Anthropology's Seen and Unseen

In 1866, Alfred Russel Wallace sent a breathless letter to his friend and colleague, Thomas Huxley, inviting Huxley to join him in exploring a “new branch of anthropology”: Spiritualism. Based on the explosive growth in seances in Europe and North America, Spiritualism conjured a world beyond the grave where the dead continued to learn and improve themselves while enjoying each’s ghostly society. When the dead deigned to visit the living, it was typically to help and to advise: “this haunting could teach the living how to build a more perfect society in the here-and-now” (Forbes 2016: 445). So, for Wallace, this really was a new direction for the field–an inquiry into the unseen and, simultaneously, into a future that awaited humanity, both in the afterlife and in the perfection of human life on this planet.

 

To give away the ending, Wallace was not successful in establishing his “new branch of anthropology.” Huxley wasn’t buying it, and other anthropological colleagues eventually turned against him as well. After wavering a bit through his own field investigations of London seances, E.B. Tylor weighed in against Wallace, relegating Spiritualism to a “survival” from more “primitive” times. But Spiritualism held some fascination for Tylor as well, even as he tried to distance anthropology from it. In the end, though, what would become “anthropology” as we know it would only engage with Spiritualism as a symptom of something else, in the same way that magic, religion, and ritual would yield to an understanding of deeper truths. Or is there something more? As Pels and others have argued, this episode reveals something more about the way anthropology regards its object.

 

On one hand, the two couldn’t seem more different. On the other, anthropology and Spiritualism–both middle-class endeavors arising in the context of 19th century empire, suggest a variety of homologies. The most salient, perhaps, is the idea of culture itself. Yes, “culture” surrounds us in countless material forms–but at the same time, it does not. A behavior, an object–to be sure, these are “cultural,” but where is that “culture”? As Delaplace points out, “Describing “culture” should also include an actual account of its “wholeness”: the invisible thread, as it were, which bundles up these cultural components into a totality” (2019: 37). In other words, “culture” is the results of the anthropologist’s revelation, the end results of an analytical process that renders an unseen world of connections and isomorphisms visible to the anthropologist’s audience. Spiritualism would make the same claims–the technologies of the seance were precisely those revealing a concealed world: spirit rapping, table levitation, automatic writing, spirit photography.

 

And, like Spiritualism, anthropology also involves concealment. During the 19th century, the Spiritualist medium utilized a number of contrivances–dimly lit rooms, screens, capacious tablecloths. Whether or not you believed in Spiritualism, these were the preconditions for the spiritual knowledge. For anthropology, the trick of culture was the revelation of relevant behavior and the concealing of what was considered extraneous. In photography, for example, “the epistemic virtue of ethnographic photography entailed the ability to hide certain things” (Delaplace 2019: 39). Franz Boas and George Hunt would work to (playfully) conceal the evidence of settler colonials from their portraits of indigenous life. And Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead would both conceal the impact of evangelical Christianity on people at their fieldsites, all with the ultimate goal of representing “authenticity” in native life.

 

This kind of concealment, of course, is no longer part of anthropology. Or is it? When we look back at the prevalence of reflexivity in late twentieth century anthropology, we might be led to believe that anthropology had gone all-in on revelation. Anthropologists located themselves amidst intersectionality and intersubjectivity, lifting the curtain and turning on the lights, as it were. There were still concealments, however. Or, to be more exact, the revelations of reflexivity facilitated other dimensions of the unseen. Consider, for example, the dominance of a handful of elite departments in producing the vast majority of academic anthropologists, and the embeddedness of those universities in structures of US empire (Speakman et al 2018). Or, alternately, the similarities between anthropological work and extractivist industries commodifying indigenous knowledge and practices for a rapacious capitalism transforming all life into exchange value. These undercurrents are concealed, as the precondition, perhaps, for the revelation of other anthropological “truths”.

 

There is, therefore, a dynamic in anthropology that we can trace from the 19th century–one that extends between the seen, the unseen, revelation, concealment and, as Taussig had written, “the skilled revelation of skilled concealment” (Taussig 2003: 273). To be sure, this configuration changes over the course of anthropology's history. But it’s the imbrication of anthropology in this dynamic that betrays anthropology’s embeddedness in capitalism and western imperialism as a whole for, as an economic system, capitalism depends on concealment for its strength: the alienation of labor, the destruction of the global south and, ultimately, the untimely end of human life on this planet. All of these must be concealed for the revelation of value and the novelty of production.

 

Marx, of course, realized this at the fore, and his Capital contains references to the very same Spiritualist practices that perturbed Wallace and Tylor in the 1870s. A table is “just” some wood joined together, he explains:

But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing on its own free will. (Marx 1990: 163-164)

This was, of course, an allusion to the “table lifting” practices in seances. The commodity itself issues from the dialectic of revelation and concealment, and the 19th century’s human sciences soon craft their own “dancing tables” discerning culture, society and the psyche through the very same transformational calculus. Yet even in this critical revelation, we would be wise to think about the concealments that enable this insight.