Michael Herzfeld | Harvard University (original) (raw)

Papers by Michael Herzfeld

Anthropological Theory, Aug 13, 2017

Anthropology is a realist discipline. In this article, I draw a sharp distinction between realism... more Anthropology is a realist discipline. In this article, I draw a sharp distinction between realism and scientism, or objectivism, arguing that realism requires the recognition of the contexts and contingency of all knowledge, including ethnography, whereas scientism-a rhetoric that invokes science as its source of authority-paradoxically occludes recognition of its own context of production. A realist position, anchored in social experience and aware of the limitations that such an entailment involves, is thus far better situated to explore the political implications of anthropological theory, especially in a world where market consumerism, neoliberalism and audit culture, as well as certain authoritarian regimes, have, to their political advantage, substituted quantitative rhetoric for critical thought.

Radical Housing Journal

In this piece Michael Herzfeld and Loretta Lees reflect upon their roles as urban studies scholar... more In this piece Michael Herzfeld and Loretta Lees reflect upon their roles as urban studies scholars based in the academy, and what their positionality means regarding the communities that they have engaged with.

Starting from a comparison of two national contexts – those of Greece and Italy – the author anal... more Starting from a comparison of two national contexts – those of Greece and Italy – the author analyzes some of the social roles and meanings of being an artisan. While in Greece artisans are not always clearly distinguishable from artists, in Italy the variable use of this distinction partly reflects a complex social hierarchy with roots in medieval social structures – that is, from a period considered as a point of origin for the most prestigious crafts. On the basis of fieldwork in Crete, the author shows how Greek artisans transmit to their apprentices social attitudes that reflect and enforce a deep sense of marginality from which few manage to escape. On the other hand, Italian artisans, strengthened by their medieval and Renaissance tradition, enjoy great social regard. This is clear from the prestige associated with artisanship, a phenomenon that has favored virtually any product classified as “handmade.” The exploitation of this phenomenon considerably increases the value ...

Critical heritage studies inevitably confront the conflict between the desire for conservation an... more Critical heritage studies inevitably confront the conflict between the desire for conservation and corresponding processes of demographic elimination.1 In this chapter, we deploy a position of “engaged anthropology” (Herzfeld 2010) to contest persisting essentialist approaches to heritage and culture – a legacy of nineteenth‐century anthropology – that still largely undergird most nationalist and other identitarian discourses and that occasionally, in their extreme form, morph into an excuse for genocide and mass destruction. The same essentialist notion of culture infuses much of the expert discourse on heritage (see, e.g., De Cesari 2010a) and renders it susceptible to political exploitation, even to the point of collusion between scholarship and exclusionary politics. In the interests of encouraging heritage scholars to subject their own epistemic history to equally ruthless inspection, we argue for trenchantly strengthening the already ongoing re‐examination of the assumptions u...

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2019

, and their own developing identities. An unexpected aspect of the Marranos" experience with mode... more , and their own developing identities. An unexpected aspect of the Marranos" experience with modern "normative" Judaism is their expressed preference for Ashkenazi melodies and customs, rather than the Sephardi identification which most would consider natural for Iberian Jewish descendants. Leite"s discussion of this (pp. 255-9) corroborates, in considerably more detail, my own findings from discussions with some members of the same community (see "Portuguese Crypto-Jews and constructed musical identities", in Territoires musicaux mis en scène, eds M. Desroches, M.-H. Pichette, C. Dauphin & G.E. Smith, 2011: 325-38). As Leite effectively puts it, "[M]any began to focus more on experiential affinity, empathy and acceptance as crucial elements of Jewish identification" (p. 257) and "made their choice on the basis of love and nurturance, not in terms of blood and birth" (p. 259). This feeling of rejection is connected to the tendency, which she also discusses, to view Portuguese Crypto-Jews almost as zoo creatures to be viewed and admired, and their decision to affiliate with Ashkenazi culture reflects, among other things, their self-positioning as part of the global, not just local, Jewish world, and in the present and future, not only the past. ]rp1[Throughout the volume, Leite connects the experiences of this very specific community to larger questions of kinship, belonging, and related issues. Indeed, her carefully worded title encapsulates specificity and globality. On the local level, as many sensitive issues are discussed, both individuals and Marrano organizations are given pseudonyms. The reason for individual pseudonyms is clear enough, but the use of pseudonyms for organizations which can be quite easily found by, for example, Jewish travellers interested in alternative Sabbath services is a trifle puzzling. Inevitably, anyone who has spent time with the communities will easily recognize the institutions and many of the individual names, as indeed did I. This caused me some concern, but during a brief visit to Lisbon for a conference, community members invited me to a Friday night Sabbath service. Those present spoke of Unorthodox kin spontaneously, in positive terms, and to me this seemed even more important than the approbation of the author"s academic colleagues. ]rau[JUDITH COHEN York University ]bref[LINO E SILVA, MOISES & HUON WARDLE (eds). Freedom in practice: governance, autonomy and liberty in the everyday. xii, 191 pp., illus., bibliogrs. London, New York: Routledge, 2016. £115.00 (cloth) ]rp[This book is a very interesting contribution to a conceptual issue: why is freedom so rarely a key word in anthropological analyses? It seems that whereas some think that freedom is not a legitimate object for anthropological study, others think it must be, with a few publications taking this latter. For example, the father of British anthropology, Malinowski, ended his career by writing Freedom and civilization (1944); but, as Kelly states in Freedom in practice (p. 166), almost no one has read or cited it. Malinowski"s book reflects a faith in the theoretical universality of culture, and his writing on the subject of freedom is a form of prescriptive, if not dogmatic, anthropology, as Pierre Legendre notes in his own writing (Sur la question dogmatique en Occident, 1999; God in the mirror, 2017). The idea of the impossibility of an anthropological analysis of freedom appears in Edmund Leach"s

Book Reviews 386 offspring of such unions also were often married off to Chinese men. Thus, a pat... more Book Reviews 386 offspring of such unions also were often married off to Chinese men. Thus, a pattern can be seen in which daughters repeated the practice of their own Chinese mestizo mothers of marrying back into the Chinese community, thus slowing down the "indigenization" process of such families when traced matrilineally. A similar pattern of Chinese mestizo daughters marrying Chinese men can be seen in the matriline of the respondent named Halley. Halley is a Chinese mestiza whose mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother-all Chinese mestizas like her-married "pure" Chinese men. These women's lives thus challenge the traditional narrative of Chinese mestizos becoming Filipinos over time, as advanced by scholars such as Edgar Wickberg and Antonio Tan. Their histories also show that Chinese families utilized and continue to utilize their women to uphold Chinese patriarchy by opposing intermarriage with Filipinos while allowing their Chinese or Chinese mestizo sons to marry Filipino women. My only quibble about the book is that structurally, it could have been edited so that it does not read like a dissertation. Also, it seems problematic for the author to use perspectives and approaches from cultural anthropology and ethnic studies that are critical of "regimes of truth and power" to create homogenized and monolithic identities, then conclude at the end of the book that Christian churches need to find ways to re-evangelize their followers so that the latter become "true" Christians. These shortcomings aside, the study has much to offer to scholars of ethnicity in general and the history of the Chinese diaspora in the Philippines in particular.

Dialectical Anthropology, 2008

For most of the twentieth century the state was not a major part of the anthropological toolkit. ... more For most of the twentieth century the state was not a major part of the anthropological toolkit. Despite significant archaeologically driven work on evolution and state formation, most socio-cultural anthropologists have viewed the state with empiricist scepticism, populist hostility, or ethnographic indifference. Typically, state-theory has been left to other disciplines, such as political science and sociology. Since the end of the cold war there has been a greatly increased interest in the state among anthropologists. Philip Abrams, Michael Herzfeld, and Akhil Gupta, who coined the phrase ''ethnography of the state'', have been particularly important to this development. However, there remains no serious engagement with the body of state-theory generated, over the last century, by political activists, scientists, sociologists, and anthropologists. It will be argued that this has allowed for the growth of an unproblematised orthodoxy around an ethnographically informed variant of classic American pluralist state-theory. This orthodoxy has hobbled the understanding and explanation of complex political phenomena, led to confusion between hypotheses and conclusions, and tied parts of the discipline to a partisan political project that remains largely un-interrogated. This essay seeks to provide context and clarification on state-theory as a step towards discussion of anthropology's contemporary engagement with the state and broader questions of political action and social change. Keywords State theory Á Ethnography of the state Á Pluralism Á Imagined state The state does not exist in the phenomenal world; it is a fiction of the philosophers…There is no such thing as the power of the state A. Radcliffe-Brown 1940

Journal of the Siam Society, 2012

It is now over a decade and a half since Marc Askew published an influential critique of the rise... more It is now over a decade and a half since Marc Askew published an influential critique of the rise of heritage discourse in Bangkok (Askew 1996). In an argument that reverberates sympathetically with my own critique of modernist planning a decade later (Herzfeld 2006), he suggests that the current planning regime has chosen to ignore existing, on-the-ground social arrangements in favor of a Westernderived and locally unappealing concept of “heritage,” now officially enshrined in state discourse as moradok haeng chaat (“national heritage”). While the term is etymologically cognate with the Lao moladok, its exponents in Thailand have never succeeded in promoting its potentially affective appeal in the way that has made significant inroads in the Lao consciousness (Berliner 2010). In order to understand why the concept has so little appeal and how its implications nonetheless suffuse current urban politics in Bangkok, I propose in this brief exploration to address some key issues both f...

The Ambiguous Allure of the West, 2018

The Journal of Asian Studies, 2017

The present parochialism of Thai studies, although partial, suggests parallels with the situation... more The present parochialism of Thai studies, although partial, suggests parallels with the situation of Modern Greek studies in the early 1970s. The cultural and political conditions attendant on both in the respective time periods—especially the prudery, emphasis on bourgeois notions of respectability, and restrictions on the scope and content of scholarship—suggest that a comparative framework, already emergent, would benefit both Thailand and Thai studies today. Thailand and Greece both represent conditions of “crypto-colonialism,” in which the combination of adulation and resentment of powerful Western nations produces a distinctive set of attitudes. Important cultural and political consequences flow from this shared condition, as is also contrastively demonstrated by the two countries’ very different recent histories. For example, censorship, once deeply intrusive but now virtually nonexistent in Greece, was instantiated by absent voices and official surveillance at the Thai studi...

Qualitative Research, 2014

control. This chapter displayed more understanding than the street drug researchers whose discuss... more control. This chapter displayed more understanding than the street drug researchers whose discussion of the ethics of care was less convincing. Researching marginalised groups focused upon the Research Ethics Committees’ apparent duality protecting the vulnerability of the drug addict subject on the one hand and simultaneously protecting the researcher from harm, on the other. The chapter questioned the necessity of this protection, making it clear that these streetwise researchers did not need the REC protections. Yet the chapter’s focus on the REC lost an opportunity to be evocative. Should novice researchers or hired hand research assistants be protected by RECs? For example, I recall a 20-year-old psychology student presenting the interview questions she wanted to ask prisoners to her REC. Her question asked: What crime are you thinking of right now? The book as a whole is a useful primer for research ethics. In particular, the middle five chapters demonstrate that even after formal ethics oversight researchers must plan to take responsibility for the unforeseen ethical issues that emerge in the field.

American Anthropologist, 1997

AT A SPECIAL WORKSHOP held in the fall of 1994, we gathered to discuss the rapid growth of intere... more AT A SPECIAL WORKSHOP held in the fall of 1994, we gathered to discuss the rapid growth of interest in European ethnography and ethnology, especially since the foundation of the Society for the Anthropology of Europe in 1986, and its implications for the larger development of anthropological theory. 1 After the deliberations, each of us developed the position paper originally formulated for that initial encounter. The texts that follow are the result. They claim neither thematic nor theoretical unity, but they do suggest that the refocusing of anthropological interest on one of the discipline's cultural contexts of emergence, coupled with the geopolitical shifts of the past decade, may have contributed to a reconsideration of the role of social and cultural anthropology in the formulation of a social theory. In one sense the "anthropologizing" of Europe was a necessary methodological counterpart to the dethronement of Europe as the fount of all wisdom. But what, for those who still (or for the first time) claim it as their identity and home, is Europe? We offer these brief ruminations

TRaNS: Trans -Regional and -National Studies of Southeast Asia, 2014

Thai political life is caught in a tension, sometimes temporally rendered as an oscillation, betw... more Thai political life is caught in a tension, sometimes temporally rendered as an oscillation, between extremes of democracy and egalitarianism on the one hand and authoritarian relics of older structures on the other. The confrontation between Red and Yellow Shirts leading up to the 2014 coup might seem to suggest a binary model of Thai political ideology, but the internal complexities of both groups belie a simplistic model of two parties with diametrically opposed views and homogeneous composition. In this article, I argue that it is more productive to approach these tendencies in terms of political performances by politicians representing mutually overlapping and often strikingly convergent ideological tendencies. With the benefit of hindsight, I analyse the 2004 Bangkok gubernatorial election – and in particular one key rally held at Thammasat University ten days before polling day – as a case study in the value of an approach from what I have called ‘social poetics’ for understa...

American Ethnologist, 2019