Anthropologist as Public Intellectual
My motivation to tell a different story came from a moral imperative, driven by sentiment and several points of recognition. The first was intellectual awareness that the Haiti in the public domain was a rhetorically and symbolically incarcerated one, trapped in singular narratives and clichés that, unsurprisingly, hardly moved beyond stereotypes. Second, for that reason, it was necessary that such perceptions be challenged. Third, complex ideas about Haiti circulating in the academy stayed among academics, rarely trickling outward. Finally, as a scholar possessing such knowledge, I could add a nuanced perspective to ongoing public discussions about the republic.
The late Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who constantly pondered over whether academics can be, or better yet, can afford not to be public intellectuals, was a great inspiration to me in that regard. In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995), Trouillot made an important point concerning this that is worth revisiting. He warned us not to underestimate the fact that history is produced in overlapping sites outside academia. He wrote: “Most Europeans and North Americans learn their first history lessons through media that have not been subjected to the standards set by peer reviews, university presses or doctoral committees. Long before average citizens read the historians who set the standards of the day for colleagues and students, they access history through celebrations, site and museum visits, movies, national holidays and primary school books.”8 As I learned the broader implications of who gets to tell and write the story, I agonized over issues of social responsibility. What better way to help Haiti than by inserting my anthropological self into some of those overlapping sites to relay critical insights to the general public?
To be sure, these popular areas are particularly ripe for intellectual interventions. This would be nothing new to the discipline. Since the historical development of anthropology, its practitioners have engaged various publics in different ways. This practice can be traced back to the discipline’s “founding fathers”—less bound to academic boundaries—who actively participated in the debates of their time as they sought to explicate social evolution, human nature, and variation.
Later forebears such as Franz Boas, the notable father of American cultural anthropology, had a significant presence as an anti-racist academic who publicly challenged racist ideologies. Melville Herskovits championed the significance of cultural relativism in understanding black people in Africa and the Americas. Ruth Benedict practically redefined conceptual understanding of culture. Margaret Mead, to date, remains an icon as the quintessential example of the public intellectual who not only brought anthropology to the masses through cross-cultural analysis, but did so as host of a television show and through columns in popular magazines.9
While I was taught, in graduate school courses, this history of the influence of public presence on disciplinary traditions, the underlying understanding was that intellectually valuable work, which we were inadvertently encouraged to pursue, was that which produced knowledge for its own sake. Though this belief seemed to be at odds with my agenda (my initial interest was in development), the rigorous emphasis on recognizing how narratives are created, and the pervasive and insidious power of their representations, only made me more curious about their practical implications.
Anthropological queries that challenge the so-called divide between advocacy and analytical work abound.10 There are recurring conversations within the discipline concerning where and how to theoretically locate these “publics,”11 conversations that anthropologists engage in often in overlapping ways.12 Nonetheless, with increasing professionalization and specialization, the presence of anthropologists in the public sphere has changed, in part because academics do eschew this arena.13 In the past, public engagement was more central to the discipline. In recent years, however, the American Anthropological Association has taken to encouraging the public presence of members, to “increase the public understanding of anthropology and promote the use of anthropological knowledge in policy making”14 and its overall relevance in our times.
Still, external causes for the discipline’s obscurity in the public sphere include the fact that in popular imagination anthropology is still equated with a study of the “exotic” rather than everyday social phenomena at home as well as abroad. Moreover, prominent pundits and experts who offer insights on cultural specificities are not only more adept with the media, but their work, as Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman so rightfully note, tends to “cater to their audiences’ existing prejudices rather than those who upend their easy assumptions about the world and challenge them to see a new angle.”15 Undeniably, as we were frequently informed in the op-ed seminar, the likeliness that an opinion piece will influence readers enough to change their perspective is slim, as most minds are set. Therein lies the biggest inhibition to fruitful interventions in the mainstream.
Academe is only so diverse with its set of canons, conventions, and resistances to difference. While much has changed since my days of graduate school, it must be said that the stories of public intellectuals I heard (in nonspecialized courses) generally excluded or marginalized the works of black pioneers in the United States16 who confronted racialized structural barriers that not only severely impeded their work but also determined their professional relationship to the discipline.17 The extensive breadth of their impact is unknown in the mainstream. For example, Zora Neale Hurston and Katherine Dunham both took their training out of the university system, turning to folklore and the arts to make significant contributions across disciplinary boundaries, which to this day continue to highlight expressive dimensions of black experiences. Dunham, using the pseudonym of Kaye Dunn, was actually a public writer who published articles in Esquire and Mademoiselle magazines predating Margaret Mead’s Redbook days. Allison Davis had a tremendous impact outside anthropology, as his studies of intelligence were instrumental in influencing compensatory education programs such as Head Start.18 The pan-Africanist St. Clair Drake, another influential pioneer, introduced, along with sociologist Horace Cayton, the notion of a “black metropolis” to a wide audience,19 before he even finished his doctoral degree.
Back then, black academics and artists deployed their knowledge of anthropology despite conflicted views of it as an esoteric endeavor, as St. Clair Drake put it, with little “relevance” to problems of “racial advancement” in the United States.20 They found it useful in attempts to expose and consider various aspects of black diasporic life in the broader struggle against colonialism and racism. Barred from mainstream mass media, their public interventions were documented mainly in black outlets. They managed to achieve this while differentially positioned vis-à-vis white counterparts who at times actively opposed their presence and activities not only within the discipline, but also inside and outside of universities. Indeed, what was permissible for some was heavily policed by others, including some of these well-known foremothers and forefathers.
In that vein, it must be noted that academia and the media are more congruent than dissonant when it comes to the structural factors influencing the underrepresentation of minorities. It is from this context that I emerged and learned how to maneuver as a black Haitian woman, an anthropologist, bent on issuing a counter-narrative in the public sphere in the post-quake period.
Neither Informant nor Sidekick
I began to write back, in a sense, when it was evident that Haiti was being represented in damaging and restricting ways. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the treatment of Vodou, which was repeatedly portrayed devoid of cultural meaning, and thus reinscribing the “mystical” characteristics ascribed to Haiti and barring it from narratives of modernity. Attempts to demystify this myth had their own challenges. In interviews with white colleagues (usually friends), I was often cast as the “native informant” by the interviewer, while