Jonathan Mair

The concept of neoliberalism has become an obstacle to the anthropological understanding of the twenty?first century

The following discussion developed from a debate held on the motion: ?The concept of neoliberalism has become an obstacle to the anthropological understanding of the twenty-first century?, held at the 2012 meeting of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory (GDAT) at the University of Manchester. The debate was organized and edited for publication by Soumhya Venkatesan. A full transcription of the debate is hosted on the JRAI website: http://www.jrai.net; a full podcast of the debate can be heard at the Talking Anthropology website: http://www.talkinganthropology.com/2013/01/18/ta45-gdat1-neoliberalism/#t=2:49:40.219.

Introduction: Making Ignorance an Ethnographic Object

It is not surprising that anthropologists, being academics, should value knowledge. After all, an academic life is a vocation to generate data, to act as a critic in order to detect and eradicate error, and to transmit the state of the art to the next generation. This pursuit of knowledge entails an ethics: knowledge is the value that justifies all aspects of academic activity, whether it is desired as a means of promoting other goods (health, happiness, wealth, well-being) or as an end in itself. The argument that underlies this volume is that anthropologists have too easily attributed to the people they study the same unambiguous desire for knowledge, and the same aversion to ignorance, that motivates their own work, with the result that situations in which ignorance is viewed neutrally—or even positively—have been misunderstood and overlooked.

Cultures of belief

In popular thought about the meaning of religion, as well as established debates in anthropology, religious belief is interpreted as either a commitment to a clear set of propositions, or as a non-literal, symbolic, ethical or social commitment. Anthropologists have tended to support the latter of these positions, so much so that this can now be seen as the ‘anthropological’ position; it is also characteristic of the view of scholars in related disciplines, such as religious studies. This article argues for a third possibility: that religious (and other) believers are often engaged in complex, reflexive practices that stipulate specific cognitive and non-cognitive relationships to propositional content. This is demonstrated with reference to contemporary Buddhism in Inner Mongolia, China. The author argues that the existence of such cultures of belief demonstrates there is a need for a systematic anthropological theory of belief and suggests some sources that may contribute to its formulation

Post-truth anthropology

Countless commentators have announced the advent of the post-truth era, but while everyone seems to be talking about it, there is little agreement about what it really means. This article argues that anthropology can make an important and distinctive contribution to understanding post-truth by treating it ethnographically. Commonly proposed explanations for post-truth include changes in political culture, in the structure of information in the digital age and universal cognitive weaknesses that limit peoples capacity for critical thought. While all these are likely important factors, they do not account for the role of culture in creating and sustaining post-truth. In fact, it is likely that culture, especially in the form of metacognition, or thought about thought, plays an important role by providing knowledge practices, techniques for allocating attention, and especially competing theories of truth. Ethnographic methods provide anthropologists with a distinctive window on post-truth cultures of metacognition.

Ethics across borders: Incommensurability and affinity

This article takes what has always been a methodological and ethical question for anthropologists (how should we relate to others?) and turns it into an ethnographic one (how do those we study think ethically across borders?). We show that, paradoxically, anthropologists’ commitment to their own forms of ethics across borders have frequently effaced alternative conceptions among the people we study, whilst the burgeoning field of the anthropology of ethics has reintroduced ideas of cultural boundedness and incommensurability into the anthropological canon. Moreover, within anthropology, a focus on either universal motivation or cultural relativism has obscured ethics across borders, which as a practice is premised on both the existence of ethical difference and the possibility of transcending it. In relation to an example taken from Evans’ work on Ahmadi Muslims in India, we develop the idea that ethics across borders depends as much on the creative production and elaboration of incommensurable difference—a process we call “incommensuration”—as on the identification of affinities. As suggested by the collection this essay introduces, ethics across borders in this sense must be widespread, and deserves greater ethnographic attention, particularly with regard to the diverse ways in which difference and affinity are imagined.