Anthropology as critique: The legacy of Joel Kahn

This special edition plays tribute to the work of Joel Kahn, joint founder in 1974 of Critique of Anthropology, and Professor of Anthropology at both Monash and La Trobe Universities in Australia, as well as for several years at the University of Sussex. Joel was born in the US and did his undergraduate studies at Princeton and Cornell. In principled opposition to the US war against Vietnam, Joel refused military conscription, moving to England in 1968. Following fieldwork in Sumatra, Indonesia, Joel received his PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1974. After teaching at London’s Goldsmith College and at University College, he moved to Australia in 1986 to take up a Chair in Anthropology at Monash University, and then to La Trobe University in 1992.

Joel’s career at La Trobe University was a period of great creativity, despite heavy administrative responsibilities as Head of School. He fostered the work of many PhD students, including the doctoral work of both authors, wrote a number of outstanding books and journal articles, pursued fieldwork in Southeast Asia, helped raise a family, and worked as Visiting Professor at a number of other institutions. Joel retired from La Trobe University and active teaching in 2007. He continued to do research and to write, working as an Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne from 2011 to 2016. He published his last (amazing) book in 2016, Asia, Modernity, and the Pursuit of the Sacred: Gnostics, Scholars, Mystics, and Reformers (Palgrave).

Joel died from cancer in May 2017, too early at the age of 71, and is sorely missed by his family, colleagues, and former students, many of whom have progressed under his gentle advice and guidance to careers in anthropology. ¹

In this introduction we briefly discuss some of the unifying foci of Joel’s work, as well as sketching out the main features of the issue’s papers and how they relate to it. In one way the collection is a fitting reflection of Joel’s life. It includes papers by Maila Stivens, his partner in life, family, and intellectual work; by John Gledhill, a former colleague at Critique of Anthropology; and by Goh Beng Lan, Jean-Paul Baldacchino, and Christopher Houston, three of his former students. As with Joel’s own work, the papers are tremendously varied in subject. Beng Lan’s essay traces out the key concerns of Joel’s intellectual journey and its historical trajectory over time. Baldacchino’s and Stiven’s papers engage in close dialogue with and develop certain of its enduring themes – with religion and otherness, and with modernity and gender in Malaysia respectively. Gledhill’s paper takes off from Joel’s interest in the possibility of cosmopolitanism to discuss contemporary global political themes with a focus on Brazil. Houston’s final essay on modernity’s political orders is intended as a festschrift, in which “one offers in tribute one’s own work as an extension of one’s teacher’s work” (Fisher, 2018: 101).

As Goh notes in her paper, Joel’s work might be usefully summarized as contributing to (at least) “three strands of scholarship central to anthropological debates over modernity, that is, the relationship of peasant economy to modern social formations, the constitutive role of cultural difference in the making of modernity, and modern religiosity” (this issue). In the 1970s and 80s Joel was a vital participant in the creative turn to Marxist thought in some sections of British anthropology, including its critique of functionalist anthropology and modernization theory. Analyzing social transformation in Indonesia through the language of modes of production, in his first book Minangkabau Social Formations: Indonesian Peasants and the World Economy (1980) Joel explored how Marxism might be applied to the study of segmentary society, and how its characteristic “lineage mode of production” is transformed by colonialism, commercial agriculture, commodification of the economy, and incorporation into state authority. Joel’s own work on Sumatra showed (and we quote him here) “that what appears to be an isolated segmentary society is in fact the product of a particular form of Dutch colonialism, and not a pre-capitalist survival at all” (Anthropology of Pre-Capitalist Society, Kahn, 1981: 80). The paper by John Gledhill in this issue shows the continued relevance of the Marxist project of critique that formed the heart of Joel’s work in his early years. In his discussion of Brazilian society and of the rise to power of ultra-right President Bolsonaro in recent elections, Gledhill convincingly demonstrates that class politics are the underlying factor behind the increasingly racialized politics in Brazil: “it is fear and loathing of the poor by many upper- and middle-class Brazilians that is the principal driver of the country’s politics of hate” (this issue).

In his 1993 work, Constituting the Minangkabau: Peasants, Culture and Modernity in Colonial Indonesia, Joel continued to develop his historical account of class formation in Indonesia, showing how the land acquisition fostered by Dutch colonialism also formed a peasant economy. But in this book a new concern is also sketched out, as seen in its title: an interest not only in how contemporary Minangkabau society was produced through its incorporation into both the world capitalist system and the post-colonial nation state, but also in the politics of the construction and representation of “Minangkabau culture” in colonial and postcolonial discourse as well. In studying the colonial archive about the Minangkabau Joel engages with historical questions of tradition, cultural difference, and modernization, of orientalism and indigeneity, indeed of the possibility of “indigenous modernist traditions in Asia which cannot be merely subsumed to our western notions of modernity” (Kahn, 1993: 2).

Constituting the Minangkabau paved the way for a second phase of Joel’s work in the 1990s and his interest in the concepts of modernity and modernisms. Rejecting a pure modernity with its origins in the West for an intercultural modernity that is formed as much as by what took place in its Asian as in its western spaces, Joel showed how the West and Asia are mutually implicated in the constitution of the other. Joel’s work in Southeast Asia led him to the study of different dimensions and experiences of modernity, understood as a global condition. As Goh puts it beautifully, “Joel’s brand of intercultural scholarship provides a way out of the problem of incommensurability towards a multi-directional anthropology that recognizes the imbrication of multiple universes of meanings and logics in a world where the center cannot hold” (this issue). Testifying to the truth of that claim, Houston is able to extend Joel’s insights to the very different case of Ottoman Imperial and Turkish Republican history. In Turkey, Kemalists saw in modernity a praiseworthy and inexorable rise of reason and science, claiming by contrast vestiges of superstition, theocracy and pre-modern tradition in religious convictions and in Turkey’s contemporary Islamic movements. In constructing an alternative theory of state-religion relations in Turkey, Houston applies Joel’s insights to illuminate how particular theoretical positions also facilitated an expansion of agency for those who advocated them, for example for Republican elites who proclaimed themselves the vanguard of modernity.

Joel’s life-long work in Southeast Asia constitutes a sustained critical project that revisits understandings of modernity and modernist thinking. In this issue, Stivens, who together with Joel conducted fieldwork in Southeast Asia since the 70s, critically addresses theories of modernity through an analysis of the debates over gender and modernity. Joel’s and Maila’s research in Malaysia occurred at a key time when Malaysia as a region was moving through a period of prosperity that led to the development of a “state Islamic modernity project” (Stivens, this issue). In her paper, Stivens develops a sophisticated critique of feminist theory in order to highlight the gendered dimensions of modernity that forces us to re-evaluate much of the grand theory on the subject. Joel’s engagement with modernity as a topic of anthropological enquiry was as much a response to ethnographic facts “on the ground” as a theoretical interest. As Stivens notes, “during successive field work periods in Malaysia, it became clear to both of us that we had to address modernity as a crucial dimension of our work” (this issue), given how “ideas of being ‘moden’ (modern) were all around us in everyday and state-level discourse in Malaysia.” Joel’s engagement with questions of Malaysian modernity brought him to re-evaluate our own (Western) understandings of Western modernity and modernist discourses.

In 1995, Joel published Culture, Multiculture, Postculture, and in 2001, Modernity and Exclusion, each exploring different aspects of modernity. His identification of an “expressivist” current in modern thought that valued cultural difference and community in Culture, Multiculture, Postculture was complemented by study of its darker side that noted modernism’s ambivalences and often racialized debarments in Modernity and Exclusion. Similarly, his Other Malays: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Malay World (Kahn, 2006) traces out the ways that the postcolonial discourse of a dominant Malay nationalism, based on a race–nation dyad and associating Malayness with Islam, village life (the Kampong), and rural indigeneity, is used to discriminate against other Malaysian citizens. It does so by excluding a range of relationships in the 19th and 20th centuries that “other” Malays have always had, downplaying the significance of their speaking of other languages, their migration, their participation in trade and commerce outside the Malay Peninsula, their Islamic ecumenism, and thus of their cosmopolitanism and hybridity. Goh describes how influential Joel’s work on the “structural and discursive global interlinkages … that integrated and transformed Southeast Asian and Western experiences of modernity” (this issue) has been in Southeast Asian studies, an influence under-appreciated by the broader anthropological “community” outside the region.

Gledhill’s paper in this issue is inspired by Joel’s work on cosmopolitanism. Joel’s emphasis on cosmopolitan practice serves to highlight the ways in which individuals and groups live with each other without impositions from above or outside. Through his research in peninsular Malaya, Joel explored the “cosmopolitan possibilities inherent in existing processes of identity-formation” (Kahn, 2008: 261). Joel contrasts this “popular cosmopolitanism”, however with the universalizing discourses of global “Islam” and “Western secularism” which have emerged as competing discourses for regulating relations between non-Malays, Muslims, and non-Muslims: “While both may justifiably lay claim to the mantle of classical cosmopolitanism, both also manifest the authoritarian and exclusionary tendencies inherent in modernist universalism in all its guises” (Kahn, 2008: 274). In drawing our attention to popular hybrid Malayness, Joel highlights the importance of the anthropological task of tracing the contours of alternative models of co-existence.

One might add that the search for such alternate models has never been more of an urgent task. As Gledhill points out in his paper, while Europe and the United States have long been considered the home of liberal versions of the cosmopolitan ideal, “current tendencies seem to be running in a different direction as declarations of the failure of liberal multiculturalism morph into an intensification of hate politics” (Gledhill, this issue). Gledhill provides a sobering assessment of the rise of ultra-right politics in Europe and the United States that leads to a form of “xeno-racism”. These shifting political tendencies, however, cannot be divorced from the effects of a neoliberal capitalism that has placed “consumption at the centre of the production of the self.” Similar changes can also be witnessed in Brazil where even leading evangelical churches have allied themselves with such ultra-right political forces leading to a situation where the possibilities for a “popular cosmopolitanism” to act as a vehicle for co-existence between classes, let alone in resistance to their polarization, seems bleak.

A third significant phase of Joel’s work concerns his thinking about religion. In his last writings, Joel criticized the standard approach of the social sciences to religious knowledge about, and experiences of, the divine. For Joel, the orthodox methodological strategy of “suspending disbelief”, by which the anthropologist brackets out the question of the truth of religious contentions – say that a spirit is speaking through a medium – is problematic unless one also simultaneously suspends the truth claims or beliefs of one’s own social or psychological science. For Joel, rather than putting aside the experiential testimonies of believers or religious devotees, one should engage with them in a different way, by participating in their practices or by reorienting oneself to their vision of a different ontological world. Joel himself, as Baldacchino points out, was refreshingly honest about his own personal existential motivations for pursuing a study of mysticism. This form of honesty however is indeed a pre-requisite for the development of an anthropology that is not simply seeking to build “tolerance” – with all the ethical problems that it entails. In his last work Joel advocated for an approach to the ontological worlds of others that is characterized by the openness of the self to the Other – “Joel was not simply trying to discover the other in his/her own right but was himself seeking to develop and encounter new horizons of belief and experience” ((see Baldacchino's paper in this issue).). This leads him to recommend that we risk the contamination and transformation of our worldview by embarking upon what he calls “gnostic diplomacy.” As Goh explains, for Joel the “experiential and contemplative methodologies adopted by both interwar Gnostics [in the West] and Sufis are promising in facilitating cross-religious understanding and embracement.” In the spirit of Joel’s work, she concludes her paper by writing about the Saya Anak Bangsa Malaysia (SABM) (One Nation, One People) citizens’ initiative in Malaysia that seeks to foster inter-ethno-religious dialogue and intercultural understanding.

Baldacchino focuses his paper on two important questions that arise from Joel’s gnostic challenge to conventional anthropological epistemologies. How is the “secular anthropologist” able to penetrate the religious worlds of our informants? And if we do engage with the religious life-worlds and the discourses of our informants, at what point then would anthropology slide into theology? In sympathy with Joel’s approach, Baldacchino seeks to extend Joel’s enquiry by arguing for the centrality of a form of embodied surrender in order to encounter or at least to experience something akin to the ontological other worlds of our religious subjects.

Joel’s engagement with ontological matters – Goh describes it as a shift from a secular to a post-secular humanist orientation – came as a surprise to many of his colleagues who knew his work when he was engaged with questions of political economy. There is however an underlying unity in Joel’s intellectual trajectory. A spirit of critique has consistently animated Joel’s oeuvre. Critique is not to be reduced to a simple criticism of an established order, but rather is characterized by an epistemology of interrogation. Joel’s enterprise of critique is Foucaultian in intent if not in word. In this light

the primary task of critique will not be to evaluate whether its objects – social conditions, practices, forms of knowledge, power and discourse – are good or bad, valued highly or demeaned, but to bring into relief the very framework of evaluation itself. (Butler, 2001: 2)

In many respects this critical perspective meant that Joel never found himself completely comfortable within an individual disciplinary paradigm. As his colleague and friend John Rundell points out, Joel described himself as a “reluctant anthropologist”, reluctant

because he was subject to the play and limitations of professional location, whilst always researching and writing in interdisciplinary ways that embraced deeply contextual and comparative analyses, historical sensibilities, especially to the long dureé, to social strictures and structures, and especially to the nuances and complexities that denote our very modern age. (Rundell, 2019).

Joel was equally at home in the analysis of film, music and the archival record as he was among his informants. If in his early work Joel took to task the theoretical apparatus that dominated British social anthropology in its classical period (1920–1960), he grew equally uncomfortable by the application of much of critical post-colonial theory that led to an oversaturation of “power” in anthropological analysis. This became particularly pronounced in the work of anthropologists zealously seeking out the hidden protests of subalterns against a hegemonic capitalist order in an intellectual trend symptomatic of an “overabundance of wishful thinking on the part of analysts keen to find their own voices spoken by subalterns” (Kahn, 2001: 34). Drawn to Charles Taylor’s discussion of the transformation of understandings of the self and the world initiated by “modernity” (but not by Taylor’s Euro-centrism) Joel sought to apply Taylor’s insights to the comparative construction and mutual constitution of modernity at both the “centre” and the so-called “periphery”, even while questioning the constitution of these very categories.

Joel not only sought to transcend established anthropological paradigms of analysis but also the very epistemological assumptions of the discipline. In his turn to questions of ontology Joel investigated and rejected the typical anthropological approach to religion. His critique of anthropologists’ recommended way of dealing with the “mystical” practices, experiences and claims of their interlocutors – by seeking to suspend their disbelief – is also a self-critique of the same procedure in his earlier work. In it he notes how the suspension of belief and the contextualizing of religious experiences/claims within political, economic or social contexts acts to dissolve religious experiences into “precipitates” of other social processes. Anthropologists, by reducing the religious life-worlds of their informants to reflections of class location, ideological statements, or purely contextualized cultural truths, have by and large shied away from the radical potential of anthropology. In this trajectory Joel’s engagement with mystical ontologies in his last phase is perhaps his most challenging extension of his own project of critique, one that saw him shifting from questions of economy and identity-politics to those of ontology.

In some ways, however, even as we acknowledge the “reluctant anthropologist” in Joel, we must note that his own thrust was always anthropological – in so far as we can characterize anthropology as born out of an encounter with otherness. Joel’s work was always premised by an acceptance of social difference, the difference of other times and other places that he constantly sought to bring into conversation with the constitution of Euro-American modernity. One example suffices in this regard. In Culture, Multiculture, Postculture (1995) Joel brings together the analysis of John Huston’s films, the Hungarian composer Bela Bártok, the philosophy of Herder and German romanticism, the music of American composer George Gershwin with the construction of Minangkabau modern identity in the early twentieth century in the wake of Dutch colonialism only to end the book with a discussion of inter-ethnic relations in Los Angeles and New York. The list is far from exhaustive but it serves to highlight the breadth and scope of Joel’s redefinition of a critical anthropology.

Following his first two books (but in them as well), Joel was increasingly driven by a tireless and fully engaged confrontation with and subsequent redefinition of “social difference”, a task that he did not see as the sole preserve of anthropologists. Seen in this light perhaps the most radical and intractable source of otherness confronts the anthropologist in the nature of the ontologies of the religious subject. In his last book, Asia, Modernity and the Pursuit of the Sacred (Kahn, 2016) Joel looked at how certain interwar Western “gnostic diplomats” sought to transcend the boundaries that divided the Western secular world defined by scientific rationality from an Asian religious world. Such mystics and scholars served as templates for Joel in his own attempt to engage with his Sufi mystic informants characterized by a willingness to redefine his own sense of being (see Baldacchino's paper in this issue). In Joel’s hands, anthropology ceases to be defined by a unique method or indeed by an intellectual division of labor but rather becomes an eclectic practice of critique albeit always framed as an encounter with the Other. In his later works, this Other is not only the otherness of his mystic informants but indeed becomes a form of Radical Alterity.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that Joel’s anthropology was divorced from political engagement with the world around him. At heart, Joel’s praxis of anthropology was always geared towards a certain commitment to the betterment of the world. Whether concerned with displacing facile multiculturalism, challenging foundational narratives of modernity, or indeed challenging secularist modernity, Joel was committed to forms of engagement and being-in-the-world that sought out better means to co-exist and truly make difference a part of everyday life. John Gledhill in this issue takes up precisely this aspect of Joel’s work, in particular his provocative redefinition of “Anthropology as a Cosmopolitan Practice” (Kahn, 2003). It is this ongoing task to seek to orient anthropology towards the study and praxis of interconnected worlds that unites Joel’s earlier concern with anthropology as a cosmopolitan practice with his later work on anthropology as a form of “gnostic diplomacy” (Kahn, 2016). In many respects his anthropology is Boasian in orientation. Joel decried the retreat of academics in general – and anthropologists in particular – from public life. Boas’ fight against social Darwinism and his own role as a Jewish intellectual lending his support to WEB Du Bois in the African American struggle represented the quintessential model of the engaged anthropologist. The accomplishment of Boas, among others, therefore “can only be admired, rather than merely dismissed as orientalist” (Kahn, 1995: 155).

This commitment to social engagement extended to his work on religion. Joel sought to redefine the role of anthropologists as “gnostic diplomats” committed to exploring the counter-cultural resources of different traditions with the potential to redress the problems of religious violence and enmity. In his Asia, Modernity and the Pursuit of the Sacred (2016), Joel writes in his characteristic mode of cross-cultural engagement. If his earlier work on “everyday cosmopolitanisms” in Southeast Asia served to identify alternatives to Western liberal cosmopolitan politics Joel’s own encounter with the mystical worlds of his Indonesian informants in Depok, West Java looks at practical examples of ontological multiplicity. Joel challenges any facile differentiation between the West and Asia, as

Indonesia’s Gnostically inclined Muslims do not inhabit a world that is hermetically sealed off. It is instead a world that is embedded in what is always a diversity of worlds both local and global – the worlds of Islamic reformers; of Christians, Buddhists and Hindus; or secularists and liberals and so on. (Kahn, 2016: 142)

This is to say nothing of the ontologically other worlds they inhabit.

Joel remained deeply skeptical, however, of the potential of institutional religion to develop a better world that embraces “ontological pluralism” (see Baldacchino's paper in this issue). Within institutional structures religious claims are often wielded to shore up sexist, discriminatory or reactionary political processes. Houston’s paper on anthropocracy as a possible new political paradigm may be thought to take up this concern of Joel’s in a different form, by noting how the incorporation of religion into (or under) the State as a tool of human governance has a detrimental impact upon people’s search for the sacred, the spiritual, or the transcendent in that religion. In Turkey, the Diyanet’s (Ministry of Religion) recent anxious conference into the apparent outbreak of “deism” (or even atheism) amongst pious young people (see Bilici, 2018) seems to herald just such a development, in which the enrolment of the divine to aid in particular humans’ rule (in this case the AKP’s) over others appears to result in a “contemplative critique” of Islam.

Last, as Joel’s students, we are grateful to have been supervised by him, and to have called him a friend. We have gained immeasurably from our own fortunate encounter with Joel and his work. At core, we have learned that anthropology, framed as a practice of critique, should go beyond the representation of other worlds and other lives in seeking to re-frame the very categories by which we structure our praxis. As such, there is no privileged object of anthropological analysis. Nor does anthropology begin and end with participant observation. Popular culture, music and film serve as important anthropological texts to analyze both “Western” and “Other” experiences of modernity. Joel’s consistent attempt to confront radically different life-worlds and their social imaginaries bears testimony to an anthropology that is committed to a universalist vision of humanity without however falling prey to facile linear models of modernity that characterize many grand narratives of social theory.