Author: Sean Heath is a MSCA Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at KU Leuven. His work examines the relationship between water policy strategies, water stewardship, the senses, and more-than-human wellbeing in sport and leisure contexts, with a focus on outdoor swimming in Canada, the UK, and Norway. Sean can be reached via email, and he tweets from @SeanmrHeath.

Season 3 of the popular Netflix adult cartoon Archer begins with a three part mini-series, The Heart of Archness. In these episodes we meet the spy ‘with a license to kill’, Archer, who has absconded to an unnamed South East Asian island in order to mourn the death of his fiancé. He gets captured by a gun-for-hire, Rip Riley, who is charged with returning him to the US and his spy agency. Hijinks ensue, the float plane they are flying back to the US crashes, and the life raft carrying Archer and Rip Riley gets captured by modern day Malay pirates. Being a licensed to kill international spy, Archer has a few tricks up his sleeve and ends up murdering the pirate captain and several of his crew, upon which the rest of the crew surrenders.

Enter Noah, our erstwhile anthropologist. Cracked glasses, unkept beard, slightly receding hairline and a half mullet, Noah is the picturesque stereotype of the 1970’s anthropologist, including sweat-stained white, long-sleeved button-down dress shirt. He is the only crew member who speaks English and becomes the de-facto translator for Archer.

Now, the anthropologist has become a well-used trope in popular media, especially in horror films since the 1960s. Investigating all manner of ‘exotic’ rituals of voodoo, cannibalism, sacrifice, is the raison d’être of these film characters. Television series have been kinder to the stereotype of the anthropologist, often focusing on the linguistic aspects of anthropological training (e.g., Daniel Jackson on Stargate SG-1 and Alex Blake on Criminal Minds). The popular understanding of cultural anthropologists – and archaeologists – as globe-trotting adventurers, who speak multiple languages, has entrenched this type-cast character of the anthropologist as cultural interpreter/translator. Noah is one such character who is used more as a foil for comedic relief and a convenient interpreter of non-English languages.

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Fast Forward to episode 2, Noah has been promoted to ‘first mate’ by Archer, the new Pirate King, because of his grasp of the local language making him indispensable to Archer’s ability to maintain control over this group of pirates. Noah attempts to ‘brief’ the new Pirate King on the daily ongoings and requirements of running a Pirate Kingdom. Archer derogatorily calls Noah, ‘Mr. PhD’ to which Noah clarifies that he is, in fact, only a doctoral candidate whose research vessel was captured before he became enslaved as a Slave Pirate. There are parallels to be drawn to experiences of fieldwork by many an anthropologist: enter the field, have the initial research topic hijacked, conduct research on a different topic than stated in one’s research grant proposal. But here I want to delve into Noah’s ethnographic data collection on, presumably, modern day piracy.

Noah’s notes and extant dissertation (presumably on the pirates who enslaved him) are left on the pirate fortress island during their escape from the mutinying pirates (a curious point explained on the wikipedia page of Fictional Anthropologists). Losing, or having to leave behind, entire unpublished manuscripts is nothing new in the history of academia. Edmund Leach’s classic, Political Systems of Highland Burma, is one such example where, upon losing the draft manuscript, fieldnotes, and photographs from his fieldwork in Burma during his flight from the Japanese invasion during WW2, he reconstructed the entire monograph from memory.

Nowadays we have ‘the cloud’ to back up our documents and therefore the likelihood of such a catastrophe striking has been severely reduced. Still, this only works when you have a stable and reliable internet connection with which to back-up those documents. As an anthropologist still wedded to scribbling down field jottings by hand in notebooks before typing up my fully fledged fieldnotes (when I have access to a computer), the thought of not having triple back-ups of this collected data is slightly terrifying. Noah, having been enslaved by pirates, presumably does not have access to a computer to type up this monograph, let alone connect to the internet. We can assume this as the only piece of communications technology on the pirate fortress island shown is an analogue amateur or ‘ham’ radio. So, Noah has most likely resorted to writing all of his fieldnotes and data out by hand – similar to the ‘Pirating Operations’ manual shown in the episode.

A manual of piracy

The ‘Pirating Orientation’ materials is another foil used in this episode. Leave it to a Slave Pirate Doctoral Candidate to come up with an orientation manual for the rules and rituals of pirating. Clearly, the pirates do not need such a manual as only those not familiar with pirate society would have to consult such a document. Pirating Orientation can be read as a text which freezes the social organization of pirate society: it maps out the rules, rituals, and regulations of the pirate code, which includes the rules for 1vs1 challenge fights for leadership. These fights for leadership are something present in the romanticized narratives of the Age of Piracy in the 18^th century, both as ‘tall tales’ told by pirates themselves and reproduced by authors writing on those pirates. In historic records, we find that this practice seldom, if ever, occurred, and that pirate captains and their first mates were rather elected by pirate crew.

Anthropology has been critical of its own ‘classics’ which depicted dynamic changing social worlds and stabilized them into ‘archetypes or exemplars of a type of subject.’ While Noah’s unfinished dissertation may not flatten the existence of his pirate captors, this orientation manual reframes the unwritten pirate code, offering a lack of detail as to whether the challenge fights for leadership are to be hand-to-hand combat or if anything goes. This distinction, which Noah has failed to include in his orientation manual, provides another comedic point in the episode as Bucky the Pirate ‘consults’ the manual to establish the correct rules of these leadership challenges.

Returning to the romanticized depiction of piracy, pirates working for equal shares of the ‘booty’ (spoils of piracy) and holding elections for captain/leader, are both historically accurate depictions of pirate social organization mentioned in the episode. The social conventions from which pirate ship organization and diving up of treasure hail are ‘laid out’ in the manual and subsequently ‘translated’ for Archer (who failed to read the manual) by Noah. Historical accounts of pirate experiments in social organization, according to the late anthropologist David Graeber, offer radical departures from 18^th century hierarchical and gender-based roles in European and Madagascar societies, setting the scene, as it were, for experiments in Enlightenment thinking to foment. We are only presented with the romantic vision of pirate savagery in the Heart of Archness episodes, a repetition of time-honored pirate narratives so successfully sown by 18^th century pirates that we continue to glorify the Jolly Roger flying, swashbuckling, pistol slinging, peg-legged, bearded, tyrannical pirate captain today (look no further than the popularity of the Pirates of the Caribbean series).

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With an aside into Pirate Enlightenment complete, it’s time we moved full sails ahead back into our analysis of Noah, the anthropologist. Towards the end of Part II we find Archer, Rip Riley, and Noah climbing down ladder rungs of a secret floor passage in an attempt to escape from the mutinying pirates. 

Many doctoral candidates and Masters students in anthropology will recognize the above exchange. Quite the on-the-nose comment, not breaking the fourth wall, but certainly poignant enough to make an anthropologist wince. From firsthand experience, having to explain to my parents-in-law, for instance, the use-value of my training, or that I don’t brandish a whip, have never jumped over spike pits in ancient temples (other than in the occasional video game), and have no fear of snakes, makes this ‘equally huge waste of time’ something of a conundrum. Unlike, say, the field of engineering which explicitly trains undergraduates to be employable in engineering firms upon completion of their degrees, anthropology has no such ‘anthropology firms’ for graduates to cut their teeth in. NGOs, government positions, or HR departments are where many keen anthropological thinkers end up working. Rip Riley is correct when he jokingly wishes Noah ‘good luck’ with the job hunt, as scholars within anthropology, and the social sciences more broadly, face ever increasing precarity in the job market, both within academia and beyond. The gig economy and truncated research project timelines may not seem to fit with the in-depth, longitudinal ethnographic investigations which are at the core of our disciplinary training. Still, anthropologists, even the Noahs amongst us, have much to offer beyond the walls of the ivory towers.

Even though Rip Riley and Archer are both ‘taking the piss’ about Noah’s chosen profession and critiquing anthropology’s relevance to society, they are both relying on Noah’s skills as cultural interpreter and translator, as well as his intimate knowledge of this pirate society and the physical geography of the pirate fortress. Noah’s indispensability in this regard is the reason Archer gives for not ‘freeing’ him of his ‘slave’ status. The juxtaposition between reliance on Noah’s anthropological skills and the presumed lack of relevance this discipline has to broader society ultimately makes for good comedy. Reading the subtext in this relationship we see the value which Noah brings. Without Noah’s anthropological skills, Archer would never be Pirate King. I would even go so far as to suggest that Noah’s anthropological training, including his linguistic skills, are why he alone, amongst the rest of his research vessel crew, is alive, and still enslaved by the pirates.

To conclude, Noah, like many of the depictions of popular media anthropologists, is a white ‘Westerner’ conducting research in a non-English speaking ‘foreign’ context (at least for him). As such, he is one of many in a line of reproduced stereotypes of the lone anthropologist from the early 20^th century, a depiction of the anthropologist which does not accurately represent the diversity of anthropological scholars, let alone the diversity of possible anthropological fieldsites and topics of investigation. That being said, the critique of anthropology’s relevance to society forces us to confront how popular media depictions of anthropologists might be imagined, including how we reframe our discipline’s contributions to present political, social, and environmental debates. Temperance ‘Bones’ Brennan catches murderers through forensic anthropological techniques. The critical work which characters such as Noah do in these fictional narratives (translation, cultural interpretation, mediation, shared knowledge production) may be less flashy but offers a more nuanced representation of anthropological praxis.