The issue of harm in certain contexts and settings at some very fraught moments appears overly connected to anthropology: an idea of the discipline is made as the problem in a focus that can overshadow the actions of individuals and or institutional practices. This includes claims for anthropological harm that conflate the actions of particular individuals with the discipline. Alongside the potential harm in blaming anthropology, indiscriminately, a form of public anthropology may be gleaned: a mandate emerges to attend to spaces which presage this furore. The discipline is being ‘re-tasked’ robustly with its own huge remit to avoid damage in the studies of all peoples. This is extended to detrimental spaces that are revealed in academia, structural or evident, for which anthropology must be made to take culpability, particularly so in certain contemporary high-profile incidents.

Thus, an idea of anthropology to be named and blamed overshadows any scrutinising of institutional structures (across disciplines) that might have contributed to such problems and which are not as trendy. In some instances, there is an apparent indistinguishability of anthropology from the alleged actions of famous or highly placed anthropologists in universities. One immediate example is the ongoing Harvard University lawsuit (Czerwienski, M., L. Kilburn, and A. Mandava v Harvard University and the President and Fellows of Harvard College 2022) with accusations against the anthropology professor John Comaroff.

Discussing the Harvard lawsuit, the 2018 #HAUTalk and other incidences where anthropologists have allegedly misused their positions, Rine Veith (this issue) reflects on wider issues of harm and responsibility and reminds of the ever-present possibilities for anthropologists to bring their knowledge and expertise to offset any such wrongs. This is a mandate that goes beyond current conversations. The largeness of the discipline (all peoples) and the emphasis on specificities (understanding people in their lived contexts) indicate that issues of harm, responsibility and speaking with others remain incomplete, as tasks in progress, while much ventilated. That the issue of harm is not one without benefit of own interlocutors in anthropology aligns with the spaces for a public anthropology to be more interventionist. This is so, even as such a role is not always visible, particularly with regard to aspects of latter-day viral communications.

In an op-ed published earlier this year on the Harvard case, and with reference to the #MeToo Anthropology Collective, Holly Walters (2022) asks: “So, what is it about academia – and anthropology specifically – that allows this kind of systemic abuse to thrive?” She acknowledges that addressing harms must focus not only on individual perpetrators but also on “the people and organisations around them.” Walters argues that the attention to power dynamics, along with campus and off-campus positions, has “yet to fruitfully challenge academic anthropology at its core” while concurring with understandings of its separateness from an anthropology which examines harm. Such understandings of limited attention or failure by anthropologists to have oversight and address abuse in academic settings, given their anthropological skills and expertise, are elided in social media and related interactions. This is, also, where it is anthropology as a discipline that is identified as the problem rather than institutional practices.

Social media feeds, inclusive of Twitter, along with e-mail threads circulate on other incidences as well. Thus, some members-only conversations on American Anthropological Association (AAA) communities are captured in screen shots to be reposted for wider social media circulation. Conversations or letters deemed controversial that are posted on closed communities’ feeds can quickly gain social media attention; I am at times notified almost simultaneously by a Twitter ‘pop-up’ of something deemed of interest relating to an AAA post. This can sometimes be before I even have time to turn to my e-mail inbox and have a look at the official AAA thread. This was so with a 13 April 2022 co-authored ‘Letter of Concern’ (AAA e-mail communication). The letter went on to note the dominance of “dark anthropology”. It attracted certain dissonant views within the closed anthropological communities. One Twitter account, however, was quick to note the letter's existence, first pointing out that the recent quiet mode of AAA communities was not to last and now a letter of concern had emerged. People were urged to standby for details. In several tweets, the letter's contents were provided. This initially closed communication was now open access, if differentially so.

The AAA starts each email thread with an advisory, inclusive of the following:

The AAA Communities platform is designed to help our members communicate, connect, and share their academic insight with fellow anthropologists. We ask that you respect the purpose of the community. We will not tolerate posts that are defamatory, abusive, profane, threatening, or offensive. In order to preserve an environment that encourages both civil and fruitful dialogue, we reserve the right to suspend or terminate membership in this community for anyone who violate these rules. (AAA e-mail communication)

Publics accessing such communications are not to be so constrained. Antonio de Lauri and Kristin Bergtora Sandvik (2021) point to radical shifts marking online interactions where general publics are now participants in key discussions that were once select to anthropology. They consider that this allows for spaces where “anthropologists may be challenged by their interlocutors at any time”. While noting destabilising factors affecting expert knowledge, De Lauri and Sandvik consider that dialogue can be enhanced. These spaces remain problematic, however, where high-profile incidences inclusive of the Harvard lawsuit and allegations against Comaroff move out of the potentialities for fruitful exchanges to align with or to open spaces for causing harm in online interactions. Insufficiently carried over into such online settings are the modes of critical approaches within the discipline. This is while a large remit remains, if loosely so: that which anthropology cannot solve becomes its responsibility; it must be blamed accordingly.

Generally, an ease of allocating and sharing blame connects with a contemporary predicament having to do with how some information can circulate on Twitter and other social media platforms ostensibly unmoored from fact-checking or any related approaches. Any concerns of what is fake or real can be superseded by the viral post of the moment. Alongside the rise of fake news, the acts of making real through virtually wide circulation are not without spaces for harm. This is even as the reach and immediacy of multitudinous responses on social media also pose inhibitions to harm, with or without legal recourses. Variedly, organisations as well as governments endeavour to monitor and legislate harm online with differing emphases on responsibility and culpability. Daniel Funke and Daniela Flamini (2022) note one mapping of countries taking legislative actions against online harm. Examples also include the Malaysian government's actions to criminalise those who spread fake news. Malaysia passed the Anti-Fake News Act 2018 where the spreading of fake news was to be punished with both criminal and monetary penalties (Parliament of Malaysia 2018). Subsequently, it was subjected to significant outcries: in effect, this was seen to be about other forms of harm, with claims of sweeping powers affecting people's rights. The act was subsequently repealed. In March 2021, Malaysia moved to limit misinformation on COVID-19 with the Emergency (Essential Powers) (No. 2) Ordinance 2021. Under this ordinance, fake news spreaders were to be once more determined on the basis of the law and subject to criminal convictions and fines: Fake news according to the ordinance was inclusive of “news, information, data and reports, which is or are wholly or partly false relating to COVID-19 or the proclamation of emergency, whether in the forms of features, visuals or audio recordings or in any other form capable of suggesting words or ideas” (Federal Gazette 2021: 19–20). This ordinance also attracted significant protests. It has been revoked.

The UK White Paper on Online Harm, on the need to regulate such harm, noted the use of algorithms to “ promote disinformation by ensuring that users do not see rebuttals or other sources that may disagree and can also mean that users perceive a story to be far more widely believed than it really is”(Online Harms White Paper 2019: 5). Richard Wilson points out that while, for example, Facebook's and Twitter's “guidelines on incitement, harassment and hate speech provide for more stringent protections for users than federal or state agencies are permitted under the First Amendment” these companies are not legally compelled to provide such protection (2019: 6).

Harm and the anthropological emphasis on taking care against harm are inseparable from disciplinary concerns, as variedly highlighted, occasioning a great deal of self-scrutiny and debate. This is suggestive both of the anthropologist's role of speaking for others with empathy and shared humanism (as an ideal, also) and of a discipline's mandate to privilege the other in the ‘co-existing’ of many selves. This indicates the complexities of any discipline's work to represent and share what it means to be human. Extensive probing of anthropological forms of knowledge-making occurs within the discipline to consider its own shortcomings. This is also where intra-disciplinary scrutiny occurs in a crisis mode leading to revised approaches to studying people, as has been well aired (e.g., Halstead 2008).

Differences of views, elucidated variously from conference debates to published disagreements and quarrels, have illustrated the capacities to disturb established positions. Some approaches are repeatedly examined over different periods, not least those bound up with respecting cultural differences, where there have been significant debates on cultural relativism vs. universal rights – with debates spilling over into human rights’ issues in contemporary settings. Ready examples include constant scrutiny on how respect for own cultures can also provide over-distinct visibility in particular contexts. Thus, Judith Kleinfield (1984), entering into one debate, points to how anthropology became equated with an over-recognition of cultural differences which precluded access to other rights. She verifies that a sign decrying any further requirement of anthropology to explain failure did indeed exist inside Alaska's Department of Education. Kleinfield pointed out that this sign was meant to call out anthropology's focus on difference with regard to such explanations. She notes that the sign-maker meant to highlight that “anthropology had an effect on educational practice, but that effect was pernicious”. Kleinfield adds: “Cultural differences are replacing cultural deprivation as the fashionable excuse for school failure. The Department of Education was announcing that it was not buying this excuse. The staff was meeting under that sign” (1983: 283).

Long predating contemporary Twitter and related feeds on events in anthropology, the Napoleon Chagnon 2000 e-mail trail circulated to question his depiction of the Yanomami as a “fierce people” and his alleged role in violent in-fighting to gain preference for gifts he distributed. Despite his robust defence, he was impacted, as Ron Robin (2004) noted (see, also, Mitchell 2014). Robin, for example, points out that a task force created by the AAA opted not to “pass judgment on Chagnon's promotion of violence and his disruption of customs through gift giving.” However, “the report concluded that ‘his representations of Yanomami ways of life were damaging to them and that he made insufficient effort to undo the damage’” (2004: 151).

Such high-profile incidences serve to highlight kinds of readiness to address harm alongside the ongoing reflection and scrutiny of disciplinary practices. Despite some residual ideas of anthropology as tribal study, which can be communicated in lay settings and conversations, for example to unsuspecting PhD students being asked what they were studying, other more positive understandings are also in circulation. These conversations also turn to how other disciplines draw in methodological approaches once definitively associated with anthropology to study people in their lived settings.

In my own work, while running an anthropology unit for over a decade to guide students as they conducted primary fieldwork in the diverse city that is London, sitting on university and school's ethics committees (deputy chair, ethics advisor/trainer, research supervisor), and reviewing numerous ethics applications for field research in anthropology and other disciplines, this issue of dealing with harm was invariably addressed. As would easily be attested, how to address harm has attracted different levels of committee-type ethics, some of which overlook field dynamics: at times, decisions have to move out of formal instruction settings in order to meet the situation on the ground, as it were, as Marilys Guillemin and Lynn Gillam (2004) argue (see also Erickson 2016; and Plattner 2003).

Outside of academic settings, I am at times treated to enquiring conversations by happenstance interlocutors. One such conversationalist, expressing his interest from time to time in the value of an anthropological approach to contemporary issues, media and social media, noted that anthropology was well-placed to deal with these issues. So much was going in the world. Anthropology was needed. “It covers everything”, he said. This interlocutor was neither an academic nor a research participant, but generally expressing much interest in the idea that solutions could be found with the help of anthropological approaches. I told him that it starts and continues with the position of “do no harm”. This was met with some silence. He then noted: “That is a tremendous undertaking”.

Narmala Halstead

University of Sussex