Transformations of cultural intimacy: An afterword

Abstract

This Afterword provides an opportunity to consider the contribution of the assembled articles to our understanding of the expansion and exposure of culturally intimate information in the age of social media and uncivil populism. The new international style of bully politics creates special problems for anthropological ethics, in which anthropologists must increasingly accept responsibility for the social and political impact of their research without yielding to—and, indeed, while actively resisting—the neoliberal counter-ethics of blame (or “responsibilization”). Within that contentious geopolitical reality, discretion, new understandings of political strength, and cultural solidarity, and even displays of weakness and subservience may create opportunities for social solidarity. The world is in cultural flux, and the concomitant precariousness and deep provisionality of social experience mandate a flexible analytical style and a realization that collective intimacy is a fundamental resource, not only for the bureaucratic nation-state, but for all organizational structures, including our own academic discipline.