Anthropology is a Martial Art: Towards a Theory of Critical Anthropological Practice

In these difficult days what use is anthropology? Why bother with it when the world is going up in flames, flooded by rising seas, facing another turn to fascism, and witness to genocides? Faced with these challenges, can anthropology save the world? Probably not, especially by itself. But anthropology’s methods and theoretical approach can be politically potent. Anthropology can make unique contributions to radical political movements that attempt to deal with the ‘dark times’ and generate hopeful imaginings of a more just future. Drawing on interviews with 10 contemporary British anthropologists and a year’s fieldwork in a British anthropology department as a masters student, I extend Bourdieu’s concept of sociology as a martial art to anthropology. Doing so highlights the political dimensions and affordances of anthropologists’ actions and outlines a theory of critical anthropological practice. Three autochthonal parts of the anthropological method enable critical practice. The first is anthropology’s commitment to long-term, place-based, closely embedded, assumption-challenging participant observation. The second is anthropology’s particular approach to critical analysis. The third is how anthropologists move between worlds or, in Bourdieu’s terms, ‘fields’. Together these three stances can guide anthropologists to challenge injustice in an aim to make the world more just.