By David Bond, Associate Director, Center for the Advancement of Public Action, Bennington College
What place does ethnography have in a world coming undone? Each season, a new deluge of disasters conspires with historical landscapes of inequality in the remaking of dispossession. How can ethnography stand against this quickening current of loss? Or is there merit to going with the destructive flow? The divergence of such questions signals a fault line emerging in how anthropological theory takes up environmental justice today.
During COVID-19, two of my longstanding research projects were enlisted in grassroots efforts to hold nearby negligent industrial facilities accountable. Although both facilities had abysmal track records leading up to the pandemic, both facilities also hid a rising cascade of violations to environmental protections under the emergency of the pandemic. Collaborating with frontline neighborhoods near a hazardous waste incinerator in upstate New York and a massive oil refinery in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands, I worked with outraged residents to amplify the lived reality of environmental injustice in a moment that seemed intent on looking the other way. After months of complaints to plant operators and nearby authorities that were uniformly met with blithe assurances and no real investigation, many residents began to suspect their private encounters with toxic exposures – skin rashes, headaches, lethargy, bloody noses, diarrhea, trouble breathing – were an indication of personal illness more than environmental injustice.
“I thought I was going crazy,” residents at both sites told me. Yet when held together, the stories residents told about these encounters were remarkably consistent. Weaving together fractured individual experiences into the coherency of a real event, my work helped amplify ethnographic realities into public accountability. Such amplification came through hosting community information sessions, writing opinion pieces for local news and national papers, providing background interviews for national reporters, launching public websites that conveyed the lived suffering of ongoing lapses, testifying at hearings hosted by state agencies and community groups, working with congressional staffers on new legislation, and joining with community groups to advocate for their seat at the table. This public anthropology brought the bright spotlight of national attention to both sites and led to substantial victories for both impacted communities even as the struggle is ongoing. Anthropology – as a method of inquiry and as a matter of emphasis – played an instrumental role in broadcasting both sites into community recognition, national news, and congressional deliberation.
In a moment of withdrawn official concern, these projects offer yet another compelling demonstration the civic relevance of ethnographic insights to science, policy, and justice. Yet this work also pulled ethnography in a slightly heterodox if not entirely unpopulated direction, one where the research agenda is more attuned to the shifting terrain of an unfolding fight than the refereed metrics of the discipline. It is work that calls upon a set of skills largely ignored in the graduate training at top anthropology programs: blasting out press releases rather than submitting proposals, hammering out feisty talking points rather than narrating a cleverly hedged conference paper, and success measured in how your novel framing becomes journalistic common sense rather than in the accumulation of citations.
As my apostate anthropology dove into the swirling waters of advocacy head first, the reach and reception of the ethnography itself deepened in unexpected ways. I was neither neutral nor an observer. I was an active participant, with all of the tactical considerations and political convictions, that flows from such a stance. Yet far from diminishing the ethnographic view of the problem, such commitments enriched it. My activism opened the door to a much wider set of actors, authorities, and accruals at work around these negligent facilities than would have been available in the professional detachment of more traditional anthropological research. The world seen, felt, grasp, confronted through involvement does not align perfectly with the world under the gaze of interpretation, but exactly how they vary remains a shifting, slightly off-putting, and deadly serious question in anthropology today.
If the practice of ethnography was enriched by its direct confrontation with a hazardous waste incinerator and an entrepot oil refinery, so was its readership. The most receptive audience – an audience that met every published piece with spirited discussion and follow-up questions – was the very people I was writing about. Everything I wrote also attracted a far more adversarial readership of industry lawyers and complicit state officials looking for any poorly worded phrase or overly zealous conclusion that might undermine my credibility. Peer-review pales in comparison. In other words, the very real stakes at play in these contested worlds played an active role in the ethnographic narration of those worlds. Description was not a matter of pulling wounded lives into disciplinary significance but of realizing and amplifying the significance people themselves were demanding in their struggle for justice. Alpa Shah convincingly argues that the most political acts within ethnographic writing today is how we situate, connect, and explain the experienced upheavals of today.
So many frontline communities feel their worlds lurching beyond the analytical capacity of endorsed science, the social responsibility of offending industries, and the archaic vigilance of the regulatory state. Reworking materialism, the sheer physicality of disruptions underway overwhelms the given coordinates of thought and action. Living amidst self-devouring growth, runaway changes, smothered horizons, proliferating loss, and military occupations without end, communities struggle to simply carry-on in places where the powerful seem intent on eradicating everything. For many anthropologists, it is no longer tenable to describe such worlds from the sidelines: unbound violence and ecological vertigo demand a new immediacy and intimacy in ethnographic writing. Such writing cuts deep, and poses questions that go beyond analytics. What happens when these lives drift beyond the pale of possible? Many besieged neighborhoods and discarded landscapes are desperate for bold, cogent accounts of what is happening to them that takes seriously the scale at which they experience the upheavals of now. To put it another way, they want anthropological theory in the present tense.
As I learned over the past few years, such theory does not make an easy peace with complicit institutions nor does it stand back in contemplation of the destruction underway. Rather, it works to historically excavate the convergence of forces at play in upended lives, helps rising discontent learn how to land a blow, and never loses sight of what real justice would mean. Following Rosa Luxemburg, we must demand practical justice now not because we think reform will bring it but because the demand itself is a revolutionary education. For so many battered communities, the way disasters, pandemics, wars, and toxic exposures overwhelm the existing institutional orders is not so much a prompt for scholarly reflection on better worlds to come as it is an invitation to join with the political struggle to build a better world now. How we might start writing to the theoretical need within our blasted contemporary should be the aim of critical anthropology today.
[This post is excerpted and slightly edited from: David Bond. 2023. “Public Anthropology in a Pandemic: Advocacy, Ethnography, and Theory,” General Anthropology, 30(1): pp. 6-11.]
Engagement 