Doing anthropology with hope or with hopelessness?
Spinoza, the renowned philosopher, states fear cannot be without hope, nor hope can be without fear. He puts fear and hope in one trajectory and points at their companionship to highlight the speculative quality of hoping. Individuals may hope for fulfilling outcomes and even calculate all possible risks and minimize them. However, a world that enacts itself to produce unpredictable and non-linear flows stimulates the fear that the intended outcome may refuse to emerge and disappointments would replace hopes. Such a fear constitutes anthropological methods (ethnography and participant-observations) because they are unpredictable, not easily accountable and highly dependent on the agency of the researched. Three types of anxiety bolster this fear:
the anxiety of the cooperation and collaboration
the anxiety to represent and reflect others’ lived experiences as justly as possible
the anxiety of social relevance and impact
These anxieties bolster the fear, as well as indicate the hope which is embedded in conducting anthropological researches. There is a sense of hopefulness in the initial/pre-fieldwork steps of anthropological investigations, which presumes people would collaborate with researchers; a sense of hopefulness that the research will stimulate social change and serve some sorts of justice and anthropologists would not misconstrue the stories and experiences entrusted to them. Anthropological methods and anthropology at large are constructed from hope because anthropology pursues how life works from below and from a bottom-up perspective. Hope is the essence of anthropology and anthropological methods; however, this hope is the very doom of anthropology because it implies anthropologists presume themselves entitled to hope. This hope is either consequence of training or due to national/ethnic/racial/communal dispositions.
Anthropological trainings incessantly encourage students and budding researchers to develop confidence, assurance and hope that locals will talk and welcome them. They are also told the lack of cooperation or even refusal to welcome are also valid anthropological clues. Anthropological trainings produce the sphere of entitlement and encourage researchers to embark on their fieldwork with luggage full of hope and curiosity. This luggage is full of hope, but it is shaped by anxiety and fear too. Additionally, there are two more anxieties lurking in shadows, and they become more visible during or mainly after fieldwork when writings and analysis become more pressing and necessary. Most anthropologists ask themselves if they have been able to capture and represent others’ realities and experiences well. They even step further and wonder about their own role in their act of representations. Anthropologists shield themselves from the arrogance of their hope by applying reflexivity and positionality before fieldwork. They often would engage with thoughts such as how ‘my’ dispositions influence ethnographic encounters, ways of seeing, listening, looking and overall ‘data’ collections. Such thoughts are maybe valuable, credible, noteworthy, or even nobel; however, they emerge from problematic relationalities and perpetuate unequal distribution of hope.
Hope is embedded within the historically and culturally specific understanding of the world; therefore, the hopeful anthropologist must examine their hopes and which kind of historical setups and dispositions give them the audacity to hope. In other words, anthropologists must ask themselves how they would dare to step into others’ world with the entitlement/presumption that the world of others is ‘available’ for knowing and their stories are for sharing? My harsh tone is not to discourage anthropological curiosities and embarking on fieldwork in unfamiliar places. Instead, my harsh tone and interrogative probing are attempts to dismantle hope and invite anthropologists to start anthropological thoughts, proposals, researches and curiosities from the point of hopelessness and placing one’s selves at the mercy of unfamiliars. Starting from the point of hopelessness will undo the presumptions and push anthropologists to build hope along with locals and unfamiliars. Hopelessness forces anthropologists not to expect collaboration but rather allow serendipity, surprises and non-linear flows to guide their wonders, discoveries and possibilities to build themselves anew.
Hopelessness is an anthropological invitation that allows anthropologists to take permission and find themselves through the lives of others. Hopelessness is not indifference, disenchantment and the lack of care. Instead, hopelessness is dismantling Eurocentric egoistic hope/hoping to decenter its unequal distribution and finding new surge of hope together and on a planetary scale.
Here, you can listen to my podcast series Hopeless World of Reality; the seventh episode about enactment of hope and its relevance to anthropology.