AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST
WORLD ANTHROPOLOGIES
Interview
World Anthropologies: A Portuguese–Brazilian Conversation
Bela Feldman-Bianco
UNICAMP (State University of Campinas), Brazil
Miguel Vale de Almeida
ISCTE-University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal
B ela Feldman-Bianco (UNICAMP, Brazil; Figure 1) and
Miguel Vale de Almeida (ISCTE, Portugal; Figure 2) are
both members of the special advisory board of the World An-
thropologies section of American Anthropologist. In 2016, sec-
tion editor Virginia R. Dominguez checked in with the entire
advisory board, asking for suggestions and explaining that she
was contemplating a different set of genres. One such genre
was a mutual interview, and she gave the example of Bela and
Miguel possibly interviewing each other in person, via email,
Skype, or live chat, or any combination of these, and either
in Portuguese or English. Bela and Miguel agreed right away
but were only able to do this in July and August 2017. That
the mutual interview proved substantive and gratifying to
all of us is a testament to the richness of their experiences
both inside and outside of the academy. The mutual inter-
view was conducted in Portuguese, and Virginia translated
the interview into English (and, of course, ran it by the au-
thors). Their words reflect two lives well lived, two sets of
strategic choices well made, and two colleagues who frankly
exemplify the very idea of engaged anthropology.
FIGURE 1. Bela Feldman-Bianco. [This figure appears in color in the
online issue]
BFB: This is an excellent opportunity to have us re-
flect on our critical Luso-Brazilian dialogues in the context
of world anthropologies, an idea that, in essence, aims to
contribute to “the development of many anthropologies less
AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 120, No. 1, pp. 126–152, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. 
Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12991
influenced by hegemonic centers and more open to plurality”
(RAM-WAN, n.d.). Just like in the case of other anthropol-
ogists who have promoted this idea of anthropologies in the
plural, our own academic and professional training has in-
cluded studies in our own semiperipheral countries as well
as the United States, one of the central countries. These
transnational experiences we have had (of both study and of
life in general) require, as you well know, mastering more
than one language to be able to engage in dialogues and pro-
duce knowledge beyond our own national anthropologies.
This means, of course, that we have to both read and
keep on top of what is published in these central anthropolo-
gies, namely, the North American, English, and French ones.
In addition, in accordance with our research and interlocu-
tors, we also have to read, write, and produce knowledge in
other languages. For example, in my case this entails work
not just in Portuguese and English but also in Spanish. In this
landscape, taking into account our critical Luso-Brazilian
dialogues about nation, diaspora, empire, Portuguese colo-
nialism, and postcolonialism that we commenced in the late
1990s, I propose that we take into account here our locations
in the production of knowledge. We are from semiperipheral
countries, but we also participate in and potentially con-
tribute to the hegemonic center. We talk to each other, but
we also have other interlocutors both in the Global South and
in the hegemonic centers of anthropology. Are we subaltern
or cosmopolitan? Are we producing knowledge that contests
or reaffirms the hegemonic center? Does this knowledge
we produce become part of what is called “epistemologies
from the South”? Or are we more open to plurality? What
are the relationships among bilingualism, trilingualism,
or even multilingualism and the production of knowledge
in English? These are questions I ask just to start our
conversation.
MVA: What you pinpoint, in fact, describes very well
the situation of all anthropologists who are not in or from the
United States, Britain, or France. Perhaps those who work
in recently decolonized contexts feel a third thing because
they also have to relate themselves to (what I call) the semi-
hegemonic places. For example, I am thinking of a Mozambi-
can anthropologist relating to Portuguese anthropology. But
they, too, could in fact “pluralize” their dialogues with other
anthropologists who try to decolonize their countries’ rela-
tions, such as British colleagues, or with other postcolonial
anthropologists, such as those in South Africa.
C 2018 by the American Anthropological

FIGURE 2. Miguel Vale de Almeida. [This figure appears in color in the
online issue]
But perhaps I should start by reacting to your text with a
bit of my personal biography. My undergraduate education
had a lot of French influence, although it also included some
Anglo-American works. We also had a national Portuguese
tradition focused on the interpretation of Portugal’s identity,
an interpretation I think is redeemable, by the way, even
though it was produced in the midst of the dictatorship and
of colonialism. I spent my entire undergraduate education
reading in French and English because very little was trans-
lated into Portuguese. I don’t know when and how people
in Brazil accessed these texts. Of course, Brazil itself is very
different given the gigantic nature of the internal market of
your country. When I finished my first degree, I felt the need
to go to “the center” to feel more “competent” as an anthro-
pologist, and that was the United States, in my case. I also
had personal reasons because I had gone there as a seventeen-
year-old exchange student and completed my senior year of
high school there. Only many years later did I return to the
United States, in 1984, for my master’s degree. It was only in
the mid-1990s that I went to Brazil for the first time to partic-
ipate in an ABA (the Brazilian Association of Anthropology)
event at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (commonly
known only as UFRJ). It was during the presidency of João
Pacheco de Oliveira (1994–1996), and it was organized with
the collaboration of Portuguese anthropologist Cristiana
Bastos, who then doing research in Brazil in connection
with her doctoral training in the United States. It was only
World Anthropologies 127
then (and somewhat by accident) that I discovered Brazilian
anthropology.
BFB: I was also at that ABA event; and what did you
think?
MVA: I recall that you and I first collaborated a
bit later with the Colonial Transits initiative and that it
drew on postcolonial and imperial questions inflected by
historical and anthropological points of view.1 After all,
that agenda, that theme, was established in the centers (of
anthropology)—especially in the United Kingdom and the
United States. They were very much influenced by people
from the ex-colonies who managed to get to the centers, or
at least have access to them (especially people from former
British colonies). That is to say that we (both Brazilians and
Portuguese anthropologists) know and articulate ideas, first
and foremost, in light of a topical agenda and research con-
ducted by people in the former colonies and in the centers
they access. In that sense, we both “obey” the centers, but we
do what for me is always the best form of making a difference
and of moving or changing things a bit: instead of radically
“moving ourselves elsewhere” (after all, we don’t decolonize
from on high), we tackle those central themes and agendas
and we listen to them, but from a different angle.
BFB: A different angle?
MVA: Yes. Well, we had a shared intellectual and his-
torical experience of state expansion. This was an expansion
that treated colonialism as subsidiary or contingent, but that,
in fact, had “two moments.” In one case, Brazil transformed
itself into an enormous nation-state; in the other case,
Portugal developed what can only be rightly called “modern”
Portuguese colonialism focusing on Africa. It was that colo-
nial reality—itself marginal relative to other colonialisms
but nonetheless a colonialism based in Europe and control-
ling the rest of the world—that allows us a differential angle
(or detour) in our analyses, in my view. It is a differential
angle (or detour or perspective) that we still do not want
to turn into a Freyrian or Lusotropicalist exceptionalism.2
Yet this differential angle does seem worthwhile with
respect to certain things. I speak specifically of those things
that allow us simultaneously to perceive the centers (of
knowledge and power) that we belong to as colonizers,
including those elite, white sectors of Brazilian society, and
those things that have to do with being in a peripheral area
as well. Portuguese people, after all, have been seen by
those in northern Europe as “second-class whites” and our
having colonies as a “secondary or dependent colonialism.”
Brazilians, in turn, have long had an “internal colonialism”
yet are often seen as a global geopolitical subaltern society
straddling the “First World” and the “Third World.”
I spoke of too many things so far, but it is really this inter-
stitiality of the Portuguese language that I would like to focus
on (and concretize). When I have thought about it, I realize
that I am neither totally peripheral nor totally “dependent”
on a center (of knowledge and power). I am, after all, obliged
to show that I am competent within the center and on its
terms.
128 American Anthropologist • Vol. 120, No. 1 • March 2018
BFB: I agree with your comments. In a certain way, our
conversation in Portuguese (here) is mediated by our expo-
sure to Anglo-American anthropologies. I remember a con-
versation I had with João Pina-Cabral in which we reached
the conclusion that our exchanges in Portuguese flowed with
so much ease because both of us had been influenced by “the
Manchester School.” But it is also more than that. A proces-
sualist orientation was part of my undergraduate education
in the social sciences at the University of São Paulo (USP),
where the greatest challenge was how to combine Marx and
Weber, and this combination of Marxism and Weberianism
was also the base of a “theory of action” developed by Max
Gluckman’s disciples at the University of Manchester.
It’s worth remembering that the “São Paulo School of
Sociology” was very influential when I studied at USP in the
1960s. It was led by Florestan Fernandes at a time when
there wasn’t a clear distinction between sociology and an-
thropology. Florestan did research and had advisees in both
disciplines. In 1952, he published his classic book, A função
social da guerra na sociedade Tupinambá (The social foundation
of war in Tupinambá society), and he participated, along
with Roger Bastide, his mentor, in a UNESCO project
on race relations that aimed to decipher Brazil’s supposed
“racial democracy” as a “civilizational laboratory” (Chor Maio
1999).3 A fervent critic of Gilberto Freyre, Florestan later
led a race-relations project in the southern part of the coun-
try, which focused on the existing racial and class inequalities
between whites and blacks, contesting Freyre’s arguments.
Publications arising from this project came out when I was a
student there and clearly influenced my training.4 But Flo-
restan was already mostly working (along with his assistants)
on a sociological analysis of underdevelopment in Brazil,
and this was a topic that attracted students to sociology.
MVA: Do you really remember all that, and the
broader context?
BFB: I do remember. We lived during the Cold War,
a time of increasing cultural effervescence and political
polarization. We witnessed the expansion of popular culture
centers that denounced imperialism and underdevelopment,
while theater, music, and the New Brazilian Cinema focused
on Brazil’s national reality. I, for one, chose to study social
science because I wanted to pursue agrarian reform. In our
courses, we read classic Brazilian works and authors, along
with Latin American and Anglo-American ones like C.
Wright Mills, Albert Hirschman, Andre Gunther Frank, and
many other contributors to the Monthly Review (translated
into Portuguese). We also read the Martinican Franz Fanon,
along with French and German authors. I remember really
liking reading the work of Fernand Braudel and Pierre
Monbeig. Both were part of the so-called “French mission”
team, along with Claude Levi-Strauss, that came to Brazil
to help structure USP at the time of its foundation in the
1930s. Although a Portuguese translation of his Tristes
Tropiques came out in the late 1950s, Levi-Strauss still was
not very popular at the time I was at USP. For me and
my generation, however, a major influence was French
existentialism—Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, and the nouvelle
vague (new wave). And, of course, the Cuban revolution
was a central reference for us as we still lived in a world
divided between capitalism and socialism, where utopia
prevailed (in our dreams and political actions).
The military coup of 1964 changed our lives. It resulted
in a twenty-year dictatorship that became more repressive in
1968 and as late as 1978. Several of our university professors
were fired. This was especially true of those in political
science and sociology, including Florestan Fernandes. Many
of my friends and acquaintances chose guerrilla warfare.
Some were incarcerated, some tortured, and some died. I
left Brazil in 1969. I accompanied my former husband who
had been invited to be a research fellow in the Immunology
Department at NYU. We were going to stay for two years,
but I ended up staying for ten years. For a while, we just
could not return to Brazil because some of our friends
and acquaintances in prison would, under torture, give the
names of Brazilians abroad instead of subjecting those at
home to arrest and imprisonment. So we ended up on a
blacklist for many years.
MVA: So that is how you ended up in the United States?
BFB: Yes, I never thought about living in the United
States. I dreamed about being an existentialist in Paris. But
these political circumstances and twists and turns in life led
me to work for my MA and PhD at Columbia University
in the 1970s. I chose anthropology at the suggestion of
Florestan Fernandes. I was further stimulated to pursue
this field of study by several young US anthropologists who
were writing their theses on Brazilian themes and who I
met, mostly through Judith Shapiro, when I moved to New
York. It was a hard period for me, especially in my personal
life. I felt exiled. But it was also a very enriching period,
and I learned a lot. I lived New York’s cultural-political
effervescence, I marched against the war in Vietnam, I
became involved in the feminist movement, and I got
divorced. I went to events organized by the Black Panthers
and the Young Lords and, together with other Brazilian
and Brazilianist friends, I did everything in my power as a
militant fighting against the “War on Terror” in Brazil.
At Columbia, I encountered debates among multiple
paradigms (which forced me to systematically examine
how questions are formulated in order to understand
how paradigms are built). I believe that being exposed to
different anthropologies and living in-between countries
presented me with intellectual and life challenges. I
continued to be interested in studying capitalism and social
inequalities, whether focusing on questions of power at
the local level or on transnational migration. That interest
preceded my academic immersion. A few professors at
Columbia imagined I would study some Indigenous group.
There was then a certain presumption, even a prejudice,
against urban anthropology and anthropology “at home.”
MVA: How did your transnational experiences, and
particularly the Luso-Brazilian experiences, influence your
work?

BFB: In retrospect, I see how much my Brazilian expe-
rience shaped my training and academic formation. In these
moves between different kinds of anthropology, it was key
for me to bring together a political economic analysis and an
analysis of culture. At the same time, our critical Portuguese-
Brazilian dialogues were essential for me, both personally
and as a scholar. This is also true of the exchanges I have had
over the past decade with Latin American sociologists and an-
thropologists. These multiple critical dialogues open up new
horizons for me. They stimulate me intellectually. Mainly,
I feel at ease with my Portuguese and Latin American col-
leagues. It is all very familiar, whether it is in Portuguese or in
Spanish. We (in the semiperiphery) share a great deal, includ-
ing on a political level. But I also feel quite at home with US
anthropologists on the left. In the end, I participate in several
critical anthropologies, always located in a particular place
and marked by a certain kind of Otherness. I always feel like
a bit of an outsider, as someone who challenges the dominant
forms of knowledge (and knowledge production), including
in Brazil. Isn’t this the goal of world anthropologies?
MVA: Do you have a sense of how this has affected
you in more recent years, and perhaps especially how this
has affected your relations with us in Portugal?
BFB: Well, my exchanges with Portuguese social sci-
entists began toward the end of the 1980s when, after I had
finished my postdoc in labor history at Yale, I was hired as
University Professor of Portuguese Studies at the University
of Massachusetts Dartmouth. I was then in charge of stimu-
lating and generating studies on Portuguese immigrants and
Portuguese Americans in southern Massachusetts. Initially,
it was a two-year contract, but I stayed five years because of
several activities in which I took part. It wasn’t just in teach-
ing and research. It was also cultural and political interven-
tion. At the time, given my immigration experience, I found
myself quite torn between living in the United States and
living in Brazil. It was in the midst of research about the cul-
tural construction of nostalgia5 that I came to understand this
tension inside me and that I was able to reconstruct myself
as a person. So, that experience of mine among Portuguese
people both in Portugal and in the diaspora was key to my
personal reconstruction. Does this make sense, Miguel?
MVA: Yes, it does, though I had little idea of it at the
time. Can you tell us more?
BFB: I first went to continental Portugal in 1988 at
the suggestion of some interlocutors during my fieldwork
in New England. They kept saying that for me to get to
know them I really had to know where they came from.
It was then that I started a collaboration with the Centro
de Estudos Sociais (CES, or Social Studies Center) at the
University of Coimbra. I became a research associate there
at the invitation of Boaventura de Sousa Santos. As a result,
I also started to meet anthropologists in Portugal.
I remember I met your colleague, Brian Juan O’Neill,
through historian Linda Lewin. It was during my first
stay in Portugal. I was very surprised when he told me
that he used one of my books, Antropologia das sociedades
World Anthropologies 129
contemporâneas: Metodos (Anthropology of contemporary
societies: Methods), which was published in 1987. This
was a book distributed throughout Portugal and its former
colonies in Africa because the publisher’s owner was from
Mozambique. I think I met you before we met each other
in Rio de Janeiro (the event hosted by ABA in 1995, which
proved to be important because it brought together for the
first time in the Portuguese postcolonial era anthropologists
from Brazil and Portugal).
Susana Matos Viegas had research plans in Bahia and
got in touch with me at Boaventura’s suggestion. We
collaborated on a project we called “Desafios à Identidade:
Portugueses, Brasileiros e Afro-Brasileiros num Mundo
Globalizado” (Challenges to Identity: Portuguese, Brazilian,
and Afro-Brazilian Peoples in a Globalized World). It
allowed us funding for research missions between Brazil
and Portugal, and this is how our Luso-Brazilian dialogues
started to develop.
MVA: More than transnational, it was a plurilocalized
trajectory, wouldn’t you agree? There you were: a Brazilian
anthropologist studying in the United States, researching
Portuguese migration there (in the United States) and also
developing scholarly contacts in Portugal.
BFB: Transnational interlocutions are part of my tra-
jectory. During my time as a student at Columbia, I became
friends with several anthropologists with whom I still have
much in common, both about anthropology and about life
in general. Then, when I started doing research on the Por-
tuguese in New Bedford, I also developed good exchanges
with oral-history and labor-history specialists, experts on
migration, and even colleagues in Portuguese and Brazilian
studies at Brown. These colleagues, and particularly
Onézimo Teotónio Almeida, introduced me to literature on
the Portuguese in the United States, including fiction. I really
appreciated these exchanges, and some of them remain long-
term connections. But it was especially stimulating for me to
develop dialogues with anthropologists who were then doing
fieldwork on “new immigrants” in US cities—that is to say,
immigrants who moved to these US cities between 1960 and
1980—and who in the course of their fieldwork were devel-
oping a transnational perspective on migration (Basch, Glick
Schiller, and Szanton Blanc 1993; Glick Schiller, Basch, and
Szanton Blanc 1992). Like me, they focused on migration
as part of the dynamics of capital formation. We shared
political and theoretical positions beyond the specificities of
our work and our national and regional traditions. I consider
it very important that these disciplinary and interdisciplinary
horizons cut across the Global North and Global South.
This used to happen during the Cold War, when the idea of
a Third World, conveying disputes between capitalism and
socialism, was appropriated by intellectuals and activists
of the left as a tool against imperialism. It’s for that reason
that I have some resistance to the notion of “epistemologies
from the South,” though I agree that we always have to
locate ourselves critically and, thereby, problematize and
challenge hegemonic productions of knowledge.
130 American Anthropologist • Vol. 120, No. 1 • March 2018
Clearly, I agree with John Comaroff’s characterization
of anthropology as a/n “(in)discipline whose conceptual
foundations and techniques of knowledge production have
an infinite potential to open up new horizons” (2010, 533).
Our ethnographic discoveries are of utmost importance
in formulating and revising paradigms. For example, the
transnational perspective on migration was developed in the
United States based on fieldwork done with migrants from
former colonies of various European powers. In compari-
son, my own study focused on the secular migration to New
Bedford of different groups of Portuguese people coming
from different regions of an old imperial European power,
which was also by then positioned as a country of emigrants
in the global political economy. It was obviously crucial for
me to examine the double positioning of Portugal as an old
imperial power and a country of emigration. I had to look
into the repercussions of this double positioning in everyday
life, in work, and in the mobility patterns of different gener-
ations of Portuguese migrants and their descendants, and to
pay attention to the different regions of Portugal they came
from even though they had all come to this “gateway city”
in New England. But the adoption of a transnational per-
spective on migration at the time proved to be insufficient,
given my work in New Bedford. It would just have allowed
me to focus on one dimension (of the reconfiguration) of
the postcolonial Portuguese nation—that is, of “immigrant
Portugal” (Feldman-Bianco 1992, 1993, 1995, 2009a).
But you, Miguel, will probably ask about my return
to Brazil as well. Here it goes. I resumed my work at
UNICAMP in 1992 and, a couple of years later, in the
context of comparative fieldwork research, I perceived a
need to develop tools to allow me to relate the migration
question to the imperial/postcolonial question. I was
then doing work comparing the Portuguese migration to
New Bedford and São Paulo, and of Brazilians to Lisbon.
Unfortunately, questions about migration and empire were
studied separately due to the prevailing positivism, except
perhaps in cultural studies. This “state of the art” led me
to plan the workshop, Nation and Diaspora: Cross-Cutting
Luso-Brazilian Conversations, that we held at UNICAMP in
Brazil in 1998. This was how I became interested in the Luso-
Brazilian empire along with the reconstruction of relations
between former colonizer and the former colonized—all, of
course, in the larger context of Portuguese colonial spaces.
Growing out of these discussions, as you will remem-
ber, we organized a seminar called “Tensões Coloniais
e Reconfigurações Pós-Coloniais” (Colonial Tensions and
Post-Colonial Reconfigurations) in 1999 in Arrábida, Por-
tugal, jointly with Cristiana Bastos. It wasn’t by chance that
we used as a frequent reference Frederick Cooper and Ann
Stoler’s Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World
(1994), a book that focused on modern-day empires. Amid
our discussions, it was key to me to understand the specifici-
ties of Portugal’s long-term colonial empire with its different
historical imperial periods along with its transformation into
a subaltern power as global capitalism expanded. It was also
crucial for me to see colonial continuities as well as the re-
configuration of imperial ideologies in postcolonial Portugal.
I believe that we contributed to the scholarly literature
because of our location as fieldworkers and scholars between
the semiperiphery and the center. But, noticeably, only
one of our publications—a special issue called “Colonialism
as a Continuing Project: The Portuguese Experience”—
published in 2001 in Identities: Global Studies in Culture and
Power came out in English. The articles we included are valu-
able ones, but for some reason they have never been placed
online, which suggests that we still confront the problem
of distribution of our knowledge in the lingua franca. I like
writing for different publics, and in Portuguese, English,
and even Spanish, but it takes quite a bit of time because it
is not just a matter of translation in the simplest sense. It is
often a matter of rewriting because we think differently in
each language. We are, for example, now writing to each
other in Portuguese, through email, which makes great
sense, but, to be honest, I am rather worried about how
this will appear in translation into English. I think that the
matter of language remains the big challenge for the world
anthropologies project. I think of it as the question of how
to change unequal relations into more horizontal relations,
whether in English or undoubtedly any lingua franca.
MVA: So you agree with me about the importance of
language?
BFB: Yes, I agree with you about the importance
of language. However, I don’t know if I agree with you
completely that the imperial and colonial question is only
part of the agenda of postcolonial researchers and of the
“centers” where they live and work. This topic might have
been established in those centers, but I think it still forms an
intrinsic part of the agenda of Portuguese researchers. After
all, Portugal’s long-lived colonialism (or should I say colo-
nialisms) was constitutive of Portuguese history, together
with the fifty years of dictatorship in the twentieth century
and the Carnation Revolution (of 1974) that overthrew the
dictatorship; and it wasn’t by chance that many Portuguese
anthropologists chose to do research in Portugal’s former
colonies once they stopped doing fieldwork in Portuguese
villages. So I think that the question of empire and post-
coloniality is key to the critical Portuguese anthropology
people are doing today. It is also noteworthy that Brazilian
anthropologists have likewise chosen to do fieldwork in
Lusophone (Portuguese-speaking) Africa as well as in Goa
and Timor Leste (the latter two also former Portuguese
colonies)—all connected to the internationalization of
fieldwork. Remember that our own critical exchanges were
from the beginning based on such research, but I regret that
we were unable to include Angolan, Mozambican, and other
anthropologists and historians in our discussions at the time.
Now we are at another critical moment. Both Brazil
and Portugal now get more students and researchers from
Portugal’s ex-colonies. Most of these are from Angola, the
Cape Verde Islands, and Mozambique, and they come to do
their first degrees as well as their graduate degrees in both

Portugal and Brazil. We (in Brazil) also get many students
from other parts of Latin America. It is worth remembering
that under Lula there was an expansion of university courses.
This expansion included the creation of two very interesting
public universities. One was the University of International
Integration of Afro-Brazilian Lusophonia (UNILAB), which
was sought by the black movement in Brazil. The other
was the Federal University of Latin American Integration
(UNILA), which is now facing the risk of extinction due to
congressional efforts to limit educational expenditures. Like
all public universities in Brazil, both UNILA and UNILAB are
suffering serious financial problems at the moment because
of the country’s grave economic and political circumstances.
We need to incorporate these students and researchers even
more into our discussions, or we risk reproducing our own
centers and peripheries in knowledge production. In fact,
I believe that it is those colleagues from African countries
who gained independence through revolution who might
bring new angles to enrich our Lusophone anthropologies
and, consequently, the plurality of world anthropologies.
MVA: You know that I began my career studying
gender, especially masculinity, and that after publishing my
doctoral thesis (Senhores de si: Uma interpretação anthropológica
da masculinidade [1995], which appeared in English as The
Hegemonic Male: Masculinity in a Portuguese Town [1996]),
I wanted to start a new type of research project. I have
never been one to keep to one topic or site, just like I have
never just dedicated myself to academia. I do activist work
and politics, and I participate in public opinion on multiple
fronts, including social media. But it was a change for me, in
any case. Despite everything, I wanted to do research on dis-
crimination. I have always been fascinated by societies that
became plural or mixed as a result of slaveholding and the
colonial processes that shaped them. So, in the mid-1990s, I
went to Trinidad and Tobago on a “scouting” mission (or to
do a pilot project). I became intrigued by something I had not
planned to research and that I knew nothing about—namely,
the community of Portuguese descendants, especially from
the Madeira Islands, who were taken to Trinidad and Tobago
as indentured laborers to take the place of slaves. True,
some went because of religious persecution after converting
to Presbyterianism in Madeira, but most were indentured
laborers. I was taken in by many of them probably because
of my national origin, though I was certainly not seeking
it. More than anything, I ended up talking and writing
about how relations between empires, racial classifications,
and statutory hierarchies and their processes were not
really dichotomous. They were, I argued, more like those
Russian dolls that have other Russian dolls inside them, and
still others inside those. I realized that the Portuguese in
Trinidad were not quite white people in the eyes of the British.
But as it turned out, I did not proceed with research
there. Susana Matos Viegas convinced me to join her in doing
research in Bahia, Brazil. She was working on a project that
focused on the processes of renewal of Indigenous identities,
and I began work there on the politics of cultural identity
World Anthropologies 131
of the black movement. That is how I spent eight months in
Ilhéus, in southern Bahia, working with local black entities.
But do you know what happened? I was perceived as
Portuguese and white, which meant that my interlocutors
put me in the category of “colonizer.” In all the literature
I read about the construction of Brazil and its debates about
race and class, I systematically faced what João Pina-Cabral
has called “the process of expansion of the Portuguese state”
(which, in turn, includes the initial expansion, the coloniza-
tion of Brazil, and Portugal’s modern colonialism in Africa,
all of them quite different). I began to be curious about
Lusotropicalism and the way Freyre’s theory of Portuguese
expansion and colonialism, and the formation of Brazil was
used by the Portuguese dictatorship to legitimize colonialism
in Africa in the second half of the twentieth century and
its totalitarian regime. I became interested in the ways this
survives in visions of Portuguese society today (which sees
itself as nonracist and as heir to a mild colonialism).
You write about similarities between Portugal and
Brazil, right? That’s why the piece I published based on
this work (Um mar da cor da terra: Raça, cultura e polı́tica da
identidade [2000], published in English as An Earth-Colored Sea:
Race, Culture and the Politics of Identity in the Portuguese-Speaking
World [2003]) ended up highlighting the critical analysis of
colonial legacies in postcolonial Portugal. This took place at
the same time that Cristiana Bastos and Cláudia Castelo, for
example, were working on this issue, indicating (perhaps)
a tendency in our local Portuguese social sciences to inter-
vene in this question of national identity, then dominated
by images coming from the dictatorship and colonialism but
passed into the general public and “whitewashed” by our lib-
eral democracy, which stressed a supposedly universalist and
humanist colonialism. Many of these concerns were part of
our discussions in Trânsitos coloniais (Colonial transits) (Bas-
tos, Vale de Almeida, and Feldman-Bianco 2002, 2007) and
became part of the motivation for many, many Brazilian stu-
dents who started to visit us in Lisbon around the year 2000
(whether at ISCTE or at ICS or in FCSH6 ), especially those
with research projects about Brazilians migrating to Portugal
and questions about race, ethnicity, and nation. Of course,
many Brazilian students also began to work on questions of
gender and (especially) sexuality, and not just because of my
1995 book, Senhores de si (The hegemonic male). They also
became interested because of my later political and academic
work on homosexuality, which itself led to my becoming a
member of parliament and the 2010 legalization of same-sex
marriage. My 2009 book, A chave do armário: Homossexuali-
dade, casamento, famı́lia (The key to the closet: Homosexual-
ity, marriage, family; not available in English) details all this.
I agree with you that we do nothing if we do not
acknowledge the schools and countries that influenced us
in our training, just as much as our conversations with
colleagues around the world. My experience with the
European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), for
example, has been very productive. There is, in fact, a great
deal of diversity and power inequality in Europe itself, but
132 American Anthropologist • Vol. 120, No. 1 • March 2018
this doesn’t mean that EASA itself is a “hegemonic” space for
a Portuguese anthropologist, because the quality of our work
is recognized and our representation is disproportionately
high in the association compared to other countries and to
population size. We also balance this connection with our
privileged link to the Brazilian Anthropological Association
(ABA) and Brazil in general, where our positions are
inverted given issues of scale. The size of ABA is quite
something to us in Portugal. Portuguese anthropologists
(like me) face the high level of political and social engage-
ment of anthropologists in Brazil, which is much lower in
Portugal and even more generally in Europe. In my own
case, it is interesting that my international connections
are more with EASA and ABA than with the American
Anthropological Association (AAA) or with the Association
of Social Anthropologists (ASA) based in Britain. This is not
necessarily the case with many other Portuguese colleagues,
however.
Moreover, even though there is a potential link to
colleagues and institutions in African countries that have
Portuguese as an official language (because they are former
colonies of Portugal) that could turn into a counterhege-
monic form of diversity, this can also be parochial. We
really do have to strive to discuss things and publish work
between us but also beyond us. That means publishing and
presenting work in English in international forums. I think
this gives us what W. E. B. Du Bois (1903) called a “double-
consciousness”—we are able to master the language and
worldview of the “center” and the language and worldview
of a certain part of the subaltern world. This may be easier
in Portugal than in Brazil. Portugal, after all, is a small
country, and its anthropological community is also small.
Brazil, on the other hand, is gigantic, and anthropology
there has an enormous influence and, therefore, an internal
self-sufficiency. Perhaps. But in both contexts we really
should not forget the internal divisions by class and race in
our countries. This also obliges us not to confuse claims to
“the national.” There are, after all, many subaltern groups in
our societies, groups that are not acknowledged as such in
our societies or in our public spaces (and, in this respect, the
situation with Afro-descendants or with the Roma is worse
in Portugal than in Brazil). Also, in order to avoid parochial-
ism and participate (more) in international discussions, we
need to do research in non-Portuguese-speaking contexts.
Good examples might be your work as a Brazilian anthro-
pologist working with Portuguese immigrants to the United
States and my work (not yet published) with Brazilian Jews
in Israel.
BFB: I find your ability to multitask incredible. I also
find it incredible that you have managed to take up different
topics and do research in different locations over the years,
and to do it quite well! I am different. Ever since I became
an anthropologist, my activities have tended to be based
on academic life and its research, teaching, and political
aspects. This has also been true of my involvement in the
politics of science, scientific associations, and migration
politics. And yet, despite our different ways of being and our
different strategies, I think that we have a lot in common.
Both of us like fieldwork and are politically active.
I enjoy ethnohistorical research—that is, deciphering
enigmas and apparent paradoxes amid the complexities
inherent to the unfolding of social processes over time and
space. In my case, it seems that one case study can be added
to and even related to another. Also, each study requires us
to think carefully about our relations with our “subjects” in
our research (Are they actors? Are they partners?). It wasn’t
by chance that I focused on the construction of nostalgia
(saudade) in my research in New Bedford—at the level of
the self and at the level of the Portuguese nation. I wanted
to understand the social construction of Portuguese-ness in
a region where Portuguese immigrants had for more than
a century been pejoratively known as the “Black Portugee.”
When I started fieldwork in the city, in the late 1980s, they
still suffered aggravated discrimination and xenophobia due
to a notorious case of gang rape that took place a few years
earlier, in 1983. All the protagonists in this drama were
Portuguese. The six unemployed Azoreans—accused and
incarcerated for the rape—had only recently moved to the
city. The victim and the judges were all Portuguese Ameri-
cans. New Bedford, long famous as “the whaling city,” and for
Moby Dick itself, became “the Portuguese gang-rape capital
of America.” The film The Accused portrays this rape without
the ethnic dimension because it was pressured to omit
this ethnic dimension by the city itself and the Portuguese
American associations (Feldman-Bianco 2012, 2014).
MVA: Wasn’t it in the middle of all that that you took
up your position at UMass Dartmouth? That must have
been some experience!
BFB: Yes, indeed. UMass Dartmouth created the
University Professorship of Portuguese Studies chair in
response to the demands made by Portuguese leaders and
the Portuguese Americans of the region. So, when I took up
this position, I received the mandate to involve faculty and
students (many of them of Portuguese origin) in research
activities connected to this migration. I decided to embark
on projects that were cultural and political interventions.
We focused on producing written and audiovisual materials
that would have scholarly value but could also serve to
educate the community more generally—with respect
to the variety of migration experiences, everyday lives,
and work. We were interested both in recent Portuguese
immigrants themselves and in the descendants of Portuguese
people who settled in the region. I chose to implement
an oral history project in collaboration with faculty and
students at UMass Dartmouth in order to record memories
of the Portuguese migration to this region. Based on the
oral histories I collected, I conceived and directed a visual
ethnography I called Saudade (which translates in English
to a yearning or nostalgia). Working with filmmakers Peter
O’Neill and Michael Majoros, we made versions in English
and Portuguese.7 A local New Bedford publisher, whose
focus is local history, published a book, titled Portuguese

Spinner: An American History, based on our Portuguese Oral
History collection (McCabe and Thomas 1998).
These projects were conceived in collaboration with
Portuguese immigrants and descendants of Portuguese im-
migrants. They showed the human dimension of migration
and the dignity of these people. Saudade, to some extent,
belongs now to the Portuguese community. It is used a lot
in the schools and universities in New England as well as in
California where there are also Portuguese-origin commu-
nities. It is also shown in some Brazilian universities, and I
hope it is still also shown in some universities in Portugal. I
know that it is also sometimes shown on RTP International,
and the oral history book, Portuguese Spinner, became a best
seller in the region, although it has been sold out for some
years. Thankfully, the collection of oral histories is available
at the Ferreira Mendes Portuguese Archives.8
If my work on the New Bedford case sheds light on
the production of difference, most noteworthy in my
comparative study of Portuguese people in São Paulo and
Brazilians in Lisbon was the recurrent theme of similarities
(and even sameness) and differences between Portugal and
Brazil. These differences, by the way, were exacerbated
by mutual stereotypes each migrant group had of the host
community. Looking carefully at these identity games, I
showed how Brazilian and other Lusophone immigrants have
emphasized sameness in their mobilizations in favor of their
rights in Portugal. Those strategies, I have argued, reinforce
the production of imperial continuities (Feldman-Bianco
2001a, 2001b, 2001c, 2004a, 2004b, 2007, 2010).
I think this analysis was valuable when, in the 1990s, I
changed my focus from the Portuguese to the social history
of New Bedford through the lens of migration. I was able
to see how the incorporation of Portuguese immigrants and
descendants in this city meshed with their incorporation into
Portugal and, by extension, the European Union. From that
perspective, I was able to relate the transnational agency
of these immigrants and descendants to the differential
repositioning of New Bedford and Portugal in the global
political economy. This also allowed me to see change in the
image of the Portuguese in New Bedford and its surrounding
region. As in the case of other European immigrants to
the United States, the Portuguese underwent a process
of whitening. The affluent and influential elite garnered
prestigious positions. Yet, with the closing of local factories,
most Portuguese immigrants and their descendants faced
hardship and flexible labor. Most of all, I exposed the
paradoxes that permeate the ongoing neoliberal projects that
are grounded in the flexible organization of labor, restrictive
immigration policies justified by national security concerns
that criminalize immigrants, and ideologies of cultural
diversity (Feldman-Bianco 2009b, 2011a, 2012, 2015).
When I began my conversations with Latin Americans,
I also returned to my study in Lisbon. I realized that I had
another story to tell, this time about how those Brazilian mi-
grants in Lisbon led the fight for their rights in Brazil. A global
movement emerged after the post-Schengen draconian
World Anthropologies 133
measures were put in place. These measures criminalized
undocumented immigrants, and these Brazilians in Lisbon
led a social movement of the so-called Brazilians abroad. I fol-
lowed all this closely and collaborated with the International
Seminar of Brazilian Emigration held in Lisbon in 1997.
This seminar gathered together for the first time migrants,
Brazilian and Portuguese government representatives, stu-
dents of migration, and the church, and it focused on the
need for public policies directed to those Brazilians abroad. I
also participated in 2002 in a conference called “The Iberian
Encounter of Brazilian Communities Abroad,” also held in
Lisbon. It was part of the Brazilians Abroad Project (Projeto
Brasileiros no Exterior) organized by the Regional Legal Of-
fice of the Rights of the Citizen at the Federal District Level
(the Procuradoria Regional dos Direitos do Cidadão do Dis-
trito Federal). It was a time when undocumented Brazilians
were being imprisoned and deported. The Lisbon Report,
resulting from this conference, became a reference guid-
ing public policies. Under Lula, this globalized movement
contributed to the formulation of public policies in Brazil di-
rected to Brazilians abroad. It also stimulated a movement of
immigrants in Brazil and articulated with it. All this, Miguel,
became much more intense after the 2004 Global Social Fo-
rum of Migrations led by Brazilians tied to liberation theol-
ogy and involved in emigration and immigration questions,
especially in São Paulo (Feldman-Bianco 2011b, 2016).
MVA: Is this how you became an activist?
BFB: Well, I have always been an activist. A number of
circumstances led me to participate in activities that aimed
to change migration laws in Brazil, where the Foreigner’s
Statute (Estatuto do Estrangeiro) will be in force until
November 2017, when it will be replaced by a new migra-
tion law whose final version we are still trying to improve.
This dated back to the dictatorship. When I was president of
ABA from 2011 to 2012, I created an International Migration
working group (GT Migracões Internacionais), and since
2013 I have chaired its Migrations and Displacements Com-
mittee. That same year I was nominated to be a councilor
on the National Immigration Council, where I represent
the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science. I was
also invited to hold a UNESCO/Latin American Memorial
chair for a semester, where I taught an extension course
about migrations and displacements that drew immigrants,
students, people who work with immigrants and refugees,
government bureaucrats, and even Latin American consuls.
With all these activities and further participation in the
organizing committee of the 2016 Global Social Forum on
Migration in São Paulo, I discovered a different and more
interesting São Paulo through the lens of immigration.
Well, guess what? I am back doing “anthropology at home.”
I am beginning to study the social movements of immigrants
and refugees in the city, with a focus on their political and
cultural productions. I want to know what the chances are of
having these immigrant and refugee movements join other
local movements of people at the margins—such as rural
migrants, Indigenous people, and blacks (Afro-Brazilians)
134 American Anthropologist • Vol. 120, No. 1 • March 2018
living in the urban periphery. This is already happening
through music, rap, and feminist movements, and it is very
interesting. But all the time now I am aware of and reflect
on my various roles as researcher and activist.
I am now involved in several projects (requiring more
than one life!). I am currently finishing an ABA project with
Daniel Simião. It is about anthropology in Brazil, and it
follows the research done by Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and
Wilson Trajano for the 1992–2002 period (Trajano and
Ribeiro 2002). We are now taking a twenty-year approach
to anthropology in Brazil. This era of ours, under Lula, was
a period of great expansion of graduate programs in social
anthropology (in Brazil). I have much to do with this ex-
pansion, as I represented anthropology and archaeology at
the Council of Higher Education (CAPES) from 2005 to
2007, at a time when there was great demand in the Brazil-
ian north and northeast regions for anthropology courses. I
am very proud that we succeeded in creating the first doc-
toral program in anthropology in the Amazon. Our findings
are quite interesting. Yet, right now we are confronting
harsh times with the cuts in education and research fund-
ing as a result of current ongoing neoliberal policies. As
you know, anthropologists—including ABA itself and some
of the populations we study, such as Indigenous people and
quilombolas—are being attacked by rural and agrobusiness in-
terests in the national congress and senate. Moreover, there
is a lot of xenophobia toward immigrants. We live in dark
times and, also, times of much struggle.
So, yes, I continue to be active in ABA, also in the
Council of Latin American Social Sciences (CLACSO), and
was very active in AAA until recently. Together with Carla
Guerron-Montero, I coordinated the AAA’s Committee on
World Anthropology (CWA) from 2013 to 2015. One of
our main projects was the creation of a section in American
Anthropologist dedicated to world anthropologies, which
we eventually succeeded in having, after much discussion
and negotiation. Then Editor-in-Chief Mike Chibnik was
open to our ideas and clearly so is current Editor-in-Chief
Deborah Thomas. It is, therefore, quite a pleasure to
have this conversation of ours appear in this section of AA
“occupied” by world anthropologies.
I do think that it would be really good if our colleagues
in the former Portuguese colonies who went through
wars of independence started to “occupy” and transform
Portuguese-language anthropologies. As I see it, Indigenous
feminists, LGBTI people, and other marginalized protago-
nists are the ones currently transforming the social sciences
and anthropology in particular. The best presentation I heard
at the last Luso-Afro-Brazilian meetings, held in Lisbon a
couple of years ago, was delivered by a Mozambican scholar
on a panel on “Epistemologies from the Global South.”
MVA: I think that the most original and special thing
about this conversation that we are having in/about world
anthropologies is that it is occurring in Portuguese and focus-
ing on our shared historical-cultural experience. I care about
the language issue and appreciate being able to do this in
Portuguese. Consider some key differences. When a Czech
colleague is invited to speak about Czech anthropology, they
are going to speak about Czech anthropology, period. But
when a French colleague is invited to speak about French
anthropology, they are going to speak about it but probably
not about Francophone anthropology more generally (talk-
ing with a colleague in Quebec or Haiti). Perhaps something
like what you and I are doing here would happen in the case
of Spanish and Hispanophone Latin American colleagues. I
don’t know. But I think that this reveals two things. First,
I notice that we are not trying to restrict ourselves to the
space of the monolingual nation-state, and, secondly, I no-
tice that we are not keeping ourselves from comparing what
we know to other historical and cultural experiences marked
by expansion, colonialism, and, more recently, postcolonial
globalization. There is a whole in-betweenness in all this, an in-
teresting Hispanophone and Lusophone in-betweenness that
runs the risk of echoing some Freyrian ideas (just not in order
to create useless pride but, rather, to define some specifici-
ties that, of course, have to do with relations of power).
But I would like to end this by talking a bit about
“today.” We are currently witnessing a process of ferocious
neoliberalism. It is happening both in social and economic
contexts. It is an attack on the social state of things, in
one way, but we are also witnessing “post-truth” and “fake
news” political and communicative processes for which
anthropologists are wonderfully suitable as analysts and
critics. The nonmilitary coup that took place recently in
Brazil is a good example. Brazilian anthropology is going
to react strongly against all those regressive moves that
the new government wants to introduce—in social, racial,
Indigenous, sexual, and gender areas. But it has the ability
to do much more. It can show everyone the processes of
cognitive transformation taking place now. It can analyze
discourse and rhetoric that is being implemented. It can
denounce what is happening now in widely comprehensible
language, and it can continue to be politically engaged at
the same time, yes, but neither dependent on nor equal
to the language of the political debate. That is the great
challenge.
Here in Portugal, we just went through four years of
outside intervention due to the debt crisis. This included the
IMF and the EU. They changed the way we see the EU and
made it possible for us to see that neoliberalism is not the
only alternative. Note that we now have a labor/socialist
government, which for the first time since the return of
constitutional democracy in 1974 has the support of parties
further to the left. This is a solution popularly referred
to as geringonça (contraption). This was an insult hurled
by a right-wing politician at the left but, interestingly, is
now appropriated by the left today in Portugal, much like
“queer” is in LGBTI circles. In recent months, the social
and political climate in Portugal has allowed the rise of a
public discussion about racism in Portugal along with talk
of internalized nationalist representations and of memories
of colonialism that were not problematized earlier.

We can certainly intervene in these conversations as
anthropologists—bringing discussions we have long had in
the academic realm to the general public. But, above all, we
can use Brazil’s experience with racism and its analysis and of
surviving colonial structures, not to mention Portugal’s new
social movements with a focus on race. These movements
are emerging quickly and en masse, as the language shows,
with people now talking about Afro-descendants, a term
proposed by the first generation of Portuguese blacks to
reach university education. As you know, a large part of
my civic and academic work concerned issues of gender
and LGBTI matters. This was not just about the decriminal-
ization of abortion (which we succeeded in doing in 2008)
but also about the struggle to have antidiscrimination laws
for LGBTI people (where we got pretty much everything
we wanted). This was all happening at a particular time,
and I ended up becoming a member of Parliament (and
interrupting my academic life for a while). Parliamentary
discussions at the time included same-sex marriage, which
we pursued and won. But in the area of racism, awareness
of the importance of an antiracist agenda, critical reflection
on colonialism and its consequences, and questions about
why Portugal as a society has never done “truth and
reconciliation” work on colonialism are still missing.
Certainly, we will not fit into an idea of “epistemologies
of the South” because we are not an ex-colonized nation.
We do not even do what we see in other former colonizing
powers, with their critical reflection on these things. Too
much time has passed, time in which the country dedicated
itself to a postdictatorship reconstruction of Portugal itself,
including the construction of a democratic society to be
integrated into the EU. It is also because, as we have already
discussed, the Portuguese colonial experience in the twen-
tieth century showed elements of Portugal and its colonies
being in the “periphery.” Of course, our African colleagues
don’t see things quite the way we do. And it is probably with
the collaboration of Portuguese, Brazilian, and other African
colleagues that we can do this task, extending our university
work so that we can proceed to help the more ambitious
processes of general social and cultural decolonization.
BFB: It is amazing how our conversation flows so
easily. It is a joy talking to you. I could go on discussing with
you decolonization, present-day Brazilian anthropology,
and Brazil’s current messy political and economic and
situation. However, as we have limited space, just let me
end our email exchanges by stating that there is an urgency
to pay attention and even start transnational research on
the so-called New Right. We are, in Brazil, somewhat
astonishingly watching the actions of the (old and new) right
undermining our social achievements. We have a corrupt
president who, albeit his 5 percent of approval, holds himself
in power both by controlling the National Congress through
spurious exchanges and representing solely the interests of
agribusiness, large development plans, financial capital, and
so on. While I wish we could come to a similar Portuguese
geringonça solution, I do not foresee such a political alliance
World Anthropologies 135
in the near future. It seems that there is a collective sense
of desolation in the face of increasing unemployment,
precariousness, dispossession, and all the ongoing political
setbacks. Yet, at the same time, there are here and there
mobilizations springing up. This is why I am so much into
studying and being involved with today’s social movements.
MVA: Bela, it has always been a pleasure working with
you. Reflecting together on our common experience has
been an even greater joy.
NOTES
1. See Bastos, Vale de Almeida, Feldman-Bianco (2002, 2007). This
volume was also edited in Brazil and published by UNICAMP.
It led to two events, one at UNICAMP and one in Arrabida,
Portugal, both in 1998. These are discussed by Bela later in this
conversation.
2. Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre’s interpretation of Brazil’s
formation included a romanticized vision of Portuguese expan-
sion. His work was later appropriated by the dictatorial colonial
regime in the 1950s in order to establish an exceptionalist
interpretation of Portuguese colonialism as less aggressive than
others and more prone to cultural and racial mixing. Freyre
called this “Lusotropicalism.”
3. Roger Bastide’s and Florestan Fernandes’s participation in the
UNESCO project led to the publication of the book Whites and
Blacks in Sao Paulo (1955).
4. Capitalismo e escravidão no Brasil meridional: O negro na sociedade
escravocrata do Rio Grande do Sul (Capitalism and slavery in
southern Brazil: The negro in Rio Grande do Sul’s slave-owning
society), authored by Fernando Henrique Cardoso in 1962;
As metamorfose dos escravo (The metamorphosis of the slave),
authored by Otavio Ianni in 1962; and A integração do negro na
sociedade de classes (The integration of the negro in a class society),
authored by Florestan Fernandes in Portuguese in 1964 but also
published in English in 1969 as The Negro in Class Society.
5. This is the meaning of social symbols and practices from the
past, prior to emigration from their original home, affecting the
everyday lives of immigrants in their new home.
6. ISCTE refers to the University Institute of Lisbon; ICS refers to
the Social Science Institute in Lisbon; FCSH refers to the New
University of Lisbon.
7. Saudade, which was a finalist at the American Film and Video
Festival and received a Society for Visual Anthropology honorable
mention, both in 1991 can be viewed at https://player.vimeo.
com/video/8990792 and at https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=YFZQy7sfYe4.
8. Some of the archives can be browsed online at http://
www.lib.umassd.edu/paa.
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Feldman-Bianco, Bela. 2009b. “Reinventando a localidade:
Globalização heterogênea, escala da cidade e a incorporação
desigual de migrantes transnacionais” [Reinventing locality: Het-
erogeneous globalization, urban scales, and the unequal in-
corporation of transnational migrants]. Horizontes Antropológicos
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71832009000100002&script=sci_abstract&tlng=pt.
Feldman-Bianco, Bela, ed. 2010. Nações e diásporas: Estudos comparativos
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Feldman-Bianco, Bela. 2011a. “Remaking Locality: Uneven Global-
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Feldman-Bianco, Bela. 2011b. “Caminos de ciudadanı́a: Emigración,
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Columbia University Press.
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Livro.
Essay
From Rice University to the University of Tehran: Reflections
on Working as an American-Trained Anthropologist in Iran
Nahal Naficy
Allameh Tabataba’i University, Iran
S everal accounts of the state of anthropology in Iran
have been published (Fazeli 2006; Hassanzadeh 2006;
Shahshahani 1986), but this essay is made up of snippets of
my own experience as an anthropologist in my native coun-
try, having returned to it for the first time in 2009 after
eight years of training in the United States. I left Iran with a
BA in English literature from Allameh Tabataba’i University
in Tehran and returned with a PhD in cultural anthropol-
ogy from Rice University in Texas. Of the amazing journey
across continents, cultures, and disciplines that this has been,
I have to write some other time; here I will focus mainly on
some of my challenges as an Iranian anthropologist trained in
the United States with the way anthropology was conceived
at the University of Tehran and then on how those concep-
tions have been challenged, mainly by students, over the
past few years. My eight-year experience with anthropology
in Iran has, of course, not been limited to the University of
Tehran, and some of the issues I emphasize here (including
questions about ethnographic fieldwork and writing) have
been handled quite differently by others outside this par-
ticular institution. But I focus on the University of Tehran
partly because it is home to the first and most influential
Department of Anthropology in the country and the only
one with a PhD program, and partly because it was my first
and most startling institutional encounter with anthropology
in Iran.
World Anthropologies 137
McCabe, Marsha, and Joseph Thomas. 1998. Portuguese Spinner: An
American History. New Bedford: Spinner Publications.
RAM-WAN. n.d. “Red de Antropologı́as del Mundo – World An-
thropologies Network.” http://www.ram-wan.net/pt_BR/.
Vale de Almeida, Miguel. 1995. Senhores de si: Uma interpretação
antropológica da masculinidade [The hegemonic male: Masculinity
in a Portuguese town]. Lisbon: Fim de Século.
Vale de Almeida, Miguel. 1996. The Hegemonic Male: Masculinity in a
Portuguese Town. New York: Berghahn Books.
Vale de Almeida, Miguel. 2000. Um mar da cor da terra: “Raça,” cultura
e polı́tica da identidade [An earth-colored sea: “Race,” culture,
and the politics of identity]. Oeiras: Celta.
Vale de Almeida, Miguel. 2003. An Earth-Colored Sea: “Race,” Culture
and the Politics of Identity in the Post-Colonial Portuguese-Speaking
World. New York: Berghahn Books.
Vale de Almeida, Miguel. 2009. A chave do armário: Homossexuali-
dade, casamento, famı́lia [The key to the closet: Homosexuality,
marriage, family]. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais.
THE FIELD
The first thing I did as soon as all my boxes arrived from
the United States and I had settled back into my old room
in my parents’ and grandparents’ house in Isfahan was to
contact a professor at the Anthropology Department at the
University of Tehran, well-known for his website, anthro-
pology.ir. Having lived and studied in France for many years
and having returned to Iran relatively recently in the 1990s,
the professor was introduced to me as someone “in the sys-
tem” who would also understand my outside position and
be the best person to advise me as to how I might proceed.
He openly accepted the chance to meet with me as soon as
he returned to Tehran (he spent the summers in France),
and in that first meeting he suggested that I propose a course
to teach in the Anthropology Department as a way of intro-
ducing myself and my project. His suggestion was American
Culture, Native American Cultures, or something like that,
because no one at the department did anything remotely
similar and that would increase my chances of finding a place
in the department without ruffling too many feathers.
I thought it might help to tell him about my disserta-
tion so that we might come up with a project for me that
hewed more closely to my interests than American Culture
or Native American Cultures. I had studied Iranian NGOs
in Washington, DC, but my account was very much influ-
enced by the experimental Writing Culture atmosphere at Rice
where I worked with George Marcus, Julie Taylor, Stephen
Tyler, and James Faubion, among others. In that spirit,
138 American Anthropologist • Vol. 120, No. 1 • March 2018
my ethnography took inspiration from Persian Miniatures
(thirteenth- to eighteenth-century manuscript paintings),
attempting to be sensitive to, among other things, the indi-
rection of language and action and the dispersion of actions
in spatially separate but juxtaposed frames that characterized
my field while also reflecting on the stakes—ethically, po-
litically, and in terms of poetics—in engaging in a genre of
ethnography that moves among deep understandings of clas-
sic or emblematic aesthetic forms and contemporary events,
everyday life, publics, and politics. My Iranian colleague
responded by saying that there were already people doing
urban and political anthropology and anthropology of art in
the department, so it was best for me to propose a new field.
I had never conceived of my research as “political anthro-
pology,” “urban anthropology,” or “anthropology of art” nor
was I encouraged by my advisors at Rice to do so. I suggested
I could teach, instead, something like ethnographic design
and writing. He told me that “qualitative methods, including
ethnography” were already being taught. Plus, he said, my
fascination with “ethnographic form” and “textual acrobat-
ics,” though maybe appreciated by some back in America
(namely, the “postmodernists” like George Marcus and
Michael Fischer, with whom I had worked), were not going
to work—or would indeed be counterproductive—in Iran,
where he and his colleagues had a hard enough time teaching
students to do “standard” research and write in “standard”
academic fashion. Hence, better that I focused on America
as my specialty area.
But how could “America” be my ongoing project and
specialty area if I did not have access to it as a fieldsite, if I
could not immerse myself in that environment, if it was be-
yond my immediate perception (seeing, hearing, touching,
feeling), given the complicated visa, cost, and security issues?
This seemed like an odd concern to my Iranian colleague be-
cause, as I would learn gradually, at least at the University of
Tehran at the time, specialty in an area (whether topical or
geographical) was generally not tied to ongoing ethnographic
research in that area. Instead, it was tied to having knowledge
of individuals, topics, methods, and theories relevant to that
area (explicitly a “study of” rather than “study with” people, a
“thinking about” rather than “thinking in and with” the world,
to use Tim Ingold’s [2008, 82] terminology). With few ex-
ceptions, “data gathering” was a labor allocated to students
who were either sent to the field for assignments and theses
or employed by professors to conduct field research, using
interviews, questionnaires, archival research, and a range of
other methods generally known as qualitative. The profes-
sors then mostly functioned as gatekeepers to fields of study
with a repertoire of social networks and practical tips to
lend to the lesser mortals in return for their labor. It would
soon become evident to me that going to the field, in the
spirit of “long-term and open-ended commitment, generous
attentiveness, relational depth, and sensitivity to context”
(Ingold 2014, 384), was not something that my colleagues
at the University of Tehran generally deemed valuable, nec-
essary, or even appropriate for a professor of anthropology.
I knew only one colleague there with a long-term fieldsite
to which she returned off and on, as far as I know, with or
without students. Having been trained to see anthropolog-
ical analysis and the form of knowledge it produces as tied
to ethnographic fieldwork and writing (however broadly
and variously conceived), I found this very unsettling. I
was, after all, indoctrinated in Clifford Geertz’s dictum that
“in anthropology, or anyway social anthropology, what the
practitioners do is ethnography” (1973, 5).
Sans this connection to the intensive and intimate craft
of anthropology, I had a hard time grasping what in my
colleagues’ minds constituted anthropology as distinct from
sociology, in particular, and in some cases from political sci-
ence, philosophy, or some strands of cultural management
and urban planning. In fact, of the seven faculty members
at the Anthropology Department at the time, only three
had doctorates in anthropology (interestingly, all three from
France), and others held degrees in communications, edu-
cation, and sociology. The Ethnography and Cultural An-
thropology courses were taught by a sociologist at the time.
In the anthropology master’s program, genetics and biology
were taught but no ethnography—just Research Methods in
Anthropology (it is still that way). It was no surprise, then,
that when, a few years later in a Cultural Studies master’s
class at another university, I asked the one anthropology
graduate from the University of Tehran to tell the class what
ethnography was, she said it was a method from the nine-
teenth century that was now pretty much replaced by more
modern methods such as “grounded theory.” When, within
a few months of my arrival at the University of Tehran, I
decided to join the Iranian Anthropological Association, I
was reprimanded by my senior anthropology colleague for
not having asked his opinion first so that he could tell me
that the right association for me to join was the Sociological
Association, also located on the Social Sciences campus of
the University of Tehran—apparently the cooler and livelier
of the two.
Looking at the books published by the faculty members
of the Anthropology Department at the time further indi-
cates this near-complete absence of concern with ongoing
empirical research in particular areas and with ethnographic
craftsmanship. One faculty member, Nasser Fakouhi, has
published at least twelve authored books and twenty trans-
lated ones, at least twenty-five of which have come out
in the past fifteen years. Of these, nine are authored and
translated introductions to anthropology in general or to
one particular branch of anthropology, including visual an-
thropology, urban anthropology, anthropology of art, and
development and applied anthropology. He states his aim in
this generalist approach as showing to his Iranian audience
that anthropology—for which he insists on the term ensan-
shenasi (study of mankind) instead of the older mardomshenasi
(study of people)—is not just ethnological studies of folk-
lore and gathering of objects for museums but a dynamic
multidisciplinary field that allows the anthropologist to in-
tervene and contribute to current discussions in society as

a public intellectual as well as a consultant and strategist.
What is significant about this emphasized distinction be-
tween ensanshenasi and mardomshenasi, though, is not just
the expansion of fieldsites to urban and modern ones or the
shift toward more engagement in the current discussions
and processes in society but an eradication of long-term,
in-depth field research as a formative part of the discipline (a
tradition that was upheld in the heyday of area and folklore
monographs in Iran in the 1960s and 70s). It is not just that
the new anthropology (unlike the old ethnology) engages
in public discussions and intervenes in current political and
economic processes in urban and industrialized settings. Im-
portantly, it does so not from the situated and comparative
standpoint of ethnography (however it might need to be
“re-functioned,” à la Douglas Holmes and George Marcus
[2005]) but from the standpoint of a multidisciplinary sci-
ence whose repertoire of concepts, theories, and approaches
is claimed to be richer and broader than any other of the hu-
man sciences. To take ethnography as anything more than a
collection of field techniques (that remain pretty obvious and
more or less fixed, endlessly teachable and repeatable, and
not worthy of debate) is in this view “unscientific” and gen-
erally not supported by the scientific community the world
over, except for a small group of postmodernists (Panjtani
2012).
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES
If I had to pick a specialty that no one in the department had
claimed before, I wanted it to be an area in which I could
do long-term empirical research, something that “America,”
as a field, did not offer. I had long been interested in the
social and cultural history of modern medicine, science, and
technology in Iran, so I welcomed this opportunity to take
this leap. Coming from a family with generations of physi-
cians (including a grandmother who worked as an intern in
the American hospital in Mashhad in the 1920s and became
the village doctor; a grandfather who headed the Isfahan
Medical School in the 1970s and another who experienced
the early days of penicillin in Iran as an injectionist in the
1940s; and my father, a virologist and World Health Or-
ganization fellow to Hungry in the late 1960s), I had good
access to people and fieldsites for historical and ethnographic
work in this area. I was also interested in following up on
the fate of certain technological artifacts in Iran, like the first
hemodialysis machine ever made in the country, for which I
had had the chance, through a relative at the Iranian Research
Organization for Science and Technology, to translate the
user’s manual before I left in the 1990s. So within a few
weeks of my colleague’s proposition, I went to him with
another suggestion: How about I teach Anthropology of Sci-
ence and Technology; was that taken already? It wasn’t, and
so I took on an STS identity overnight.
In the end, we agreed that I teach Anthropology of
America, a course that existed in the chart as an elective
but had never been taught, and Anthropology of Science
and Technology, temporarily under the guise of a course
World Anthropologies 139
awkwardly titled The Place of Man Among Other Crea-
tures until a new course was created for it. I gave some
sort of an inaugural talk titled “What Is the Anthropology of
Science?” at the Sociological Association (significantly, not
the anthropological one), at the end of which a young man
from Sharif University of Technology approached me and
asked if I could write a regular column on the anthropology
of science for Iran Daily, a paper close to Ahmadinejad’s
administration I would later learn. It was a high time for sci-
ence in Iran. The leadership had called for “scientific jihad” in
2007, four Iranian nuclear scientists were killed in terrorist
attacks between 2009 and 2011, and one denomination of
the rial now sported an image of the data-processing satel-
lite Omid (Hope), one of President Ahmadinejad’s prized
achievements, instead of the usual mosques and histori-
cal buildings or religious figures. Everyone was curious to
know what this new arrival, the “anthropology of science,”
could illuminate in the way of our evolving relationship
to science. Basij-affiliated students were among those who
took my classes in large numbers and systematically fol-
lowed questions like where anthropology of science stood
between Heidegger and Popper or how a Foucauldian cri-
tique of modern science could contribute to the develop-
ment of indigenous science in Iran. Anyone who talked
about science as culture sooner or later had to comment
on Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s (1999) Fashionable Non-
sense, of which two different translations in Persian already
existed.
In the absence of ethnographic examples in Persian to
refer to, I felt unarmed and empty-handed in showing what
anthropology could offer to the already existing explana-
tions and thought styles as well as the complexities that they
failed to articulate—what Kim Fortun (2015) calls “dis-
cursive gaps” and “discursive risks.” But ethnographic texts
do not constitute a genre that gets translated in Iran, per-
haps because of the nature of these texts as somewhat of
a practitioners’ craft—a kind of “handiwork,” in Ingold’s
words, as opposed to “the mass-produced goods of indus-
trial data-processing turned out by sociologists and others”
(2008, 84)—which makes such accounts harder to translate
than most other genres of academic writing. This disincli-
nation toward ethnographic accounts in Iran (including the
“inferior” status assumed for the locally produced area and
folklore monographs referred to previously) has also some-
thing to do, I believe, with the scale at which they engage the
world—what Marcus and Fischer call “a jeweler’s eye view
of the world” (1986, 15). Focusing this up close and long
term on a very particular thing or situation, no matter how
complex and multisited, seemed to trouble my Iranian au-
dience. Those who heard about my projects often somehow
got it across to me that to focus on one particular hemodial-
ysis machine or one department of virology in Isfahan was
not to study “science” but just one small instance of it and
that that was maybe more an instance of the workings of
history or society or culture or politics than of science itself.
The little assignments that I occasionally came up with in
140 American Anthropologist • Vol. 120, No. 1 • March 2018
class, like asking students to take a couple of weeks to look
for ways swine flu was represented in the media and around
town during an outbreak in 2009, were received, I felt,
with some disappointment by my best students, who found
them a little irrelevant, even a little ridiculous (one student
actually called them “cute . . . in a very American way”),
considering the colossal dimensions of science talks in the
country at the time. I would hear from here and there that
perhaps my American education had made me a theoreti-
cally unsophisticated though methodologically skilled social
scientist, which was clearly an inferior thing; I was brought
up on the wrong side of the Atlantic.
Around the same time, I took charge of the new “Anthro-
pology of Science” page on Anthropology.ir (now anthropol-
ogyandculture.com), one of the most visited academic web-
sites in Iran. Run by Nasser Fakouhi and a mostly unnamed,
unpaid, and underacknowledged army of students working
relentlessly behind the scenes in the production lines, the
website was part of Professor Fakouhi’s never-sleeping ar-
mory of academic literature production, a monumental tes-
timony to his view of anthropology as the all-encompassing
encyclopedic science of humankind. I was to use the page as a
platform for sharing material (articles, book chapters, inter-
views, book reviews, sometimes whole books, summarized
and translated) with my class while also building knowledge
of STS as a field for the interested public. Site work dictated
its own pace, its own kind of material, and its own mode
of production, which was almost inevitably in teams. With
the requirement to update the page at least once a week
(preferably two or three) to keep visitors clicking, there was
hardly any choice but to allocate each task to a different
person or group: some to find material, others to translate,
others to edit, and others to upload. Obviously, only short
and general pieces could be translated at this pace; longer,
more particular, and more complex pieces like ethnographic
accounts were automatically omitted. Also, more personal
pieces, notes, observations, reports, and so on by the stu-
dents or readers were hardly considered suitable material for
the site, as they were not seen to have educational value or
to help with defining the professional contours of the field.
Aside from problems of pace and scale, there were
also limits on how satisfying this kind of work could be
for me, not just intellectually but also professionally. I had
started with the prospects of doing fieldwork in an area I
found interesting, but all I found myself doing for almost a
year and a half was translating, summarizing, editing, and
coordinating. There was no time, budget, or energy to invest
in a personal project and to pursue that in necessary solitude.
Besides, none of this work was of the kind that I could present
anywhere outside Iran or put in conversation with projects
my friends and colleagues were doing back in the United
States. My senior colleague’s advice? Make up your mind;
if you don’t have either money or residency papers to settle
in any other country, give yourself to this one and do as the
natives do. Perhaps I did that too well, because at the end
of my three semesters at the University of Tehran, despite
relatively positive feedback from students, I felt dry and too
far from doing what I was taught anthropologists do: write
ethnographies.
In the spring of 2010, just as my now husband and I were
talking about getting married, a one-line letter arrived at the
office of the chair of the Anthropology Department from the
recruitment committee of the University of Tehran announc-
ing that my continued collaboration with the university in
any shape or form was not approved. The Armenian-Iranian
chair of the department at the time seemed genuinely sad
to give me the news, telling me that she and the depart-
ment also felt cheated and disrespected by this sudden and
unexplained decision from above by the recruitment com-
mittee, but that there was nothing at that point that anybody
could do about it. Nothing was said to the students, and my
courses remained on the chart for the new semester, though
apparently once classes started, the inquiring students were
told by the registrar office that I had left without notice,
perhaps back to America. I never received a straight answer
from the office of the president of the University of Tehran
as to why this decision was made. Had some people in the
department worked against my recruitment? Could it be the
ideological screening that was part of the procedure? Or
the fact that I was a single woman back then, coming from
America? After all, the university president had told me in
the final interview that I shouldn’t have felt a need to come
back to the country, for “we are training our own specialists
here.” At any rate, based on the letter, not only could I not
be employed by the University of Tehran, I could not even
continue teaching there as an adjunct. That was it, and so my
career as an STS anthropologist came to an end as abruptly
as it had begun.
At the end of the year, I was ready to leave Iran once
again and return to my own initial dissertation project on
NGOs, with the miniatures as ethnographic style. In 2011,
I got a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at ICI Berlin, the
Institute for Cultural Inquiry. When I returned in 2014, the
University of Tehran was a changed place.
CHANGE IS IN THE AIR
Within weeks of my arrival, in August 2014, I got a call
from the Anthropology Student Association of the Univer-
sity of Tehran inviting me to come in to discuss possibilities
for classes, workshops, talks, and reading groups that could
be held at the Faculty of Social Sciences in the semester
ahead. I gathered from them that the department was prac-
tically a war zone and that the students were doing what
they could to influence decisions made at the departmental
and higher levels of the university regarding faculty recruit-
ment, curriculum, and so forth. To guarantee the continued
presence of alternative classes and professors in university
halls and corridors, the students held parallel classes and
events on campus instead of resorting to the private cul-
tural, educational, and research institutes mushrooming all
over Tehran. We decided to design a reading group, starting
for the time being with the work of Clifford Geertz, but I

was also encouraged by the students to take up my case with
the University of Tehran again, now under a new university
president appointed by the Rouhani administration.
Over the next year and a half, the students and I both
did our parts to win me back a chance at the Anthropol-
ogy Department of the University of Tehran. The students
wrote letters and collected signatures, questioned the pre-
vious decision in their public meetings, and wrote about
it in their student papers. I, for my part, kept going from
office to office and wrote letters of interest to the depart-
ment chair at least once every semester. No matter what
we did, however, the closest we ever got to an answer
was that there were things that we didn’t and couldn’t
know about but that the department chair was “working
on it.” Still, I was energized by the new efforts and felt
somewhat like Batman in the movie Batman Returns, having
been away for some years reflecting and training, gaining
skills, resolve, and more effective use of connections. I was
once again back in Tehran, and it was not the end of the
world.
When not perceived as dubious for its colonial back-
ground, anthropology was generally seen at the Faculty of
Social Sciences to be somewhat of an inferior discipline com-
pared to sociology or communications, wanting in theoreti-
cal rigor or a clear contribution to social sciences. With its
well-represented physical and biological branches, it wasn’t
always clear what it was even doing on a social science cam-
pus. The new anthropology students, nevertheless, held pub-
lic meetings and used the student paper, Neda, to criticize the
department for not being able to stand up for anthropology
and its distinct value, and for actively misrepresenting an-
thropology by consistently allowing non-anthropologists to
teach key anthropology courses while rejecting others with
anthropology degrees, thus dragging the discipline and those
seeking to get an education in it in Iran into a full-on iden-
tity crisis. A little revolution had started in the department,
and I can’t quite put my finger on what had changed in
the two years we were away. New faculty members, more
and more students in transit between Iran and institutions
of higher education abroad (where they saw a completely
different and, as some reported, more exciting face of cul-
tural anthropology), a change of government, improvement
in Internet service (which made it possible to browse other
anthropology departments around the world and compare
curricula, courses, syllabi, etc.); these are only some of the
changes that come to mind.
In the fall of 2014, the undergraduate student editor-
in-chief of Neda wrote an exposé in three parts. Part one,
“Order,” criticized the department for hiding behind clichés
like order, morality, and respect to damper public critiques
and protests, while escalating student discontent could no
longer be contained or denied but had to be understood and
critiqued in anything but private terms. Part two, “Asia,”
questioned the department’s plan to start a PhD program in
the “anthropology of Asia,” considering that hardly anyone
among the faculty spoke any “Asian” languages besides Per-
World Anthropologies 141
sian and Azeri Turkish or had a project and fieldsite outside
Iran. Part three, bearing the name of one of the sociologist
faculty members of the anthropology department, quoted
him as chiding students, “while you were busy being avant-
garde over here, I was floating in the bottomless ocean of the
Oxford library” (referring to his one-year sabbatical there).
Perhaps this was acceptable, even commendable, for a social
scientist fifty years ago, the student wrote, but nowadays
it could only be a laughing matter to call oneself a social
scientist, particularly one with publications on the social
construction of science, and yet have no interest in what
is happening at one’s own home institution concerning the
modes and conditions of knowledge production and repro-
duction (Farahi Moqaddam 2014).
Things were changing in the Anthropology Department,
and somehow insisting on a particular fieldsite and a per-
sonal project had become part of this force for change.
In the winter of 2015, a new, young, and ambitious as-
sistant professor in the Department of Anthropology is-
sued something like a manifesto emphasizing the impor-
tance of having a lifelong personal project with a central
fieldwork component for anthropologists who seek to be
engaged in documenting and mending the suffering experi-
enced by marginal groups in the country. His references for
this kind of “engaged” and suffering-centered anthropology
were almost entirely American-based anthropologists, like
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Paul Farmer, Didier Fassin, Clara
Han, Arthur Kleinman, and Veena Das. Though even these
welcome words for change did not go without their under-
lying presumptions critiqued by students, the manifesto was
published in Neda (No. 11, 9 Esfand 94) in clearly celebratory
terms.
It is noteworthy that these increasingly radicalized cri-
tiques came almost a year after the inauguration of the PhD
program in anthropology at the University of Tehran, an
event that many anthropology well-wishers conceived as
an essential and eagerly awaited step toward the develop-
ment of an indigenous anthropological tradition in Iran. But
when the general contours of the program took shape, the
result was more than a little underwhelming. The official
program introduction reads as follows: “In order to know
the society, one has to know mankind first in its cultural,
biological, archeological, and linguistic dimensions. With-
out anthropology, sociology is not possible. The only way
to achieve a thorough understanding of mankind is to study
the physical-biological dimensions in conjunction with the
social-cultural ones across the history of our species.” The
methods course covers such topics as “critical review of
quantitative methods and their points of strength and weak-
ness for anthropological research,” “qualitative methods and
their points of strength and weakness for anthropological
research,” “multitechnique methods in anthropology,” “re-
search techniques,” “critical review of methods in biological
anthropology” (and then in historical, linguistic, and cultural
anthropology), and “critique of ontological methods in an-
thropology from the point of view of Islam.” Ethnography
142 American Anthropologist • Vol. 120, No. 1 • March 2018
is only mentioned once as part of “multifocal research tech-
niques” next to observation, visual data, and archives. As I
am writing these lines, an MA program in biological anthro-
pology has also just been inaugurated at the Anthropology
Department.
For well over a year, the Geertz group met once a
week, rain or shine, with eight regular student members,
both graduate and undergraduate. What came out of these
meetings, besides some deep and probably lifelong personal
and professional ties, were a few ethnographic MA theses,
including an ethnography of a poor neighborhood in South
Tehran with a host of vulnerabilities, including drugs, pros-
titution, and homelessness, as well as a high concentration
of charities, municipal social workers, UN programs, and
NGOs, including Doctors Without Borders. At her thesis
defense, a well-known and controversial professor from the
Department of Sociology called this student’s work a turning
point in the Faculty of Social Sciences, one that would finally
make Jalal Al-e Ahmad, a leftist writer in the 1960s, famous
for his village monographs and realist short stories based
on the lives of the downtrodden (and one whose name was
given to the highway on which the Faculty of Social Sciences
was located) quite proud. The sociology professor was so
impressed by the fact that the student had actually spent con-
siderable time in the neighborhood, not just observing but
also participating in the lives of the neighborhood dwellers
and forming close relationships with them, that you would
think it was the first time he had heard of this cool little thing
called ethnography! The fact that this professor himself,
after some twenty years of being the most well-read and
influential champion of high theory in cultural sociology,
had taken to urging students to undertake empirical field re-
search into the real conditions of people’s lives in far-off and
neglected parts of the country, could itself be an indication
of a turn that has been taking place in Iranian social sciences
over the past few years.
This new interest in sustained fieldwork (or renewed
interest, after its 1960s and 70s surge in folklore and
village/tribe studies) as a subversive element against the
dominant atmosphere of anthropology in Iran, perceived
as unattached to Iranian on-the-ground reality and unen-
gaged in detailed, long-term work that matters, gave me
a chance to reengage my training in US anthropology, this
time from a different angle. When, refused by the An-
thropology Department once again, I was invited by the
students to teach a course in their “parallel academy” in
2015–2016, I designed a course titled Ethnography in the
US After the 1960s, which started with “The Radical Trans-
formation of Anthropology: History Seen Through the An-
nual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association,
1955–2005” by Herbert S. Lewis, and continued with Dell
Hymes and Laura Nader, George Marcus and Dick Cushman,
James Clifford, Lila Abu-Lughod, Ruth Behar, Douglas
Holmes, and Kim Fortun. This is not an exhaustive list, and it
reflects, to a great degree, my own training and the people,
works, and histories I have come to know more closely as
a result of it. While these US-based anthropologists are not
representatives of a unity called “US anthropology” nor are
they all necessarily pressing for the same thing, they do nev-
ertheless invite us to think critically and creatively about
what, why, and how we as anthropologists study. Method
is politics, these anthropologists remind us. My purpose in
introducing these works has not been to help fashion an
anthropology in Iran after the American tradition but to
give myself and my students a chance to see how others in
other times and other places have challenged dominant views
about what anthropology is and what it should do: “Not to
answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us
answers that others, guarding other sheep in other valleys,
have given” (Geertz 1973, 30).
REFERENCES CITED
Farahi Moqaddam, Arash. 2014. “Nazm, Asia, Vedadhir: Alayh e
epidemi ye mohafeze-kari dar gorouh” [Order, Asia, Vedadhir:
Against the conservatism epidemic at the department]. Neda 9
(30 Azar 94): n.p.
Fazeli, Nematollah. 2006. The Politics of Culture in Iran. New York:
Routledge.
Fortun, Kim. 2015. “Ethnography in Late Industrialism.” In Writing
Culture and the Life of Anthropology, edited by Orin Starn, 119–37.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic
Books.
Hassanzadeh, Alireza, ed. 2006. Mardomshenasi Irani: Chalesh ha va
porsesh ha [Iranian anthropology: Questions and challenges].
Tehran: Nashr e Naqd e Afkar.
Holmes, Douglas, and George E. Marcus. 2005. “Cultures of Ex-
pertise and the Management of Globalization: Toward the Re-
Functioning of Ethnography.” In Global Assemblages: Technology,
Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, edited by Aihwa Ong
and Stephen J. Collier, 235–52. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
Ingold, Tim. 2008. “Anthropology Is Not Ethnography.” Proceedings
of the British Academy 154:69–92.
Ingold, Tim. 2014. “That’s Enough about Ethnography!” HAU: Journal
of Ethnographic Theory 4 (1): 383–95.
Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer. 1986. Anthropology
as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Panjtani, Monireh. 2012. “Interview with Nasser Fakouhi.” Ettelaat
Hekmat va Marefat website, April 22. http://www.ettelaathe
kmatvamarefat.com/new/index.php?option=com_content&
view=article&id=493:—l-r&Itemid=38.
Shahshahani, Soheila. 1986. “History of Anthropology in Iran.” Iranian
Studies 19 (1): 65–86.
Sokal, Alan, and Jean Bricmont. 1999. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern
Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. New York: Picador.

Commentary
The Cosmopolitan, the Local, the Particular, and the
Universal: Commentary on Nahal Naficy’s “From Rice
University to the University of Tehran”
Cristiana Bastos
University of Lisbon, Portugal
I would like to start with a note of praise for the World
Anthropologies section of American Anthropologist for pro-
viding the opportunity to discuss the varied forms, styles,
contents, and practices of the discipline around the world, as
in Nahal Naficy’s case study of her encounters with anthro-
pology in Iran after training in the United States. Naturally,
each case presented in the World Anthropologies section
reenacts the structural tension between what is particular
and what is widely shared, general, and perhaps universal.
That tension emerged in my reading of Nacify’s essay.
My first reaction to the essay was to wonder how much of
Nacify’s experience in joining the Anthropology Department
in Tehran was site-specific or very similar to that of anyone
joining a department anywhere, abroad or at home. Any
new faculty member anywhere can be asked to fill an empty
slot and teach according to the department’s needs rather
than on matters of her or his specialty, uniqueness, and
ambitions. Any first job can be a terrain of tensions between
the joys of getting a position that may lead to professional
fulfillment and the frustrations of being removed from the
path to theoretical immortality imagined in graduate school.
To that point, the author’s experience may have been shared
by many others transitioning from life as a graduate student
to that of faculty.
But the transition narrated by the author was not just
any transition, nor was it simply a return home, as Naficy,
her world, and her home had all been transformed while
she was in the United States. Nacify provides a guide to the
precise conditions of the setting (the University of Tehran)
and of her expectations so that we can assess the speci-
ficities of this particular locale of anthropology as she, a
young cosmopolitan anthropologist with a particular back-
ground, has experienced it. Naficy’s postreflexive take on
ethnography—“what anthropologists do”—clashed with a
local devaluation of long-term, field-based ethnography as a
backward method associated with things past, unable to com-
pete with the more attractive “grounded theory” proposed
by sociologists. In sum, at her arrival in Tehran, sociology
was cool and anthropology was backward.
The author creatively overcame such estrangement by
settling in science and technology studies (STS), an indis-
putably cool disciplinary niche where, at the time, much
theoretical innovation was happening. But, yet again, there
were the particularities of time and place, and STS had to
be negotiated in local terms, such as Iran’s appraisal of
science as a banner of modernity. Naficy had to juggle STS
World Anthropologies 143
in the structural tension, lived there as elsewhere, between
what STS anthropologists like to do and what science
institutions require them to do.
In addition to those tensions, the author experienced the
stress of having to accomplish much in a short time; again,
this is a universal condition, yet experienced and enacted
in particular tones such as the constant blogging Naficy’s
position required. Those circumstances removed from the
author’s immediate horizon the prospect of fulfilling a per-
sonal project. But the worst was yet to come. It arrived as
the suspension from her functions, and for unclear reasons.
If the author had ended the narrative at this point, we
might be prompted into fast and fragile appreciations of what
anthropology in Iran is and is not. Fortunately, the essay
covers a larger span of time and a variety of experiences that
in one way or another relate to anthropology in Iran. After
the interruption of her activities at the University of Tehran,
Nacify went abroad and pursued a research project on the
topics she had cherished for a long time but had no chance
of fully exploring while she was teaching and blogging. She
settled in Berlin, away from the incidents and frustrations
of Iranian domestic politics, away from the specificities of
her original doctoral program, and closer to the experience
of a disembodied, universalist, and cosmopolitan practice of
working in theory.
When she returned to Tehran, she had changed, the
world had changed, and the anthropological landscape was
rapidly changing. The students were pushing research agen-
das forward, campus life was in transformation, reading
groups took shape, and the prospect of a theory-friendly
anthropological niche was there. Anthropology in Iran is
dynamic after all, and the narrator is part of those dynamics.
Naficy’s experience is well narrated; the author uses her
ethnographic skills to provide detail and description, index-
ing the universal embedded in the particular. Her experience
will not be replicated in other settings, or at least not exactly
in the same terms. It will not provide the basis to formulate
a universal law. But it will shape our knowledge, awareness,
and ability to recognize complexities, structures, articula-
tions, and indeed human agency. Just like ethnographies
do.
Nahal Naficy’s experience described in this essay
resonates only very partially with my own experience of
returning home to Portugal after years of training in the
United States at the CUNY Graduate Center. Much in her
experience sounds familiar: juggling different academic
agendas, moving from an academic vanguard into what used
to be home and yet had changed in the meantime, facing puz-
zlements and alienation, finding creative responses and new
144 American Anthropologist • Vol. 120, No. 1 • March 2018
approaches, building different networks with new partners,
changing focus, and so on. But as much as I went through
some of these universal stances, I also had the good fortune
of having met with different particularities of context: same
structure, different contingencies, different experience.
While I was away in the United States into the mid-1990s,
things at home changed dramatically—and for the better,
as far as higher education goes. The country had joined the
EU. The democratic regime had matured (a dictatorship
had lasted until the mid-1970s, inhibiting the development
of the social sciences). There was, among many positive
developments, much more funding for science and a public
commitment to enhancing the scientific infrastructure.
Furthermore, the social sciences were taken seriously,
much to the benefit of the anthropological community.
I thus had the privilege of working in an environment
where programs expanded, graduate students were funded,
research projects received support, and the discipline gained
credibility. Those were my particulars, which every now
Commentary
Remaking the Craft: Reflections on Pedagogy, Ethnography,
and Anthropology in Iran
Orkideh Behrouzan
SOAS University of London
I would like to thank American Anthropologist for inviting
these reflections and Nahal Naficy for her candid ethno-
graphic account of the possibilities, promises, hopes, and in-
stitutional blockages in the disciplinary life of anthropology
in Iran. Her nuanced portrayal of the difficulties of doing
ethnographic work in Iran is itself a welcome and timely
piece of ethnography that shows how one can persevere in
an ethnographic calling against all odds. Her paper comple-
ments other informative insights into the history and the
state of the discipline in Iran (Fazeli 2006; Hegland 2009;
Manoukian 2011; Nadjmabadi 2009). It is in this history that
Naficy’s 2009 return to Iran and her reflections on the state
of pedagogy and methodology should be situated. Her piece
raises questions about reflexivity and Otherness in a climate
already marked by generative debates about the stakes of
anthropology and how its boundaries are defined in relation
to changing ideological territorializations. Not only is the
piece an invitation to Iranian anthropologists and anthropol-
ogists of Iran to rethink pedagogy, but it is also a call to take
seriously the question of disciplinary identity.
One has to rewind the clock back to the 1960s de-
bates on colonialism and cultural identity, the flourishing
of folk studies that helped plant the seeds of an indigenous
anthropology in the 1970s, followed by the legacies of the
1980–1983 Cultural Revolution in order to contemplate the
fate of anthropology in the decades that followed the 1979
and then have replicas in other situations (like Brazil in the
mid-2000s) but cannot be taken as universals.
What was yet to come, however, may resonate more
universally. What was lived as commitment to expand and
strengthen research institutions and a political choice of in-
vesting in higher education is now challenged by the man-
agerial ideologies that seemingly pervade every institution,
turning education into a business with consumers, providers,
and products; turning labs into sweatshops producing repet-
itive outcomes; bringing an insidious precariousness to most
academic appointments—all standing upon an alliance of
austerity and auditing that leaves little resources and en-
ergy to actually pursue research and practice higher educa-
tion. Regardless of the particular configurations this trend
takes locally, the pattern is widespread. Perhaps the World
Anthropologies section is a good site to share the modes of
resistance that are already in place—be it in Tehran, Lisbon,
Brussels, Johannesburg, Rio, or Berkeley. A challenge for a
next chapter?
Revolution (Fazeli 2006; Hegland 2009; Nadjmabadi 2009).
Today’s preoccupation of Iranian social sciences with notions
of modernity, development, cultural identity, and critiques
of “Western” ideologies is rooted, in part, in these historical
moments. In the 1960s and 70s, several non-Iranian an-
thropologists, notably Byron Good, Mary Jo Good, Michael
Fischer, William Beeman, Mary Elaine Hegland, Richard
Tapper, Mary Catherine Bateson, and several others joined
their Iranian colleagues in Iran (including Mehdi Soraya,
Sekendar Amanollahi, Fereydoun Safizadeh, Kaveh Safa-
Isfahani, and Soheila Shahshahani, among others) and cre-
ated seminal ethnographic texts (see Hegland 2009). Several
of these ethnographies not only impacted the trajectory of
American (US) anthropology in the 1980s but also rendered
Iran one of the birthplaces of what has now become the
established field of medical anthropology.1 The predom-
inantly interpretive approach of this cohort acknowledged
the 1960s debates on cultural authenticity and created a mar-
riage of phenomenology, cultural analysis, cultural critique,
and indigenous anthropology. But this work was interrupted
by the 1979 Revolution and the 1980–1983 Cultural Rev-
olution, which shut down universities and sought to purge
from the academy all that contradicted the ethos of the rev-
olution, including Westernized teachings and teachers.
The pedagogical impact of the Cultural Revolution
on different disciplines was uneven (see chapter 2 in
Behrouzan 2016). Eventually, the more “scientific” and “pro-
fessional” disciplines (namely, medicine, basic sciences, and
engineering) were mostly spared from major curricular

transformations due to a blend of postrevolutionary de-
mands for reconstruction and development, pragmatism in
the face of the undeniable weight of the Iran–Iraq War, and,
significantly, the technoscientific aspirations of the Islamic
Republic. The fate of social sciences and the humanities,
however, was less bright. The nativist policies of the 1980s
emphasized a revision of cultural identity and promoted a
critique of Western schools of thought, reviving the anti-
colonial debates of the 1960s into postrevolutionary Islamist
frameworks. Ideologically driven as the Cultural Revolution
may have been in its approach to the social sciences and
humanities, its differential treatment of the technosciences
resonated with long-standing Iranian hierarchies of knowl-
edge and expertise. One historical continuity in the life of
academia has been the placement of the social sciences and
the humanities at the bottom of these hierarchies over the
course of the twentieth century and the dominance of tech-
nocratic values over critical and analytical thinking. Within
the social sciences, too, disciplines such as law, sociology,
and political sciences have persistently enjoyed a higher re-
gard and accrued prestige in a way that anthropology never
has. This history, however, is far from linear.
In discussing the life of anthropology in the 1980s, Fazeli
identifies three points of conflict between anthropology and
the revolution (tensions that contributed to official evalua-
tion of social science disciplines based on their relationship
with secular and imperialist agendas): “Islamic versus pre-
Islamic identities; secularism versus religion; and the culture
of anthropology versus the political culture of Islam” (2006,
135). However, in the 1990s and during the Reform Era
(1997–2005), postrevolutionary ebbs and flows were fol-
lowed by a surge in translations of Western thinkers and
a rise in popular demand, particularly by youth, for the
expansion of the social sciences and especially for theoret-
ical discussions. Social science disciplines began to attract
a growing body of keen students and gained further visi-
bility in the media. These developments, both pedagogical
and institutional, were indeed a reflection of broader social
change in the postwar era and the emergence of the reform
movement, as were their corresponding obstacles and fail-
ures (see Behrouzan 2016; Fazeli 2006). This flourishing of
research centers, publications, museums, and a newfound
eagerness among youth for studying social sciences in the af-
termath of the Reform Era shaped the backdrop of Naficy’s
return to Iran in 2009. Hers is an account of internal dis-
ciplinary tensions, contestations, negotiations, and, eventu-
ally, incremental triumphs in an environment particularly
dismissive of ethnography. Naficy’s gender cannot be dis-
regarded in these navigations, nor should the fact that she,
a recent graduate of Rice University (the American home
of Writing Culture [Clifford and Marcus 1986] and Anthro-
pology as Cultural Critique [Marcus and Fischer 1999]), had
returned to an academic anthropology landscape that was
predominantly Eurocentric (Fazeli 2006) and particularly
unwelcoming to the so-called postmodernists (a label used
disparagingly in this context and not one claimed by those
World Anthropologies 145
to whom it was applied) who had trained her. In her de-
scription of how her training in “ethnographic form” under
“postmodernists” such as Fischer and Marcus was initially
unwelcome, it is foremost the marginalization of ethnogra-
phy (as form and content, method and concept) that stands
out.2 Indeed, Naficy’s focus on the University of Tehran as
a flagship program should not obscure the fact that, as she
points out, the University of Tehran is only one among the
many institutional homes of anthropology, some of which
(e.g., the women-only Alzahra University) have provided
safer havens for ethnographic approaches.
The timing of Naficy’s return, too, is significant: gen-
erally, as a moment of heightened political contestation fol-
lowing the 2009 presidential election and the emergence of
the Green movement, and, more specifically, as a time of
uncertainty for the social sciences. The 2000s had witnessed
a revival of revolutionary rhetoric that warned against the
cultural hegemony and imperialist agendas of the social sci-
ences and the humanities (leading to close scrutiny of the
activities of returning academic researchers). Representa-
tion was a key concern; looming large was the potential
charge of siahnamayi (promoting a dark portrayal of society
in the interest of Western plots) against anthropology and,
by extension, against ethnographic probing that aimed to re-
veal the nuances of social phenomena.3 Even though Naficy
does not dwell on this context in her account, these debates
were in the air at the time of her return to Iran and had
seeped into academic and institutional mindsets.
Naficy’s reflections remind us that the key tensions
inherent in the life of anthropology in Iran seem to be
ideological and pedagogical ones. Several factors have con-
tributed to the Othering of anthropology among the social
sciences. The crises of identity that Iranian anthropology
seems to struggle with is intertwined, in part, with a crisis
of voice that is rooted in broader and ongoing cultural nego-
tiations. The informal placement of anthropology under the
umbrella of sociology or as inferior to the fields of political
science and communications has resulted in the obscurity
of anthropology compared to the visibility of these other
disciplines in the public domain (e.g., in the production of
public intellectuals or governmental cadre). This obscurity
is as much an outcome of historical contingencies as it is a
reflection of a kind of situated know-how that has simulta-
neously enabled anthropology to survive the tides of time
and secure an academic location, albeit at the peripheries
of academia. Ethnography, after all, is still alive, and it sur-
vives in informal places—for example, in study circles and
in non-elite programs, such as Alzahra University. Navigat-
ing the malleable and uncertain boundaries of permissible
and nonpermissible topics and approaches, Naficy reminds
us, anthropologists are faced with the inevitable task of con-
stantly revisiting the very definition of the craft. Over time,
Otherness and scrutiny can become internalized and enacted
as cultural work and modes of knowledge production.
This precarious mode of being, however, has peda-
gogical and methodological implications, to which Naficy’s
146 American Anthropologist • Vol. 120, No. 1 • March 2018
experience testifies. Hers resonates with Fazeli’s experi-
ence of how, in the 1980s, “the political and ideologi-
cal conflicts between anthropology and the revolutionar-
ies were reflected in anthropology courses and classrooms”
(Fazeli 2006, 159), where he found teaching anthropol-
ogy difficult not only because the “culture of anthropol-
ogy” clashed with the “political culture” of the time but
also because the students did not seem fully equipped to
embrace the critical outlook that was required for “de-
constructing” the given, a central tenet of any anthropo-
logical pursuit. Significantly, as both Naficy and Fazeli re-
mind us, many anthropology courses are taught by non-
anthropologists. As such, the reduction of ethnography to
“data gathering,” as elaborated in Naficy’s piece, points
to more than mere contingencies (e.g., lack of funding).
It raises questions about particular conceptualizations of
the culture(s) of Iranian anthropology and the relation-
ship between “doing fieldwork” and sustaining an academic
identity as defined by key actors at elite institutions who
regulate the demarcations of the field(s) and the pedagogical
life of the discipline. Ongoing debates over the appropri-
ate Persian term for anthropology is a telling reflection: the
emphasis on the term ensanshenasi over mardomshenasi takes
the attention away from ethnographic engagement. Ethnog-
raphy is movement. It is practice and speech. It decodes,
reveals, makes visible, and renders accessible the nuances of
social forms. The decline of ethnography is, in part, and as
Naficy writes, a reflection of fundamentally different, albeit
contested, conceptualizations of what the task of anthropol-
ogy is and should be. Yet it is also an inevitable outcome of
a history of disrupted, scrutinized, and at times politicized
formulations of what anthropology is, what role is assigned
to it in society, who anthropologists are, and where they
come from, geographically as well as conceptually.
Naficy mentions international exchanges only in pass-
ing. Since the 1990s, several Iranian and non-Iranian anthro-
pologists have returned to Iran and conducted fieldwork,
participated in academic gatherings, and produced influ-
ential research and publications (see Fischer 2005, 2010;
Nadjmabadi 2009). The place they occupy in the landscape
Naficy describes cannot be overlooked, insofar as the land-
scape is not reducible to an insider–outsider dichotomy.
Lively discussions have emerged from these exchanges, as
Fazeli argued in his 2006 book, along with interest in the “re-
establishment of intellectual ties with the West . . . [and]
the renewal of contact with Western institutions” (212).
While several returnees enjoyed a warm reception at Iranian
universities, some others have chosen to conduct fieldwork
without seeking academic affiliations. “Doing fieldwork in
Iran under heightened political anxieties of the state over so-
cial control is not easy,” Fischer (2010, n.p.) argues, “but all
the more valuable when done well, and able to . . . engage
discussion about what matters to all, identifying and eliciting
perspectives of all sides.”
While ethnographically productive, however, these ex-
changes have rarely resulted in sustained and systematic insti-
tutional and pedagogical ties with anthropology departments.
Hence, their impact on pedagogy has been minimal. For one
thing, even though several key ethnographies of this period
have been written by Iranian-born ethnographers with deep
experience of Iran, they are not taught in Iranian classrooms.
Works by Arzoo Osanloo (on law and gender), Afsaneh
Najambadi (on gender and sexuality), Homa Hoodfar
(on Islam, gender), Shahla Haeri (on temporary mar-
riage), Nazanin Shahrokni (on women-only parks), Shahram
Khosravi (on youth culture), Saeed Zainabadinejad (on cin-
ema), Mazyar Lotfalian (on art worlds), and myself (on
generational memory and psychiatry) are but a few among
many, along with a long list of PhD dissertations (includ-
ing, but not limited to, theses by Sima Shakhsari, Narges
Bajoghli, Alireza Doostdar, Elham Mireshghi, Maziar
Ghaibi, Janet Alexanian, and Nahal Naficy herself) that
are not read or taught in Iranian university class-
rooms. Other seminal ethnographies too written by non-
Iranian anthropologists with exemplary ethnographic knowl-
edge of Iran (e.g., Michael Fischer, Setrag Manoukian,
and Zuzanna Olszewska) also provide a rich, yet un-
tapped, reservoir of teaching material (see Fischer
2010).
Indeed, most of these ethnographies are published
in English (or other foreign languages) outside of Iran,
and a key issue remains that little of this scholarship is
available inside Iran (whether in English or in Persian).
Naficy’s point about the lack of ethnographic translation
as a byproduct of situational contingencies and the insti-
tutional politics of anthropology is significant, particularly
given the impressive scale and scope of Persian translations
in theoretical domains. As such, while informal and indi-
vidual international exchanges exist, they rarely translate
into sustained theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical
engagements. Nevertheless, Iranian anthropologists inside
and outside Iran continue to build lively and critical dis-
courses and work toward deeper engagement with their
counterparts.
Naficy’s ethnographic account of challenges is ultimately
followed by promising news of shifting attitudes and cul-
tures within anthropology, particularly after the launch of
the PhD program at the University of Tehran. Significantly
promising are signs of a revival of interest in ethnogra-
phy as a mode of knowledge production. The post-2010
“change in the air,” in Naficy’s words, entailed newfound
interest in ethnographic texts. Most notably, several private
institutes, informal gatherings, and independent (online and
print) publications have been launched, creating an alter-
native academia that promises a widening of debate. But
it is primarily the change in voiced student demands that
stands out and is bound to result in incremental bottom-up
advances. Like most bottom-up pushes in the face of lagging
complementary top-down change, they continue to both
struggle and make strides. An uncanny and ethnographically
significant microcosm, indeed, mirroring the dynamic life
of civil society itself.

NOTES
1. Works by Byron and Mary Jo Good, for instance, created a valu-
able starting point for a new generation of medical anthropologists
of Iran after a long hiatus. My own work on psychiatry and mem-
ory was an attempt at ethnographically deepening their work
by adding a generational analysis for the postrevolution period,
institutional histories, and theoretical interventions on trauma,
medicalization, and subjectivity.
2. A familiar parallel is the Othering of psychoanalysis and psycho-
dynamic approaches within academic psychiatry, a topic I have
explored in writing the pedagogical history of Iranian psychiatry
(Behrouzan 2016). Like Naficy, the 1980s returnees who were
psychodynamic psychotherapists trained in the UK were advised
by senior professors in Iran to steer away from psychoanalysis
and psychodynamics in their teaching and their media appear-
ances, and to emphasize instead the “biomedical” aspects of mental
health, a fact that reflected psychiatry’s own identity crisis as much
as it reflected the demands of the Cultural Revolution. Eventually,
however, both anthropology and psychodynamic psychiatry have
survived, albeit at the margins; it took over a decade and several
persistent individual initiatives for psychodynamic psychotherapy
to become institutionally incorporated into academic psychiatry’s
training and practice (see chapters 2 and 7 in Behrouzan 2016).
3. This was a specific period of heightened anxieties about surveys
on suicide, addiction, depression, and other societal ills as well
as about the agenda of incoming researchers from abroad (at one
point in 2010, universities were warned about collaborating with
visiting social science researchers, particularly those from the
United States and Canada). This had implications for how ethno-
graphic work was received by counterparts and collaborators in
Iran. At the outset of my fieldwork as a medical anthropologist,
for instance, I was advised by more than one clinician to steer
away from anthropology and other boodār (literally, stinky; a term
for that which sounds suspicious and clandestine) endeavors
Commentary
On Anthropology and Ethnography of and in Iran
Christian Bromberger
IDEMEC Aix Marseille University, France
N ahal Naficy gives evidence in this text of the discredit
suffered by anthropology, especially ethnography, in
Iranian academic contexts. She explains that her account
is limited to the University of Tehran. The University of
Tehran is not all of Iran (nor is it all universities in Tehran),
just like anthropology and ethnography at Rice University
is neither anthropology nor ethnography everywhere (in-
cluding in the United States). It is useful, of course, not to
generalize, but Naficy’s essay points to an endemic malaise
that is very present in the main institution for the instruc-
tion of anthropology in Iran. Why, then, do anthropology
and ethnography occupy an inferior status? We should try
World Anthropologies 147
and to stick with my “medical stuff” as a physician. Research on sci-
entific or medical topics was generally perceived as value neutral
and thus innocuous, a perception that was itself ethnographically
significant.
REFERENCES CITED
Behrouzan, Orkideh. 2016. Prozak Diaries: Psychiatry and Generational
Memory in Iran. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture: The Po-
etics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Fazeli, Nematollah. 2006. Politics of Culture in Iran. New York:
Routledge.
Fischer, Michael M. J. 2005. “Persian Miniatures: I. Bahs (Debate)
in Qum; II. Simulation in Tehran.” New Initiative for Middle East
Peace (NIMEP) Insights 1:14–24.
Fischer, Michael M. J. 2010. “Raising the Tone (Harmonically)
of Ethnographies of Iran and its Diasporas.” https://www.
academia.edu/33430263/Raising_the_Tone_Harmonically_
of_Ethnographies_of_Iran_and_its_Diasporas.
Hegland, Mary Elaine. 2009. “Iranian Anthropology—Crossing
Boundaries: Influences of Modernization, Social Transfor-
mation and Globalization.” In Conceptualizing Iranian Anthro-
pology: Past and Present Perspectives, edited by Shahnaz R.
Nadjmabadi, 43–72. New York: Berghahn Books.
Manoukian, Setrag. 2011. “Review of Conceptualizing Iranian An-
thropology: Past and Present Perspectives—Edited by Shahnaz R.
Nadjmabadi.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17 (3):
669–70.
Marcus, George E., and Michael M. J. Fischer. 1999. Anthropology
as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nadjmabadi, Shahnaz R. 2009. Conceptualizing Iranian Anthropology:
Past and Present Perspectives. New York: Berghahn Books.
to identify the reasons for this tenacious malady, a malady
whose reasons allow me to mention my direct (2006–2008)
and indirect knowledge of the University of Tehran. Here I
will refine this diagnosis with a more in-depth analysis of the
situation of anthropology and ethnography in Iran.
In Iranian academic contexts, our discipline is heavily
stigmatized by the “rustic” nature of our objects and their
theoretical weakness. In a book that assesses anthropological
research in Iran (Nadjmabadi 2009), Mohammad Shahbazi
writes: “Anthropologists were seen as living and working
in unattractive places and studying the ways of life of back-
ward people to no obvious reasonable end” (2009, 148).
Ethnography falls into an old-fashioned empiricism, tied to
the collection of tools and dusty knowledge, and should
cede its turf to sociology, which is otherwise theoretically
148 American Anthropologist • Vol. 120, No. 1 • March 2018
armed and able to deal with contemporary society. Anthro-
pology and ethnography connote the past, a regression in
a modern country proud of its engineers, its doctors, and,
in the social sciences, its sophisticated quantitative tech-
niques. I remember having crossed paths with a professor
and his student (when I was doing ethnographic research in
the province of Gilân). They were discussing Anthony Gid-
dens’s work. But when I told them the object of my research
(the study of a village family), they looked at me with arro-
gance. It reminded me of reactions I received at the begin-
ning of my career in the 1970s in France, when sociologists
looked down upon anthropologists’ long-term investigations
on the ground, which they contrasted to their hypothet-
ical/deductive methods and their quantitative techniques.
Since then, ethnographic research has become more valued,
and it is widely borrowed across disciplines, though I am not
sure that “ethnography” has the same meaning to all social
scientists.
Another critique of ethnologists and anthropologists in
Iran is that the knowledge produced through ethnographic
research is useless (cf. Digard 2009, 135). “What does it all
serve or do?” they ask. If this discipline planted itself timidly
at the University of Tehran in the early 1970s, it wasn’t so
much to preserve traces of pastoral life as it was to help in the
process of settling the nomads. But because it didn’t respond
adequately to the requirements of modernization, applied
sociology—and even the sociology of development—took
prominence over anthropology and ethnology.
To distinguish itself from the negative image of an
anthropology focusing on relics and antiques at regional
museums, as well as from an ethnography that privileges mi-
croscale studies, the University of Tehran opted to turn an-
thropology into a generalizing discipline (as is often the case
today around the world), a discipline able to debate contem-
porary social problems, a sort of forum for the grand theories
of our times. This has led to a proclaimed change of label—
from mardomshenâsi (ethnology, a term henceforth reviled
by its hint of colonialism and essentialism) into ensânshenâsi
(anthropology). Following this approach, some anthropol-
ogists have taken refuge in the theoretical, stressing the
contrast between “generalists” and “collectors.” Across an-
thropology in Iran (and not just there, by the way), there
is a strictly policed divide between empirical research and
theory, and the links between locally grounded work and
general anthropology are very weak (see Bromberger 2009,
195–97).
This taste for high theory is connected to the professo-
rial allergy to fieldwork that Naficy aptly notes. It seems to
me that this is first and foremost a matter of status. In Iran,
and elsewhere, people think poorly of a university professor
going off on his or her own for a long period of time and liv-
ing a modest life. The rare professorial research missions in
which I have participated were collective ones that included
chauffeurs and administrators—just the opposite of the sort
of ethnographic research project I am accustomed to, char-
acterized by solitary, discrete, autonomous, and long-term
work in which one listens and looks, sometimes without
asking any questions.
Another reason for the discredit of anthropology and
ethnography in Iran, both in society at large and in the
universities, is its interest in small things and everyday things
that don’t have the luster of major works and the great
texts studied by the Orientalists. Valued is the knowledge of
archaeologists and philologists. It was all the more so under
the Shah when it emphasized the Aryan, Indo-European
origins of Iran. Scholars seem to say: “How can we compare
the importance of the great and ancient site of Persepolis to
nomadic black tents or to the meager, contemporary rural
architecture of Gilân?” This hierarchy of heritage(s) seems
to impose itself on disciplines and to have direct effects on
faculty positions, credits, and salaries.
The authorities are all the more hostile to ethnographic
research because, in addition to being perceived as useless, it
is suspect. Government authorities suspect foreign anthro-
pologists of being spies whose interests in allegedly futile
research objects, such as kinship, techniques, and ways of
life, are regarded as weak cover. Their presence there, in
difficult material conditions, can only be tied to shady activ-
ities. Richard Tapper (2009, 236–37) analyzed how “con-
spiracy theories” poison ethnographic work in Iran. These
suspicions do not weigh heavily just on foreign anthro-
pologists but also on Iranian anthropologists confronting
“reluctant bureaucrats,” as Shahbazi showed (2009, 148–
52). This tension around ethnographic research can also
threaten a population or individuals who take a researcher
into their midst, and this poses ethical problems for the
researcher.
If anthropology were to satisfy itself with its modest
status, it would be widely tolerated but would still remain
dangerous because it stresses cultural particularities or ethnic
claims that risk stirring a fragmented country where the word
most stressed by the government (for at least a century) is
unification—a linguistic and cultural unification under the
Pahlavi dynasty and a religious unification in the Islamic
Republic. Anthropology would not only be useless but also
subversive, as suggested by an ethnologist who confided to
Mary Hegland: “She found that any activity that is labeled
tahqiqat or research can be seen as a critical and potentially
subversive activity” (2009, 57).
But it is, for sure, the political situation that has drasti-
cally limited access to the field and to long-term fieldwork.
This is especially true for foreign anthropologists and, in
particular, “Western” anthropologists. As Hegland put it in
2009: “With the upsurge of the revolutionary movement
during 1978 and 1979, Iran turned into a forbidding field-
work country” (43; see also Digard 2008, 123–24). I myself
was not able to do long-term fieldwork in Gilân from 1990 to
2000 (Bromberger 2013) except as part of a Franco-Iranian
team project working to build an open-air museum that I
had designed and advocated for since the 1980s.
Despite this unfavorable context, long-term research
projects have continued to be carried out over the past few

decades, and they shed light on the somber picture painted
by Nahal Naficy. I am thinking of ethnographic projects car-
ried out by Iranian anthropologists in Iran and by diasporic
Iranian anthropologists as well as by “determined foreign-
ers” (Friedl and Hegland 2004, 569), all despite the difficult
circumstances. I am thinking of (and this is by no means an
exhaustive list) Alireza Hasanzadeh of the Centre of Ethno-
logical Studies at the heart of the Organization of Cultural Af-
fairs and Tourism and author of important research projects
and work, and research projects by Mehrdad Arabestani (see,
for example, his 2016 article cited here), Soheila Shahshahani
(2003), Lois Beck (2000), Anne-Sophie Vivier-Muresan
(2006), Yuko Suzuki (2011), Sonja Moghaddari (2015),
Mitra Asfari (2015), Sepideh Parsapajouh (2016), Pardis
Mahdavi (2009), and Janne Bjerre Christensen (2011), who
had to interrupt her research because of an injunction is-
sued by the authorities. These last three monographs deal
with themes and fieldsites that echo Nahal Naficy’s con-
cerns. Parsapajouh did a long-term and remarkable study
of a shantytown near Tehran. Mahdavi did a path-breaking
study of sexuality among Iranian youth. Bjerre Christensen
did one on drugs and deviance in Tehran’s southern neigh-
borhoods. This interest in marginalized or disempowered
populations does not have to lead to an exclusive special-
ization on the marginalized or disempowered. If it is ap-
propriate to study at the local level, the “subaltern layers”
(following Gramsci), then so too can anthropologists study
bourgeois families, kinship relations at the heart of the Shiite
clergy and the Islamic government, and the functioning of a
factory—and these are badly needed (see Bromberger 2009,
196). We do not yet know if these projects are now possi-
ble in the current climate, despite the apparently reassuring
election of Hassan Rouhani to the presidency in 2013 and
2017.
Nahal Naficy justly insists on the importance of ethnog-
raphy, defined as a “long-term and open-ended commitment,
generous attentiveness, relational depth, and sensitivity to
context.” She now runs a workshop on this theme outside
the official channels of the University of Tehran, and she
includes new and current fieldwork. But ethnography is not
all there is to anthropology. Limiting anthropology that way
risks reinforcing the prejudices of Iranian colleagues about
the absence of science in anthropology. Instead, stressing
the place of ethnography among many other rigorous meth-
ods of the discipline could perhaps dissipate some of these
misunderstandings, in whole or in part.
Nahal Naficy’s text, which I deem severe but fair, will
without a doubt be poorly received in Iran, just like this
commentary. Colleagues there will see in all this a new
example of the West giving lessons to them, including when
it comes from the voice of a “Westoxified” emigree, citing a
notion developed by Jamal Al-e Ahmad some fifty years ago
in his book Gharbzadegi (Westoxication) (1962 [1341]). In
sum, a good and deep study of the field would perhaps be
more convincing than an article, which, given the politics
of knowledge production in Iran, risks being interpreted by
World Anthropologies 149
some of her Iranian colleagues (although certainly not all) as
self-serving advocacy.
NOTE
This piece was translated into English by Virginia R.
Dominguez.
REFERENCES CITED
Al-e Ahmad, Jamal. 1962 (1341). Gharbzadegi [Westoxication].
Tehran: Enteshârât-e Ravagh.
Arabestani, Mehrdad. 2016. “The Mandaeans’ Religious System:
From Mythos to Logos.” Iran and the Caucasus 20 (3–4): 261–76.
Asfari, M. 2015. “Étrangers endotiques de Téhéran. Une ethnogra-
phie des dynamiques identitaires des Ġorbat” [Endotic strangers
of Tehran: An ethnography of Gorbat’s identitarian dynam-
ics]. Doctoral dissertation, Université René Descartes, Paris,
France.
Beck, Lois. 2000. “Local Histories: A Longitudinal Study of a Qashqa’i
Subtribe in Iran.” In Iran and Beyond: Essays in Middle Eastern
History in Honor of Nikki R. Keddie, edited by Rudi Matthee and
Beth Baron, 262–88. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers.
Bjerre Christensen, Janne. 2011. Drugs, Deviancy and Democracy in
Iran. New York: IB Tauris.
Bromberger, Christian. 2009. “Commonplaces, Tabooed Themes
and New Objects in the Anthropology of Iran.” In Conceptualizing
Iranian Anthropology: Past and Present Perspectives, edited by Shahnaz
Nadjmabadi, 195–206. London: Berghahn Books.
Bromberger, Christian. 2013. Un autre Iran. Un ethnologue au Gilân [An
other Iran: An anthropologist in Gilân]. Paris: Armand Colin.
Digard, Jean-Pierre. 2008. “Éléments pour un bilan de l’ethnologie
de l’Iran: Trajets, apports, limites, perspectives” [Elements of an
assessment of anthropology in Iran: Trajectories, contributions,
limits, and perspectives]. Nouvelle Revue des Études Iraniennes 1
(1): 107–37.
Digard, Jean-Pierre. 2009. “Applied Anthropology in Iran?” In Concep-
tualizing Iranian Anthropology: Past and Present Perspectives, edited
by Shahnaz Nadjmabadi, 135–42. London: Berghahn Books.
Friedl, Erika, and Mary Elaine Hegland. 2004. “Guest Editors’ Intro-
duction.” Journal of Iranian Studies (Special Issue on Ethnography
in Iran) 37 (4): 569–73.
Hegland, Mary Elaine. 2009. “Iranian Anthropology—Crossing
Boundaries: Influences of Modernization, Social Transformation
and Globalization.” In Conceptualizing Iranian Anthropology: Past
and Present Perspectives, edited by Shahnaz Nadjmabadi, 43–72.
London: Berghahn Books.
Mahdavi, Pardis. 2009. Passionate Uprisings. Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Moghaddari, Sonja. 2015. Migrations et modernités iraniennes: Les familles
transnationales [Iranian migrations and modernities: Transna-
tional families]. Tehran: IFRI and Paris: Éditions du Cygne.
Nadjmabadi, Shahnaz, ed. 2009. Conceptualizing Iranian Anthropology:
Past and Present Perspectives. London: Berghahn Books.
Parsapajouh, Sepideh. 2016. Au cœur d’un bidonville iranien. De Zurâbâd
à Islamâbâd [At the heart of an Iranian shantytown: From Zurâbâd
to Islamâbâd]. Paris: Karthala.
150 American Anthropologist • Vol. 120, No. 1 • March 2018
Shahbazi, Mohammad. 2009. “Past Experiences and Future Perspec-
tives of an Indigenous Anthropologist on Anthropological Work
in Iran.” In Conceptualizing Iranian Anthropology: Past and Present
Perspectives, edited by Shahnaz Nadjmabadi, 143–56. London:
Berghahn Books.
Shahshahani, Soheila. 2003. “The Mamassani of Iran: At the Juncture
of Two Modes of Subsistence.” Nomadic Peoples (Special Issue
on Nomads and Nomadism in Post-Revolutionary Iran) 7 (2):
87–97.
Suzuki, Yuko. 2011. “Évolution structurelle d’une société tribale
du sud-ouest de l’Iran en conséquence de la modernisation poli-
tique: Une étude anthropologique de la communauté des Owrizi
Commentary
Methods as Politics and the Anthropology of Change in Iran
Arzoo Osanloo
University of Washington, United States
A mong the most compelling takeaways from Nahal
Naficy’s elegant reflection on the field, practice, and
teaching of cultural anthropology in Iran are the bold efforts
of students to press for an agenda of change. What Naficy
calls “the little revolution” happening in the Department of
Anthropology at the University of Tehran extends beyond
singular departments and into broader social and political
realms as well.
Naficy’s comments resonate with a series of exchanges
I had with a student from the same department. The student
contacted me in the spring of 2014, just as I was about to
embark on my annual research trip to Iran. After a series
of follow-up phone calls, I met the young researcher, who
wanted to discuss her ongoing project on youth living in
their society’s zones of exclusion and whose lives were
defined through that very precarity: runaways, homeless,
drug addicted, and/or gang members. With a probing eye
and sharp observational skills, she had ventured into conver-
sations with young people from some of Tehran’s toughest
neighborhoods. As she recounted her fieldwork to me, I was
impressed with her sustained engagement with the sites.
The southern stretches of the capital city are harsh places to
live, and visitors from the affluent northern parts of Tehran
or its quiet suburbs, the latter of which the student called
home, would not find it particularly easy or welcoming. As
she described her fieldwork, the young researcher sounded
almost like a detective trying to uncover a mystery: how to
render visible the lives of some of the most vulnerable while
also making their experiences legible and relatable to her
readers.
To conduct her fieldwork, she traveled alone into south
Tehran to hang out with these youth and learn about what
they were up to. She spent long expanses of time with them
in order to gain their trust, to be able to understand their
de la tribu Doshmanziyâri dans le département de Kohgiluye va
Boirahmad” [Structural evolution of a tribal society in southwest
Iran as a consequence of political modernization: An anthropo-
logical study of the Owrizi community from the Doshmanziyâri
tribe in the department of Kohgiluye and Boirahmad]. Doctoral
Dissertation, EHESS, Paris, France.
Tapper, Richard. 2009. “Personal Reflections on Anthropology of and
in Iran.” In Conceptualizing Iranian Anthropology: Past and Present
Perspectives, edited by Shahnaz Nadjmabadi, 225–41. London:
Berghahn Books.
Vivier-Muresan, Anne-Sophie. 2006. Afzâd. Ethnologie d’un village
d’Iran [Afzâd: Anthropology of a village in Iran]. Tehran: IFRI.
views, and to better appreciate their needs and desires. The
challenge for her, she told me, was making sense of what
she was witnessing—that is, to place their experiences in
a broader social, political, and economic context. She was
attuned to gender, age, social class, and the myriad effects
of recent history on the youth, including the anti-imperial
tenor of the revolution, the Iran–Iraq War, and international
sanctions against Iran.
The young researcher, who was working on her MA
thesis at the time, was deeply committed to the field of
cultural anthropology, and she was looking to deepen her
findings by placing them into conversation with contem-
porary anthropologists working on similar topics as well
as theoreticians who could help her to tease out the com-
plexities of her findings. She had read Foucault, Gramsci,
and Durkheim, and while also familiar with many of the
names I suggested (many of the same names mentioned
by Naficy), the student wanted to know about more re-
cent works. She asked me for resources to help shape
her ethnography of youth living on the margins—the lat-
est books and articles that could sharpen her critical un-
derstanding and deepen her analysis of the lives of her
interlocutors.
I cannot say for sure whether this is the student Naficy
discusses in her essay, the one who was part of the small
revolution in her department. However, only after reading
Naficy’s reflections on being an anthropologist in Iran was I
able to appreciate the extent to which this student and others
with whom I have been in touch over the years struggle to
overcome the obstacles of the prejudices and presuppositions
against anthropology in Iran. The biases against the discipline
that Naficy details are not particular to Iran, nor are they
absent from contemporary US academia. That the field’s key
methodological tools are both belittled as not serious science
and hailed as the hallmark of empirical methods highlights
a certain ambiguity about anthropology’s contributions to
knowledge production.

Yet, it appears that the younger generation of scholars in
Iran finds something useful in sustained ethnographic field-
work. The conclusions, drawn carefully and systematically,
not caustically or haphazardly, and based on thick descrip-
tion, appear to serve important ends in the Iranian context
that are yet to be fully appreciated. In Naficy’s account,
research conducted over extended periods of time, with at-
tention to detail and specificity, challenges the status quo
but without overt rejection of or recalcitrance to the overall
system. A little revolution, it seems, is more than just a way
to change the agenda of the Department of Anthropology.
Commentary
From Delhi to Iran via America: Reflections
of an Indian Anthropologist
Nandini Sundar
Delhi University, India
N ahal Naficy’s article on the devaluation or absence of
serious ethnography in the Anthropology Department
of the University of Tehran and in Iran more generally raises
several questions. At one level, it is a lament on the state of
anthropological scholarship in Iran, where understandings of
anthropology appear woefully behind the times compared
to the United States, if not the rest of the globe. It is also
depressingly familiar as a story of ignorant university ad-
ministrations everywhere for whom fieldwork is seen as a
dispensable luxury. In my own department at Delhi Univer-
sity, where ethnographic fieldwork has long been a prized
tradition, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get away
even to do short spells of fieldwork, let alone extended pe-
riods of leave, and the so-called 10 percent rule is strictly
applied (which dictates that no more than 10 percent of a
department’s faculty can be away at any given time).
At another level, though, the essay raises several ques-
tions about the self-understanding of anthropology as it arises
in or is transplanted to different places, its relationship to
sociology, its engagement with contemporary national and
political issues, and the role of translating/digitizing material
to make it easily accessible.
Naficy’s article, although understandably constrained
by restrictions on length, tells us nothing about the tra-
dition of anthropology in Iran—how it began, whether it
ever had a tradition of ethnographic fieldwork, and so on.
As fieldwork in a disciplinary tradition goes, the article is
remarkably ahistorical, uncontextualized, and insufficiently
comparative. For instance, professors relying on students to
collect data is not a particularly Iranian or Third World phe-
nomenon. In many countries, the more senior a professor
gets, the more they have access to grants and the more they
become patrons of large research teams. While the image
of the lone anthropological fieldworker immersing herself
World Anthropologies 151
Anthropological methods’ work of rendering visible while
making legible and relatable speaks, almost allegorically, to
a much broader picture of how the youth in Iran are slowly
and incrementally bringing new ideas to their society’s old
guard and finding ways to enrich and illuminate without
bullishly denouncing them.
Methods, as Naficy shows us, are politics. Inside her
own attempt to bring new insights to the Department of
Anthropology, we learn much more about the subtle tech-
nologies of persuasion and change happening inside Iran
today.
or himself (mostly himself) in the field for long stretches
of time is indelibly entrenched in the anthropological self-
imagination, it no longer describes the actual state of the
field, which has increasing numbers of women, new sources
of data, and a ceaseless pressure to publish.
Changes in modes of publication have made the trans-
lation, digitizing, and archiving of articles something that is
seen as essential to research production. While it was clearly
a chore for Naficy to do this at the expense of her own field-
work, the project in itself seems a worthwhile contribution
to the field of anthropology.
The gliding over of a disciplinary distinction between
sociology and anthropology is evidently something that trou-
bles Naficy. But the distinction between the two is not merely
methodological (traditionally, it lies in small-scale ethnogra-
phy versus quantitative surveys, though, in practice, both of
these methods are shared between the disciplines) but is also
colonial. Sociology was the study of “the West,” anthropol-
ogy of the “rest.” In India, the will to resist this distinction has
resulted in a remarkable overlap. For instance, despite a PhD
in anthropology from Columbia, I teach in a Sociology De-
partment in Delhi and enjoy the access to both traditions this
offers. We teach both stratification and kinship, industrial
conflict and theories of organization, and anthropological
studies of religion.
As an anticolonial strike, there is something I find quite
charming about Naficy’s being asked to teach an “Anthro-
pology of America” course in Iran, much like the area studies
courses of an earlier era introduced American students to
different parts of the world. Indeed, the geographical objects
of area studies have not disappeared as bounded units of
study, even if anthropologists today teaching contemporary
introductory courses on South or West Asia emphasize
disciplinary shifts, much as Naficy herself ends up doing.
While it is true that there are different rhythms involved
in long-term fieldwork and engagement with contemporary
public issues, with the latter often leading to an obliteration
152 American Anthropologist • Vol. 120, No. 1 • March 2018
of the former, the pressure to engage in public conversation
is something that anthropologists are experiencing world-
wide. Indeed, many of the important theoretical moves in
US anthropology—the turn to history and political econ-
omy, or gender studies—came after the Vietnam War and
the civil rights movement. September 11 (and now the pres-
idency of Trump) sparked yet another round of anthropo-
logical rethinking about how the discipline should react, in
terms of studying migration, surveillance, the use of big
data, and so on. In India, anthropologists have been increas-
ingly concerned with violence—both in everyday practices
and moments of communal rupture. Climate change is an-
other instance of a public imperative influencing academic
discussions of the Anthropocene.
Finally, while it is deeply satisfying to read good ethnog-
raphy, one should worry whether the umbilical identifica-
tion of anthropology with ethnography is necessarily good
for the discipline. There was a good reason for the four-field
approach in American anthropology. While I personally do
not have the skills to do anything other than ethnography,
I wish I could acquire competencies in big-data analysis,
genetics, or linguistics, because a narrow culturalist anthro-
pology alone will not help us keep afloat as a discipline or as
beings attempting to inhabit and understand this world.