Fabian, Johannes 1937-

## Quotes

   "The changes we begin to notice on the level of the production of discourse are (at least some of them) directly related to the nature of our empirical work" (Fabian, 1985, p. 204).

"To acknowledge that Self and Other are inextricably involved in a dialectical process will make anthropology not less but more realistic" (Fabian, 1985, p. 205).

## Biography and History

Johannes Fabian was born in 1937 Glogau, what is today, Poland. In 1956, his studies began in Bonn, Germany, followed by philosophical and theological studies at St. Gabriel Mission House in Austria. Fabian’s experience in Austria lead him to explore anthropology, sociology, and history in Munich, Germany in the early 1960’s. Shortly after, he moved to the United States to complete his MA (1965) and PHD (1969) in anthropology at the University of Chicago (German Anthropology 2015).

Throughout his career, Fabian was a professor in various universities. For example, he was assistant at the department of Anthropology and lectured at Northwestern University in Chicago and was a professor at Wesleyan University in Connecticut US (German Anthropology 2015). Fabian also got a deanship in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Zaire (present day Congo) where he conducted studies on “religious movements, language, work, and popular culture in the Shaba/Katanga Mining regions of Zaire”(Bennett and Frow, 2008, p. viii-ix). Although his time as Dean in Zaire was short, it certainly was an interesting time for anthropologists to be in that part of the world. The year was 1973, only two years after three universities and 17 educational institutes merged in the beginning of Colonel Joseph Mobutu’s dictatorship in 1971 which followed the Congo crisis in the 1960’s (Lulat, 2005). His research in Africa was not restricted to his time at the University of Zaire, he remained present in that area throughout his career.

He spent the largest part of his career at the University of Amsterdam, from 1980 to 2002, as head chairmen of the department of cultural anthropology and sociology of non-western people. Today, at the same university, he is a professor emeritus of Cultural Anthropology. As a postcolonial critic, Fabian he was interested in anthropological history, theories concerning acquiring knowledge, and representation (African Study Center 2015). This gave way for one of his most famous books and one of the most influential books in the critical turn; *Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object*.

His most recent interests include reflection on writing contemporary ethnographies and virtualizing information. These reflections emerged during the process of digitizing his 30 year old recordings. The book *Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive* was a result of that process (Forte, 2008).

## Work

Johannes Fabian has published work from 1965 to 2008 (University of Amsterdam, 2015) as well as mass information on his website Language and Popular Culture in Africa.

n regards to anthropological fieldwork, Johannes Fabian postulates that anthropologists and interlocutors must be ‘coeval’, meaning they must be contemporaries and exist in the same time. Fabian accentuates the use of “co-responsibility and mutuality in fieldwork ethics” (Joao de Pina-Cabral, 2013, p. 257) in order to bond the anthropologist to their informant. Anthropological discourse must be seen as a mutual dialogue. Consequently, Fabian has conceptualized the ‘ethnographic present’ in field work. Further concepts in Fabian’s work in coevalness includes the ‘denial of coevalness’, ‘schizogenic use of time’, and ‘politics of time in anthropological discourse’. These theories refer to the misrepresentation of the anthropologist and the interlocutor in which the anthropologist uses the present tense in their writings. The exchange is static and consequently, creates a separation of the ‘us’ and the ‘other’ whose representation gets lost in time. As a result of this distancing effect, we see the reinforcement of the domination and exploitation of the ‘other’ by the West (Strong Reading, 2011).

Furthermore, Fabian illuminates the tension between re-presentation and presence: The plural use of representation invokes products of knowledge or culture and representation in the singular puts emphasis on process and activity. “Johannes Fabian has been pressing anthropologists to think hard about how we produce and represent ethnographic knowledge” (Ortner, 2012) in it’s historical and present contexts. He inspires anthropologists to write truthful, honest, accurate and revelatory ethnographies (Ortner, 2012). Being aware of space and time in culture is important in interpretation; the present is just as important as historical contexts and we can achieve a lot with accurate present tense information.

Fabian rejects the historical construct of the 'Other' as being regarded as the object of anthropology; the Other is never simply a given, never found or encountered, but constructed. As a result, this reinforces the Wests supposed superiority in the world. Fabian asserts that working as contemporaries and writing in the 'ethnographic present' dissolves concepts of the Other (Fabian, 1990).

## Influences

Fabian was heavily influenced by his professor Paul Schebesta from the St. Gabriel Mission House, a “missionary, ethnologist, linguist and physical anthropologist”. Schebesta asserted that the pygmies ought not be be referred to as an ancient form or subspecies of mankind, but as belonging to the Homo sapiens species (Anthropos, 2015). This very well could be the fundamental basis that fueled Fabian’s theories surrounding the deconstruction of the distance in time that anthropologists create between them and their interlocutors.

Correspondingly, his critique of earlier anthropologists methods influenced a number of theorists who concern themselves with matters regarding globalization and its effects. Arjun Appadurai, a contemporary social-cultural anthropologist from India, who stands among these thinkers, talks about the homogenization of culture as well as the “disjunctive global cultural flows”(Wikipedia, 2015a). Another one of these theorists includes a Colombian-American anthropologist, Arturo Escobar. Along with many more anti-globalization thinkers, Escobar similarly focuses on development in third world nations as well as social movements.

Furthermore, Fabian set the stage for an entire generation of anthropologists when he created the Language and Popular Culture in Africa Archives (LCPA), an online, open access collection of translated and transcribed documents concerning aspects of African culture. The access to this once inaccessible information had a huge “impact on what the subsequent monograph should look like” which revolutionized the way people began looking at ethnographies (Savage Minds, 2015). Subsequently, through his concepts regarding the discourse anthropologists write with in reference to their fieldwork, Fabian got anthropologists thinking about “how events and experiences become documents” and how “facts” were all written “after the fact” of those experiences (Forte, 2008).

## Analysis

Johannes Fabian noticed many contradictions and ethical detriments within anthropological fieldwork and ethnography. He focused on the anthropological discourse that occurs when studying cultures beyond the west which can be seen as an invitation for non-anthropological institutions to put their political interests at work. As a result, western culture becomes normalized; a standardized frame of mind that created a new form of colonialism, manipulation, and exploitation by ‘othering’ people in terms of time and distance.

Fabian was concerned with time and how it relates to current anthropology. He called upon different notions of time for anthropology in order resolve the conflicts in the concept of 'West and the rest’ that he understood to be a problem in anthropology’s past associations with colonialism. Cultures are usually compared chronologically with the West as being the standard for progress and as a result, the anthropological ‘object’ or ‘other’ is then vulnerable to labeling. An anthropological tendency is to look for an object and its position in time, as with any discipline. However, Fabian felt by engaging in the 'ethnographic present', anthropology becomes capable of bridging the gap between the West and lead the discipline into an equal and non-exploitative process.

Being connected to one’s interlocutors was important for Fabian’s ethnographic method to create a sense of relief. Similarly, he felt that the assumption behind cultural relativism is that it is an objective, non-violent view of another culture. It accentuates cultural difference and values, that carry a different political agenda which can position a culture in a vulnerable position for control and manipulation. In contemporary research, Fabian wants anthropologists to play a different role and avoid historical mistakes by understanding their own role within the context of their writing and participant observation.

## Critique

A recent critique emerged in response to Fabian’s lecture entitled *Ethnography as Commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive*, which was held on September 22nd,  2008 at Concordia University. Maximilian Forte, among others base their critique on certain outdated views Fabian holds of anthropology. Although embracing the inclusion of new virtual means of putting forth ethnographic text, some anthropologists take issue with Fabian’s belief that without epistemological duplicity, ethnographic text would not be possible. Another point of contention is Fabian’s assertion that anthropologists, like mathematicians, should not be governed by any code of ethics and lastly that along with the idea that anthropology is an intellectual endeavor not a profession. Among these beliefs, the most debatable would be Fabian’s opinion on anonymity of interlocutors, in terms of the way he asserts that “We cannot be neutral in communication. Ethnographers and interlocutors are both agents, so why is just one being named?” (Forte, 2008).

For example, in the book *Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest*, Anne Mcclintock referred to the way in which Biblical time has been subject to “a single pedigree of evolving world history” (Mcclintock, 1995, p. 36) and consequently secularized. She proceeds to talk about the concept of the family tree and how it too has been secularized. As a result, Fabian claims that the family tree had been switched into an “image mediating between nature and culture as a natural image of evolutionary human progress” (Mcclintock, 1995, p. 37). In this respect, she asserts that Fabian missed the way in which the family tree was “not only secularized, it was domesticated” and gendered (Mcclintock, 1995, p. 38).

## Sources

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Anthropos. (2015). ‘ANTHROPOS - Paul Schebesta SVD’. Retrieved on http://www.anthropos.eu/anthropos/.

Bennett, T., & Frow, J. (Eds.). (2008). The Sage handbook of cultural analysis. Sage.

Bongmba, E. (2001). Fabian and Levinas on Time and the Other: Ethical Implications. Philosophia Africana, 4(1), 7-26.

Fabian, Johannes. (1991). "Culture, Time and the Object of Anthropology," in Time and the Work of anthropology: critical essays, 1971-1991. Chur, Switzerland: Hardwood Academic Publishers.

Fabian, Johannes. (1990). Presence and Representation. Critical Inquiry. 16(4), 753-772.

Fabian, Johannes. (1991). *Time and the work of anthropology*. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers.

Forte, Maximilian. (2008). 'Review Of Johannes Fabian’S Ethnography As Commentary'. ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY. Retrieved from http://zeroanthropology.net/2008/09/22/review-johannes-fabians-ethnography-as-commentary/.

German Anthropology. (2015). 'SP Johannes Fabian'. Retrieved from http://www.germananthropology.com/short-portrait/johannes-fabian/202.

Language and Popular Culture in Africa Archives. (2015). http://www.lpca.socsci.uva.nl/

Lulat, Y. M. (2005). A history of African higher education from antiquity to the present: A critical synthesis. Greenwood Publishing Group.

McClintock, A. (1995). *Imperial leather*. New York: Routledge.

Ortner, S ( 2012). Ethnography as commentary: Writing from the Virtual Archive. By Johannes Fabian. American Ethnologist, 39 (2), 464-465.

Pina-Cabral,J d. ( 2013). The Two Faces of Mutuality: Contemporary Themes in Anthropology. Anthropological Quarterly, 86(1), 257-276.

Savage Minds. (2009). 'Memory, Virtual Archives And Johannes Fabian'. Retrieved from http://savageminds.org/2009/02/23/memory-virtual-archives-and-johannes-fabian/.

Strong Reading. (2011). Johannes Fabian: "Time and the Other". Blog. Retrieved from http://strongreading.blogspot.ca/2011/07/johannes-fabian-time-and-other.html

University of Amsterdam. (2015). 'Johannes Fabian'. Retrieved from http://albumacademicum.uva.nl/cgi/b/bib/bib-idx?type=simple;lang=en;c=ap;rgn1=entirerecord;q1=fabian;x=-173;y=-289;cc=ap;view=reslist;sort=achternaam;fmt=long;page=reslist;start=2;size=1.

Wikipedia. (2015a). 'Arjun Appadurai'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arjun\_Appadurai.

Wikipedia. (2015b). ‘Congo Crisis’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo\_Crisis.

Wikipedia. (2015c). ‘Missionshaus St. Gabriel’  https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionshaus\_St.\_Gabriel.

Wikipedia. (2015d). ‘National University of Zaire’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National\_University\_of\_Zaire.