Walking down collectively forged paths toward abolition and revolutionary change

Abstract

Through an antiracist, intersectional and decolonial feminist reading of a portion of the half-century chronology of the Malinowski Awards, this lecture highlights significant, although little examined, aspects of the history of applied anthropology. The intersection of antiracist, anti-/de-colonial, and feminist streams of praxis offers a context in which my engaged intellectual pursuits can be situated and related to enduring intergenerational concerns that link several past awardees to each other as well as to other social scientists who share similar commitments. A look at race- and gender-cognizant webs of connection over time and space reveals a dynamic crossroads of knowledge, power, and application where the trajectories of awardees such as St. Clair Drake, Bea Medicine and Louise Lamphere overlap or resonate with the publicly engaged agendas of Eslanda Goode Robeson, Manet Fowler, Lélia Gonzalez, Ochy Curiel and Betty Ruth Lozano Lerma with her associates in Otras Negras…y ¡Feministas!

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Keywords:

• intellectual history
• antiracism
• anti-colonialism
• feminist anthropology
• Black decolonial feminism
• Black radical tradition

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Society for Applied Anthropology and the colleagues who nominated me for the distinct honor of receiving the Malinowski Award. Over many years, I have found the SfAA to be a congenial space for exchanging ideas and cultivating meaningful disciplinary relationships. I deeply appreciate the support I have received within the SfAA along with the professional experiences I gained from the American Anthropological Association (AAA), particularly in the Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA) and the AAA public education initiative that developed the “Race: Are We So Different?” traveling exhibit. The International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (IUAES) has also been an important organizational base that has shaped my professional identity and understanding of world anthropologies and world applied anthropologies. I am heartened that my conversations with past SfAA president Roberto Alvarez contributed to the SfAA’s decision to join the World Council of Anthropological Associations (WCAA). In 2017, the WCAA merged with the IUAES to form the bicameral World Anthropological Union (WAU). As IUAES president (2013–2018) at that time, I played a part in the reorganization process and cherish the relationships I established along the way. For many years I chaired and co-chaired the IUAES Commission on the Anthropology of Women (COTAW). I acknowledge my debt to Constance R. Sutton for convincing me to stand for election as commission chair at the 1993 congress in Mexico City. And I am deeply indebted to Subhadra Mitra Channa, Esther Njiro, Ga Wu, and Jan Delacourt for making the commission such a meaningful intellectual and intercultural experience. I extend special thanks to Giles Harrison-Conwill, Crystal Felima, Dawn-Elissa Fischer, Justin Hosbey, Mark Schuller, Gina Athena Ulysse, and Marie Wallace for accompanying me to the awards program and representing the many relatives, friends, students, and colleagues who were unable to travel to Salt Lake City. Finally, I appreciate the helpful feedback I received from editor Lenore Manderson on converting the script for my March 2022 presentation into a text appropriate for publication.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I have expounded on my approach to praxis and to theorizing as a potentially ex-centric or non-hegemonic practice elsewhere (Harrison 2008c, 38–40, 63–68, 121; also Harrison 2016).

2 Abolitionist approaches to dismantling injustices and promoting transformation are indebted to Du Bois’ (1935) formulation of the concept of abolition democracy in his analysis of the possibilities for the social, economic, and political transformations that Reconstruction appeared to represent in the wake of the Civil War and the emancipation of enslaved people. The post-bellum entrenchment of an antiblack regime of unfreedom and violence precluded those prospects. The public intellectual and applied philosopher Davis (2005) has revitalized the relevance of Du Bois’ concept along with the goal of fundamental structural change in the context of current movements dedicated to dismantling empire, the carceral state, and related repressions which implicate racism, xenophobia, and cisheterosexism. Savannah Shange demonstrates the relevance of abolition for anthropology. She calls for an abolitionist anthropology to “[apprehend] the necessary conjuncture of antiblackness theory and a critical anthropology of the state,” which she sees as part of the legacy of earlier decolonizing generations (Shange 2019, 7).

3 The significance of Drake’s Africanist research has not been unknown among mainstream anthropologists. Miner (1960) edited a special issue of Human Organization on “Social Science in Action in Sub-Saharan Africa.” Besides Miner, contributors included Lucy Mair, Georges Balandier, Peter C.W. Gutkind, M.G. Smith and St. Clair Drake (Miner 1960).

4 W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson, and E. Franklin Frazier were among the earliest U.S. Black sociologists whose research and scholarship elucidated the organization and dynamics of African American life in racially and class stratified U.S. society. Oliver Cromwell Cox, the first recipient of the Du Bois-Johnson-Frazier Award in 1971, was an immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago renowned for his studies of race and racism in world capitalism. He is credited with being a progenitor of world systems theory (Wallerstein 2000).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Faye V. Harrison

Faye V. Harrison is Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is also a faculty affiliate in African Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Women & Gender in Global Perspectives. She was the 2022 recipient of the Society for Applied Anthropology’s Malinowski Award and delivered the Malinowski Address at the Awards Ceremony on Friday, March 25, 2022 in Salt Lake City, Utah.