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Received: 8 June 2022 Accepted: 15 June 2022

DOI: 10.1111/aman.13815

C O M M E N TA R Y

The anthropological and the consequential

Ghassan Hage
The University of Melbourne

Correspondence
Ghassan Hage, The University of Melbourne
ghage@unimelb.edu.au

Though this text raises several important issues, there is one aspect that I want to particularly interact with. It has to do with a mode of valorizing
anthropological inquiry in relation to a certain socio-political function it is invited to perform. While stressing that they do not want to imply that
“research should respond only to current events,” Gupta and Stoolman nonetheless argue that “the chase for novelty, which is so often elevated
to primary importance, does not always lead to theories that are consequential for the world. We believe that there is much work to be done,
theoretical as well as applied, by keeping a sharp focus on what is politically and socially most important.” I want to reflect on this conception of
what makes anthropology “consequential for the world.”
I think that this opposition between a devalorized “chase for novelty” and an overvalorized “focus on what is politically and socially most
important” is neither as valuable nor as consequential as the authors think it is. It is made at the expense of a valorization of both the “pure science”-
like pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake from within anthropology and the politics and consequentiality that derive from this pursuit. An
anthropology that is interested in pursuing a distinctly innovative and specifically anthropological program of research, I would argue, ends up para-
doxically producing a much more consequential contribution to social and political problems than an approach that foregrounds those problems and
assigns to the social sciences the role of servicing them.
I have a way of introducing students to what is a distinctly anthropological tradition that is useful in framing the thoughts that I am trying to
formulate here. My introduction takes the form of a consciously naïve historicization of the emergence of disciplinary traditions as they are taught
in the universities. I tell the students that my aim is not to tell a truthful history but to tell a useful story that conveys a truth. The story goes
something like this: if we think hard, we can connect every discipline we study at university, whether we are talking medicine, history, philosophy,
engineering, architecture, literary studies, or social sciences, to a primary mode of thinking and acting that we acquire and start developing in our
childhood. This mode of thinking remains constitutive of the core problematics later defined by the disciplinary tradition.
For instance, the moment we hurt or injure ourselves as kids and start thinking about what is causing our pain and how to alleviate it, we are
thinking and acting medically. All developments in medical knowledge and medical technologies are extensions of this primary experience. This is
true of the people who labor on making certain medical practices more systematic and more transmissible. It is also true of people who labor on
developing and creating new medications and new technologies of seeing the body, analyzing it, and treating it, etc. When we come to university
and start studying medicine, we encounter people (teachers) who labor on relaying to us practical and theoretical knowledge embodied in books
and technologies that are themselves the labor of the people who have worked on this before us. Marx ([1867] 1991) refers to the labor of previous
generations that is present in objects, such as these books and technologies, as “dead labor.” This dead labor is “re-animated” when we study it, use it,
and make it part of our own practices, as we move from being folk medical practitioners to professional medical practitioners. It is the existence and
the transmission of this body of expertise, consisting of ways of knowing and ways of doing, that constitute a discipline. Acquiring it and developing
it turn us into professionals. But the core problematic of the discipline remains connected to the way it emerges for the first time in our childhood.
One can tell stories about every discipline in this way. We can trace the first time we started thinking in general social categories—“people in this
neighborhood seem to be richer, or poorer, than people in my neighborhood”—and wondering what lies behind them as the origin of sociological
thinking. And we can do likewise and find stories of primary forms of historical or architectural thinking, etc.
Perhaps a good place to see the emergence of our first anthropological experience is when we have our first sleepover, or something of a similar
order, at a friend’s house. It is so because a sleepover involves a slightly extended visit into a space that is not “our home,” where we feel we are

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2 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

dwelling in a nonfamiliar space, and where we begin to note a whole series of differences. When, the day after, we go back home and start telling
our parents or siblings something like “you should see how they talk to their mum” or “they have this strange way of cooking and eating eggs for
breakfast,” we will be formulating our first anthropological accounts. The moment we start looking at what we are having for breakfast with a
comparative, and perhaps even a critical, eye as a result of experiencing a different breakfast is the moment our anthropology starts to have a
consequential/political effect.
As with the medical texts above, the anthropological texts that we inherit and study at university are extensions of this primary experience,
embodying various attempts at making it more systematic, more rigorous, more detailed, etc. What is this experience, then? It is the experience of
crossing into a milieu that is different from our own, struggling with accounting for it by having to both expand our categories of thinking and our
imaginaries of what is possible. And if we are so inclined, it also entails deploying this experience as a critical, comparative lens through which we
look at our own homely spaces anew. The more we study and try to systematize the way others before us who have labored on giving us an account
of these experiences of crossing and new ways of looking, the more we learn how to practice and give rigorous and systematic accounts of this mode
of crossing ourselves, and the more we turn ourselves into professional anthropologists. Through these texts and through our own practices, we
also develop a comparative political horizon generated from within the anthropological experience itself.
I am starting with my mode of introducing anthropology because, I guess, it points, in a rough and unpolished but significant way, to what I think
is one of the most distinct and distinguishing dimensions of the discipline. Let me be clear that I am not trying to engage in some purist definition of
anthropological practice here. As anthropologists, we work with many traditions. Indeed, it would be impossible not to be sociological and historical
and philosophical, and . . . and . . . at the same time. Nor am I, God forbid, aiming for a normative definition of “real anthropology.” But I certainly want
to highlight the existence of this “anthropological stream” in Zoe Todd’s “rivers of thought,” mentioned by Gupta and Stoolman, and the ramifications
of its existence.
First, note that this way of seeing anthropology is open to a historical critique. Open in the sense that the critique does not lead to a devalorization
of the core experience that is being highlighted by it. The history of the discipline’s emergence, and its entanglement with the history of white Euro-
pean colonialism, has made it that this “crossing into different cultures” has largely consisted of white people crossing into nonwhite cultures as the
latter were being dominated, looted, and transformed by this colonialism. It has equally consisted in the dominance of an analytical language that is
primarily derived from a white colonial imaginary. Furthermore, it has consisted of a sociological tradition where white people can claim knowledge
of/expertise in cultures other than their own. And it has also consisted in white Europeans monopolizing the profession inside and outside the uni-
versities. All of these are important critiques that need to be made, and need to be struggled against, as indeed people have in the tradition referred
to by Gupta and Stoolman.
However, none of the above critiques necessitate a critique of the idea of a social analytics structured around crossing into another milieu different
from one’s own. That colonialism was instrumental in making white people the dominant “crossing subjects” does not mean that there is no value for
us in the conceptual labor they have put while trying to convey to us their experience of this crossing. What’s more, theoretically speaking, anyone
located in whatever culture can cross into a realm of otherness and use the crossing to produce anthropological knowledge. This is all the more
so since we now know that one does not even need to “go elsewhere” to delve into the realm of otherness. If one looks hard enough, otherness
lies hidden amid the institutionalized sameness of one’s homely spaces. But, of course, there are many sociological variables that work to disallow
this “theoretically speaking” possibility from actually happening. These variables have to do with the type, such as the cultural origins, of “analytical
capital” that is available for accumulation, and they have to do with the way this capital is distributed. Some have more of it than others. Some find
it easier to accumulate than others. The struggle for a different and a more equal distribution of analytical capital is important as one struggles to
pluralize and decolonize the discipline. Indeed, it can be said, and this has been argued by some (see Viveiros de Castro 2015), that a comparative
analysis of different comparative experiences is something to yearn for. Nonetheless, that it is mainly white people who have left us accounts of
their “crossing” should not stop us from clinging to what they bequeath us. Nor should it lead us to devalorize the distinctly comparative political
standpoint we have inherited from them.
This brings me to why I see this clinging to what we might call a “distinctive professional core” important for a critical engagement with the way
the relation between the political and the consequential is presented Gupta and Stoolman’s text. I read in the text an uncritical endorsement of a
tradition of anthropology that sees political issues and socio-political problems as that which anthropology needs to confront so as to give itself a
raison d’être. Such an approach does not reflect critically enough on the way the political can become a colonizing machine, reducing the academic
to an inconsequential political moment.
As I see it, the academic profession, in general, is today subject to a vicious process of economic, social, and moral devalorization emanating
from a governmental culture infused with neoliberal criteria of “usefulness” fused with an intolerance for the tradition of academic autonomy that
has generated much of the Western tradition of critical thinking. This governmental culture is itself coupled with, and reinforced by, university
administrations that, for economic and industrial-relations purposes, are keen on infantilizing academic labor. There is no doubt that the humanities
and the social sciences have borne the brunt of this intense devalorization and infantilization. With this in mind, I feel that we need to be careful not
to further contribute to this devalorization of the academic by thinking that what makes it valuable is something that comes from outside of it, such
as “important” social and political issues.
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THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL AND THE CONSEQUENTIAL 3

As importantly, anthropology makes a difference—that is, it is at its most consequential/political when it injects its own comparative political
horizon into the world. Its contribution is far less original if it is merely the result of an opening up of the academic world to belligerent political
categories, often structured around a friend/enemy binary, extrinsic to the academic tradition, and allowing them to colonize academic space.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Open access publishing facilitated by The University of Melbourne, as part of the Wiley - The University of Melbourne agreement via the Council of
Australian University Librarians.

REFERENCES CITED
Marx, Karl. (1867) 1991. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One. New York: Penguin.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2015. The Relative Native: Essays on Indigenous Conceptual Worlds. Chicago: Hau Books.

How to cite this article: Hage, Ghassan. 2023. “The anthropological and the consequential.” American Anthropologist 1–3.
https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13815