Vincanne Adams
University of California-San Francisco
In the first words of the acknowledgments in his book, Sam offers the following confession: “My name appears by historical accident and conventional necessity on the cover as the author of this text. I have merely absorbed, rearranged, and offered to readers the narratives, experiences, theories and labors of others, some of whose names or identities appear below.” (Dubal 2018: xv)
To disappear as author of one’s work, like disappearing into the bush, is to endeavor the anthropological gambit – to embrace the risk of altering, in the Merleau-Ponty-ian sense of the term, one’s perception not as an act of thought but of experience – to endeavor an alteration of one’s fundamental sense of being in the world. I call attention to this passage because I take Sam at his word –that he truly wanted to deflect ownership of the ideas in his book as anything more than the result of multiple long-standing and mutually generative relationships— and also because it offers a moment to reflect on how I would challenge Sam –as an opening to question his fundamental, and very subtle claims about being against humanity. To disappear one’s self into the multitude of relations that he had with teachers, colleagues, LRA friends, family (and the list goes on) is to affirm the idea that to be alive in and through our social connections is to force a rethinking of what being, in and of itself, might mean (joining an illustrious list of anthropological luminaries).
I also start with this passage to make the connection between the quality of Sam as a person and his contributions as an intellectual as seen in his profoundly risky and beautifully-crafted dissertation that eventually became Against Humanity – a book that both contains the essence of his intellectual commitments and became the weapon he ultimately chose to wield in order to turn those commitments into a radical form of care.
It is not an easy thing to carve out space in the critique of humanitarianism amidst the refusals of innocent forms of care in the work of anthropologists (from Ticktin to Fassin), or amidst those who have shown the violence of humanitarian biopolitics by way of neglect or erasure (in Scheper-Hughes, Arendt or Agamben) or, finally, amidst those who write about the depoliticizing effects that humanitarian work has caused (in Ferguson and Maalki). And yet, Sam managed to do so by staking a claim to the problem of the category itself; humanity is itself the problem –a position that enabled him to craft a militant anthropology that, as he writes, is both against and beyond the human. And if he were sitting across from me in my office now, I would have argued with him on this, because I think he would disagree with the idea that he is or was ever interested in being against humans, per se. At least not in the ways that much of the work to displace the human as a site of perception or interactivity in order to capture some sense of relationality in the language of the forest (as the Amazoniansts claim)—or by displacing the human from the maps of anthropogenic climate change in order to undo the damage that human-centered growth capitalism has wrought, as others have shown. In these formulations of going beyond the human, human centered capacities for sociality are displaced by the night vision of a jaguar, the undulating force of waves, the reach of a mushroom’s nutritional resources, the microbial life of the soil.
I imagine his toothy grin, then, in response to my provocation, insisting in his stubborn way that what he had in mind is something else… but nevertheless one that still requires a displacement of the human in important ways.
As he makes very clear in his book, Sam’s effort was to undermine the universalist way in which abstract ‘humanity’ had been turned into a weapon of harm and thus itself undermined as an ethical lever. I believe he does this not by refusing the human (or displacing it in ontological ways as one might think at first pass) but rather by going deeper into the human as a passage point for the social worlds he found in the bush among former LRA soldiers. In those social worlds, he found more than human ways of being human. He shows us how moral certainty is resolutely local, always and only found in the historical and social operations of its effects in specific people and specific kinds of social bonds: the slice of a machete as it carves the flesh versus the spray of bullets that facelessly rip it apart; the empowering qualities of being animal-like in the bush; the inextricability of magic and science in a video about Che Guevara that prompts debate over the merits of cigarette smoking for the cause of political resistance. Here humanity’s capacity as an abstract moral compass is displaced by one that is attuned to the experience of armed life in the bush, itself a distillation of histories of colonial and religious occupations, alienations and salvations, and where the powers of being human are diffused through kin, love, weapons, spirit beings, and even dirt which, in Gulu, contains the potency of discernment. The dirt itself, he writes, delimits the “strict moral boundaries of what [can be] considered legitimate forms of life.” Here too, turning dirt into a basis for social connection, Sam reasoned that so powerful was this dirt that he felt the need to bring a little bit of it back in small bottles for his dissertation committee and other faculty advisors, friends and probably family. Thus, as I read his work, to be against humanity is to still be for a radically social version of what it means to be human –even one who kills – because the version of humanity that we have known is not enough to contain these transactions.
Sam’s stubbornness about these things served him well when he returned to medical school and applied his razor sharp sensibility of critical engagement in the surgical ward. I asked him at one point in the middle of his rotations “Why surgery?” I told him I thought surgery could not be further from the kind of medicine that would complement his career as an anthropologist. As usual, again with a toothy grin, as if he knew he would win me over, he told me surgery made sense. It was useful medicine. You could fix things that were broken. But then he went on to tell me he liked surgery because of its (shall we say) gruesome commitments to violence as a form of intervention. He talked about the brashness of the surgical theater, not just the ripping and cutting of tissues, but the crude joking and banter that he said, the physicians seemed to feel absolutely no shame about. It was not that he thought the surgeons were bad people or in any way amoral, nor was he enamored of the macabre, but rather that he admired their honesty in doing things that required the use of violence to heal. They were “authentic,” was what I recall him saying.
What I took as his ambivalent admiration for surgeons I think helped nurture the radicalism he wanted to apply to medicine – a radical medicine – and this is also how he felt anthropology might work—in a way not unlike that of the surgeon with precise, even if often violent, interventions. He reminded me at the end of a chat a few years later, after he returned to Berkeley, that he had left medicine, but he was still a doctor, and in that capacity he moved into a different terrain where, following Rudolf Virchow or Che Guevara, he could practice medicine on a grand scale by way of a politically sharp, even if sometimes painful, anthropology.
This helped Sam reveal not just the damage done in the name of humanity but also the ways anthropology had itself become handmaiden to that work, especially among those trying to do “good” and who, following the work of Paul Farmer and Jim Kim, had formed whole edifices of intervention in the name of structurally-competent medical anthropology. This was in many ways his ultimate act of care in the face of violence. In his wonderful combination of wanting to disappear not away from humans but into friendships, fully and with an open heart, enough to hold the violence that inevitably encumbers being alive—like death itself– we get a sense of Sam’s stubborn commitment to being alive in the most potent and realistic of human ways, to find a way to give what is foundational to being alive more power by making it hold both benevolence and harm. To disappear into this world is to make a certain kind of life possible. And this (because of the doctor in him) was his optimistic way to improve our collective lot, for he cared deeply about all of us.
In thinking about this quality of Sam, I am reminded of Sydney Pollak’s documentary about Frank Gehry, the architect. Pollak interviewed Gehry’s therapist, who said (and I paraphrase) that most people come to therapy because they are struggling with their relationships. Their relationships are holding them back. And then there are those like Frank Gehry, who come to him because they are struggling not with their relationships to specific people, but with the fact that they cannot figure out how to change the world. I think Sam was like this –in the best possible way –forming a sense of purpose around being an organic intellectual which in the Gramscian sense, had a pessimism of the intellect, but optimism of the will.
I am grateful for Sam, for his friendship, and for his contributions. Although his life was cut short, and there is surely no greater tragedy than the death of a young scholar whose ideas and impacts were just beginning to be seen, I think that in many ways Sam already lived many lifetimes in the short time he was with us, and he lived each of those lives fully and richly. Dispersing himself now in the gifts he leaves behind, the books and articles, the memories and the sparks, I will continue to carry him with me like the little bottle of dirt from Gulu he brought me, a potent medicine and a razor-sharp discernment of how to be a force for the good.
Works Cited
Dubal, Sam. 2018. Against Humanity: Lessons from the Lord’s Resistance Army. Oakland: University of California Press.