We Are Too Anxious: Anthropology and the Decolonial Project

This article probes the presence of what I term “destructive anxiety” in ongoing efforts to transform and decolonize US anthropology. Drawing on Freud's theorizations of anxiety, the article shows how conditions of objective anxiety, such as precarity, militarism, whiteness, and coloniality in anthropology, when unaddressed, can bleed into destructive anxiety. Drawing primarily from an autoethnographic account of a social media controversy, I show how anxiety erupted in a moment of semantic uncertainty and/or overdetermination, leading to acts of exclusion, determinations of worthiness, silencing, and virtue signaling, rather than conversation and engagement. Yet, as anthropologists of anxiety compellingly argue, anxiety does not have to be destructive but can be generative of new ethical subjectivities. In the conclusion, I offer an alternative to destructive anxiety, suggesting that the decolonial project can be reframed as a “politics of/from the muck,” one that leans into, rather than disavows, the contradictions, struggles, and desires we all embody as US‐based scholars and researchers.