WORKING PAPERS IN ANTHROPOLOGY

THOUGHTS ABOUT SOME MEGA-THEMES IN ANTHROPOLOGY

Johannes Fabian
Working Papers in Anthropology
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THOUGHTS ABOUT SOME MEGA-THEMES IN ANTHROPOLOGYi
Johannes Fabian, University of Amsterdam.
Abstract
Taking my lead from remarks Clifford Geertz made about "mega-concepts with which contemporary
social science is afflicted," the lecture will address and formulate some critical thoughts on three of
them: uses of "globalization" in cultural anthropology, "designs for an anthropology of the
contemporary," and calls for "collaborative ethnography/anthropology." In each case, questions will
be asked and objections will be made from the bottom up, that is, as they arose in the speaker's
ethnographic projects.
The critical reflections I shall have to offer come from an anthropologist whose distance from the
daily academic business is growing, even though my daily work continues. Distance, spatial and
temporal, may cause oblivion – forgetting and being forgotten. It may also open a wider perspective
and make for keener perception. If you no longer need to find and maintain positions or one’s
professional status you are free to speak your mind without constantly having to weigh and calculate
what you say or write. In other words, you will have to put up with, and hopefully enjoy, some old
age anarchism. However, even as an outsider to academia I cannot speak from nowhere. My
scholarly place is where it has always been – in cultural anthropology as it is understood within the
USA.
The title for this lecture came to me within hours of receiving the invitation arrived to address you
at the beginning of a new academic year. It was not the first time that this happened and often this
kind of poetic inspiration has worked like a diviner's spell when he casts the content of a calabash
onto the ground and then goes on to tell his audience what the bits and pieces mean. So, what
you might expect is not a formal presentation of recent ethnographic work or a well-organized
theoretical argument but, rather, a kind of retrospective meditation, a collecting (and collage) of
thoughts.
A title that sounds good is fine; but then themes are required to make a story of the initial idea. It
did not take me long to draw up a list of about a dozen topoi which qualify as mega-themes in
current anthropological debates. Eventually, I decided to cut the number down to three or four. I
called them "mega" because that attribute has a history that is of interest. Almost forty years ago,
Clifford Geertz spoke of "mega-concepts with which contemporary social science is afflicted –
legitimacy, modernization, integration, conflict, charisma, structure...meaning" (1973:23). Even
though it came as just an aside, it made an important statement. He considered conceptual
megalomania to be an affliction, that is, a weakness, of "contemporary" social science which I read
as somehow implying that mega-concepts, no matter which, are markers of the "contemporary" by
virtue of their mega-ness.
Ten years later, in his Huxley Memorial Lecture, Geertz returned to "mega-concepts," this time in
critical remarks addressed to social science with a Marxist bent: "Matters are cast on a resolutely
grand and abstract scale, a dialectic of mega-concepts heavily annotated with opportune mini-facts,
assembled from here, there and elsewhere...-- a tendency reinforced by the appearance of World
Systems Theory with its cores, semiperipheries, dependencies, dominations, global divisions of
labour, and other triumphant categories" (Geertz 1984:517).ii
We don't have to agree with Geertz's choice of specific targets of critique (some of them are at
present no longer on the agenda of many debates) but the alarm he sounded long ago should ring
out whenever and for whatever reasons – they may range from academic vanity to bureaucratic
necessity – we are tempted to seek intellectual cover under concepts, themes, and trends or
fashions that happen to be "triumphant." By way of inflationary repetition they conjure up width and
depth, scope and penetration, of understanding where there is in fact very little there. To paraphrase
a distinction Geertz made in his essay on "Thick Description" I quote: Big concepts and projects
may be great "to think about," but that does not mean they are good "to think with" (ibid.)
Table of content
1. Globalization 2
2. Contemporary 5
3. Collaborative Ethnography 7
4. Conclusions 9
Bibliography 10
Endnotes 12

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I / one Globalization
My work as an ethnographer began with research on an African religious movement in Katanga.
While I maintained this regional focus through the years – in fact I now think that because of it – it
eventually made me branch out to other subjects and cultural practices which had in common that
they could be understood neither holdovers of precolonial traditions, nor as imports of modernity,
or as a mixture of both. Popular culture, I found, was a concept good to think with. There was little
or no precedent for using it in studies of contemporary Africa and, above all, it was not (yet) afflicted
by the mega-concept of globalization. In a programmatic paper (Fabian 1978) "global" occurs only
twice in the concluding paragraph, both times with a negative connotation. I say that "that the only
way to prevent the concept of popular culture ... from being exploited for illegitimate political interests
is to resist its uncritical, i.e. it global and non-dialectical use," citing Mobutu's doctrine of authenticité
as an example of an attempt to posit a "unified, positive, and global identity" (1978:330).
Obviously I disliked the term. However, a few years later it caught up with me when I had occasion
to summarise what I had learned from my work on African religious movements. I formulated my
position in six theses (the essay was entitled "Six theses regarding the anthropology of religious
movements," originally published in 1981). Let me quote the final one: "By placing contemporary
African religious movements in the context of popular culture we may get closer to seeing them,
finally, in a worldwide perspective. Such a perspective encompasses the history and political
economy of religion in an age of planetary embourgeoisement" (1991:124). "Anthropologists," I
went on to say, "begin to see the need for new global approaches" (ibid:125) and proposed that
religious movements anywhere should be seen as emerging from a tripolar field of forces: global
culture, traditional culture, and popular culture and insisted that "in most parts of the world, including
Africa, the three modes of cultural praxis should be understood as be being contemporary (keep
"contemporary in mind, we'll come to it later) and not as an evolutionary sequence.
Had religious movements succeeded in converting me to "globalization"? If so, this should have
shown a decade later in a contribution I made to a conference on "Global Culture: Pentecostal/
Charismatic Movements Worldwide."iii That essay took more than ten years (after two rejections
and at least as many revisions) before getting published. When I re-read it now, it strikes me as a
kind of defiant dance around, rather than a coming to terms with, globalization. I did clarify one or
two things, for instance, what I meant when I had said earlier that the global should be conceived
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of dialectically: "Thinking dialectically always requires both, attention to specifics and a notion of
totality. In contrast to, say, classificatory or typological approaches which also work with the general
and the specific, "dialectics" holds that the relationship between specifics and totalities is, firstly,
not abstract-logical, but concrete-historical and, secondly, not necessarily peaceful, rational, or
predictable" (2004:361-362).
In that paper’s conclusion I insisted that "global should be used as part of a conceptual vocabulary
that includes ... the notion of commodification. Global then signifies a set of conditions for the
production, circulation, and consumption of ideas and practices that may be helpful in understanding
the rapid spread, or simultaneous emergence, of phenomena such as the Charismatic Renewal, its
ability to take on organizational structures that resemble multinational enterprises, the often
remarkable uniformity of the manifestations and practices of charismatic gifts, and so forth” (ibid.
380). That was about as close as I got to admitting that globalization might be a concept that is
good to think with. More recently, my thoughts about it have darkened, to put it mildly. Here are a
few of them, noted down over the years in my digital scrapbook. Though it may seem so, none of
them are arguments against using the concept/term but, instead, are arguments for considering
objections thereto.
Globalization, like colonization, is derived from a causative verb. With colonization we could ask,
who colonizes whom; we could identify agents and powers, name names, and write histories. This
is no longer the case with globalization. Though greedy capitalists may be blamed for it, or the
internet be credited with its creation, globalization is thought to happen rather than act. One way to
put it is that globalization (prepared by, I think, by world-system and dependency theory) has
become, as it were, cosmological. As a state of the world, globalization is an apolitical and
ahistorical or trans-historical mega-concept. That, by the way, is radically different from thinking
about world-wide processes in Marxist terms; Marx, who certainly used big concepts, and may be
accused of having passed some of them off as laws of nature, would never have been caught
postulating an ahistorical globalization.
Allowing globalization to become such a mega-concept in anthropology threatens to undermine a
guiding idea our discipline has inherited from the Enlightenment: the unity of mankind, which has
served us to overcome biological racism as well as cultural relativism of a kind that would have
made what anthropology has been about impossible: the production of knowledge based on
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empirical research that is able to cross social-cultural and political boundaries. Given its history, it
may be prudent to avoid the word "dialectical" but it is in my view a concept we need if we want to
study human diversity under the premise of unity. True, talking about the global has its counter-
concept in the local (and globalization in localization) but if, as I asserted earlier, globalization tends
to be used as an apolitical and ahistorical mega-concept this would also be true of localization.
Local identity is not natural.
Remember that bumper sticker on cars "Think globally, act locally?" Sounded nice, but we can no
more think globally than we can live or die, eat, have sex, or feel pain globally. Let's say thinking
globally were to mean nothing more than thinking in a way that takes what happens world-wide into
account. That would be a platitude. If it were taken literally as something that, behind our backs,
as it were, determines what and how we think it would be impossible to take a critical stance and
to make globalization an object of reflection (an objection that must be made to all kinds of
determinism and has been made against structuralism and culturalism in anthropology).
Is all this "academic"? Yes, it is if academic means academic practice. I don't know whether or not
you are familiar with initiatives (conferences, a website/network, books) that have emerged under
the banner of "World Anthropologies" (if not, you should be). A collection of essays with that title
appeared in 2006. I cite it here as an example of a planetary appraisal of our discipline that had
very little use for, what one contributor called, "the myth of globalization" (Ribeiro and Escobar
2006:247).

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2 / two Contemporary
You may have noticed that the adjective "contemporary" kept cropping up in my introductory
remarks on mega-concepts as well as in the preceding section. While, as a mega-concept,
contemporary may not belong in the same league as globalization it certainly qualifies as a mega-
theme in -- here we go again -- contemporary anthropology. I'll keep it short but I'll take this occasion
to voice some doubts and perhaps to clarify a point or two. The target I have chosen to discuss is
what it about (and calls for) an "anthropology of the contemporary." An example is Designs for an
Anthropology of the Contemporary published [and publicized] a few years ago (Rabinow et al. 2008).
I must confess that I haven't read the book carefully enough to notice whether the contributors ever
stopped to reflect on the shifts from adjective to noun, from contemporary as quality of anthropology
(opposing it to earlier, bygone, forms of our discipline, maybe also to research interests that are
considered passé) to "the" contemporary as an, and in their view, the, object of anthropological
inquiry.iv Nor did they seem to have problems with constant semantic shifts between, at least three,
significations of contemporary as (1) "at/in the same time as," (2) current/present, and (3) as a
synonym for modern ("contemporary design").
Given our practices of inquiry, which require that researchers and those they research share time,
cultural anthropology is and has always been anthropology of the contemporary (meaning #1). But
that is not what Rabinow et al. are talking about; they envisage the contemporary as a specific,
indeed distinctive, object rather than as a general condition of study. If that is what they want to
promote they must face a simple question: contemporary as opposed to what? To that which is
past and represented by such allochronic objects of inquiry as savages, primitives, traditional and
precolonial societies, and so forth? Or, more likely, perhaps what they mean is the conducting of
"multi-sited" research designed for, and conducted in, board rooms of large companies and scientific
laboratories operating in global contexts (meaning #2). Would this make anthropology more
contemporary than it has been (meaning #3)? In my view all of this talk is sowing confusion, an
example of a mega-theme afflicting anthropology.
Having said that I should make one thing clear (if this is still necessary considering my lifelong
struggle with time and temporality in the production of anthropological knowledge). While I have
misgivings about an "anthropology of the contemporary", I am convinced that our discipline survived
its post-colonial crises by recognizing and acknowledging the contemporaneity of its object. Without
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the theoretical reorientation that this entailed, ethnographic research on popular, that is,
contemporary culture in Africa and elsewhere (I am thinking of Indonesia, Melanesia, and Latin
America) would have been impossible and that goes also for the turn in our discipline that made
"our own societies" objects of inquiry.v

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3 / three Collaborative Ethnography
"Public" and "collaborative" are two key ideas promoted by recent movements in US anthropology. vi
They may not yet have attained the status of mega-concepts but don't lack the ambition to get
there. Here I will only comment upon the latter, "collaborative ethnography," for reasons of time and
because this will allow me to warn against the potential damage this aspiring mega-concept may
inflict upon our discipline.
Allow me to do this by quoting a (slightly edited) entry on "collaboration" from my digital scrapbook
(June 08, 2012): "Some years ago, when I first came across "collaborative ethnography," I had an
instant aversion to the term, for several reasons. To begin with, "collaboration" has for me (and my
generation on this side of the Atlantic) distinctly negative connotations. Notoriously, collaborateurs
were those who worked closely with the Nazi regime. Given anthropology's colonial and postcolonial
entanglements with the powers that be (also often denounced as collaboration) you must be either
be a pure or a simple soul not to be bothered by the term's historical associations. What is it that
its promoters have in mind? "Collaborative" as opposed to what? Presumably to intrusive,
manipulative, exploitative research. This would put collaborative in the company of earlier calls for
dialogical ethnography. The problem I had with dialogical, and have now with collaborative, is that
they stand for ideas one cannot be against; they are disarming, which tends to make them immune
to critique. That alone should disqualify them as guiding concepts for ethnographic praxis. At the
very least, one should be wary of these notions because they may sow yet another kind of
confusion, in this case between ethics and epistemology as legitimation of the research we do.
In all fairness, and just going on the somewhat fragmentary I evidence I found in recent quotes
from, and references to, collaborative ethnography, its proponents do skirt epistemological issues
when they speak of the "intellectual effort" involved in collaboration and say that ethnographers
ought to acknowledge their interlocutors as "co-intellectuals". Moreover, they explicitly state that
collaborative ethnography "is both a theoretical and a methodological approach for doing and writing
ethnography" (quotes from the source cited in footnote 6). Those are indeed laudable proposals,
reflecting crucial insights in the nature of knowledge production. Still, they risk being taken as
matters of professional ethics rather than as issues of a theory of knowledge that, as I have tried
to show on many occasions, has at its core the question of intersubjectivity in communication across
social and cultural boundaries.vii The premise that takes researchers and researched, the
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ethnographer and his or her interlocutors, to be co-productive of knowledge should not be weakened
to mean that field work should be done cooperatively (sometimes used as a synonym for
collaboratively). If the idea of intersubjectivity precludes (or suspends) hierarchical relationships
between subjects and if co-producing knowledge means that producers face each other at eye-
level, then ethnographic research also involves confrontation and struggle for mutual recognition. viii
I may be asked how I match my criticism of "collaboration" with the proposal to move from
ethnography "of" to ethnography "with" which I made in Power and Performance (1990:3-7). The
answer is that this was not to argue for a "collaborative" approach; the issue was a move from
informative to performative practices of research. Performing together involves something else, and
much more, than being decent and collaborative.
Furthermore, intended or not, if "collaborative ethnography" succeeds in its bid for academic
recognition, it is likely to be perceived of as a kind of subdiscipline, a domain of specialized
expertise. Perhaps departments that want to be "contemporary" would then have to create positions
for "collaborative anthropologists." This may sound ludicrous but it reminds me of what happened
with (and to) "critical anthropology" in the seventies when there were openings for "critical
anthropologists" My late friend Bob Scholte, one of the chief proponents of a critical anthropology
(see Scholte 1974), and I disagreed about this. He thought that it was a defensible strategy to
promote, I saw it as a way to compartmentalize, critique. Collaboration in practice and critique in
theory are always precarious undertakings. Attempts to routinize them as methods and to
professionalize them as specializations are, in my view, counter-productive.

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4 / four Conclusions
The point of departure for this lecture were some casual critical remarks made by Clifford Geertz
in the seventies and eighties about what he called "mega-concepts" that "afflict" the social sciences
in general, and anthropology in particular, when it comes to theorize the "complex specificity" and
"circumstantiality" of its findings (1973:23). Let me now recapitulate the critical observations I had
on three mega-concept/themes/trends and put, as they say, my cards on the table.
The first example was globalization. I recalled how the concept came up in my own thoughts and
writings about religious movements and how I ended up with second thoughts and objections.
Foremost among them is that globalization, despite its dynamic connotations, may be an ahistorical
notion, a way to imagine world-wide processes without agents. It may also be an ideological
(neoliberal) substitute for a dialectically conceived unity of mankind, a theoretical and empirical
challenge I feel is essential to anthropology.
As my second example I took recent "designs" for an "anthropology of the contemporary" which I
diagnosed as sowing confusion, due to their constant shifting between at least three different
meanings of "contemporary." Not only that, I fear that making "the" contemporary an object of
inquiry may end up as yet another attempt to get away with an anthropology that does not worry
about co-temporaneity as condition of inquiry.
The third example was "collaborative ethnography/anthropology." In many ways this is certainly a
laudable project. Nevertheless, I expressed reservations because I see the danger that it may
substitute ethics for epistemology in our understanding of how anthropology ought to produce
knowledge.
What should be the lesson for this audience of students and aspiring practitioners of anthropology?
As you begin another academic year you may expect that you will have to confront, and make up
your mind about, concepts, themes, and trends that are currently "triumphant" in our discipline. No
matter whether you find them irresistible or scary, mega-concepts should be met critically and with
a healthy dose of disrespect.

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Bibliography
Barber, K. (ed.) (1997) Popular Culture in Africa. London: James Currey, and Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Fabian, J. (1978). Popular Culture in Africa: Findings and Conjectures. Africa (London) 48: 315-334.
[reprinted in Barber (ed.) pp.18-28.]
Fabian, J. (1981). Six Theses Regarding the Anthropology of African Religious Movements. Religion
11: 109-126. [reprinted as ch. 6 in Fabian 1991]
Fabian, J. (1990). Power and Performance. Ethnographic Explorations through Proverbial Wisdom
and Theater in Shaba (Zaire). Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press.
Fabian, J. (1991). Time and the Work of Anthropology. Critical Essays 1971-1991. Chur: Harwood
Academic Publishers.
Fabian, J. (1996). Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Fabian, J. (2000). Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fabian, J. (2004). Charisma: Global Movement and Local Survival. In Peter Probst and Gerd Spittler
(eds.) pp. 359-87.
Fabian, J. (2006). World Anthropologies: Questions. In Gustavo Lins Ribeiro and Arturo Escobar
(eds.), pp. 281-95.
Fabian, J. (2014). Ethnography and intersubjectivity: Loose ends. Journal of Ethnographic Theory
4:199-209.
Geertz, C. (1973). The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Fabian, J. (1984). Culture and Social Change. The Indonesian Case. Man, New Series, 19:511-
532.
Hymes, D. (ed.). (1974). Reinventing anthropology. New York: Vintage Books.

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Lassiter, L. E. (2005). The Chicago Guide to Collaborative Ethnography. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Poewe, K. (ed.). (1994). Charismatic Christianity as a Global Culture. Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press.
Probst, P. and Spittler, G. (eds.). (2004). Between Resistance and Expansion. Explorations of Local
Vitality in Africa. Münster: LIT.
Rabinow, P. and Marcus G. with Faubion, J. and Rees, T. (2008). Designs for an Anthropology of
the Contemporary. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ribeiro, G. L. and Escobar, A. (eds.). (2006). World Anthropologies. Disciplinary Transformations
within Systems of Power. Oxford: Berg.
Scholte, B. (1974). “Toward a reflexive and critical anthropology.” In Hymes, D. (ed.), Reinventing
anthropology. New York: Vintage Books. pp. 430–57.

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i This work is a transcript of the inaugural lecture for KU Leuven’s Anthropology faculty given on 25/9/2012.

iiA casual Google search of the word "mega-concept" in anthropology came up with (among others) culture, civilisation,
transculturation, liminality, and power; it also showed that some authors use the phrase to mark the highest node in a
taxonomy of concepts. Note also that Geertz himself did not count culture to be one mega-concept that might afflict
anthropology.

iiiTheconference was organized by Karla Poewe at the University of Calgary, May 9-11, 1991. For the proceedings, without
my paper, see Poewe 1994. The paper was based on some ethnographic research I had done in Lubumbashi in the mid-
eighties on two groupes de prière, local manifestations of the international (neo-pentecostalist) Charismatic Revival.
ivIt may sound nit-picking but the Index of Designs has no entry for "contemporary" which would help to clarify the issue I
raise.

v Mega-concepts tend to congregate. I found unexpected links between this section and the following in an online document
titled "Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory" and "instigated" in July 2007 by Tobias Rees:
http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/publications/2007/08/exchangeno1.pdf
By the way, in contributions addressing the history of collaboration in anthropology none of the examples one could cite is
mentioned for Africa; such is the provincialism mega-concepts may foster.

viOn Public Anthropology (with a definition and references) see http://www.publicanthropology.org/author/admin/

On Public Ethnography see http://www.publicanthropology.org/author/admin/
and Lassiter (2005) and the definition offered at <http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/468909.html >.
Lassiter also acknowledges that conceptualizations of ethnographic "collaboration" have had a long history in anthropology,
most notoriously in proposals for "participant observation" as a method (Geertz went so far as to call this "our most powerful
source of bad faith" [1973: 20, note 4]; in fact, they go back to the "prehistory" of anthropology, see the section on Camille
Coquilhat's discovery of "friendship as a method" (Fabian 2000:75).
viiSee Fabian 2014 for my latest attempt to clarify what is at issue. Also accessible at
http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau4.1.008/649

viii
I have tried to show this view of collaboration, as confrontation may extend to writing, for instance in an ethnography of
the oeuvre of a Congolese popular painter and historian (Fabian 1996).

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