Letter from the Chair (Thomas Hansen

Message from the Chair:

TThe past year has been unusually challenging for all of us. The pandemic forced all of us to change our daily rhythms and to live a life online, meeting students, instructors, collaborators, friends and family on our screen. The other major event in 2020 was the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd on a street in Minneapolis. This murder was captured on a cell phone, like many other recent pieces of footage of excessive police violence against Black people in America.

Demonstrations, rallies, and other forms of protest across the country were unprecedented in scope, size, and duration, and they changed the mood and the conversation around race in the US. “It feels different this time,” many said last summer and autumn. Terms like systemic racism, historical injustice, and anti-Blackness were now articulated, if often somewhat awkwardly, by mainstream politicians, corporate leaders, and many others. Many university leaders and officials, also here at Stanford, seized this moment to commit themselves to diversifying faculty and student bodies and to creating a more inclusive environment on campuses across the country. We all hope that this long-overdue effort will bear fruit. One of the first results on this campus was the decision to turn our longstanding program in African and African-American Studies into a fully-fledged department, a decision many of us felt should have been made decades ago. I want to applaud and recognize the important role that many of our students played in that campaign.

Many departments, including our own, launched efforts to foreground histories of racial exclusion, anti-Blackness, and historical inequalities across the globe into our curriculum, seminars, discussions, and scholarship.

This year’s departmental newsletter has “Race and Anthropology” as its primary theme. Some of the articles in this newsletter provide perspectives on how to study and think of race in anthropology. Others describe events and initiatives in the department addressing race and social justice from a variety of angles.

Before introducing the various contributions, let me briefly reflect on the protests of 2020. Two questions immediately come to mind: First, why did it happen at this point—what was different this time? Second, why did it take so long for so many people in this country, especially white people, to realize that systemic racism was a deep reality, carved into most facets of social life?

It is obvious that footage from cell phones and police body cams now provide a new, visceral kind of evidence of the excessive and often deadly force that communities of color—and in particular Black communities—face on a daily basis. However, there were also other forces at play in the past year that contributed to the upwelling of political protest. The deepening polarization of American life in past decades, and especially the newfound confidence and visibility of armed white supremacists during Trump’s presidency, have presented many people an image of the country that they do not like or recognize. Some people say, “No, this is not us. This is not America.” Others say, “Yes, this is also us—and we do not like what we see.” I think that latter sentiment is what compelled so many people to take to the streets last summer to protest, including many of our students and faculty. The target was to stop police killings, but it was also a cry for another kind of future and a more inclusive and less violent society.

The protests made it clear that there are indeed many Americas, many experiences and many histories—not all of them white, not all of them celebratory of American greatness. That fact, increasingly visible in public life, causes anger and frustration in many quarters and further drives the polarization of politics and public life in this country.

The deep divisions of society, the memories and realities of police brutality, and the segregation of life and opportunities have all been self-evident to Black communities and other communities of color for generations. The “racial reckoning” across America this past year is in reality white America waking up to what has existed in plain sight for decades and generations. It had remained unseen by many, partly by the design of cities and institutions and partly by convenience and self-interest among millions who enjoyed the benefits of being white in America. Whiteness is, as the Black legal scholar Cheryl Harris has famously put it, a form of property, in that whiteness allows easier access to resources, opportunities, wealth, and education. It also affords what W.E.B DuBois a century ago called “the psychological wages of whiteness”—the satisfaction that even the poorest white person can take from the fact that there are millions of Black people who are much worse off.

Anthropologists have had much to say over the years about minorities and about acknowledging cultural differences. However, we must have as much, if not more, to say about how racial identities and putative racial majorities came into being, how they became “natural” and taken for granted. That work is not yet done and our newsletter describes some of the ways that faculty and students have approached the study of race.

We begin with Duana Fullwiley’s scintillating account of how the early modern science of mapping colonized territories, and classifying their people as discrete races, reverberates through contemporary ancestry genetics used by commercial genetics testing companies like 23andMe.

We then turn to an interview with Professor Faye V. Harrison, Professor of African American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who completed her Ph.D. at Stanford in the late 1970s. Professor Harrison gives us a vivid glimpse of her own intellectual trajectory and the many and intensive discussions of race at Stanford at the time, led by St. Clair Drake and other colleagues in Anthropology, as well as Sylvia Wynter and economists like Tetteh Kofi and Donald Harris.

We then feature four pieces by graduate students describing a variety of initiatives in the past year. Jameelah Morris gives an account of the department colloquia in the autumn of 2020 and winter of 2021 that were devoted to the many well-attended lectures and panels around the study of race and historical inequalities. Jasmine Reid summarizes highlights from a highly successful interdisciplinary seminar series called Race in Science, Technology and Medicine that was organized by the Science, Technology, and Society program on campus and co-sponsored by our department. Sam Maull writes about the incredible creativity and learning that happened in his class “Beyond Incarceration,” which also included a Brown Bag speaker series featuring local community organizers, activists, and community partners from the Ella Baker Center and the Ahimsa Collective. In “The Struggle for Black Studies,” Kristin McFadden and Jameelah Morris reflect on the importance of Black studies and Black feminism in sustaining a critique of how institutional racism and white supremacy informed the epistemological foundations of anthropology and many other disciplines. They tell the story of the organizing and pressure that led to the creation of the program in African and African American Studies (AAAS) at Stanford 50 years ago. They also survey the long road of tireless activism—involving many students from Anthropology—that finally led to the departmentalization of AAAS this year. In 2019, the department launched the Center for Global Ethnography (CGE) under the auspices of the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (IRISS). David Stentiford describes the activities and profile of the CGE, which managed to host a series of high profile and well-attended events both before and during the pandemic. CGE has emerged as an important home on campus for scholars and students interested in ethnographic methods and materials.

We then turn to four interviews with new anthropology colleagues at Stanford—first, two faculty affiliates: Jonathan Rosa, who joined the School of Education in 2015, and Anna Bigelow, who joined the Department of Religious Studies in 2018; second, two new colleagues: Serkan Yolaçan and Mudit Trivedi, who both joined our faculty ranks in the Department of Anthropology as assistant professors in 2020.

We also carry two letters from the field. Alisha Cherian writes about her ongoing work in Singapore, and Aaron Neiman writes about the fieldwork he conducted in Australia last year.

The final item in the newsletter are six shorter op-ed pieces written by undergraduate students majoring in Anthropology as a part of the capstone class “Contemporary Debates in Anthropology.”

As is evident from the many activities described in this newsletter our students, faculty and staff weathered all the challenges of the past year extremely well. A heartfelt thanks to all the hard work and determination that everyone demonstrated in the past year. I look forward to meeting you all in person in the next academic year.

Thomas Blom Hansen Reliance-Dhirubhai Ambani Professor in South Asian Studies Professor and Chair Department of Anthropology