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Playing with Possibilities 
Review by Shweta Krishnan 
 
A Possible Anthropology. Methods for Uneasy Times.  
By Anand Pandian. Duke University Press, 2019.  
 
A Possible Anthropology begins with a question: should I stay (in the discipline) or should I go? 
The author Anand Pandian sets up the premise of this book in a conversation with the indigenous 
Métis scholar Zoe Todd on the subtle and everyday forms of Othering that continue to lace the 
discipline of anthropology, marginalizing certain bodies and bodies of work, while continuing to 
canonize others. Together, they wonder how to make anthropology more open to play, plurality 
and possibility, even as it stubbornly clings to old paradigms of knowing and allows “the bony 
white hands of the forefathers” to constantly “claw us back” (3). A Possible Anthropology, 
strives for alternative possibilities. At its heart, this book is a critique in the Foucauldian sense. 
In conversations with the French historian-philosopher both in the Introduction and the Coda, 
Pandian endeavors not to denounce contemporary anthropological praxis but to recognize its 
limitations and to open it up to new possibilities. In other words, A Possible Anthropology 
aspires to reorganize anthropological methods in the contemporary to produce conditions for a 
different anthropology: an anthropology yet to come. 
 
A Possible Anthropology is both an ethical and a political project. Pandian writes for a future by 
historicizing and politicizing anthropology’s object: the human. This critique is not necessarily 
new. For several years now, scholars have been delving into other disciplines — critical feminist 
studies, critical race studies, queer studies, transnational studies, indigenous studies among 
others to write with, for, and as members of communities that are marginalized, misrecognized 
or misrepresented in anthropological quests for universalizing theories about ‘the human’ and 
‘humanity.’ Pandian situates himself with these scholars. But while their works attempt to take 
these interdisciplinary theories to particular field sites, Pandian brings these theories home: 
critiquing the project of imperialism as it shapes the discipline from within, and aspiring to write 
not only against this persisting trend but also for an anthropology that can take as its object: a 
humanity that is yet to come.  
 
Pandian’s endeavor is deeply ethical and political in yet another sense. He develops ‘a humanity 
yet to come’ by bringing the humanity of contemporary anthropology in conversations with the 
precarity that assails the discipline, its practitioners and their interlocutors today: climate change, 
the refugee crises, the rise of totalitarian and fascist regimes, and cries around the world 
demanding resistance, subversion and change. How does one ‘do’ anthropology within such 
chaos? Pandian does not attempt to play hero or god by laying out a clear path. Instead his quest 
is reminiscent of Haraway’s advice to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway 2015): he asks us to stay 



with the vulnerability and the precarity, and to find in the way they throw open the category of 
‘the human,’ inspiration rather than desolation.  
 
Pandian’s book is organized into three essays, focusing on empiricism, experience and on the 
promised ‘humanity yet to come.’ The first two essays pave the path to the third. Yet, each of 
these essays also stand alone, allowing scholars to read the book in phases or teach only selected 
extracts. Throughout the book, Pandian is in dialogue with several scholars: some of whom 
appear as secondary interlocutors — their published works scaffold the author’s thoughts. Others 
are primary interlocutors — people with whom Pandian develops his commentary on both the 
limitations and the possibilities within the discipline. With them, the author wanders into spaces 
where anthropological knowledge is produced — the proverbial fieldsites, departmental 
corridors, offices, classrooms, homes, and conferences. In conversation with their curiosity for 
the world, he builds a theory that pushes the reader to reach into the uncertainties besieging us 
today and develops in conversation with the chaos newer possibilities for doing anthropology.  
 
The first essay opens up questions on empiricism. He develops his commentary in dialogue with 
two anthropologists who were contemporaries, but never met during their lifetimes: Zora Neale 
Hurston and Bronislaw Malinowski. The essay opens with Malinowski’s thoughts in Freedom 
and Civilization. Reflecting on the second world war, the Polish anthropologist claims, “What 
we are now fighting for is nothing short of the survival of culture and humanity,” (15). Writing 
years after the category of ‘culture’ was thrown wide open by authors in books such as Writing 
Culture (2010), Women Writing Culture (1996), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the 
Present (1991), Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (1994), Pandian strives to expose the 
vulnerabilities that straddle the category of ‘humanity.’ But his writing is not an invective against 
Malinowski’s steadfast dedication to preserve the category of humanity. Instead, Pandian delves 
deep into Malinowski’s brainchild — empiricism — and attempts to re-read ‘humanity’ using 
the works of Zora Neale Hurston. In spite of being Boas’s protégé, Hurston struggled against the 
racist undercurrents of anthropology two-fold: she herself seemed to most of her contemporaries 
an oddity by virtue of her race. Additionally, her interlocutors, as people of color, had an 
awkward relationship with the category of ‘human’ that anthropology strived to understand. But 
racism did not stop Hurston from becoming a remarkable empiricist. With Hurston, Pandian 
enters a world where possibility emerges at the horizons of humanity, and from her love of 
pluralism and multiplicity, he finds another way to approach Malinowski’s emphasis on 
empiricism. Thus, two contemporaries who never met in their lifetimes meet in Pandian’s 
writing and invite attention to the possibilities of empiricism. Through this careful re-reading, 
empiricism re-emerges as a site for staying with the vulnerabilities and frailty of humanity. 
 
Pandian’s second essay focuses on experience. He dialogues with the late, Claude Levi-Strauss 
to meditate on reading, with Michael Jackson on writing, with Jane Guyer on teaching and with 
Natasha Meyers on the pleasures of fieldwork. Early in the chapter, Pandian dwells on Levi-
Strauss’s unapologetic love of myth. In this chapter, Pandian enters many spaces where 
anthropology happens: the field and the places of meditation and writing that follow later. In 
Levi-Strauss’s house he discovers bookshelves that scale walls and a radio that allowed the 
French anthropologist to read without distraction. Pandian dives into this world of music and 
myth, examining how Levi-Strauss’s theories of the connections between myth and music 
emerged from his own experiences of reading. Similarly, Pandian finds himself in Jackson’s 



home, in Guyer’s classroom and in Meyer’s fieldwork, tracking each anthropologist’s method 
against their own life histories and experiences. What emerges is a method for making 
anthropology plural by acknowledging the different positionalities from which different 
anthropologists observe, read, write, and teach.  
 
The final essay of A Possible Anthropology is the most aspirational by far. It focuses on what the 
book aspires to produce — a humanity yet to come. Here, Pandian seeks to find a place for 
anthropologist within a world where activists, artists and fiction writers are collaboratively 
attempting to redefine narrow approaches to human. He walks his readers through the corridors 
of the 2016 World Conservation Congress, engaging with indigenous speakers who attempt to 
find their voice in the global debate on human efforts to alleviate the conditions of the 
Anthropocene. Pandian invites entry into the creative world of Richard Lage and Judith Selby 
Lage, where abandoned plastics become artwork that invite questions into trash disposal and 
recycling. Finally, the author comes to dwell on the works of Ursula K. Le Guin, whose fiction 
in “dreaming alternative worlds,” as a fan once wrote to her (100), offers a new way of looking 
at the world we live in. From these works, and in conversation with the works of Donna 
Haraway, Edwardo Kohn, Anna Tsing, Ilana Feldman, Miriam Ticktin, Hugh Gusterson, and 
others, Pandian expands on his theory of ‘a humanity yet to come:’  how can one see ‘the 
human’ as a category produced by the exclusion of some humans and all nonhumans from the 
very definition of humanity, how can one see ‘the human’ as a category produced in 
collaboration with imperialist and capitalist projects, how can one learn to see ‘the human’ as a 
category that is always porous and in connection with everything that was excluded in its 
production? It is such a humanity – entangled, collective, plural — that Pandian’s empiricist and 
experiential methods seek to produce. Throughout this book, one feels the gravity of Deleuze and 
Guattari’s provocation about ethnography’s capacity to “summon ‘a people to come’” (107). In 
this chapter, Pandian turns directly to the French philosophers and invites his readers to plant the 
seeds for “an anthropology yet to come,” by rethinking and rereading both anthropology’s past 
and present engagements in the world. 
 
A Possible Anthropology calls attention both to the ways in which anthropological institutions 
are set up, and the ways in which anthropology as a discipline contributes to social critique. In 
that sense, this is a book that practicing anthropologists and students of anthropology must both 
read. I would recommend this book both in introductory classes and in classes for methods. 
While graduate students focusing on an anthropological career are most likely to find questions 
about ‘a humanity to come’ most useful, I also believe that undergraduates are very likely to 
benefit from reading these essays, alongside works that are considered canonical. 
 
A final word on the book: in his introduction, Pandian draws on Susan Sontag to note that his 
book focuses on the anthropologist not as the hero, but as a “medium in a wider world of thought 
and implication” (9) He writes with an understanding that as mediums anthropologists 
themselves become open to the precarities and vulnerabilities of the world in which they work 
and write. He also recognizes that disciplinary practices often ask us to shed this vulnerability in 
order to produce knowledge that sounds sure of itself. Pandian instead offers methods to stay 
with and write with the open-endedness and vulnerability of fieldwork, so that knowledge 
acknowledges itself to be situated, collaborative and always in-the-making. 
 



Shweta Krishnan is a PhD candidate in the department of Anthropology at the George 
Washington University. Her research interests include anthropology of religion, environment, 
indigeneity and South Asia.  
 
Works Cited: 
Behar, Ruth and Gordon, Deborah. 1996. Women Writing Culture. Berkeley: University of 
California Press. 
 
Clifford, James and Marcus, George. 2010. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of 
Ethnography, 25th Anniversary. Berkeley: University of California Press. 
 
Fox, Richard. 1991. Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present. Sante Fe: SAR Press. 
Haraway, Donna. 2016. Staying with the Trouble. Durham: Duke University Press. 
 
Viswesaran, Kamala. 1994. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Minneapolis: University of 
Minnesota Press.  
 
 

 
 

 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 

© 2020 Shweta Krishnan 

 


