ANTHROPOLOGY AT THE TWILIGHT OF EMPIRE
Dead whitetail near Caroga Lake, 2011What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of manners.
James Joyce
Ulysses
As neoliberalism descended upon the world with the grim dawn of the 1980s, anthropologists turned to a preoccupation with immiseration that Sherry Ortner has termed dark anthropology, or “anthropology that focuses on the harsh dimensions of social life (power, domination, inequality, and oppression), as well as on the subjective experience of these dimensions in the form of depression and hopelessness.”
While there are problems with the denomination - not least the conflation of the bad with the dark, which is too easily extended from predicament to people - Ortner surely had her finger on the pulse of the discipline with the diagnosis, which has since been strangely reified by a near-fatal crisis of the journal in which she published it, followed by the tragic and untimely death of its progenitor. Yet it was not so much that anthropologists had become depressed as that the world had become depressing. The science of humanity simply followed its subject matter into the Slough of Despond, and stayed there.
The discipline has known hard times before, not least the long epoch of violent colonial conquest that began in the fifteenth century and ultimately gave rise to the discipline itself toward the end of the nineteenth: an era which witnessed the subjugation, enslavement, displacement and ultimately mass extinction of tens of millions of people, particularly in the New World, as European capital deployed its first great assault of accumulation by dispossession. Anthropology was born of this grief, arising as a science of human variegation begat by the unavoidable observation of human difference in the midst of conquest, and morphed gradually into the science of power as the imperial wave anthropologists themselves rode to the ends of the earth threatened to obliterate the people they traveled so far to learn about.
The neoliberal era, dating more or less to the disintegration and involution of industrial capitalism in the 1970s, hardly proved less brutal. In turning back to wash anew over a world it had already flooded, capitalism seemed nothing so much as intent on finishing a destructive errand it started six hundred years ago. Modern anthropology became the science of its sorrows. For a time, our disciplinary optimists rallied, latching on desperately to pockets of defiance that promised to (at best) defeat this merciless tide or (at worst) survive it. Agency became the watchword of the day, new social movements were born, and resistance seemed not only possible but inevitable.
From the prospect of 2025, these whistles in the dark seem quaint, if faintly ridiculous. It is unclear which historical moment the archaeologists of the future will peg as the off-ramp of the neoliberal era, but it seems clear that we have crossed over it into a new one, its hallmark the disintegration of American empire and, perhaps,
The new era has, as yet, no name.
As Covid burns its way through the global population and the United States perches on the precipice of (at best) disintegration and (at worst) civil war, the champions of darkness are again having their day. And while the United States may be at the center of the maelstrom it is hardly the whole of the storm. The triple global threat of pandemic, climate catastrophe and gathering fascism suggests that Homo sapiens in general is shaping up to be our planet’s first known suicidal species, having developed a brain large enough to dominate the world but insufficiently sophisticated to save itself from the consequences of its own will to power.
If it is the job of the anthropologist as the biographer of humanity to tell this story, it is also our task to compose the smaller, place-based chapters that make up the book of peoples. The present exercise in digital ethnography is an exposition of dark anthropology in a dark corner of the world, the Adirondack wilderness located in what is, at least for the time being, America’s State of New York. It foregrounds two of anthropology’s three personas as part of the arts and humanities using the attendant tools of representation and interpretation. The third perspective, the social science of the Adirondacks, is explicated at length by the author elsewhere and readily conveyable in shorthand: the Adirondacks are gentrifying. Rural gentrification, too, is a product of humanity’s propensity for self-harm, a familiar exchange of short-term gain for long-term extinction. That is the plot, but not the mood. Gothic is here meant to invoke the haunted, the troubled, the uneasy, the disturbed. Gentrification brings change, a profound cultural loss akin to social death, and death leaves ghosts in its wake. This is their story.