I do think it’s taxing to become a biological anthropologist nowadays, partly for the “biological” reasons discussed above (fast pace of genetics/bioinformatics etc), but also because of the “anthropologist” bit: anthropology encompasses so much in both theory and practice, and one wants to do a good job of it and not give any credence to the “narrow-minded scientist” stereotype.

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http://evolutionaryanthropology.wordpress.com/2007/04/16/the-two-cultures-revisited-ad-nauseum/#more-128

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Jeff says: But if the living core of an academic discipline is a coherent methodology, then it seems problematic to try to integrate the natural scientist’s working assumption of context-independent causality, which allows their theory to advance as the cumulative “progress” of their discipline, with the linguistic/cultural anthropologist’s working assumption of the “arbitrariness of the sign,” which generates relativist context-focused explanations grounded on criticism of all grand theories of trans-historical causality.

Have you been paying attention to the natural sciences in the last two decades? You’re dancing with straw-men!

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I think the real question isn’t whether or not people need to bridge the gap between various disciplines – they are doing so already. (Look at the real questions people are asking, not hypotheticals and you’ll see that many require drawing upon a variety of methodologies.) What is at stake is whether or not it makes sense to structure this interdisciplinary training under the umbrella of “anthropology” or whether we should just define anthropology more narrowly and let individual students or faculty work together collaboratively on a more ad-hoc basis.

I think there is much to said for the ad-hoc approach. It would allow, for instance, visual anthropology programs to work more closely with film programs and linguistic anthropologists with linguists, physical anthropologists with biologists, etc. Ironically, what is lost with such interdisciplinarity is a certain kind of holistic training, in favor of more narrow specialization. There are also the realities faced by university departments in terms of securing funding and lines for new professors, much of which is easier to do within a more traditional structure.

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It seems to me that new discoveries in neurosciences, genetics, ecology, evolutionary studies, and related biological-environmental fields have opened up a whole new set of questions and generated surprising new data. The psychologists and sociologists currently flooding into the gap to interpret these findings really don’t understand them, or they have their own agendas to push, rife with reductionisms at which the biological scientists themselves often cringe, problematic understandings of social evolution, and the like. In other words, a huge intellectual market niche (if I may be so bold) is opening with the social and cultural interpretation of new biological findings, and many of the fields involved crave the kind of cross-cultural data (and cautionary tales) we might be able to provide. Four-field anthropologists are some of the few people with even close to the background to interpret the new material. Ironically, as brain scientists, for example, are learning more about mechanisms for brain plasticity, sociocultural anthropologists are retreating from engagement with psychology, the brain, cognition, and anyone in our field who might be tainted by dealing with these things.

To my mind, our discipline’s romance with history, political economy, semiotics, and humanities is far too faithful. We should also recognize intellectual opportunities to be gained on the biological side of our field. Theorists like Ingold are a great example for what can be done. Admittedly, it takes a lot of work, but true interdisciplinary collaboration can also make that work a lot easier. In addition, these collaborations can open up avenues for us to generate new sorts of data (some of which lets us insert our concerns into fields that typically ignore us), engage in debate in the public sphere, benefit from funding targeted toward these emerging interdisciplinary fields, and a host of other salutary developments.

It would be a huge shame if a few bad encounters with close-minded colleagues would convince us that such collaboration is either impossible or without benefit. We probably all know both knee-jerk biological and cultural reductionists, the kind who automatically assume anyone who works in a lab must be racist, all biological data must be rejected and biologists morally suspected, etc.

As I wrote in a column in AN a while back, I found when I emigrated to Australia that, without some grounding in biology, it was very difficult to argue with scientific racists, genetic determinists, and other assorted intellectual villains. I couldn’t just shout ‘race is a construct’ at them and expect them to go away. A good four-field-style education (whether it includes three, four, five or other number of fields) is exactly the kind of remedy we most need. I’m sorry some of my colleagues think a four-fields approach is ‘dead’; I hope that the next few decades find that news of its demise has been premature.

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I haven’t paid much attention to discussions of the relation between bio-physical and linguistic-cultural anthropology subsequent to the sociobiology debates of, well, about 20 years ago. So I find your post quite interesting, and wonder if you might clarify how or if any of these recent developments in biology suggest ways of bridging the distinction between natural and social facts that (at least as far as I understood them) seemed to be the at the core of those debates. Thanks – Jeff.

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For so long, we’ve been in the position of feeling like the more humanistic aspects of anthro are the ones lagging behind: we don’t make discoveries, have grand unifying theories, systematize all previous knowledge generated, we just sort of wiggle around interpretively, sighs & lamentations.

So the science side has been eager to march onwards and upwards and doesn’t want to hear the humanistic side whingeing and ankle-biting, or complaining about an unequal distribution of lab space or whatever. And the humanistic side has (quite rightly, often enough) said: fine, suit your narrow-minded selves.

But really — the advances of the past 20 years in the biological sciences are just amazing, and they are sort of approaching a point where there is a lot of interesting interface with the squishy mysterious bits in which the humanists are interested. So if anthro gives up on that kind of collaborative approach to the human story *now*, we’ll be doing it just in time for biologists to have arrived at a moment when they are looking for insights from the humanistic side. So novel departments / programs will be cobbled together & probably do a lot of wheel re-invention of insights from, say, structuralism. I really think it would be too bad if anthro as a discipline gave up on the four fields just when the spirit of four fieldism could be getting really exciting.

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Btw….how do you go about posting a smile here?

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GSG, I’m just being smart-alecky; I otherwise find much to agree with in you post.

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As an student faculty representative at two universities before my current PhD. institution, I often witnessed this during highering situations. When one of the subdisciplines was hiring, people in that subdiscipline would often push for people who were doing something extremely similar. In one small department for example, two bioanthropologists who were left after retirements (and another prof leaving) wanted to hire more evolutionists despite the fact that those who retired had researched other aspects of bio anthro. A biocultural anthropologist or bioarchaeologist would have made much more sense in this instance since it would have filled certain gaps in the department and it would have allowed for dialogue between bio and the other disciplines.

Once specialization becomes entrenched and a university becomes known for specializing in one aspect of a subdiscipline then it becomes very hard to turn back the clock. In order to continue to get a critical mass of grad students, funding and/or administrative support you have to continually replicate what your good at. In the long run this leads to departments that break into very tiny enclaves.

Second, I’m tired of the science/not sciene debate in anthropology which increases the disciplinary divide as well. Someone really needs to put a metaphorical bullet in the extreme postmodernists who apparently can’t stand being in the same room as bioanthorpologists and extreme “real” scientists who call everyone who doesn’t share their narrow theoretical approach “hippies” or “stupid.” I’m sick of professors using theory to justify being assholes to people in other disciplines (or even in their own discipline).

I especially feel for the grad students in departments other than mine who are pressured to not hang out with people from other disciplines. In my master’s department and my current Phd. department, I have been lucky in that I have not had that pressure and I have made many friends in other disciplines. However, I still occasionally run into people who have trouble seperating their disciplinary commmitments from their ability to live their lives (in the sense that they see anyone who doesn’t share their perspective as an enemy and will never hang out with them under any circumstances). Unfortunately, some of these people will go on to have jobs and perpetuate this problem. I think that this socializing aspect cannot be ignored when we discuss the divide between disciplines.

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