Style is, by definition, the sort of thing that is hard to point to. But Tad’s recent posts on the existence/possibility of “a distinctly Canadian anthropology”:/2005/11/03/anthropological-identities/ raise deeper issues about what it would mean to have a distinct national style. What do you think? I know there are lots of readers from different countries who visit the site.
I’m not sure that the US has a national style, but maybe I just lack perspective on this. The first thing that comes to my mind in terms of a national style is the British. While British Social Anthropology is long gone, I must admit that I am one of those Americans who feel there is a subtle but distinctly British inability to ‘get’ the culture concept (obviously I am overgeneralizing here). This goes beyond the structure-functional tendency to view much of social life as ‘window dressing’ for an underlying social structure. The British adoption of Gramsci in the ’80s seems to me to be part of this as well — which is ironic, because one think that came out of that intellectual moment was one flavor of ‘cultural studies.’ Even the existing Strathernian paradigm seems focused on ‘society’ as an interlocutor that, almost two decades after Gender Of The Gift, still needs to get a beat-down.
I could make gross generalizations about other national traditions — the continuing influence of Levi-Strauss in France and South America — but the most interesting comparison to Tad’s Canadian case is Australia. Both countries have a long history of ethnology and ‘natural history’ types from the metropole working there (or at least mailing down ethnographic questionnaires), but a more recent history of institutionalized anthropology. In Australia’s case the two key institutional players — Firth at Sydney and Nadel at ANU were closely tied to the British tradition. But this hasn’t stopped Australia from producing it’s own distinctive work, and the flow of non-Aussie professors through Australia has meant that the two key institutional players turned out not always to have been so key.
Even more important, both Canada and Australia are places where native land tenure is an active issue, and debates about a multicultural national means ‘settlers and indigenes.’ Anthropological work on aboriginal issues is a central part of the discipline over there — at least in my experience. Even if you don’t work on aboriginal stuff, you know someone who does, or you did an honors thesis on it, etc. etc. It provides a focus for what anthropologists do, or should do, or argue that they shouldn’t have to do, or are accused of being colonial bastards for doing (which are all, if you think about it, sort of the same thing). Of course Australia also has a history as a regional player in the Pacific (like New Zealand, whose anthropological tradition is also comparable to Canada’s) and so there are issues of studying PNG, Fiji, etc. Canada and Australia drive me nuts because of the enormous and very high quality grey literature on land tenures issues that I try, unsuccessfully, to keep up with.
I suspect a distinct national style can emerge as the result of several different things: institutions which produced cohorts who then go on to teach, a distinct research problematic (e.g. aboriginal land tenure), a history of both of these things that allow a distinctive tradition to emerge, etc. etc. I suspect you won’t know what your national style is until someone complains about it — but when they, you’ll know you arrived!
These are thoughtful comments, Rex … and I appreciate you picking up my thread. I had hoped you would, knowing a little of your PNG work and thinking that there are probably parallels between Canada and PNG too. And yes, I would agree that national styles are the kinds of things that others complain about, particularly when they are on the outside. At times, however, it appears that Canadian anthropologists complain about a lack of style or unified style or something that is simply distinctive.
As a living, breathing anthropologist who sees American anthropologists’ lack of attention to society (structure, organization, institutions) as a primary factor in the absence of any significant theoretical development in American anthropology in the last three decades or so, I feel like Rex and I inhabit different intellectual universes.
I wonder which of the 157 definitions of culture that Kroeber and Kluckhohn collected or anything that’s replaced them I’m supposed to be not getting. I see the interpretive turn in American anthropology as a vital corrective to simplistic Durkheimian analysis. Also, I greatly admire the writing skills and humanistic insights of such American anthropologists as Rugh Behar, Carol Mattingly, and Robert Desjarlais. Still, I ask Rex the same question that I have been asking of others for years, where are the theoretical breakthroughs for which the culture concept is supposed to be responsible? I see little in recent years but moralizing and thrashing—the absence of anything like a new paradigm that produces accumulating advances is, alas, palpable.
The British have style? Perhaps they just have stronger labor unions?
I agree with John: we inhabit different intellectual universes.
It’s nice to agree, but I’d really like to understand better where Rex is coming from. That my own views are biased and largely uncorrected by spotty reading in work published since the 1970s I cheerfully admit. In the spirit of sound scholarship I would like very much to know what I am missing and where my views are wrong. I humbly await instruction.
Let me be more specific. First, Rex writes,
It would be very helpful, indeed, if someone could offer an explication of “the existing Strathernian paradigm,” of which I am wholly ignorant and explain what about Gender of the Gift is so devastating to the notion that society is a useful term in explaining cultural processes.
Second, here and on Anthro-L I continue to see references to anthropologists who were prominent in reading lists when I was in graduate school in the sixties: Geertz, Levi-Strauss, Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, Marvin Harris, less frequently folks like Stephen Tyler or James Fernandez. What I don’t see are references to anyone who has achieved comparable prominence since. What I’d like to ask my younger colleagues is who are you reading now whom you would recommend as a model to emulate? Whose work looks promising—not just in terms of what the individual author might do—but in terms of defining a paradigm that others might want to develop?
Marcus and Clifford, of course. Even if you don’t agree with the _Writing Culture_ approach, you have to admit it’s had an effect.
Then there’s Latour, Rofel, Graeber, both Rosaldos, Taussig, Brodkin, Abu-Lughod, Ginzburg, Gupta, Trigger, Vincent, Stocking, Appadurai. I don’t know how many of these people will leave a lasting legacy — bound to be some of them, as others fall by the wayside — but if you’re looking for work of importance in the last 30 years, there it is. That none of these anthropologists has the prominence of a Geertz or a Turner is, I think, less a function of the quality of their work and more a function of a) the lack of time for their work to move from “contemporary theory” to “foundational thinkers” courses, b) the fact that their careers coincide with the collapse of the idea of a “canon”, and c) the realignment of the discipline in the last 30 years as opportunities have dried up or shifted to the private sector, research problems have moved into ever-tightening niches, and publishing priorities have shifted away from grand theory.
Not that I’m biased, but I think some of the most interesting work coming out of Anthropology has been by people looking at language. I suggest looking at Regimes of Language and Langauge Ideologies to see some exciting contemporary work.
@John,
German anthropologist Ulf Hannerz, tying early anthropological approaches of networkanalysis with multisited ethnography, refers* to Bernard S. Cohn’s Networks and Centres in the Integration of Indian Civilization and Alfred Kroeber’s The ancient Oikoumenê as an historic culture aggregate in one row with John A. Barnes’ Class and committees in a norwegian island parish–admittedly all three are elder than three decades, but networkanalysis and networktheory is close to connectivity-theory. The concept of connectivity again might initiate paradigmatical changes also within Anthropology, non?
*U.Hannerz, The global Ecumene as a Network of Networks in: A.Kuper (ed.), Conceptualizing Society. New York, 1992, pp.41
Oneman wrote: “That none of these anthropologists has the prominence of a Geertz or a Turner is, I think, less a function of the quality of their work and more a function of a) the lack of time for their work to move from “contemporary theory” to “foundational thinkers” courses, b) the fact that their careers coincide with the collapse of the idea of a “canon”, and c) the realignment of the discipline in the last 30 years as opportunities have dried up or shifted to the private sector, research problems have moved into ever-tightening niches, and publishing priorities have shifted away from grand theory.”
Perhaps it also has to do with the choices of reading materials assigned in universities. Is it not possible that many (not all) professors have had a tendancy to stick with what they knew? Perhaps there has been a focus on getting students to read “the classics” with the thought that they would read more recent work in grad school. Therefore, the idea that the older stuff is somehow more “canonical” remains engrained in people’s minds when they think back to what forms the basis of the discipline of anthropology.
I would like to add, though, that maybe there is now less importance attached identifying with a particular theoretical framework than there once was. We can make a parallel between the growing view in anthro that cultural “boundaries” are not so impermeable and that “cultures” are not the distinct, bounded entities they once were perceived to be. Similarly, theoretical modes of analysis need not be distinct and mutually exclusive structures.
To further the parallel, perhaps we are moving away from the tying of theoretical framework to place just as some theorists such as, I believe, Fog-Olwig and Hannerz have tried to get us to look at the possible translocal nature of culture.
Translocal . . . I like that!
Yes, the teaching of “classics” is what I meant by “a” above — someone like Appadurai has a long time to wait before his work transitions from “contemporary theory” courses to more classics-oriented “foundations” courses, and mainly that wait has to do with people like myself who were weaned on Appaduarai to take our rightful places as rulers of the discipline and gatekeepers of the cano– I mean, to become the teachers of foundations courses.
Of course, my list was incomplete and off the top of my head — there are others. The rise of translocal or transnational theory has been an important one, and we could add Aihwa Ong in this connection. My only aim was to point out tht there is tons of important work that’s happened since the “symbolic turn” of the late ’60s/early ’70s. Much of that work will never be “canonical”, but much of it will — and we can’t know any better now than we could in 1955 that Eric Wolf would become “Eric Wolf”, or than we could have known in 1960 that “Sol Tax”, called at one point “the most well-known anthropologist”, would be better known today (when he’s known at all) for his teaching than for his work as a Latin Americanist.
This must be one of the debates where people are using such different terms that it becomes very difficult to make sense of anything.
I’ll freely admit, I was lost after ‘British Social Anthropology is long gone’, since it literally can’t be true unless Rex has sent a memo around all the UK departments, and they’ve discovered the error of their ways, dismissed their students and retracted all degrees handed out for several decades.
Slightly more perplexing is the idea that social anthropology as a discipline, or more precisely, as an ongoing lineage of social thinkers has somehow terminated. I can think of at least two introductory textbooks off the top of my head which appear to glaringly omit this pertinent fact, and cheerfully consider it to be an ongoing thing of which, indeed the authors themselves, are a part.
What is doubly perplexing is that whilst the death of social anthropology is proclaimed, with culture triumphant, at least some of the thinkers mentioned by oneman have actively engaged in the process of destabilising “culture” as the organising concept in American cultural anthropology (I can’t remember if culture is still something to be “written against”, or is it not? Has anyone decided?).
Whatever the Strathernian paradigm is, (which presumably was ruled the school when I was handed my degree, although I was unaware of its existence), the Thatcherite terms in which society as a concept is described and then dismissed appear, well, yet again perplexing.
The thing about Savage Minds is, if this isn’t confusion of terms, these perplexingly incorrect offhand comments are thrown up as a matter of fact (Kerim’s Nigeria comment being the one that sticks in the head) time and again. Its beginning to look like a trend. Other than that, I really don’t know what to make of it, other than its an incredibly poor way of saying “structural-functionalism was considered limited by the 1950s”.
Obviously I could have been more clear when I wrote that “British Social Anthropology” is long gone, and I apologize if this was confusing. I did in fact mean “the structure-functional paradigm.” But to conflate poor writing with an obviously untenable position like the one Tigerbear attributes to me is simply mean-heartedness. Nowhere in the post do I ever claim that ‘culture is triumphant’ or anything like this. Amazingly, I do believe that there is rich and worthwhile tradition of anthropology in the UK and that — gasp! — it continues today. To his credit, Tigerbear does (eventually) manage to figure this out.
If he feels that this sort of poor writing is part of a bothersome trend on SM, I would remind him of two things. First, the best way to avoid being bothered by SM is simply not to read it. Second, it is not only the staff of SM that are guilty of the sin of poor writing. However unclear my
is, it differs from his
in one key respect: it is grammatically correct. I really don’t know what to make of his comment, other than to assume it is an incredibly poor way of saying
At least that’s what I _think_ he’s trying to say. The thing about Tigerbear is that these perplexingly inarticulate comments are thrown up time and again. It’s beginning to look like a trend.
Well, I obviously touched a nerve there.
Ouch! There are grammatical errors (I have a tendency for them, I’m a dreadful proofreader of my own writing though I’m great at spotting ’em once I can do nothing about ’em…)
But to describe ‘British Social Anthropology is long gone’ as being an “unclear” way of saying ‘structural-functionalism was considered limited by the 1950s’ is frankly, ridiculous.
It is possible to interpret what such a statement must refer to (if you have a respectable grounding in anthropological theory), but only as a comment so dreadfully confused as to be worthless (What a casual reader is meant to make of your post, I’ve no idea).
It doesn’t express anything like the meaning you intended for it, indeed what it implies is very, very different (which is why I mentioned how, taken literally, it can’t be true).
The majority of my response was pretty much conditional on ‘British Social Anthropology is long gone’ referring to something other than structural functionalism in the 1950s. Which it could have (I mean, your comment was so ineptly made it was just my best guess), and as it doesn’t, the pertinent point resolves to: “This must be one of the debates where people are using such different terms that it becomes very difficult to make sense of anything”.
Which I think you’ve accepted.