Afterword: The day after liberal reason

I should start with a confession: I have never known for sure what a public is. I have studied them, addressed them, and I know when I am in one. But when pressed to define ‘a public’, I seldom say the same thing twice. I do know that publics described as ‘liberal’ are often unwelcoming places, or politically imposed frameworks, in the communities I work with most closely as an anthropologist. In Yemen and Jordan, tribal groups push for governmental reforms that are stereotypically liberal – fair elections, freedom of speech – yet because these groups are factional, keep their own customary law, and make priority claims on national identity and state resources based on genealogical descent, they are routinely depicted as backward constituencies that cannot persist in a truly democratic society. In Dearborn, MI, as I write this afterword, Muslim activists are lobbying to have LGBTQ books removed from school libraries, a position they see as consistent with their right to be different and an expression of their full participation in the American political system. In both settings, what can be properly included, or endorsed, in the public sphere is up for debate, as are the boundaries of this contested place/space/jurisdiction. One thing is for sure: labels cannot be trusted. Advocates of inclusion are not above marginalizing those who disagree with them; and the most exclusive factions might be the most willing to leave their opponents alone. Liberal public spheres can be as dogmatic in their moral assumptions as the evangelical Christian churches I attended while growing up in the American South. In becoming an anthropologist, I set aside my religious beliefs, but I always detected a false friend in secular liberalism, which seemed related, in very deep and disturbing ways, to the epistemologies it wanted to replace. Now that the contributors to this special issue have taken me on a multi-stage tour of publics that are ‘neither liberal nor illiberal’, I am convinced that a critical orientation towards liberalism and its public spheres is, for analytical and political reasons, a sensibility worth cultivating. We should not be smug about this stance, as if it were something we cooked up in our own disciplinary kitchens. Critical orientations are baked into foundational scholarship on public spheres. Habermas, in the creative energy of his youth, portrayed the liberal public sphere as something that no longer lived up to its aspirations, if it ever did. It was a striving towards ideals, and a failure to meet them. Inclusive in theory, it was exclusive in practice. It claimed to speak for humanity, but it spoke mostly for property-owning European men. And so on. Habermas knew this. As he crafted his original formulations, which he described as a ‘stylized’ rendering of a specifically bourgeois public sphere, he admitted to readers that he was leaving something important out. ‘Our investigation’, he writes, ‘is limited to the structure and function of the liberal model … to its emergence and transformation. Thus it refers to those features of a historical constellation that attained dominance and leaves aside the plebeian public sphere as a variant that in a sense was suppressed in the historical process’ (1989 [1962]: xviii). With this admission, Habermas pinpoints one of the defining features of the bourgeois public sphere: it was designed to rise above, and thereby ‘suppress’, alternative forms of life. It did so through class privilege, literate education, and favoured means and modes of communication. The liberal public was also, for Habermas, an expansive, innovative cultural form. The plebeians might have imitated, ridiculed, or rejected the pretensions of the bourgeoisie, but there is no doubt whose public counted most for Habermas, both in world politics and as intellectual history: the plebeian public sphere, throughout its development, ‘remains oriented toward the intentions of the bourgeois public sphere’ (1989 [1962]: xviii). The authors of this special issue agree and disagree with Habermas. ‘Many anthropologists’, Lino e Silva writes, ‘even those who claim to support freedom, have blind spots when it comes to liberalism, in that we keep (normative) liberal attitudes we cannot easily discard.’ Anthropology evolved alongside the liberal public sphere – hence, our secure perch (for now) in the Western academy – yet ethnographers have consistently chosen to work outside the liberal mainstreams. We like to pretend nowadays that we no longer have a taste for ‘exoticism’ and ‘remote areas’, but this is clearly not the case. Just scrutinize the programme guide at any sizeable gathering of social anthropologists. The marked, liminal, Othered, and marginal are still our favoured terrain. If a colleague works in ‘the centre’ – in France, say, or Germany – odds are very good that they work with a minoritized community, or belong to one. The odds are even better that this minoritized community will contend daily with the enabling and disabling expectations of ‘liberal’ interlocutors. Increasingly, the ethnographer is (taken for) one of these interlocutors. We arrive alongside the activists and organizers, whom we resemble. We use their infrastructures – their contacts and institutions – to engage what were once called ‘the natives’ and are now called ‘the community’. NGO operatives are today what missionaries and bush pilots used to be. And the worlds they transport ethnographers to are still, in key respects, sites of conversion and colonization. With the global expansion of liberal publics, it is hard to distinguish ethnographers from culture workers of other kinds. What does set us apart – sometimes; not always – is our residual interest in cultural difference as a form and proof of human freedom. If we are honest about this, the insights we stand to gain are many. Let's start with the claim that something is amiss with liberal publics, or public reason. It surfaces in all the essays, and it is related in every case to the realization that liberal publics keep certain people, certain beliefs, at bay. These suppressions give the liberal public its managerial capacity. When they become part of governing ideology, they become essential to political integration, to functional participation in mainstream politics. Our essayists offer ample proof. In Tunisia, the liberal public disqualifies key aspects of working-class and Islamist political culture (Boutieri). In France, it does the same to North African immigrants (Everett). In Greece, it is women and the service work they do in solidarity movements that does not count as public or political (Cabot). In Brazil, it is the gay, or drug-trafficking, or Pentecostal poor of the favelas who are shut out of polite society and its publics (Lino e Silva). In London, community organizers encourage pluralism by folding cultural difference into coalitions that focus their activity on pressing socioeconomic issues, like available and affordable housing (Samanani). In Israel/Palestine, the particularism of devout Muslims and ultra-Orthodox Jews compounds the ethnoreligious exclusions of Zionism, making it impossible for Muslims, Christians, and Jews to exist as equals in a shared liberal polity (Weiss). The transition zones between liberal and illiberal run through these communities, social types, and organizing strategies. What is happening in these zones, and why do anthropologists so often find themselves at work in or around them? I have already noted our discipline's attraction to edges and peripheries, to alterity. It draws us, as ethnographers, towards ‘special populations’ that are also prime targets for liberalist missionaries. Anyone who works in Arab/Muslim settings knows that we share our representational ecosystem with democracy advocates – often funded by Western governments and benefactors – who introduce supposedly ‘unfree’ and ‘traditional’ people to the virtues of pluralism, dialogue, team building, and engaged citizenship. Two papers in this collection (Boutieri, Weiss) study programming of this kind, showing how people engage with and resist it. Liberalism in this guise is an import, a gift/message sent to the region from the Global North. The representational niche more typically occupied by anthropologists sends information in the other direction, with ethnographers representing Others to metropolitan, presumptively ‘Western’ audiences. Alas, most of this information is directed at members of our own discipline or to other scholars, but some of it reaches, and is even designed for, the general public. What happens when that connection is made? For several years in the 1990s, I did what is now called ‘public-facing’ anthropology.1 I managed community-based research on greater Detroit's Arab populations. I lectured in local schools about immigrant families, their distinctive kinship and gender systems, and spoke to ecumenical groups about Muslims and Islam, all on behalf of ACCESS (the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services), where I also helped establish a cultural heritage museum. Inclusion and cultural sensitivity were paramount values in all ACCESS programming. Most of our speakers, and many in the audiences, were good liberals (in every sense of the word). If they were not, they were present to encourage tolerance or to raise consciousness. This format affected ecumenical programming in obvious ways. Sometimes, the hyper-religious were expected to show up without bringing their most distinctive (or ‘parochial’) beliefs along. Sometimes, they were expected to show the way forward when secular liberalism faltered. If Palestinians and Israelis could not make peace, perhaps the Children of Abraham could? Meanwhile, in the real world, the United States invaded Iraq, Israel bombed Lebanon, and Detroit's Arab and Muslim communities, despite growing levels of political incorporation and economic success, were subject to an endless barrage of Islamophobia, targeted state surveillance, and racist scapegoating. In the end, I decided that culture work brought about integration through disciplinary inclusion, through targeted reductions of Otherness, tactical distancing from ‘homeland culture’, and overt identification with American things and values. I saw how heavily invested Arab Americans were in this process, and I saw how hard it was to criticize representational strategies that, in the larger liberal public, were often successful. It was with rueful recognition that I spotted these tropes, thirty years later, swirling through the papers in this collection. The authors contend with roughly the same complex. The blockages and integrative powers of the liberal public are still firmly in place, as is experience-based disappointment with its real liberatory potential and concerns over how best, and when, to criticize it. The authors describe contexts in which religion remains problematic and deviations from kinship and gender/sex norms prevalent in the Global North are confidently stigmatized. Liberal publics, and liberal reason, still ask us to take key values off the table. Deeply held presuppositions about God's law, the perfidy of secular governance, the moral contours of the human soul and body – these are hard to set aside and even harder to generalize in polities where many political actors affirm these beliefs while others are known to believe otherwise. Some principles are simply asserted, or enacted, never justified through public discussion. Ironically, the greater the demand for pluralism, the less there is to openly (or even politely) discuss. But ‘off-stage’ discussions of difference abound. The authors of this collection go straight to the terrain on which these occluded zones and liberal reason intersect. As a result, their essays are filled with vivid moments of refusal (to engage), agreement (to disagree), tactical silence, proud defiance, and trust in the moral consistency of Others (but not their moral equality). We also encounter alternative forms of public life rooted in traditions that reject modernist values (e.g., North African Judaism, with creative invocations of Maimonides). Or, in the favelas, we encounter subaltern notions of freedom, pleasure, and self-respect. Across these cases, the ethnographer pushes against a dominant idea, much as Habermas's stylized bourgeoisie confronted public authority. The result is critique; again, the dominant space is held accountable for its inconsistencies, its overreach, its suppression of alternatives. Even in the essays that deal with Irish (Morningstar) and US (Greenhouse) legal systems, we are shown that public reason is not always liberatory, and judicial protocol is not consistently liberal. The most advanced judicial reasoning is used to deny rights to individuals and groups (through US citizenship laws that derive, via precedent, from racial exclusions); rational-critical discourse is, in fact, a theatrical display of fixed political and religious positions (as in the US Supreme Court's decision to reverse Roe v. Wade); and legal procedure privileges majoritarian preferences without arriving at a secularized, Habermasian consensus and without deciding the best, or ‘winning’, moral argument (as in the Irish Citizens’ Assembly, which sanctioned a nationwide referendum that legalized abortion). What most intrigues me about these critical assessments of liberal courts is the conclusion that judges can arrive at better decisions – using their own procedures and reasons; an outcome that is often visible in official dissents – and that the purported il/liberal status of these courts and law-making protocols is constantly modified by the fact that they are governing bodies. In its earliest historical phases, the bourgeois public sphere did not govern, nor did it represent ‘the people’ as an elected body. It represented a public of private persons who asserted their right to criticize those in power, with a view towards changing policies and reforming the law. Is it wrong to suggest that anthropologists, as a profession and in the way they practise their craft on these pages, represent themselves in similar ways? According to Habermas, it is worth studying the transformation of the bourgeois public sphere because understanding how liberal publics ‘assume their proper function’ will help us determine ‘whether the exercise of domination and power persists as a negative constant, as it were, of history – or whether as a historical category itself, it is open to substantive change’ (1989 [1962]: 250). It is a serious charge. The contributors to this special issue make parallel claims. They insist that ethnography is crucial to the study of domination and power, not only because it grounds knowledge and shows variations within liberalism, but also because it transforms ethnographers and the knowledge they produce. This is an affective process. It brings to the analysis of liberalism expressive and experiential modes other than ‘rational-critical’ discourse. Solidarity, common problems, shared traumas, caring, kinship, and their various historical and cultural elaborations are all points at which a more transformative ethnography becomes possible. This broadening of representational effort is often treated as a tool – practical and theoretical – for with minoritized publics and people, yet this is a of the The powers of liberal public its expansion and have and for difference that are now so so with liberal democratic governance, that the of Western knowledge is a of What the bourgeois public sphere once – not or by the – is the of liberal And from the democratic to and now they illiberal constituencies and that could not exist apart from these When the essays in this issue focus on communities, whether or several One that but is to is a to alternative within and against liberal public One could this – in the sense of ‘a and – as an of global or of of changing and of anthropologists the and along. But of the of with as the are to a shared by ethnographers and in making or something with the and infrastructures of liberal politics. is a to the secure the that difference can be used to alternative Increasingly, these publics are They are in which people can life to their own find from dominant forms of polity and public and be alone. of this pluralism and difference without to do so on behalf of society a interest is not a political not or the but forms of life and their Across the various and religious communities in this people that liberal publics both alternative and it. discourse often on this – can be Muslim in this secular we can be only a certain of Muslim in this secular – and is it is in the forms of and that from claims. and making sense of these is now to ethnography and It is their Liberal is as a dominant As the contributors to this issue it is yet to and filled with them. to the it is filled with communities it suppressed and can no longer using – that is, by their and into human of If this of inclusion is now confidently illiberal moral to it liberal politics is becoming more about its on on of certain beliefs, of people, forms of of political and economic an essential in this process, and it is that this special issue should from people and minoritized communities to the courts and in the United States and is a deep history to this For Habermas, the public sphere and its evolved in the as a way for private people to engage with political with and The public sphere was a of and its out of cultural the were and to As people who are not full this of they the of we are with With to or is out in the moral of liberal and are decided and The contributors to this issue are in a legal I have Habermas at every of the not because I agree with his at the of but because I am convinced that ethnographers are out his when they engage with and write about liberal reason. We are by our in this this the contributors are and are reasoning we are larger whose claims over us we and I also Habermas because transformation of the public sphere (1989 was and cultural in ethnography be as it forms of public life. In fact, his of the bourgeoisie from their and to their and over a of If the people Habermas about a for and moral they did so in a cultural The in up even of The poor of and are part of human that into the When I to Arab immigrants in about their to American public they are of its and their The as do the they make possible. up in public to and for and for our is a on ‘the liberalism already this its subject I like to and for me to in this They helped me and their good brought to I was making in other readers of this special issue will have similar I am for that, is of Anthropology at the of political culture in the Arab/Muslim communities in North and to history books the politics of and friend and history: the of and present of