The two collective actions – (1) gathering the evidence about specific allegations and (2) reforming the current system of anthropological knowledge-production – are not mutually exclusive and can be carried out simultaneously.

Maybe one way would be to disentangle various calls for third party intervention, investigation, formalisation and mediation from mere generic liberal, “technocratic”, “audit culture” mechanisms you criticise? Not everything around formalisation of procedures and demands for evidence should be discounted as “obfuscation” and “neutralising the momentum for reform” I believe. On the contrary, it might precisely be the place where creativity for formal inventions and reforms can take place. The Cullen Dunn “Asshole Problem” article you cite asks to make precisely these kinds of formal interventions to my mind (like some kind of code for sexual harassment etc.) even if the exact nature and details of such interventions should be debated. Also, there are existing attempts to scrutinize and hold accountable the impact of “ethnographic partial truths” by the anthro-community (some good, others lame and bureaucratic, yet still they exist). What progressive mechanisms are there to deal with the impact of partial truths of anonymous call outs? Considering the existence of various lists targeting US and European academics as anti-semitic the practice of open source, hashtag justice is open for appropriation.

In other words, specifically the List of sexual harassers as a progressive analogy works poorly for me. It actually does not seem to produce many testimonies and narrative accounts— it just lists names, tags, and circulates. Circulates perhaps precisely because of these big names put at the forefront and the affect of OMG-how-crazy-I-knew-it-all-along it generates. When someone (Partha Chatterjee) asked for a reason why he ended up on that list at all, the response was, again, purely within the language of that medium and genre (trolling, liking, circulating) https://www.dailyo.in/variety/name-and-shame-campaign-partha-chatterjee-sexual-harassment-raya-sarkar/story/1/20318.html

Is that how we really want to deal with systemic issues, hierarchies, bullying, elitism, and accusations? As economic pressures are gonna continue to pile up on young academics and students (like me) I feel frictions and battles for places in the hierarchies will increase and become more ugly and vicious. It would be a disappointment if the current energy of discussions around systemic troubles would remain confined to the formats of anonymous call outs, near-automatic ascriptions of guilt and dismissal of formalisation as sites of possible collective invention and creativity.