Why We Should Keep Looking Down: Against the Metropolitanization of Anthropology
Debra McDougall, University of Western Australia
In an age when studies of international financial instruments seem as common as studies of poor agriculturalists for PhDs in anthropology, and a political situation in which few novice anthropologists dare study disenfranchised groups with whom they are not identified, do we still need to justify ‘studying up’? This talk traces some changes in anthropological theory, practice, and institutional structures since the 1970s when Laura Nader, Dell Hymes, and others called for reinventing the discipline in a way that would allow anthropologists to study the rich and powerful as well as the poor and down-trodden. Although anthropologists today may continue to find subalterns in all sorts of strange places, fewer anthropologists seem to be moving far beyond familiar cultural or class positions in the process of doing fieldwork. I provisionally attempt to articulate reasons why academic anthropologists should continue to ‘study down,’ beginning with the mundane fact that the vast majority of the world’s population is ‘down’ in relation to tertiary-educated scholars. I suggest that anthropologists are some of the few academics who are still ‘looking down’ in order to engage in dialog with the disenfranchised, viewing them not just as the victims of social problems to be solved but as interlocutors whose views of the world are worth taking seriously
