aspects of my nuanced perspective might actually fit in the world of fast media. Although quite scary at first, the best incentive was the knowledge that I would be restricted to limited space (five to seven hundred words maximum) and had to gain a reader’s attention quickly, often in just the first sentence. This new approach to writing meant undoing earlier academic training, eschewing professional attachment to the value of jargon-laden prose and a method of slowly developed storytelling that emphasized covering all bases. While it was challenging, it was also freeing to use my ethnographic eye and sensibilities to creatively unpack cultural complexities knowing the endpoint was to introduce readers to potentially alternative views. With more experience, I really liked this medium.
No Silence after the Quake
My first op-ed was a commentary on James Cameron’s blockbuster film Avatar. I used the Op-Ed Project mentor-editor program to get feedback before pitching my piece, “Avatar, Voodoo, and White Spiritual Redemption.” I discussed various aspects of the film, including its connection to New Age spiritualism, which hardly ever incorporates Haitian Vodou, as it is still marked as evil in interfaith circles. My op-ed went live on Huffington Post on January 11, 2010, and the next afternoon the earthquake struck Haiti. A couple of days later, the Reverend Pat Robertson publicized the infamous evangelical belief that Haiti was being punished for its pact with the devil. Similar views would find space in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the two most widely read papers in the United States.
I began a writing spree that lasted well over two years. The sense that there was so much at stake was a feeling I could clearly articulate, and it was quite evident in my first post-quake op-ed, “Amid the Rubble and Ruin: Our Duty to Haiti Remains,” published January 14 on npr.org. I recounted the impact of my recent trip and the realization that indeed, I could have a relationship with my birth country as an independent adult. What I also found were people with whom I could work in solidarity and who were determined to contribute their collective effort toward transforming the Haiti they had inherited. I say “they” because as a Haitian-American living in the diaspora, I am only too conscious of the fact that I have the privilege of making my life elsewhere. I can always leave, and thus would always be akin to an “outsider within.”6 Only those with concrete knowledge of infrastructural conditions in Haiti truly understood the full devastating impact of that disaster at the time.
In the days, weeks, and months that followed, words, sentences twirled in my head at all hours. I often found myself waking in the middle of the night, driven to writing stints until I got to a point where I felt I had no more to say. Most of the pieces I penned went live. Some (not all of them were about Haiti) were rejected, and others were never submitted,7 a different kind of rejection. It was an opportunity to move away from academic settings as I learned to discern between when and where my opinion could be an intervention of some sort and where it wasn’t worth the effort or would not be effective. Those were the times when I reverted to stubborn professional maxims, unwilling to adapt to generalizations that would appeal to an even broader readership. More often than not, in these instances, my objections concerned matters related to race.
Anthropologist as Public Intellectual
My motivation to tell a different story came from a moral imperative, driven by sentiment and several points of recognition. The first was intellectual awareness that the Haiti in the public domain was a rhetorically and symbolically incarcerated one, trapped in singular narratives and clichés that, unsurprisingly, hardly moved beyond stereotypes. Second, for that reason, it was necessary that such perceptions be challenged. Third, complex ideas about Haiti circulating in the academy stayed among academics, rarely trickling outward. Finally, as a scholar possessing such knowledge, I could add a nuanced perspective to ongoing public discussions about the republic.
The late Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who constantly pondered over whether academics can be, or better yet, can afford not to be public intellectuals, was a great inspiration to me in that regard. In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995), Trouillot made an important point concerning this that is worth revisiting. He warned us not to underestimate the fact that history is produced in overlapping sites outside academia. He wrote: “Most Europeans and North Americans learn their first history lessons through media that have not been subjected to the standards set by peer reviews, university presses or doctoral committees. Long before average citizens read the historians who set the standards of the day for colleagues and students, they access history through celebrations, site and museum visits, movies, national holidays and primary school books.”8 As I learned the broader implications of who gets to tell and write the story, I agonized over issues of social responsibility. What better way to help Haiti than by inserting my anthropological self into some of those overlapping sites to relay critical insights to the general public?
To be sure, these popular areas are particularly ripe for intellectual interventions. This would be nothing new to the discipline. Since the historical development of anthropology, its practitioners have engaged various publics in different ways. This practice can be traced back to the discipline’s “founding fathers”—less bound to academic boundaries—who actively participated in the debates of their time as they sought to explicate social evolution, human nature, and variation.
Later forebears such as Franz Boas, the notable father of American cultural anthropology, had a significant presence as an anti-racist academic who publicly challenged racist ideologies. Melville Herskovits championed the significance of cultural relativism in understanding black people in Africa and the Americas. Ruth Benedict practically redefined conceptual understanding of culture. Margaret Mead, to date, remains an icon as the quintessential example of the public intellectual who not only brought anthropology to the masses through cross-cultural analysis, but did so as host of a television show and through columns in popular magazines.9
While I was taught, in graduate school courses, this history of the influence of public presence on disciplinary traditions, the underlying understanding was that intellectually valuable work, which we were inadvertently encouraged to pursue, was that which produced knowledge for its own sake. Though this belief seemed to be at odds with my agenda (my initial interest was in development), the rigorous emphasis on recognizing how narratives are created, and the pervasive and insidious power of their representations, only made me more curious about their practical implications.
Anthropological queries that challenge the so-called divide between advocacy and analytical work abound.10 There are recurring conversations within the discipline concerning where and how to theoretically locate these “publics,”11 conversations that anthropologists engage in often in overlapping ways.12 Nonetheless, with increasing professionalization and specialization, the presence of anthropologists in the public sphere has changed, in part because academics do eschew this arena.13 In the past, public engagement was more central to the discipline. In recent years, however, the American Anthropological Association has taken to encouraging the public presence of members, to “increase the public understanding of anthropology and promote the use of anthropological knowledge in policy making”14 and its overall relevance in our times.
Still, external causes for the discipline’s obscurity in the public sphere include the fact that in popular imagination anthropology is still equated with a study of the “exotic” rather than everyday social phenomena at home as well as abroad. Moreover, prominent pundits and experts who offer insights on cultural specificities are not only more adept with the media, but their work, as Hugh Gusterson and Catherine Besteman so rightfully note, tends to “cater to their audiences’ existing prejudices rather than those who upend their easy assumptions about the world and challenge them to see a new angle.”15 Undeniably, as we were frequently informed in the op-ed seminar, the likeliness that an opinion piece will influence readers enough to change their perspective is slim, as most minds are set. Therein lies the biggest
