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I don’t know what would be feasible, but I see it this way: There is the psychology of the individual mind, both the conscious and unconscious(belief, motivation, will), the imposition of the rules and culture of the family, the group, the nation, the world. The ostensible theories of dominance, prestige, justifications for leadership. The hypocrisies. The self and group deceptions. Denying the facts to maintain an internalized reality or belief system. Methods for maintaining the beliefs of the group in the face of contradictions. How does the individual get what he wants(what does he want). How does the group on each level of size and organization get what it wants. What factors and mechanisms promote altruism? The entrenchment of meaningless gestures and dead metaphors. Y’know, if someone were organizing from outside the Earth, they would remove people from flood plains and deserts and move them to habitable areas. Why can’t we do this. What is the theory of such folly? National boundaries why: allegiance to family–>allegiance to group–>nation.

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Anthropologists are always talking about the need to communicate anthropological ideas to the world outside, and intro classes for undergrads are the number one way to do this. The goal of intro classes, as I understand it, is that twenty years down the line, students will still be able to ask anthropologically-informed critical questions when consuming news, policy, ideas, etc.

Designing a class for students is good pedagogy, not necessarily a concession to the marketization of pedagogical relations. It is also good strategy: the pragmatic-minded students through whom anthropology could make the most difference–i.e. future policy-makers–are often the ones who find the historical approach most boring, and end up taking quantitative, “fact-filled” sociology courses to fulfill their social science requirements. (I TAed one of these and all the students said they would never take an anthro class).

Seems to me that the best thing would be to offer both courses, perhaps in succession–first the ideas and big topics, and then the history for those students who are considering the field as a major.

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I’m still keen to know who are these “hot theorists” students want to read? My usual suspects might be out of step, so I’m curious.

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Jenny: Thanks for the syllabi! Do you have any more :?) Rethinking Anthropology is a seminal essay but the one I mentioned is more explicitly historical and incorporates the additional decades that Leach had to think things over in the course of his life.

Your suggestion that we think about “topic definition” is fascinating. I think a lot of departments already do this (although we don’t describe it in the way you do), but in the context of offering different courses — thus we have the methods course, the theory course, etc. etc. I guess the question that your question raises in me is why it is the Theory course that is typically given pride of place in a department’s (or at least the ones I’ve been in) offerings rather than another course.

As a matter of fact I can imagine an interesting reconfiguration where you might have ‘writing ethnography’, ‘doing fieldwork’, ‘theory’ etc being rearranged and having the different aspects of the research process being foregrounded in different ways. Hmmm….

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why should what students want be of any consequence to the development of curriculum?

Jenny, that is a big question. How would like to ask it?

1. As a marketing question? Assuming that treating students as consumers is the way to attract them to classes and earn good student evaluations (both of which may be essential for anthropologists’ holding on to academic jobs)? Or

2. As a pedagogical question? Assuming enough consensus on core values, concepts and methods to focus attention on how best to communicate them?

It seems to me that our slipping toward 1. reflects the very real fragmentation of our field. I am old enough to remember one of my teachers Jack Roberts (at Cornell, late 1960s) telling me that he could remember when the whole of the American Anthropological Association could meet in a ranch house outside of Tucson. Back then any new book was a must read, and the notion that everyone would keep up with work in all four fields wasn’t unreasonable.

By the time of my graduate training, I had my hands full with social anthropology and East Asian Studies. I took courses in linguistics and and one course in the Archeology of China because I thought I needed some breadth. Never did get around to doing a full-fledged course in physical anthropology. Later, when I had to teach intro, I scraped by with what I’d picked up in anatomy and biogeography courses taken as an undergraduate, to supplement what the intro texts had to say.

Now it’s not uncommon for me to run into recent graduates of different programs and discover that the overlap in what they’ve read is very small, since what they read depended on the texts their teachers assigned them…And folks who specialize in East Asia at Cornell or Michigan wind up with very little in common with people who do Africa at Chicago or Latin America and U. of Texas. Once you get past the obligatory bits of Malinowski, Boas, Geertz, Levi-Strauss that most everybody still pays lip-service to, the authors seen as essential predecessors diverge rapidly.

Or that, at least, is the way it seems to me, an exile from the ivory towers, who peers over the walls now and again.

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That’s the link for Leach’s syllabus. I mistyped it in previous comment and can’t now go back and edit, sorry.

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Who are these “hot theorists”‘ that students want to read? And why should what students want be of any consequence to the development of curriculum? (Oops, that’s actually a big question, nm.)

Don’t you consider Leach’s 1961 essay “Rethinking Anthropology” a treatment of his “big picture” view of what anthropology is and ought to be? His concern there with generalization and critique of comparison as “butterfly collecting” seem relevant.

As the thread began with his mention, I thought there might be some interest in Dr. Leach’s syllabus for Principles of Social Anthropology from the 1951-1952 academic year at LSE. There Leach describes the general topic for Michaelmas term as: “The historical background and basic concepts of modern theory in Social Anthropology;” and for Lent term as “The application of theoretical concepts to the anthropological field situation.” Would such a strategy of topic definition work today, instead of taking on the daunting, difficult-to-define task of teaching “anthropological theory?”

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It may be because my training at Cornell was largely derivative of British social anthropology that I find myself in harmony with Michael’s suggestion. I might call myself an anthropologist and go off to do research in places off the map of more conventional social sciences focused on Europe and America; but when it came to theory, the must-know guys were Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Freud and Simmel. One also learned, of course, that Kroeber and Leslie White believed in something called the superorganic, Julian Steward was an evolutionist, Kroeber and Kluckhohn had surveyed 157 definitions of culture.

But those sorts of information were, in Joe Levenson’s memorable phrase, “of merely historical interest.” They had no significant bearing on planning for research, which for those of us then doing China studies, was largely framed in the tradition running from Radcliffe-Brown through Meyer Fortes to Maurice Freedman, the major alternative being urban studies and/or geographical modeling a la G. William Skinner or historical demography a la Arthur Wolf.

Of the folks who were then the leading edge of the field as I was learning it, the biggest influences on my thinking were Max Gluckman, Victor Turner, Mary Douglas and Claude Levi-Strauss. Clifford Geertz was also important, but largely, in my case, because while I was persuaded of the need for “thick description,” he never provided a recipe for how to do it. That I got from Victor Turner.

Then, of course, came fieldwork and the shocking realization that while Turner had worked with people who live in grass huts in communities of a couple of dozen inhabitants who spent most of their time in plain sight out of doors, my wife and I were in a Chinese market town of 35,000 inhabits, who lived behind brick walls and included a sixteen-year old Rotary Club exchange student from Illinois, spending a year with the family of a local doctor. Our first night in our “field site,” we went to see “2001: A Space Odyssey” at the local movie theater, with exoticism added by the beetlenut spit on the floor and the bats twittering in the rafters.

That is one reason when I think of anthropological theory I always recall what Turner wrote in “Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors” (In Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Cornell U. Press 1974, p. 23.

In moving from experience of social life to conceptualization and intellectual history, I follow the path of anthropologists almost everywhere. Although we take theories into the field with us, these become relevant only if and when they illuminate social reality. Moreover, we tend to find very frequently that it is not a theorist’s whole system which so illuminates, but his scattered ideas, his flashes of insight taken out of systemic context and applied to scattered data. Such ideas have a virtue of their own and may generate new hypotheses. They even show how scattered facts may be systematically connected! Randomly distributred through some monstrous logical system, they resemble nourishing raisins in a cellular mass of inedible dough. The intuitions, not the tissue of logic connecting them, are what tend to survive in the field experience.”

Rereading this passage I find myself wondering if it would be possible to construct a theory course that combined theorists’ ideas with ethnographic examples in which they do seem to illuminate what is going on….

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Michael: you write “undergraduate major needn’t be a PhD program in microcosm. It can be something quite different—and arguably should be, because most of our majors end up in business, the professions, and education rather than anthropology.” Uh… as opposed to graduate programs where 90% of all grads go on to become professors….? Concern about where grad students ‘end up’ probably contributes to the view that ‘theory’ is unnecessary if grad students don’t go on to enter the academy.

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It is not, of course, accidental that it is precisely those subfields that are most scientifically grounded (in the sense of being based on established research methods that generate reproducible results) that have been most ostracized as social and cultural anthropology have swung away from science toward literary models, where “theory” means only sets of assumptions that loosely guide interpretation, there being no generally accepted methods for judging when one theory is better than another.

Which is not to say that one should throw out postmodernism’s baby with the tepid bathwater in which it too often floats.

The critical recognition that the grand narratives of traditional social and cultural research mostly reflect the excessively narrow perspectives of mainly privileged white, male researchers was long overdue. So was recognition that most of the “theoretical” terms used in social and cultural analysis are highly ambiguous and polysemic, with usage varying dramatically from one researcher and context to another. So was the realization that, at the end of the day, anthropologists are writers, either writing in ways constrained by the genre conventions of the times and places in which they publish or rebelling against them in various experimental ways.

What we really need to move beyond the binary opposition of science/modernism and literature/postmodernism is a new synthesis that combines the best of both, while also modestly recognizing Aristotle’s point that the mark of an educated man is to demand no greater precision in argument that the subject matter allows (so that, for example, in his prototype, it makes no sense to demand of political orators the precision required of mathematicians). Those who fancy themselves adherents of science will have to give up the absurd claim that elegant theories restricted to the low-hanging fruit of easily described data amount to universal superiority whatever the question at hand. Those who fancy themselves insightful humanists will have to give up the equally absurd claim that all theories are equal, since where science applies, its theories are demonstrably superior. Good liberal education will have to train students to assess the questions before them and the data available to them and choose the forms of understanding most appropriate for them from the intellectual toolkit their education supplies. Anthropologists who claim a four-field competence will have to be conversant (if mostly amateurish) with every tool in the kit.

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This isn’t to say we shouldn’t have survey courses, it is important to have context and genealogy, but I would personally structure such a course around those theoretical issues which I struggle with in my own work, rather than trying to come up with something definitive for the discipline as a whole. For instance, I might take the relationship between synchronic and diachronic analysis as the basis for such a course, looking at the back and forth between structuralist and historicist approaches to anthropology and how the discipline has struggled with the question of history. Or another course might focus on the changing notions of “community” in anthropological thought. In either case, we could cover huge swaths of the discipline’s history while remaining focused on a particular problem.

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