Too Sensitive For Anthropology?

Last week, I was reading a 2018 article by Sophie Chao detailing the relationship of the Marind people of West Papua with sawit (oil palm). I 'know' about the situation in West Papua, very generally, but reading the words, the dreams, the nightmares of the Marind people…well, it had me in tears in the library.

Chao embodies the Marind's animate worldview in her writing. Through her words, sawit comes alive as a being – not just a crop or commodity, but a presence. I felt the destruction of the Marind's homes and extended family. The vivid dreams that confused sawit and soldiers. The terror of being ‘eaten by the palms’. Chao calls it a "topography of terror" – spatial, systemic, temporal, all-encompassing. Terror embedded in the landscape, literally and metaphorically. There's nowhere to hide.

And yet. Some of the Marind are still able to show such kindness and compassion toward this unloving and violent interloper. They imagine sawit as lonely and lost: Where is it from? Where is its family? It doesn't have any friends in this unfamiliar place. I would expect people suffering violence at the hands of anyone – human or plant – to be angry, and of course some are; Chao's account highlights the heterogeneity of Marind experience. But to still access this sense of compassion and curiosity, to be concerned for this plant they have nightmares about touched me deeply.

This wasn't an intellectual debate about indigenous politics anymore. It was visceral. A fractal story of climate crisis: the villagers suffer from oil palm's relentless expansion even as they're excluded from its sites and circuits of production, including the profits. There's so much suffering in the world, and these ethnographies are asking me to come into even deeper contact with oppression, violence, and pain every day of my studies.

Suffering I'm complicit in. As a white British woman, I carry the weight of the British Empire and the modern global north's ongoing responsibility for colonial extraction. And it hasn’t stopped. For me to have this iPad, this MacBook, has meant the extraction of rare earth minerals from places like the DRC: child labor in horrific conditions, open-cast mining killing mountains. I sit in the library, tears in my eyes, reading about Marind nightmares on devices that are themselves implicated in ongoing violence. It's paralyzing. I don't know how to hold that tension, and it's confronting even to think about turning towards it.

I've always had a sensitive side to me. I wasn't allowed to watch Lassie on my own as a small child because I would get too upset. I remember crying in shock and horror as Bambi's mother was murdered and the mother dinosaur was killed at the beginning of Land Before Time (why is it always the mothers?).

But over the years, I became extremely adept at pushing my feelings so deep down and disconnecting so forcefully from my body that I didn't notice I had feelings anymore. You can't selectively numb; the cost of protection from pain is also the loss of joy.

I suspect I'm not alone in that patterning. In fact, I see it all the time with my coaching clients and workshop participants. How else does one cope with the everyday violence we're exposed to and complicit in? As I've heard Philip Shepherd discuss, we're taught to disconnect from our bodies as soon as we go to school and we’re told to sit still, only allowed to use the toilet at designated times according to the timetable. So, whether through survival or socialization, we disconnect: from ourselves, from each other, and from the more-than-human within and around us.

After the incident in the library, I worried: how am I going to keep reading these kinds of ethnographic accounts on subjects that are inherently so violent? Climate change, migration, conflict... It's hard to be in touch with those lived experiences of violence and harm. Maybe I'm too sensitive to be an anthropologist. Perhaps I don't have what it takes to be so intimate with people's lives and the pain so many are living with.

But I don't want to toughen up to get through this course. I think that's the opposite of why I'm here and what the world needs.

I’ve also been engaging with Zoe Todd's work this week, and encountering it brought a wave of relief and excitement. From what I'm learning of her scholarship, I think she's advocating for an anthropology that listens like a fish: a whole-body attunement to our environment, including the human and other-than-human beings in it. It’s a listening that gets underneath what’s being said, that can hear what’s not being said. There's a place for this in anthropology. I recognize this way of listening from my training in eco-therapy, authentic relating, and somatic coaching.

I don't yet know how I'll work with this as an anthropologist or ethnographer. But there's something about this tension of feeling and being felt. I think to be a good anthropologist requires this deep listening – yet how do I not be overwhelmed by it?

I'm reminded of what Rachel Blackman has said to me: that my single human body isn't meant to hold the world's suffering. That's the same form of narcissism and hyper-individualism (my words, not Rachel's) that got us into this mess in the first place. Holding this requires a collective response, collective care, community.

Perhaps that's a form of community action. On many days, all I can do is ask the more-than-human bodies around me that are bigger than me – the trees, the sky, the Earth herself – to help me hold it all. When I do that, something shifts. There's the exhale I allow myself when I imagine sharing the weight. There's the act of asking itself, and the humility in that. There's the refusal to conform to neoliberal individualism, the refusal to believe I must carry this alone.

I've been delighted to encounter these threads of my professional life here in anthropology. It gives me hope for the discipline and my place in it. It doesn't make the daily encounters with lived experiences of violence in the literature any easier to be with. But maybe sensitivity isn't a weakness to overcome; maybe it's a form of knowledge. Maybe it's exactly the kind of listening and attentiveness we need in response to the polycrisis.

For myself, I'm learning to allow myself to be the kind of anthropologist I want to be, rather than conforming to an intellectual stereotype or continuing to reproduce anthropology's colonial, extractive past. I'm learning that staying open-hearted might not be a liability but a practice, one that requires community, more-than-human relations, and the courage to keep feeling even when it hurts.

What if our sensitivities are actually forms of knowing? What if the work isn't to build thicker skin, but to build stronger webs of care that can hold us as we stay tender?