Lessons from a life in anthropology and the conversational nature of reality
A mind-widening conversation and ruminations on how it informs how we live now
What is your willingness to contend with complexity?
I recently had the mind-widening and humbling experience of sitting down with Professor and renowned anthropologist Agustín Fuentes, whose anthropological, ecological, refreshingly unalloyed sensibility you get a glimpse of in the audio clip above from The Origins Podcast (full episode here or wherever you listen to podcasts).
How we apprehend the world is what we apprehend, and there is something beautiful about the way in which Agustìn encounters the world. It moved me during the conversation and has continued to do work on and in me since.
Attention to questions and the anthropological sensibility
Agustín is full of space-widening questions, a quality that seems characteristic of anthropologists. My conversation with him brought me back to a familiar and ever-enlivening idea: What form does the other's question take? Have you stopped to consider it, to try to discern it and what it might mean? It is our questions, not our answers, that reveal us to one another. In studying and attending to another's questions, we find out who we are to and for each other.
This inquiry draws me to the social sciences, particularly sociology and anthropology, because of the questions (and their forms) that they believe are valid and meaningful. It is the intellectual generosity of sociology and anthropology that moves me. Mark Granovetter, the most highly cited sociologist of all time, exemplifies this philosophy of asking questions that open one's mind to new ideas without providing definitive answers.
So it is in this light that I chose to do this episode with Agustín Fuentes now and not some other, to explore the ways of asking and the forms of questions of one of our great living anthropologists.
The capaciousness of anthropology and the conversational nature of things
Fuentes describes anthropology as the most intellectually generous of the transdisciplinary sciences, permitting questions about millions of years of history and irreverent of disciplinary boundaries.
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Silently suffused throughout this conversation is the notion, perhaps the imperative, of being capable of holding two contradictory truths at once. James Baldwin once wrote, "It began to seem that one would have to hold in mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition." So part of the human experience is this tension that it is resounded and re-articulated down the annals of thought. It is Hegel's dialectic (grossly simplified to the union and intersection of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis), Marx's way of interpreting the world, Deleuze's world as a state of change, Varela's breakdown of sensemaking, de Beauvoir's ethics of ambiguity (and the idea spans across Eastern and Western thought, the Global North and Global South).
This dialectic is our way in the world, a truth resonating with Fuentes' work and articulated beautifully by poet and philosopher David Whyte. Whyte writes:
“Self-knowledge is not clarity or transparency or knowing how everything works, self-knowledge is a fiercely attentive form of humility and thankfulness, a sense of the privilege of a particular form of participation, coming to know the way we hold the conversation of life and perhaps, above all, the miracle that there is a particular something rather than an abstracted nothing and we are a very particular part of that particular something.”
He calls it the conversational nature of reality and, in a statement that has been reverberating in my life for weeks, says that there is no self that will survive a real conversation, no real organization that will keep its original identity, if it’s in a conversation.
The conversation is not only within each of us, but beyond too, with the world.
Undeniable dialectic
Whyte writes:
“Desire demands only a constant attention to the unknown gravitational field which surrounds us and from which we can recharge ourselves every moment, as if breathing from the atmosphere of possibility itself. A life’s work is not a series of stepping-stones onto which we calmly place our feet, but more like an ocean crossing where there is no path, only a heading, a direction, which, of itself, is in conversation with the elements.”
And this desire is what stretches us into the person we will become (and collectively, into the people and the society we will become). The tension between the way you are right now and the way you want to be in the future is like an engine that drives your identity forward. Slovenian Philosopher Slavoj Žižek, himself giving new understanding to the notion of dialectic, writes that desire is the force inside someone that compels them to move beyond.
Dialectic seems to be a core competency of the anthropologist. Anthropologist Margaret Lock used “local biologies” as a concept to capture “the ongoing dialectic between biology and culture in which both are contingent.” And Fuentes' own work is shaped by this notion of local biologies, fascinated by the ceaseless interactions among bodies, environments (evolutionary, historical, local), and social/political variables. His work delves into the entanglement of biological systems with the social and cultural lives of humans, our ancestors, and a few of the other animals with whom humanity shares close relations.
Fuentes adopts this core of dialectical thinking and the conversational nature of reality to his reaching, indescribable, uncategorizable portfolio of work. His current projects include exploring cooperation, creativity, and belief in human evolution, multispecies anthropologies, evolutionary theory and processes, and engaging race and racism, across each of them turning the lens on his own life in search of understanding and meaning. Clearly he engages the complex. The complexity of the world, a complexity we are increasingly confronted with and can no longer ignore, demands this dialectical, many truths at once, way of thinking. An authentic engagement/conversation/collision with the complex requires a vocabulary of mystery. He embraces this as a scientist and his life embodies how we all might orient ourselves around and toward complexity. What scientists do most of the time is prove themselves wrong--this is what opens your eyes to new ways of thinking and knowing. Indeed, being wrong teaches you more than being probably right.
Wisdom for now
Agustín suggested that we need a shift from knowledge (accumulation of information) to wisdom (understanding of how that knowledge and information connects and relates in the world). And Fuentes offered his wisdom, turning this conversation into a master class in the future of learning and teaching. He starts his students with complexity, choosing not to talk down to them instead inviting them into this journey. It is a generous and compassionate way of being with students. He believes that training students should aim for them to surpass their mentors. This approach, if widely adopted, could transform how we guide others along knowledge paths.
What if we all approached the world with the responsibility towards compassion that comes with the role of guiding others along knowledge paths?
Start with complexity
Fuentes chooses to start with the complexity. He says that his fields, anthropology and biology, both invite capacities for mystery, for confusion, and for inspiration. Contending with complexity, it seems, requires a vocabulary of mystery and the form of language mystery makes is questions.
Are questions, the form other's questions take, windows into this hopeless complexity of another human being? Are the questions one asks revealing of how they are drawing a balance among contradictory truths, their dialectical process? Is glimpsing this process in another a portal to understanding them? Are we defined by our search for balance among contradictions?
If it is a philosophy of unsettledness we are searching for and articulating, perhaps, then, the form of questions are its indicators/measures.
Forming a philosophy of unsettledness
Anthropology studies collisions—between environments, cultures, societies, and time. Our anthropological past is the result of these collisions, and history itself is shaped by them. Navigating and negotiating conflict and collision, themselves conversations, on new scales may be our greatest challenge. It is the way that anthropology has learned to think about conflict and collision that makes it a core competency for each of us.
Anthropologists, with their willingness to contend with complexity, offer toolkits for doing so. The guests of Origins reveal that this capacity spans domains of inquiry, situations in life, and profession. I'm accumulating and generalizing the wisdom from those conversations into a sort of philosophy of unsettledness--a way of thinking about the world born of the conversational nature of reality. The philosophy of unsettledness is something I will be developing in public, here in these essays, alongside each of you.
Agustín led us into this space.
Fuentes' is an anthropological, ecological, refreshingly unalloyed sensibility, an uncommon concoction whose life of scholarship and insight illuminate what we all might need to cultivate for the world we are walking into. And this conversation, the way it gives attention to questions, is enlivening in its entirety. This is the literacy of Origins and one of the great callings to attention of my work with that medium: what is the form of questions the other is asking? Complement it with Mark Granovetter on "Weak ties, living questions, and the history and future of social science" and Krista Tippett and Sara Hendren on "Great Asking."