Cultural AnthropologyDiane M Nelson, Professor of Cultural Anthropology
In 1937 the French Jewish anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss fled the Nazis but was denied entry into the United States. He ended up doing fieldwork in the Brazilian Amazon with the Nambikwara, reputed to be cannibals. He later reflected on these experiences in “A Little Glass of Rum” (referring to the drink offered prisoners before their executions). Pondering the “mutilation inseparable from the vocation” of the anthropologist, as someone who is “a critic at home” (given the field’s commitment to social justice, despite our colonial stains) but a “conformist abroad” (steeped in the “Prime Directive” of not interfering in other peoples’ modes of life) he asks a critical question: How might we judge the apparently horrible practice of eating people?
In classic “making the strange familiar and the familiar strange” mode, Levi-Strauss explores the mystical and religious contexts where absorbing another person is meaningful (think Communion) and then turns the tables. “Anthropemy”—vomiting the human—ejecting and isolating them in prisons, he says, is considered civilized to many Westerners yet would be looked on “with profound horror…by those we call primitive.”
When I taught Levi-Strauss several years ago a student wrote a beautiful essay about his own horrible experience of anthropemy due to his heroin addiction. Returning to these texts in the second week of lockdown and “social distancing” I realize that amid the fear, uncertainty, grief, and dread I am experiencing withdrawal from my drug of choice. Sociality. All the little exchanges and interactions that sew together our shared worlding, our abilities to act together. And also horror: Horror that, being the useless kind of doctor, isolation is the best way to serve to my fellow humans. Horror at suffering and dying alone.[1] Horror at an economic system that not only vomits poor folks and people of color into mass incarceration and denies refuge but shreds safety nets and forces us to compete with each other for protective equipment while the 1% eat the profits.
While we must distance and isolate now, anthropology reminds us that, as with HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and now with the heroic people “just doing their jobs,” and the blossoming of mutual aid, healing is as much social as it is biomedical.
[1] Ah! The joyful moment of sisterly solidarity in Avengers Infinity War when Scarlet Witch is threatened with a solitary death and Black Widow and Okoye come to her rescue. “She is not alone.” Yes, I’m bingeing Marvel.