In memoriam Stephen Nugent,1950–2018

Stephen at the Musée du quai Branly, Paris, 2011. Photo courtesy of June Wyer.

As many readers will already know by the time this tribute goes to press, my fellow managing editor Stephen Nugent passed away on 13 November 2018, to the shock and distress of his many friends and colleagues. Although the development of lymphatic cancer took an increasingly heavy toll on his strength, Stephen continued to work on the journal from his hospital bed up until the final days of his life. That life was a rich one. Stephen’s achievements and accomplishments were by no means restricted to academic anthropology. He was an exceptionally talented musician who not only wrote about popular music and made films about musicians but also collaborated in the 1970s with Ian Dury on tracks included in that punk legend’s debut album, New Boots and Panties!!, transcending the cultural barriers that some in the music industry apparently thought should exist between an ‘Essex Boy’ and an ‘American’ by co-writing the classics ‘Billericay Dickie’ and ‘Plaistow Patricia’. That Stephen’s equally puzzling pursuit of an academic career was in anthropology apparently did not strike such commentators as relevant was no doubt a reflection of disciplinary public image problems that are more difficult to transcend than the Atlantic.

Stephen’s contributions to the academic discipline as such were wide-ranging, original and influential, and he has left us a rich legacy of monographs on the Brazilian Amazon that I will discuss later in this tribute. But for Stephen himself, editing this journal and keeping it true to its mission was a supremely important intellectual commitment. I will begin with that since I am uniquely qualified to testify to what he gave to this publication. We became good friends at the very start of our respective careers in London, since we were age-mates (I was born in 1949), had similar theoretical interests, and both worked on Latin America. But decades of work together on Critique of Anthropology created a very special kind of bond and not a few debts that I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge.

I need to begin with a little historical background. Critique of Anthropology emerged on the initiative of a multi-national group of postgraduates studying in London at the start of the 1970s, publishing its first issue in January 1974. Although most of the founders were in permanent academic posts by the time that I joined the teaching staff of University College London in 1976, postgraduates continued to play a role in an editorial working group whose ethos was collective and egalitarian during the first two decades. Evaluation of articles and decisions about themes to be pursued were based on discussion in face-to-face meetings of the collective. But although what was in many ways an admirably anarchistic approach produced contributions to debate that can still be recognized as intellectually ground-breaking today, practical difficulties with printing and distributing the journal reduced its financial viability and publication was suspended after the first issue of 1981 came out. Fortunately, with the aid of Bob Scholte, the London collective was able to relaunch Critique in 1985, with printing and distribution handled by the Dutch cooperative Luna. Although we now enjoyed important intellectual input from a parallel Dutch editorial working group, the collective editorial approach remained the same, although Bob’s tragically early death from a heart attack in 1987 meant that copy-editing and typesetting the text for printing in Amsterdam became my regular weekend pastime.

Luna raised our production standards substantially, allowing us to launch a series of photo-essays, but still experienced difficulties guaranteeing effective international distribution to subscribers. This made the transfer of publication to SAGE from 1991 onwards a real parting of the waters, not only in terms of guaranteeing the journal’s continuing financial viability but in further enhancing its international profile, reinforced through the creation of a third editorial working group made up of colleagues located in the United States and Canada. The move to an important commercial social science publisher did, however, oblige us to move to a system of blinded external refereeing of submissions and formalize the journal’s editorial management. Since the journal was produced by SAGE’s UK office, Stephen and I assumed the roles of Managing Editors at the UK end, and a succession of Corresponding Editors coordinated our other editorial group across the Atlantic. The latter’s individual members were more geographically dispersed, but American Anthropological Association Annual Meetings provided opportunities for them to come together with each other and have face-to-face discussions with me, Stephen and other counterparts from the UK and the Netherlands.

Because the production of the journal remained in London, it was more effective to keep the administration of Critique based in that city after I moved to Manchester in 1996. I was able to enlist the support of various Manchester colleagues in the work of the editorial group, but my relocation inevitably meant that the burden of administration fell most heavily on Stephen. He not only remained directly responsible for oversight of the editorial assistants who handled the flow of submissions and onward transmission of final copy to the press, but also took on the role of administering the increasingly important stream of royalty income that resulted from the journal’s success, which also meant dealing with its tax affairs. Since we have kept administrative costs low, most of the journal’s income has been used in ways that benefit the wider discipline. In addition to sponsoring various conference panels, workshops and conferences, in recent years we have supported the annual debates of the Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory, which are now published by this journal. We have made a number of contributions to supporting the work of colleagues working in countries in which funding for anthropology is less readily available, a practical counterpart to the journal’s consistent provision of a platform for the writings of anthropologists outside the United States and Western Europe. Our latest initiative has been to offer an essay prize in memory of Joel Kahn, one of the journal’s original founders. Decisions about how to allocate resources have always been made collectively, but it was Stephen and Stephen alone who took on the work involved in implementing the decisions.

An ‘early adopter’ of new technology across the range of his academic work and other interests, Stephen commissioned our first foray into the online administration of the article submission and reviewing process, something that was essential once the journal entered its transatlantic phase. Following the transfer of copy-editing and production from the UK to India, we shifted to SAGE’s system. As the twenty-first century advanced, the old editorial collectives morphed into wider and more diffuse virtualized networks that nevertheless continue to play a role in article review and attracting interesting submissions. Although both I and Alan Smart as North American Corresponding Editor had full access to the SAGE system, and the three of us always consulted before important final decisions were taken, Stephen continued to take care of overseeing day-to-day housekeeping tasks, such as flow of referees’ reports, feedback to authors, resubmission of revised manuscripts, and scheduling of articles for final decisions, working directly with Sam Kelly, our supremely efficient administrator at Goldsmiths. It has not taken us long to appreciate just how much we are going to miss everything that Stephen did to keep the journal functioning smoothly. These unglamorous but essential contributions represented an enormous amount of voluntary work on the part of someone who had many other administrative and academic commitments. They deserve public recognition and a personal expression of gratitude from me, given that new research and family commitments kept me out of the UK for very long periods over the past decade. But these tasks can now be taken on by others. What is irreplaceable is Stephen’s lifetime of consistent but always forward-looking intellectual commitment to the critical project that inspired the creation of Critique of Anthropology.

In 2012, Stephen published an edited collection of debates from the journal’s pre-SAGE era, Critical Anthropology: Foundational Works (the current edition is Nugent, 2016a). Some were extremely polemical, and none more so than the exchange that concludes the volume, Michael Taussig’s confrontation with Eric Wolf and Sidney Mintz, which exemplified much of what then seemed to be at stake in changing ideas about what a ‘critical anthropology’ should be aiming to do. In an exceptionally lucid introduction that, along with his section prefaces, adds significant value to the original publications, Stephen contrasted what he termed Critical Anthropology Mark I, associated with the resurgence of Marxism, rethinking of the relationship between anthropology and colonialism, engagement with dependency and world systems theory, and feminism, with Critical Anthropology Mark II, which he defined as a movement staking a claim, as ‘cultural critique’, for being an anthropology fit for purpose in the globalized landscape of a post-modern age. Stephen’s discussion was not restricted to the time horizon represented by the republished debates, since he moved on from the problems posed by the Mark II perspective to related dilemmas emerging from the debates on the ‘Anthropologies of the South’ movement that we fostered in the SAGE-published journal in the second half of the 1990s. Yet his diagnosis of what was lost in the original transition to a now relatively ‘mainstreamed’ Critical Anthropology Mark II seems just as relevant today as it was in 2012, as disturbing new repercussions of deepening structural economic crisis unfold at all levels in a world that, in other respects, as Stephen insisted, remains as differentiated today as it was in the past. Stephen consistently defended the maintenance of a ‘political economic focus’ that he saw the New Critical Anthropology as having carelessly abandoned, and he argued that it needed to be embedded in a serious and grounded understanding of history over the long term.

An excerpt from an article that he published in 1988 will illustrate both the consistency and prescience (20 years before the 2008 financial crisis) with which he mustered his counter-arguments. Responding to a claim by George Marcus that ‘global homogenization is more credible than ever before’, Stephen retorted:

I take this to mean that because ‘things out there’ are more like ‘things back here’ (‘global homogenization’), we can spend our energy looking at certain fields of representation (‘gender and lifestyle constructs’) with the assurance that such analyses are generally (globally in two senses) valid. Marcus's assertion depends in the first instance on an empirical claim that hardly bears consideration. The alleged ‘global homogenization’ (Madonna cassette played on a Sony Walkman by a small-holder in the Upper Orinoco?) has occurred only at a trivial level. Far more persuasive is the evidence for increased heterogeneity at the global level, an increasing differential in living standards, the proliferation of forms of government with ever more esoteric styles of repression, and a marked instability of even those long-established global networks (financial markets, for instance) on the basis of which economic integration has been promoted. That ‘gender and lifestyle constructs’ of the core have implications for the periphery is undeniable, but that the constructs the primitive and the alien have perforce been pasteurized in the course of homogenization has yet to be demonstrated. (Nugent, 1988: 86)

In his many contributions to general debates about the directions being taken by anthropological theory, Stephen was consistently opposed to the exclusion of the goal of explanation from the anthropological project by interpretive approaches. In a nuanced and penetrating assessment of a new ethical controversy surrounding the work of Napoleon Chagnon, Stephen drew on an earlier argument by Eric Wolf against the demonization of a colleague whose data allowed those who rejected his neo-Darwinian premises to advance alternative interpretations, before going on to insist that anthropology should not seek to dissociate itself from science in the sense of ‘systematic and formulated knowledge’ (Nugent, 2001: 14). He practiced what he preached about the desirability of social scientists taking on board the findings of other kinds of scientists, arguing, for example, that symbolic anthropologists needed to pay more attention to cognitive science. In his work on Brazil Stephen always kept up to date with the latest advances on environmental and palaeoenvironmental issues and archaeological research on the pre-colonial societies of the Amazon, whose radical difference in terms of scale and complexity from the indigenous societies known through modern ethnography has become incontrovertible as a result of advances such as light detection and ranging technology. In his last monograph on Amazonia (Nugent, 2018), Stephen made frequent reference to the concept of ‘cheap nature’, central to arguments that the roots of our ecological crisis are better understood in terms of the concept of a ‘Capitalocene’ rather than a de-historicized ‘Anthropocene’ (Moore, 2017), and an apt complement to Stephen’s own longstanding efforts to critique the persistent ‘naturalization’ of a region with a long history of resource extraction. Yet at a moment in which concern about climate change is treated as another facet of a global Marxist plot by Brazil’s new ultra-right government, we can no longer afford to tolerate the contempt for scientific research displayed by the ultra-right in the United States, Europe and Latin America. Stephen would have been the first to insist that it would be wise to combine critical social science (political economic) perspectives with attention to the alarming evidence that natural scientists have recently produced about the length of time that may remain before the planetary system reaches an irreversible tipping point (Steffen et al., 2018).

Stephen’s perspective on the ‘science wars’ that resulted from the susceptibility to parody of overextended postmodernist and social constructivist thinking did not mean that he was in any way averse to efforts to bring anthropology closer to the humanities that did not imply a wholesale forsaking of social science. One of his many contributions to the development of the anthropology program at Goldsmiths’ College London, where he served twice as head of department, was the founding of a visual anthropology programme that included the photographic image as well as film, and despite his many other commitments, he found time to direct Goldsmiths’ new Visual Anthropology Centre as well as foster its development. He saw the tensions between anthropology and the growth of cultural studies as an opportunity for mutual rethinking and reflection rather than a ‘threat’ (Nugent, 1997).

The content of this journal under SAGE’s auspices has been shaped by many active participants in our editorial groups and networks, and by proposals for special issues that we have reviewed and accepted. But work that Stephen himself solicited, especially from Brazil, played an important role in making Critique of Anthropology truly international as well as making sure that our style of critical anthropology offered some truly original material to think about and retained a political edge. One of the seminal achievements of his work on Amazonia was to extend the anthropological gaze beyond those inhabitants of the region who would identify themselves and be identified by others as ‘Indians’, a theme that runs through all his books, but is given its most extensive exposition in his second monograph, Amazonian Caboclo Society: On Invisibility and Peasant Reproduction (Nugent, 1993). His Brazilian networks also brought the journal some highly original articles that were not about Amazonia, caboclos or indigenous people, such as Rita Segato’s essay ‘The untold story of the Afro-Brazilian religious expansion to Argentina and Uruguay’ (Segato, 1996) and Ruben Oliven’s comparison between the meanings of money in the United States and Brazil (Oliven, 1998). But Stephen was profoundly concerned with the question of indigenous rights and critical analysis of the indigenist policies of the Brazilian state, bringing us a rich selection of articles on this theme from leading scholars working in Brazil, such as Alcida Ramos and Stephen Baines. He collaborated with Baines on a photo essay dedicated to the kinds of indigenous people who, within a landscape of historically rooted ethnic complexity, were portrayed by military and business interests as taking advantage of ‘real Indians’ who look like ‘Indians’ should look, such as the Yanomami, to gain ‘undeserved’ rights to land (Baines and Nugent, 2003). This topic has become more relevant than ever as the Bolsonaro government attempts to end new demarcations of land for indigenous and quilombola (Afro-descendent) territories, and even to reverse some of the existing demarcations, in the interests of agribusiness and mining capital, a threat that preoccupied Stephen greatly in the last weeks of his life.

Stephen continued to explore what photographic and filmic images of Amazonian people reveal and conceal about Amazonian society as part of his contribution to visual anthropology. His book Scoping the Amazon (Nugent, 2016b) shows how images produced by professional ethnographers seldom challenged the stereotypes embodied in photographs taken by other kinds of observers in the past, surveying a vast archive of material in a rigorous way based on thematic classification and quantification. The authority of a book that also offered a broader critical intervention in debates about the potential of visual anthropology was enhanced by the fact that Stephen had already challenged the non-recognition of Amazonian ethnic diversity through a visual anthropology project of his own, the 2001 film made with Renato Anthias, Where’s the Rabbi?

Stephen’s first monograph, Big Mouth: The Amazon Speaks (Nugent, 1990) was illustrated with line drawings by Humphrey Ocean. The drawings again served as a way of focusing attention on the diverse range of people who are ‘Amazonians because they live there’, not because they conform to other people’s expectations of the qualities that they should embody, including the expectations of the international development apparatus, NGOs and the Brazilian state. A majority of actually existing Amazonians live in cities, and the reconstituted peasant population living from a range of petty commodity producing activities is the product of successive waves of resource extraction and failed schemes for ‘development’ that have not only failed to benefit them but left them invisible. What is much more visible to the eyes of the external world, even as it is being destroyed, is the rainforest that environmental activists seek to preserve as an asset of planetary significance, ‘the lungs of the earth’. Stephen argued that the naturalization of both the rainforest and its indigenous population by environmentalists not only obscured the demographic catastrophe that initial colonization brought to the region but made it more difficult to recognize that the people who actually live in Amazonia should have a voice in shaping the region’s future since ‘wise forest guardian’ images co-existed with ‘peasant with chainsaw’ stereotypes. He concluded that the ‘eco-babble’ of even well-intentioned outsiders needed to be replaced by a fundamental change in the asymmetry of relations between the global North and global South that had been the root cause of Amazonians’ problems since the arrival of the Europeans.

In his final monograph on Amazonia, The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Rubber Industry (Nugent, 2018), Stephen drew together the different strands of his earlier work to provide a trenchant deconstruction of the very concept of a ‘rubber boom’ (and ‘bust’, since sustainable petty commodity extraction of ‘wild’ rubber continued as part of a diversified livelihood strategy after Brazilian rubber was side-lined by Asian plantation production and the development of synthetic substitutes). Once again, he challenges the way the concept of an untameable tropical wilderness has served as a baseline for explaining Amazonian development, ranging from Betty Meggers’ now demonstrably misguided arguments about environmental limits on the complexity of pre-colonial aboriginal societies through to explanations for the failure of Henry Ford’s attempt to produce plantation rubber, which began in 1927. But this book’s detailed presentation of the social life as well as political economy of rubber also takes us to a little-known chapter in the industrial history of London and provides a powerful demonstration of the ability of historical anthropology to add new dimensions to commodity chain analysis as seen from other perspectives. In Stephen’s work, deconstruction of existing images and stereotypes led to the construction of better interpretations and theory. By researching all manner of resources, academic and commercial, on rubber, Stephen reasserted the possibilities of an anthropological perspective on the capitalist world system that could recover ‘the histories of the peoples without history’ whilst simultaneously exploring the forces that shaped and reshaped their lives in extraordinary depth.

All Stephen’s writing was enlivened by a mordant wit that truly engages the reader but underpinned by the same robust scholarship across disciplinary boundaries and technical fields of expertise that marks The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Rubber Industry. That book offers an historical anthropology that speaks loudly and clearly to the contemporary conjuncture, with its frequent reminders that contemporary forms of economic extractivism in Amazonia are continuing long established patterns. In their strong challenges to received wisdoms, including those that anthropologists themselves often unwittingly replicate, yet insistence on the need to provide an alternative account, Stephen’s work made a consistent and principled contribution to furthering the aims of a critical anthropology that remains fit for purpose in a changing world in which, as June Nash (1997) once put it in this journal, ‘isms’ still rapidly become ‘wasms’.

Stephen’s achievements are a tribute to a remarkable strength of character and resilience, as well as the strong support that he always received from his wife, June Wyer. He was deeply affected by the premature death of his younger brother Daniel, also a brilliant historical anthropologist, who worked on Mexico. Hepatitis C, contracted during fieldwork but long undetected, obliged him to undergo a liver transplant, which was successful but forced him to accept less than welcome lifestyle changes. It was a peculiarly harsh twist of fate that another illness prevented him from living to enjoy more of his well-earned retirement from Goldsmiths, and his passing is an enormous loss both for this journal and for anthropology in general. I am sure that the hearts of everyone who has ever known Stephen, as a colleague, student or friend, go out to June, and their children Zoe and Zac, as they try to come to terms with their personal loss.