events that led me to hazard this article on what I came to see as 20-year cycles in anthropology’s homing instinct for the concept of ‘possibility’. I was invited to an American Anthropological Association Panel entitled ‘How Is Anthropology Going?’,2 organized by Berkeley graduate students. At the same time I was teaching introductory undergraduates two different ethnographies about the master navigators of the Western Pacific: the socio-cultural account by Malinowski (the teacher of my own undergraduate teachers), which I was approaching as a classic, and the account by Gladwin (1970) of the Caroline Islanders’ actual navigation techniques, which I was using as an example of the astonishing technical achievements of nonwestern science and as a source in ethnomathematics (see Ascher, 1991) for a workshop on ‘Number as Inventive Frontier’.3 Beyond the landmarks of anthropology that these works represent, they are also literally about ‘going’. So as I contemplated a response to my invitation, the modes of ‘going’ from Pacific ethnography turned my mind away from the western theoretical imagery of stages, paradigm shifts and watershed ‘turns’. An imagery of amplifying circles of renown (read knowledge) took over, within which – according to the mind-bending Caroline assumptions – we, in the boat, remain still, keenly and actively attentive to the stars, the ocean’s swell, the wind, a solitary referential island and birds in flight that move beside and around us. It struck me that ‘human possibility’ had been that stable, recurrently amplifying center of the anthropology I had known. Many of the so-called ‘shifts’ and ‘turns’ I had witnessed or promoted during my career had been taken precisely in order to preserve a sense of possibility against rigidities and constraints of all kinds. From my own ‘time passing’, I realized in this uncanny conjuncture that my 1960s undergraduate exposure reached back 40 years to the 1920s and forward to the present, thereby with a real or vicarious reach of over 90 years, or at least four amplifying cycles during which we have re-set our sights or re-tuned our navigational acuity towards ‘possibility’. The strategy I took for this article, then, was to focus closely on moments during which possibility was resurgent, where it played a key role in a mode of writing from within a Heraclitean world where changes in life and rigidities in thought were producing storms of intellectual crises. The Caroline Islanders do this assessment all the time, as they go. For them, the horizon is not subjected to magisterial map and compass. Rather, they continually assess where they are on the open ocean as multiple coordinates shift around them and potential dangers are averted. The immediate reason to try to adopt their method is that our ‘going’ of the 21st century is identifying one set of possibilities that we have hardly contemplated theoretically and practically until this century, namely that the horizon might present less as an open and inviting frontier than as a flat-earther’s dangerous finitude. The swell is moving far faster than we are and marks on the horizon that were once considered chimeric illusions are not only visible but fast approaching. Hence, one imagines, the title of the AAA conference of 2009: ‘The End/s of Anthropology’.4 As the ‘near-future’ (Guyer, 2007) is liberated by sheer crisis from its recent effacement by theories of ‘endless growth’, it finds itself rediscovered in a new space: not of imaginative horizons for agency but of anachronous disjuncture between what we are doing and thinking (professionally as well as politically) and the world’s own pace and directions of movement. An appreciative review of possibility in its successive cycles seems one way of refocusing in this situation. Anthropology is the social science most familiar with a sense of 356

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unfamiliarity, so we should find signs of already knowing this problem within the disciplinary archive. Perhaps greater attention to past cycles would help in addressing the current rush of time, and thereby reduce the temptation to face present dangers by posturing in the prow instead of grappling attentively, in a variety of ways, with the intimation that we cannot row or bail fast enough to stay afloat. The vista that should be included in such a retrospective study would be vast. For the moment I return to the library to see how the definition of ‘possibility in the throes of change’ has actually worked. My choice of examples is necessarily idiosyncratic and provisional, but all these scholars are considered to be central figures. I invoke the 1920s and 1930s first, in this introduction, and I skip past the immediate post-war moment of reconfiguring the world at large. These are rather well-known already. I start the detailed discussion in the 1960s with Gellner’s Thought and Change (1965), moving to Marcus and Fischer’s Anthropology as Cultural Critique (1986), then Graeber’s Possibilities (2007) and Rabinow’s Marking Time (2008). The chapters of Gellner’s book were delivered as one of my undergraduate courses in social theory in London. Although this book is now less well-known than his other works, his writing was then, and remains, influential. Marcus and Fischer’s book marked, and famously promoted, a major shift in our attention towards the emergent in our own societies. Graeber draws, characteristically, on a wider range of the ‘classic’ anthropological archive than I think any other scholar does in the present. Finally, I added Rabinow’s book, imagining that his shift to ‘anthropos’ and the ‘time’ of his title – Marking Time – might exemplify another approach to the ontology-temporality theme. These are four very different intellectual temperaments, advocating some quite different theoretical directions. In fact, I can almost hear Gellner’s voice (which I know from lectures) depicting this or that statement of the others as ‘whatnots’ and ‘mishmash’ (two recurring epithets in his text). But they all try to reopen questions and justify grappling with dangers by alluding to ‘possibility’. So we can ask whether they envisage the temporal horizon and our orientation towards it differently enough from each other to be instructive and perhaps inspiring. Before tackling the main texts, however, it is worth first invoking the early charisma of ‘possibility’. We are approaching its centennial, at the very least. It seems to have replaced ‘diversity’ in the early 20th century. While Boas wrote mainly of diversity, Malinowski wrote in his famous final chapter of Argonauts in 1922: ‘In the roamings over human history, and over the surface of the earth, it is the possibility of seeing life and the world from various angles . . . that has always charmed me most’ (p. 517). Ruth Benedict’s poetic gifts expressed it most memorably in 1934: ‘In culture too we must imagine a great arc on which are ranged the possible interests provided either by the human age-cycle or by the environment or by man’s various activities’ (Benedict, 1934: 24). This sentence has somehow transformed into ‘the great arc of human possibility’ in an enduring disciplinary rhetoric. The politics of liberation imbued post-war thinking in a diffuse and complex way that would demand its own treatment. I pick up the story with Gellner. ERNEST GELLNER, THOUGHT AND CHANGE (1965)

As sociologist, ethnographer of the Berber, scholar of Soviet anthropology and nationalism, social philosopher and Central European émigré to Britain, Ernest Gellner was 357


always trying to come to grips with the macro-dynamics of his contemporary world. In the case of this book, he was concerned with the continuing industrial revolution as it spread across the world in the post-World War II period. And he was inveying mightily against linguistic theory in philosophy in favor of a sociologically and historically-based framing of our themes and concepts. This puts him firmly in the fullyrecognized conundrum of thinking from within what he termed ‘transition’: not only without firm landmarks in a-historical phenomena (hence one reason for his rejection of linguistic approaches) but also with no clear repertoire of technologies for recognizing our own capacities for staying afloat. We are not the creatures we once were, in a fundamentally materialist sense. To concretize the image, he uses Kafka’s Metamorphosis: We are in the process of turning from Human into Insect, so how does such a creature think about itself and its relationship to the world? As he puts it, ‘tomorrow is not another day; it is an other day, altogether’ (p. 67), not only for the world but for our own existential being and therefore our thinking. We cannot avoid this condition, according to him. I do not explore here why and how he so downgrades the powers of language; this is another topic, and part of intense debates within British intellectual life at the time. (The book is dedicated to Bertrand Russell, gestures to Karl Popper, and rejects Wittgenstein, whereas other definitions of schools of thought might not choose the same lines of demarcation.) But rather I concentrate on his insistence that language must index to the much larger sensate condition of being and balance in the contemporary world. He writes from within necessity: ‘the allegedly solid reality is crumbling and dissolving under our feet. The need to restore order from some at least relatively stable and abstract vantage point is not pathological . . . but inescapable’ (p. 102). Order, however, is not easily conceptualized. This is an experimental moment, also by necessity: ‘We cannot go into [the transition] with our eyes wide open for until it happens we do not have the eyes to see it. . . . it must involve transfers of authority which cannot be validated’ (p. 120). He writes: ‘the new anchorage itself turns out to be a floating bank of seaweed’ (p. 99): a dizzying opening for dreadful possibilities that he does not evade. It is entirely possible, he avers, that European populations will turn to a South African-style solution because of ‘fears of political submersion and cultural annihilation’ (p. 178). There is, he reminds us, a ‘serious time lag between knowledge available to a society and the theories and concepts in terms of which life is actually lived’ (p. 212). In ‘transition’, can we maintain a human image of man? The peril is entirely justified – one might even say redeemed – by the promise of ‘possibility’ that lies within. Gellner writes: ‘The vertiginous range of possibilities which constitutes the difficulty, also provides us with a certain compensation – the exhilaration of almost limitless opportunity’ (p. 219). In view of possibility, Gellner lapses into a historicism and optimism not evident throughout the book: he writes that ‘In the later stages of the transition, it is possible to gain some degree of understanding’ (p. 219), through a certain rationalism of reflection and choice that is very ambiguously indexed to the knowability of the future. ‘The really distant possibilities, about which in any case we know little, do not affect our comprehension and evaluation of the present’ (p. 212), he concludes, whereas he started out with the observation that ‘The temporal horizon is not featureless . . . in recent years, the general character of the temporal horizon has again changed somewhat’ (p. 2). 358


Thought and Change is a strange book, in the sense that it seems to undermine itself in some places and surpass its own goals in others. Gellner clearly prefigures many of the issues picked up later in my essay, and yet his (admitted) conflicts are his own, and instructive. A mood of resoluteness and moral certainty pervades a fierce argument that none of our concrete propositions should be trusted for too long. We change; the horizon changes; the force-field changes. We cannot escape into study of the ‘minutiae’. And yet openness and plurality are ultimately deeply cherished, as both a component of ‘possibility’ and as ‘some kind of insurance against tyranny and political folly’ (p. 128). This ambiguity also coexists alongside an astonishingly dismissive view of ‘traditional societies’, which are inevitably destined to integrate into a modern industrial world and hence do not seem to belong to the category of ‘possibility’. A rejection of historicism in general is combined with reference to ‘stages of the transition’, as if a transition really were like the metamorphosis of a chrysalis. But Gellner never flinches before what he sees as the regrettable but necessary lapses in his own argument and that of others he admires, which is a quality that a reader must appreciate. He is fully cognizant of the logical impossibility of what he most seeks and of the insertion of ‘possibility’ to bridge the necessity to both thought and action. He seeks a point of intellectual clarity and moral confidence in the very eye of the Heraclitean 20thcentury world, which he tries to grapple with under the concept – which he himself occasionally intimates is dubious – of ‘transition’. In the terms of the abstract for our panel, Gellner’s version of a grasping of the use of ‘possibilities’ for forward movement is one that foregrounds the ethical valence of vigilance and action over the cognitive valence of understanding and the logical valence of coherence. Better, one senses, to admit lapses of coherence in knowledge and logic (which he sees as inevitable anyway) than to plumb depths of ‘minutiae’, only to end up with no basis – or at least, point of departure – for confident assertions about what really matters to ourselves and the world. GEORGE MARCUS AND MICHAEL FISCHER: ANTHROPOLOGY AS CULTURAL CRITIQUE: AN EXPERIMENTAL MOMENT IN THE HUMAN SCIENCES (1986)

It is striking that, 20 years later, Marcus and Fischer can reiterate some of the conditions listed by Gellner, as if they would be new to our thinking. We work in ‘arenas that are puzzling to all, collaborators-informants and experts as well as ethnographers and cultural translators’ (p. xvii). There has been a marked ‘“shrinkage” of the world into an increasingly interdependent world system’ (p. 39). In light of these dislodging dynamics, we take disorientation as a condition of thought and embrace it. ‘Because experimental periods are by nature unstable and temporary, situated betwixt and between periods of more consolidated research conventions, it is difficult to assess future directions’ (p. 42). On the other hand, Marcus and Fischer take a very different strategy from Gellner, to explore ‘innovative ways of describing at a microscopic level the process of change itself ’ (p. 12, italics added). Gellner is deeply suspicious of the microscope. Linguistic philosophy, he argues, tends towards ‘attention to minutiae . . . [which] . . . must naturally prevent any awareness of wider horizons’ (Gellner, 1965: 192). Is Marcus and Fischer’s move an expression of prudence or theoretical conviction or empirical pragmatism, or perhaps a different sense of what is happening in the world by the mid-1980s? 359


Again, aspects of their argument hinge around the concept of ‘possibility’ in precisely the multiple sense of a depiction of the world, a sense of the human, and the breadth of methods we can consider for practicing that concern. In a key passage they write: While the globe is still full of cultural differences, it is also true that most possibilities are known, or at least have been considered, and that all other cultural worlds have been penetrated by aspects of modern life. What matters, then, is not ideal life elsewhere, or in another time, but the discovery of new recombinant possibilities and meanings in the process of daily living anywhere. (p. 115) The relative foregrounding of ‘alternatives’ within, and not only between, situations is precisely what distinguishes between an older style of cultural critique in anthropology and the one the authors recommend. ‘[E]thnography as cultural criticism locates alternatives by unearthing these multiple possibilities as they exist in reality . . . [that is] strictly within the conditions of life represented rather than beyond them in some other time or place’ (p. 116; sentence inverted in sequence and spliced from two locations in the paragraph). Their method is founded on ‘insistence on a fundamental descriptive realism’ (p. 117), but in a specific manner that avoids what is depicted as an American empiricist assumption that the means for recording this reality are themselves passive recording techniques. Marcus and Fischer see their own focus on the empirical as closer to several different European schools of thought that question precisely that assumption of objective recording. In reviewing the epistemological uses of defamiliarization in the service of cultural critique, Marcus and Fischer point out shortcomings in the use of the established ethnographic archive. One is the restriction of topics to those already in the archive (kinship, ritual, etc.). They argue that we need comparable initiatives in western and modern law, medicine and science: initiatives that employ critical realism to question and dislodge cultural categories and hegemonic understandings. The purpose is explicitly the preservation and transformation of possibility: ‘The strength of ethnography and ethnographic criticism is their focus on detail, their enduring respect for context in the making of any generalization, and their full recognition of persistent ambiguity and multiple possibilities in any situation’ (p. 159). Beyond the archive, however, there is still a ‘realistic set of possibilities in the world’ that are not only discernable to us as ethnographers but those that a ‘mass readership knows or senses’ (p. 193) to exist already. Our disciplinary styles of approach are ‘by no means narrow, but might encompass any range of personal tastes and interests in research’ (p. 163). The focus moves here to variety of readership, but it does not move beyond that encounter, to how a possibility is apprehended as such. These ‘possibilities’ are primarily seen as existing in a series of conversations and encounters ‘that increasingly hold anthropology accountable for its representations’ (p. 164). Such possibilities do not include the ‘statement and assertion of values’ (p. 167), but rather rest in their ‘expression in the everyday life of diverse social contexts’ (p. 167), in ‘debates . . . worldwide’ (p. 168). ‘Possibility’ is thereby rendered in its emergent phase, as a presentist, lateral conception that conveys variety and interchange rather than having a pregnant forward thrust into the ‘time to come’. In terms of our AAA panel abstract, theirs is a foregrounding of the aesthetics of possibility, rather than – or perhaps before getting to – its ethics or politics. 360


One might add that in some works of the post-1986 and post-‘linguistic turn’ period, politics and ethics do remain foregrounded: at least as invocations. In his recuperation of an explicitly phenomenological empiricism, Michael Jackson links all three in a single ambition: ‘what compels our interest in any idea is its power to destabilize and unsettle received ways of seeing the world, replenishing our sense of life’s variety and possibility, and encouraging debate on the role of the intellectual in the world of practical affairs’ (Jackson, 1996: 4). The dimension that seems to be backgrounded, however, is precisely the velocity and horizon of the timeframes into which the ‘knowing subject’ inserts the agency of their thought and practice. This collection is aptly titled Things As They Are, and is inspirational in its own right. But in this essay, I have chosen to stick with scholars for whom the temporal horizon is a relevant presence, constituting itself a destabilizing aspect of what one sees in the world and what one senses as a ground for assessing what ‘possibility’ might now refer to. Interlude

This juxtaposition of Gellner and, 20-plus years later, Marcus and Fischer, throws into relief some passing convergences which come from, and lead in, some quite different directions that cannot possibly be summed up as a simple replacement of ‘classic’ approaches by ‘new’ concerns. All three position their work in a moment of flux, an experimental moment, where who we are and what the world is offer no fixed points of reference. I find both works hugely important provocations, so I am not at all interested in finding one better than the other. Gellner insists on attention to macro-dynamics, to temporal unfolding, and to the inspiration that only an open horizon for future possibility can offer. He is honest about his own limitations and even necessary incoherencies. In the process, however, he sacrifices the inspiration that ‘tradition’ or ‘elsewhere’ might continue to be: not as the dead hand of legitimation but as a source of real knowledge, an idea he never considers. By comparison and contrast, Marcus and Fischer insist on microscopic ethnographic attention, somehow sacrificing or downplaying the ‘pregnancy’ implicit in ‘possibility’ for the debating civilities of coexistence. Identification of specifically generative minutiae, to inform political engagement for the future purpose of winning over others, remains inexplicit. They too, however, note the shaky ground on which we stand as theorists. And they too marginalize the classic canon and thereby, in some unacknowledged sense, the peoples therein described and given voice. In one work they are past; in the other, they are already ‘known’. This juxtaposition, in itself, is an apposite example of the difficulty of the idea of paradigm-change in anthropology. Whole works do not classify themselves neatly. In my own view, without the archive – subjected to continuing critical elaboration along lines that both Gellner and Marcus and Fischer suggest – we cannot even imagine what ‘possibility’ has been and why it is such a compelling idea to keep returning to, for those whose intellectual temperaments and ways of relating to the world lead them to our discipline. We still read and refer explicitly to Malinowski and Benedict, even for work on fields of human ontology that none of these 20th-century authors could have imagined as an activity of post-transitional global culture. Boellstorff ’s (2008) ethnography of the online game of virtuality carries the Mead–Benedict era title of Coming of Age in Second Life. In the long cycles of a recuperative approach to ‘renown’ (knowledge), the foundational ethnographies return in another guise. 361


DAVID GRAEBER, POSSIBILITIES (2008)

Fast forward another 20 years, to David Graeber’s Possibilities. He and Rabinow (for whom see later) do something else again with the idea of ‘possibility’. Temporality comes back in, largely because of aspiration or ambition or some other affective (i.e. different from intellectual or discursive) orientation that inspires our lives in the present. I feel confident to guess that Graeber would entirely disagree with the overlapping first premises of both Gellner and Marcus and Fischer: Gellner on the grounds that the qualities of ‘traditional society’ are not inevitably in the past, nor – of course – deservedly in the past; and Marcus and Fischer on the grounds that the archive of the ‘exotic’ is precisely the door to which we should beat our way as the optimal source on how to do the critical defamiliarization, reconnection and accountability that they advocate. A West African people considers ‘balance’ to be one of the senses? Arguments end when someone comes up with the best pun? Life can be recycled up to about 800 times? Counting and number give way after the threshold of five, or, elsewhere, benchmark to the poetics of tonal pronunciation at 20, 200 and so on upward to very high ranges? Or we navigate by watching the stars and the islands move past our stationary boat? We have only to listen to the varied algorithms, repertoires, debates and poetics of our ‘traditional’ ‘others’ to have our minds completely blown away by their answers to the basic question: what is it to be ‘human’? We cannot know the answer without thinking about Graeber’s topics: the history of servitude in Madagascar, the skill required to enact ‘joking relationships’ properly, the convolutions of our intermittent return to fascination with the ‘fetish’, and with how gods are not revealed but made. As in mainland Africa (see Kopytoff, 1971), ‘Merina process to elderhood is longer than natural life’ (p. 201), which perhaps compares to sainthood in Catholicism and many other systems where the post-natural mode of existence includes continuing hard work in the world: The Work of the Gods in Tikopia (Firth, 1967), ‘The Work of Men, Women and the Ancestors in South Africa’ (Murray, 1979). So this is Graeber’s orientation to the classic ethnographic canon, and indeed its entire project. He sees it as a potentially endless source of ideas and provocations if we just work hard enough to tease them out. And yet, in spite of the title, possibility itself is not exhaustively discussed. We infer what he means from the preponderance of his examples. His first sentence avers that ‘I decided to call this collection Possibilities because the word encompasses much of what inspired me to become an anthropologist’. The book’s purpose is to ‘keep possibilities open’ (p. 1), above all to the idea that the world could possibly look very different than it does, and that critical social theory ‘also partakes of the powers that could transform the world into something better’ (p. 2). The subtitle is Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire: so an interesting mix of structure (hierarchy), ‘debate’ (in confrontation mode as conversation and rebellion), and affect (desire), that is, all the orienting landmarks we have seen so far, each mobilized as relevant to bringing theory and the record into a new relationship. As for the future that ‘possibilities’ might open up, his vision is frankly ‘utopian’ and focuses on challenges to – and not just conversations about – the elimination or reduction of hierarchy. Graeber’s ultimate focus is on authority and modes of challenging it, which he sees as having far more in common across time and space than in the usual panoply of multifarious aspects of society and culture that our disciplinary past has either classified into types, or arranged in sequences, or articulated to one another, or considered as simply 362


coeval. ‘[E]ven though what traditional authorities have to say about the nature of truth, beauty, or human nature might vary wildly from culture to culture, there is no place on earth where traditional authorities go completely unchallenged, and the ways people have of challenging them have a lot more in common than many of us would ever have expected’ (pp. 7–8). Hence the availability of all of human experience as a range of specific possibilities: for ongoing study, debate and inspiration in the search for exemplars of undermining and defeating hierarchical structures. It would be counterproductive to deny structures or confidently-grounded standpoints on other theoretical grounds, if the possibility that brings everything into perspective is a future with less, or less crushing, inequality. What about ‘possibility’ is reconfigured here? Certainly a historical, transitional sense of the novelty of the present is forfeited (or perhaps just backgrounded). Political purpose and agonistic dynamics are reinstated. But the context, the method and so on remain quite inexplicit (contra Marcus and Fischer), and I think deliberately so, as befits Graeber’s rejection of ‘vanguardism’ by intellectual elites as an approach to leadership. He also parts company with both of my preceding cases, who identified the most relevant originality with the present, whose attitude to the corpus was so deeply skeptical of an outdated objectivism, or, like Gellner, with so relentless a positive sense of an inevitable industrial future, that the intellectual power and relevance of the peoples represented in the anthropological archive is muted. On the other hand, like Gellner in one of his modes, Graeber clearly wants to go further than celebrating a lateral plurality of possibility as a value in itself, and he does reinstate ‘future horizons’, albeit under a sign of motivation rather than actual planning (or regretting the difficulty of planning). Avoiding what he terms ‘vanguardism’ involves embodying and enacting possibility rather than worrying, like Gellner, about disorientation and the loss of landmarks. This offers a particular meaning to ‘possibilities’ that seems to loop back to connect evidence from past and present, for purposes that are political and transformational in the most inclusive sense. Further onward and outward

By now, one can see a common reticence to envisaging ‘possibility’ as orienting us towards temporal horizons drawn in any sharp outline, and even more so to experiencing ourselves approaching those horizons unwillingly rather than advancing imaginatively. Possibility is an ethical stance, demanding courage; it is an aesthetic of coexistence, demanding discernment; it is a vision of politics, demanding study and steadfastness. ‘New possibilities for critical enquiry’ are opened up, allowing the analyst and the analyzed to occupy the same experiential modes, even if necessarily at different scales, in ‘a densely lateralized and networked, not synthetic, knowledge formation’ (Maurer and Schwab, 2005: 16). The idea of ‘possibility’ seems to maintain a dedicated and mainly optimistic conversation, across divides within the discipline. But it does not generally turn towards a temporal horizon and only rarely does peril move explicitly into sharp focus under its aegis. Anna Tsing’s exposition does envisage a variegated horizon: she encourages ‘the possibilities for imagining the about-to-be-present’ (2005: 269) in terms that can avoid the ‘shadow of inevitability’ of neoliberal globalization while also paying attention to ‘states of emergence – and emergency . . . [where] hope and despair huddle together’ (2005: 269). And, one could add, many other visions and emotions, with their own experiential locations, imaginations and temporal reaches. 363


An ethical meaning to anthropological possibilities is further developed by Michael Carrithers (2005), in a quite controversial essay. He argues that anthropology is a ‘moral science of possibilities’. From their characteristic practice, anthropologists develop to a high degree a ‘moral agency-cum-patiency’ that can provide a basis for critique of imperialist rhetoric as well as exemplifying (and perhaps also revealing) this agencypatiency as a ‘basic category of human thought and existence’ (2005: 433). My brief allusion to the debate around his paper serves two purposes. First, I use it as an illustration of the return of ‘possibility’ in the past decade, although here to address moralethical rather than scientific, aesthetic or political questions. Yet other articles by leading scholars have ‘possibility’ in the title as well, such as Maurer’s ‘Moral Economies, Economic Moralities: Consider the Possibilities!’ (2009). However, and secondly, I would point out that the temporality of our professional kind of agency/patiency in these works (and especially in Carrithers’ article and the debate) is deeply imbued with patience as distinct from agency. The everyday is our terrain; ‘contemplation’ and ‘consideration’ recur in the responses to his paper; we commit to ‘readiness to listen’; and we are ‘open to mutual recognition, mutual trust and mutual forbearance’ (Heidegren, 2005: 44). Strathern (2005) is the strongest voice to warn that some of the other possibilities may be ‘pernicious’ (like Gellner). As far as I understand, however, noone in the debate considers how long one is patient before exerting ‘agency’ becomes pressing: at least, for some participants in practical situations. The referent for action is often ‘critique’, which is hardly explored as a specific type of ‘action’, amongst others. By a certain stage of ‘patience’, Graeber would probably be joining the fray in one way or another. Tsing holds the range of possibilities in tension and friction with each other: ‘The guaranteed futures of globalization theory seem strange and far away in this storm’ (2005: 269). But one can see why Rabinow sees our slow-motion pace as a problem, focuses down on tightly organized, insurgent and essentially future-oriented worlds, and thereby shifts attention from the possible to the virtual. One should note, however, that the future becomes more object and subject, allowing a sense of confidence to reassert itself over a pervasive sense of a Heraclitean world. PAUL RABINOW, MARKING TIME (2008)

Rabinow turns resolutely towards the rush of contemporary history, which leaves our usual attentively-paced perusal behind: ‘given the pace of change . . . it would inevitably relegate the discipline to a historical one’ (p. viii). In reorienting to the contemporary as a temporal instance, he makes the same observation about thought and change as Gellner over 40 years later, and much longer beyond Kafka. ‘How is one to decide where one is? And where one is going?’ (Rabinow, 2008: 13). ‘How is one to decide what difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday?’ (p. 13) . . . shades of ‘tomorrow is not just another day, but an other day’ (Gellner). Answers are not self-evident, but less (for the immediate moment) because we ourselves are at issue, so much as because specific named techno-scientific innovations place us ‘on the verge’ of a sequence of entailments that will put us at issue, moral choice or not. In the meantime, one is a ‘modest witness’ of more-or-less self-evidently powerful processes in new knowledge spaces that work in characteristic ways. Typically, topics are identified first, and their novelty is established by an event, a pronouncement from within a field, by a fact or finding or invention that creates a future telos, and thereby a more-or-less discernible 364


pathway forward in time. But with respect to ‘possibility’, Rabinow suggests that the pathway would be better depicted as ‘virtual’ than ‘potential’ because the latter implies a realization of qualities already inherent. The virtual is a new way, not only of thinking about possibilities (‘utopias’) but of turning thought into ‘the real’ (see Marcus and Fischer on realism; Carrier and Miller (1998) on virtualism). Does this obviate the ethnographic archive and patient self-exposure as offering exemplars of the processes involved? In the new knowledge spaces, are we just along for the ride, with the power of neither agency nor critique nor even patience? Rabinow’s radical views of time in the present would imply so. ‘In our time, as never before, the continuity of past to future is broken’ (p. 59). Although we also know that decisions made now, under the existing conversational regimes, will create the future, the most desirable kind of future is one that lends itself to rapid adjustment along the way, in what is implied as a recursive, non-predictable, fashion, but towards goals identified in virtual form. His example, however, draws on analyses that remind me of Graeber’s broadly comparative view of hierarchies, although Rabinow does not turn to that comparative archive for inspiration. He tends to use classical and legendary sources, instead of anthropology, to identify the human social and spiritual processes in pursuit of the virtual. The genetic scientists whose breakthroughs he studies compete with each other, as he tells us, in discursive forms that derive straight from long histories of gendered male hostility, expressed through genres that span the ages. ‘[T]he duel to achieve a technological goal was accompanied by a rhetoric of moral combat marked by ferocity and fueled by riteousness and ego’ (p. 87). It is not unlike the dynamics and affects that both Zaloom (2006) and Ho (2008) describe in the financial markets (another highly intricate realm of the ‘virtual’). ‘Each deal parades the speaker’s masculine potency in front of other men’ (Zaloom, 2006: 123). In brief, this is a mode of the possible that seeks to contain social fields and domains of knowledge, and narrows down and closes out specific options within these bounds in highly specific, even formulaic, ways. To analyze the well-springs, poetics, technologies and implications of the charisma and passion poured into identifying different virtual realities, we might benefit from the comparative view, beyond the recourse Rabinow has to classic Greek thought. There is the literature on Big Men in Melanesia, self-realization in Equatorial Africa, visionaries in the Americas, and so on. In times of very rapid movement, it takes such triangulation to identify the specific ways in which futures are being configured and affects are made to flow into forward momentum. Are we in a race against time? Surveying a beckoning horizon of possibilities? Undertaking a search for the Holy Grail? And are the protagonists trying to do it within their own lifetimes, or building an agency-cumpatiency that can endure into the indefinite future? It seems unnecessarily obstinate on Rabinow’s part to write as if the long scholarship on ‘the duel’, ‘moral combat’ and forms of ‘riteousness’ were simply irrelevant to disciplinary approaches to new virtualism. But his shift to contained social domains where one can legitimately argue that the virtual is more operative than the possible simplifies life. The genome project Rabinow describes may be just one instance of contexts in which the horizon of the future is not a temporality in which one participates or to which the agent/actor submits, but a goal s/he aims at: in this case, the agent’s recognition for having changed the world (in some way). It is heroic. For oneself (‘ego’, in all senses of the word), the temporal mode is then 365


more like a ‘countdown’ to zero and back than it is like a count-up towards the infinity implied by ‘possibility’. And patiency takes a background position to this contained form of agency. There are, however, large areas of life to which such a passionately competitive form of agency within virtuality is not applied, that remain in the zone of the only possible, perhaps the dangerously possible, as Gellner and Strathern both entertained. There are puzzles here. Rabinow’s ‘as never before’ is surprising. Human experience has known apocalypse before. The very words for our current situation come from actual events and ideologies of ancient destruction: the apocalypse itself of the Book of Revelations; Armageddon (the attack on Megiddo in the 15th century BCE); the earthquake and tsunami that drowned the entire Minoan civilization at about the same catastrophic time. No wonder that we, as direct and indirect intellectual descendants of Mediterranean civilizations, have a cultural memory of total destruction; it happened. In 70 CE, the Roman emperor almost succeeded in dismantling Herod’s massive Temple Mount in Jerusalem stone by enormous stone. Rabinow’s ‘as never before’ seems to put all this behind us, to re-train focus on heroic control of an unprecedented future. It is not very clear, then, how anyone attends to continuing possibilities and perils outside the sphere definable in virtual terms. The modularity of this version of the ‘virtual’ can seem to take off the table, as if in a methodologically unproblematic way, what seems to be – in parts of the other works – a diffident and tentative approach to what makes ‘possibility’ a partially uncontained process through time. Outside of the module that is concentrated on here, the human genome project, there are vast entailments and eventualities that surely do not take the same form. There is a discursive and invasive working out in the world of the horizons opened up and the force-field of winds and swells that lie beyond the ‘virtual’ model but in direct and indirect ways may even emanate from it. This is certainly the case for the virtualism of the financial world and the military world. One understands why studying the ‘virtual’ is preferred to invoking ‘potential’ and perhaps still more to alluding vaguely to ‘possibility’ as a depiction of life in the present and future. In an unruly world, it’s neat, and bounded, like the financial models we have now come to distrust so deeply. But clearly the virtual cannot be ‘the whole story’. Where and how does rebellion emerge? Or a sense that ‘we’ have been changed into something we hardly recognize? Nevertheless, Rabinow’s focus on count-down thinking from a vision on the horizon to a present life of heroic agency is fascinating. How, then, do we articulate it beyond the specific intense, small arenas where it dominates? Are there now other, perhaps many, ‘count-downs’ in the world out there, as enormously dangerous or promising possibilities, created piecemeal from ‘practices’, rush almost unbidden over shared horizons? If the ‘virtual’ is springing up within the domain erstwhile dominated by the ‘possible’, the study of plans and strategies would come back into view, and we might find that there is a long history of this, too, under other names. CONCLUSION

How are we going? Very interestingly, I think. We come up with self-identified ‘experimental moments’ of great importance at least every 20 years. They are not, however, complete breaks so much as means of flexing the mind against what are eventually felt as over-encompassing and constraining theoretical frameworks. To review the recurrence of the ‘possible’ over disciplinary history is to ask how anthropology continually 366


pivots around – or revisits – key motivating ideas, offering new valences and temporalities to them, rather than how schools of thought or epistemologies or identifications in the world at moments of history distinguish themselves from each other, succeed one another and compete for prominence. Anthropologists also share across time a commitment to ‘field science’, expecting the meaning of human possibility to be ‘out there’ in the practice of life rather than in the laboratory, under controlled experiments on the generative organs of the body: the human brain, hormonal system or genome. The discipline has been, however, mainly looking at the horizon as a vista offering liberation. My sense of the present moment is that the realities of the world may make us confront the Caroline Islanders’ views of the horizon as moving towards us, rather than vice versa, and that navigation techniques may pivot again accordingly. I doubt that we will ever give up ‘possibility’ in its hopeful sense, as the matrix or ground from which one can sense originality. In this mode it has drawn anthropologists into debate across time, topic, theoretical predilection and many other dividing criteria. Ethnography carried out under a rubric of human possibility has opened up models and exemplars to take elsewhere. One of these models, the Caroline mode of navigation, throws into relief a different relationship to the horizon than the open one to which we have become accustomed. Here one learns to be acutely observant of diagnostic minutiae (such as bird flight) and to place them on coordinates which include the boat, the horizon and the movement of the cosmos as a single ‘macro’ field. In that field, one learns to sense peril. Gellner might have found such small diagnostics hard to work with, but he does envisage warning signs. Graeber redefines the coordinates in the archive around a specific imagined destination. I’m less sure about how the others would now identify the coordinates on a Caroline voyage, how they would remake their relationship to the archive and to professionalized thought about the ‘other’ and their ‘possibilities’ that have inspired many branches of the discipline thus far and that I think are still relevant to reflection and action. All resolutions come, however, as Rabinow notes, as slow infusions. This pace may synchronize better with a looming horizon of hope than dread. Our slower pace and ultimately positive outlook could be a gift to a social science scholarship caught up by ‘crisis’, including a crisis of confidence in involuted models. Or there may be some other way to face the temporalities and dangers of imagined futures. In the mean time, it has seemed worthwhile to take this different pass through disciplinary history, to contribute to a different scanning of the horizon, in conversation with a new generation, two 20-year cycles later than the one I inherited. Epilog

Claude Lévi-Strauss died just as I finalized the editing on this paper. The obituary in the New York Times sharpens my sense of the specific attractions of ‘possibility’ in Anglophone anthropology. The author concludes: ‘The final volume [of Lévi-Strauss’s fourvolume Mythologiques] ends by suggesting that . . . myths become the tools with which humanity comes to terms with the world’s greatest mystery: the possibility of not being, the burden of mortality’ (Rothstein, 2009). Again, ‘possibility’. Rothstein’s final words on Lévi-Strauss’s life as a scholar, however, take a telling liberty with the text. According to Lévi-Strauss himself, myths show that we live ‘the two self-evident and contradictory 367


truths’ of being and not being. So not-being is actually not a ‘possibility’ but a certainty: ‘the . . . certainty that [Man] was not present in former times, that he will not always be there in the future and . . . that [the few features that] once were . . . were as nothing’ (1981[1971]: 675, emphasis and insertions added). This slippage between Lévi-Strauss’s original and Rothstein’s version is not trivial. Lévi-Strauss’s ‘reservations about the subject’, as ‘just a point in space and a moment in time’ (1981: 626), cut across the concept of ‘possibility’ that has been recuperated every 20 years or so in Anglophone anthropology, for almost a century. There, it is agency, subjectivity and imagination that have been preserved through theoretical re-positioning. For Lévi-Strauss, the human factor lies in a different quality. For him, in the final instance – in the final paragraph of the final volume of his four-volume series – the mediation of being and non-being, as a species as well as in individual existence, lies in the quality of courage. In full awareness of non-being, ‘man has to live and struggle, think, believe and above all, preserve his courage’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1981: 694, italics added). It is moving to rediscover, rereading the original text of The Naked Man (1981: 561), that Lévi-Strauss saw his own thought moving in amplifying circles around a stable central point, like the South Sea navigation with which I started. Metaphors can be treacherous grounds for building conclusions if one’s own circles have not yet been sufficiently traversed. But, as a first thought, it seems to me that the insertion of ‘courage’ into the very center of those ‘circular itineraries’ may illuminate further what we have meant, or wanted to mean, by ‘the possible’. Notes

1 The title of this introduction refers to Adrienne Rich’s set of essays from 30 years of writing, entitled Arts of the Possible, published as the new century was inaugurated. In her moods and arguments many of us would recognize ourselves and the dilemmas I suggest here. All ‘my’ authors are male, but a feminist spirit also informs my perceptions of a multi-generational endeavor. 2 This article was written entirely as a response to an invitation from Kevin Karpiak, Chris Vasantkumar and Mattias Viktorin to take part in an American Anthropological Association annual meeting (2008) panel entitled: ‘How Is Anthropology Going? An Inquiry into Movement, Mode and Method in the Contemporary World’. The organizers, paper-givers and discussants, George Marcus and Aiwha Ong, enriched my thinking, and the AT editors encouraged the retention of its form as a ‘response’, in the personal voice, for a kind of paper that I had not anticipated either writing in the first place nor eventually submitting for publication. 3 ‘Number as Inventive Frontier: Equivalence, Accounting, Calculation’. Workshop coorganized by Jane I. Guyer, Naveeda Khan and Juan Obarrio, Johns Hopkins University, May 2008. Funded by the National Science Foundation and The Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. 4 This is the narrative explanation of the AAA-2009 conference title: ‘What is the relevance of anthropology in today’s world? Where does our discipline stand in the age of hyper-science and the genome; during an era in which ethnography – as a method and form of textured representation – is being mobilized with vigor and confidence by those working in other disciplinary formations; at a moment when the questions we’re asking are also being answered by others in the humanities, social 368


sciences, and media (and often with much more popular recognition)? Does anthropology still provide a unique contribution? What are its contemporary goals, and are they different from those of previous intellectual generations?’ References

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Rabinow, Paul (2008) Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rich, Adrienne (2000) Arts of the Possible. New York: W.W. Norton. Rothstein, Edward (2009) ‘Claude Lévi-Strauss, 100, Dies; Altered Western Views of the “Primitive”’, The New York Times, 4 November. Strathern, Marilyn (2005) ‘Comment [on Carrithers]’, Current Anthropology 46(3): 452–3. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt (2005) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Zaloom, Caitlin (2006) Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. JANE I. GUYER is Professor and Chair of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. Educated at the London School of Economics and the University of Rochester, her main field research has been carried out in Nigeria and Cameroon in the general domains of economic anthropology and economic history. Previous to appointment at Johns Hopkins, she was faculty in anthropology at Harvard and Boston University, and Director of the Program of African Studies at Northwestern University. Address: Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University, 404 Macaulay Hall, 3400 North Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA. [email: [email protected]]

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