Comments on: A drop of complexity

By: THE at SM

THE at SM — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 18:30:24 +0000

[...] Hylland Eriksen is blogging at Savageminds since yesterday: I expect to submit a handful of blogs on a daily or bi-daily basis [...]

By: Patricia

Patricia — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 22:12:45 +0000

Thomas- I look forward to reading your entries. Like Will, I am interested in Applied Anthropology, specifically since it utilizes anthropological tools to engage real-world problems and issues. Like Johannes, I’ve also wondered about the pacification of students when it comes to applying anthropology. My master’s research study/treatise dealt with the interaction of public alcohol advertising, alcohol addiction, and drinking behaviors among two minority populations in communities local to my university [Newark and Montclair, New Jersey, respectively]. My interest in alcohol addiction and culture includes suggestions for changes in public policy and research methods from an anthropological perspective–which until now has not been included in addiction research. My topic was innovative in its grasp of current local community problems, yet, most academics in the department I studied in weren’t interested in the least. I felt in some way they were expecting my project and topic to not be engaged with current local issues, and their support of my research was minimal. Yet I know that anthropology has an enormous amount of knowledge and perspective to offer in public discourse and have been frustrated as I’ve watched issue after issue pass through the media without any publicly published comment from an anthropological mind.

Your book was a refreshing departure from the norm and I agree that its time for the discipline to shed its shell and engage in public discourse on the important issues facing humanity in the 21st century.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 22:00:48 +0000

Johannes, I have a great deal of sympathy with your views, which are shared by many of the others who contribute to this site. In fact, I can recognize your sentiments as my own a couple of years into my undergraduate studies, having begun my studies in philosophy and social sciences to “understand the world in order to change it”. Something happens to most of us as we are socialised into the rarefied and slightly self-contained world of academia; at a certain point, the agendas of the discipline may begin to seem more urgent and more relevant than the agendas of the world. There is no simple, universal solution to this dilemma. As for myself, I have always had non-academic activities on the side, trying not to forget that the whole point is to force the different realms, or language-games, to speak to one another.

By: Johannes Wilm

Johannes Wilm — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 11:34:26 +0000

I am a graduate student of social anthropology at the University of Oslo and I can totally follow you here. However, for me the question started on the other end: I had first rejected the culturalist explanations that had been the standard in the community I grew up in by turning to political leftwing activism. When I then started studying at university two years later on, I had a hard time quite understanding the purpose of totally academizised studies without any relevance to the world (or at least with no real strategy of how to do anything about some situation/fact that one had concluded as being a problem).
But I wonder: It seems to me that to a large extend this is exactly the purpose of the current social anthropological academic staff (much of which must have been employed during the cold war) to pacify any student who may be trying to conduct research not only for the sole purpose of studying in itself, but rather in order to be better able to change things. Now if that is at leats in part so, how can one then as a student try to break this lock?

By: Will

Will — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 06:34:44 +0000

I’m looking forward to reading your posts, Thomas. I am a graduate student in applied anthropology/archaeology at the University of South Florida (apparently “the” school in the US for applied work). I am presently learning about the very short history of applied anthropology and am only beginning to understand how we must go about establishing ourselves as a legitimate and useful branch of anthropology. I haven’t read your book yet (it’s on my never-ending list) but I hope to get your thoughts on the future of applied work in the United States and elsewhere and how this integrates with your ideas about engaging the public.

By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 00:31:51 +0000

Stepping out of our secluded spaces is risky, you get your hands dirty, you hardly earn any credit points for your institution, you end up being misunderstood and quoted out of context; and at the same time, we have a collective duty to participate in impure ways.

Speaking from personal experience, becoming an anthropologist was a highly effective way of distancing myself from parents and peers whose ways of life I was determined not to share. Grounding that determination was not so much a desire for purity (though that was certainly part of it) as a desire to escape restrictions, to retain forever what I learned from Victor Turner to call a liminal relation to everyday social structures and concerns. Fortunately, I now feel, I was thrust out of academia, stumbled into a career in advertising and, then, along the way, became a political activist, an active member of the Democratic Party in the USA. That “collective duty to participate in impure ways” resonates deeply. My instant reaction was, “Bravo! Bravo! Bravissimo!”