Rewilding Anthropology

Modern Anthropology is a long way from home. It began not as a patrician academic discipline where the idle gentry hypothecate the world from sequestered halls of learning, making sporadic forays outside the university walls to confirm their suspicions before returning to build dynastic scholarly legacies from the narrative bricks of baseborn lives, but as…something else. Our tradition - and have one we must, for intellectual genealogy is a compulsory exercise in disciplinary mythmaking - holds that our chief progenitor was the Greek Herodotus, who was born a long millennium before the advent of the earliest universities. Herodotus was no professor, but a wandering scholar who charted ordinary life wherever he went, and occasionally - needs must - filled in the blanks with invention. Now and again he would return to Athens to present lengthy oratories in the public square, where both the crowds and the authorities would shower him with praise and, occasionally, money, making him not only the father of ethnography but of podcasting.

Some 2500 years after Herodotus, anthropologists are returning to the wilds whence we came. This is not by choice. Like other scholars, we are increasingly ancillary to the central mission of universities, which is not education but administration. We are, in name and in function, adjuncts to this exercise in bland bureaucratic reproduction, with a vanishingly small cohort of traditional anthropologists facing extinction with the resurgence of fascism in the west. Most of us are, or about to be, intellectual wildlife set loose upon the world, the polarity of “home” and “field” reversed or obliterated as the work becomes decoupled from the living it once provided and anthropology - needs must - returns to its roots, which are located wherever anthropologists are. Mine are the in the Great Forest of the Adirondacks, a quiet corner of a failing empire beset by much the same cultural hubris, imperial overreach and indifference to internal immiseration lamented by our vaunted forefather. It is a place where development came late and decay came early, a place beset by ghosts, silences and loss amidst the sublime beauty of the northern waste. In these pages you will find a miscellany of dispatches from this space of agreeable horror.