In my neck of the woods ‘cultural studies’ is a term of abuse. In fact it functions a bit like the phrase ‘family values’ but in reverse. ‘Family Values’ is a completely amorphous concept, but being labeled with it means (in certain circles) that You Win, while managing to make the term ‘cultural studies’ stick to what someone else does is — regardless of what this term actually means — means They Loose.
There seems to be two versions of this sort of labeling. The first is when professors consider themselves ‘scientific’ while their foes are ‘just doing cultural studies’. This position is at least made in good faith — it is so easy to ‘do science’ when you have an unexamined faith in both the phrase and the activity. But when you are a neurochemist or low temperature physicist or engineer you are actually trying to build bigger and better models that explain more things and actually designing bridges, mind-altering chemicals, and so forth.
The problem with this sort of approach is that dismisses anything that is not technoscience as ‘not knowledge’. Forget sterile debates about whether the social sciences are or are not scientific — what is at issue here is that humanities can be (and usually are) rigorous. A scholarly volume on Wesleyan sermons and their reception in Derbyshire between 1807 and 1823 is nothing if not rigorous. And don’t even get me started on the epigraphers. Those guys are out of control. If anything, using ‘cultural studies’ as a term of abuse dichotomizes knowledge in to ‘science’ and ‘everything else’ in a way that totally ignores humanistic rigor.
The second way method of using ‘cultural studies’ as a term of abuse is more closely tied to the narcissism of minor differences. I mean here the tendency of someone who most definitely does not believe themselves to be doing ‘science’, someone who might even be interested in exploding any theory of textuality that would require them to, you know, take fieldnotes. Here the issue is selling yourself ‘up’ in terms of a posture of rigor (or perhaps radicality) vis-a-vis the strawman of ‘cultural studies’.
The problem with this position is, of course, that claiming that what ‘they’ do is ‘cultural studies’ but your work is ‘real’ doesn’t actually speak very highly to the quality and rigor of your own work.
And there is the final problem with all of this — that there are now departments of cultural studies with people doing cultural studies, and none of this finger pointing addresses the quality of their work or even what it is.
Perhaps I am alone in seeing ‘cultural studies’ as a term of abuse? Has it become the evil twin of anthropology? This is a general topic that we will never stop talking about, but I wonder whether anyone can speak to the particular issue I’ve raised here: how invocations of ‘cultural studies’ as a stigmatized category reflect our understanding of our own status as a science. Or at least ‘rigorous’.
In Taiwan “anthropology” is a fairly traditional field. This means that a lot of what passes for anthropology in the US doesn’t really fit under anthropology here. Anthropologists study shamanism, not Hello Kitty, so if you want to do an ethnography of Hello Kitty you are likely to end up in either cultural studies or sociology. There are strong ties to other regional cultural studies conferences and journals. So while there are a lot of cultural studies types who are doing something much more lit-crit oriented, there are also many people doing good ethnographic work which would be considered anthropology in the states.
‘Cultural’ Studies’ touches a nerve, so please forgive me if I wander a bit from your assigned topic to offer a jaundiced view of the subject. What follows is a potted history and commentary, admittedly biased in the way one might expect within a system of limited good (academia) and competition for scarce resources (graduate students, faculty, department budgets, etc).
First, the origins of Cultural Studies are rooted, in large part, in the growing sense of irrelevance of traditional English Lit programs in the late 20th century. As ‘science’ programs were surging ahead in research and development, the ability to quote Chaucer and Spenser seemed less and less relevant.
English Departments, which in the U.S. are often among the largest departments in colleges and universities (I know that ‘Cultural Studies’ first appeared in England, and I assume that many of my comments are relevant to the British situation), had to begin recasting themselves, at least expanding their traditional boundaries, in order to maintain their interest and relevance – and their size and funding levels.
Second, major changes in social class since the end of WWII have changed the role of higher education in American life (I believe it was Jules Henry who first pointed out that education reproduces the class system in any community). While colleges once provided access to the appreciation of High Art – literature preeminent among those arts – to a privileged social class which wore such appreciation as a sign of its class status (at the Country Club we listen to Mozart, not Bill Haley), the rapid expansion of the middle class in American life after WWII and the flood of students who entered college on the GI Bill (most looking for job training, not a finishing school) changed the traditional role of English Lit departments.
Those departments were slow to follow the arc of social change (as anthropologists often point out), but within a couple of decades recognized that the breakdown of the social class system in American also entailed the breakdown of the traditional ‘art’ system; no longer would the distinction between High Art and Low be a meaningful way to legitimate English department dominance of university curricula. Debates on the ‘Canon’ sprung up; pop culture became academically legitimate. Not because of something essential in pop culture, but because English Lit needed to reinvent itself to remain competitive.
Skipping ahead a few more years, papers at MLA meetings now have titles that sound like anthropology or history subjects. ‘Postcolonial” studies – isn’t that a large part of what anthropologist have been doing since it was still ‘colonial studies’? – is now the domain of English and Comparative Lit programs. Many of our best students find it attractive NOT to risk strange disease or hunger by actually travelling to the places they read about in undergraduate courses for long-term fieldwork, but to enter a Com Lit, ‘Cultural Studies’ program and focus exclusively on the textual side of pop culture. Even if they study decorative truck art in India they don’t have to actually go to India.
Anthropology, in the meantime, can easily be sidelined within universities, along with History, Sociology, and other disciplines that have traditions of work with real people or primary source materials. My gripe with ‘Cultural Studies’ is not merely that it is a watered down version of what field disciplines do, or that it allows Literature types to pretend to be experts at every social science discipline, but that it does so at the expense of those other disciplines within colleges and universities. I suspect that all SM readers who have been working in universities for more than a few years have plenty of experiences with this; I’ll spare you all my own, and end this rant…
“origins of Cultural Studies are rooted, in large part, in the growing sense of irrelevance of traditional English Lit programs in the late 20th century. ”
wow, that is so not the history that I know… I have it coming out of the problems of analysis that rise out the class culture analysis of academia found primarily in linguistics, history, and sociology, but also in anthropology. There were major people in ‘English’ too, but that is primarily because cultural studies was ‘theory’ for a long time, but it was not philosophy, it was not political theory or social theory per se, as the work was critical of the class biases of the studies of culture in those fields. In the u.s. then cultural studies ended up allied later in life with english departments in some situations, but I would say that really it arises out of the crisis of legitimation that arose from the will to ignorance toward the lifestyles of the lower classes by academics of all stripes and flavors.
Good observations from Jeremy; I’ll reply very quickly and briefly by saying that I’m sure he recognizes that there is no incompatibility between his focus on the ideological shifts from which ‘Cultural Studies’ emerged and my focus on the political economic changes and contexts that authorized and legitimated those ideological experiments, and helped to make them especially meaningful. I’ll opt for a Weber perspective on the convergence of these, reinforcing one another. Thanks for bringing this up.
To make it all anecdotal and such:
First year in grad school, like everyone I took a class in the history of anthropological theory. The professor was one of those “we should be _scientists_!” guys. He really wanted to know what we, the young generation, thought about “cultural anthropology turning into cultural studies,” which he attributed to the decline of the 4-field model and the pernicious influence of Clifford Geertz. Whatever, in my naive and overcaffeinated state I suggested that maybe such a transformation was just fine – “I don’t know, maybe for what I’m going to do I’ve got more to learn from, say, queer theory than I do from linguistic anthropology.” Not understanding, at the time, that the professor in question was in fact a linguistic anthropologist of some note and rather a science warrior… Actually he was pretty nice about it, although when I ran into the usual mid-semester angst he suggested I’d be happier in the History of Consciousness program at Santa Cruz. Now _that’s_ a term of abuse ; .
“It is surely the following kinds of question that would need to be posed: What types of knowledge do you want to disqualify in the very instant of your demand: ‘Is it a science’? Which speaking, discoursing subjects– which subjects of experience and knowledge– do you then want to ‘diminish’ when you say ‘I who conduct this discourse am conducting a scientific discourse, and I am a scientist’? Which theoretical-political avant garde do you want to enthrone in order to isolate it from all the discontinuous forms of knowledge that circulate about it? When I see you straining to establish the scientificity of Marxism I do not really think that you are demonstrating once and for all that Marxism has a rational structure and that therefore its propositions are the outcome of verifiable procedures; for me you are doing something altogether different, you are investing Marxist discourses and those who uphold them with the effects of a power which the West since Medieval times has attributed to science and has reserved for those engaged in scientific discourse.”
Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in _Power/Knowledge_, pp. 84-85.
One more comment: to talk about “Cultural Studies” as one thing is a huge reduction of a large and diverse field of scholars and projects that self-identify as such. Like the simplification of “postmodernism” to a specific theoretical argument, this is a shortcut that is often used to discredit scholars without having to talk about (or read) their work in any detail. Hardly the sign of critical rigor.
Cultcrit: what part of “And there is the final problem with all of this—that there are now departments of cultural studies with people doing cultural studies, and none of this finger pointing addresses the quality of their work or even what it is.” didn’t you understand?
“Cultural studies” irritates me for two reasons. First, “cultural studies” is often anthropology, sociology or history that is housed in a different department or journals labeled as “cultural studies.” This irritates me because it often means that in some universities there are redundant departments competing with anthropology, sociology or history for funding and students when most of their faculty should really be in one of these three departments.
Second, I have noticed a tendency among some intellectuals to see this redundant form “cultural studies” as more in touch with the contemporary historical period (or in some cases “postmodern period”)than “outdated” or “hopelessly positivist” anthropology, sociology or history. “Cultural studies” people that take this approach seem to ignore anthropology, sociology or history that may be relevant to their research or seem unaware of theoretical debates within these disciplines. This leads to works that rehash old debates within the social sciences and ignores contemporary theoretical paradigms (you don’t have to use contemporary theoretical paradigms but you have to at least address or critique them).
There is some good work being done by people in “cultural studies” but I do not see why it needs to be housed in a new department. If we want some sort of new interdisciplinary department that studies the “cultural” or the “social,” we should combine preexisting departments not create something new which claims but is not really that much different from the old.
At a kind of broad scale this is about a couple of simple things. The first is subject of analysis and method – the idea that you can analyse women’s magazines for your phd, through reading lots of them and also reading lots of Foucault. Anthropology clearly has a traditional objection here due to still holding the sorts of questions and methods of Boas, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown etc. pretty close to the heart of matters, no matter how modern and then post-modern things may have gotten. Note there may also be some jealousy or snobbery about attracting students the easy way with funky topics. Anyway, ‘rigor’ here is founded in Method, and Big Questions (i.e. ones that are considered to overarch those addressed in Cultural studies (which generally are thought to devolve to questions about the expression of Power, and tend to be politically restricted to the Left) – so that when people are ‘only’ doing cultural studies, it is implied that that’s where it ends).
This is tied to the idea of a general Anthropological Project, or a loose form of ‘progress’ which Rex blogged about ages ago. Although individual researchers may also study women’s magazines (or the skulls of Australopithecenes), it is traditionally understood that these will collate into a wider encompassing project. This project as a whole is idealised as apolitical, although it encompasses the many different political arguments and uses of individual research (and historical periods). Although lots of people have pointed out links to colonialism and all the rest, the response is always to work towards independence. In cultural studies the response is to acknowledge, embrace, and then use the politicised nature of research. This is not, in traditional anthropology, considered ‘rigorous’ (which is also why Applied Anth is somewhat marginalised).
The differences are evident in the arguments themselves – note the defence: disparaging Cultural Studies a) is an attempt to police boundaries and construct the category “Science”, and as such is about power/discipline, b) constructs a group out of a loose aggregation of no real substance. (Note however the statement on the home page of the journal Cultural Studies where the editor says: “it is precisely as a project—a radically contextual practice of the articulation of knowledge and power– that cultural studies will continue to challenge dominant intellectual and political practices, and to look to the possibilities of the future.”) So it is a project, but one that is positioned always as the underdog.
Perhaps its now such a broad umbrella term that it captures too much and nothing at all. In my own research I am very much indebted to the Manchester School and cultural studies’ notions of power. However, the cultural studies people at my university a) think THEY have the mandate for “culture” (when of course we know anthropology does…), b) they do literature and little else or they do media studies and little else. My irk with (some of) them is that they presume to know what it all means to people even though they never actually talk to any people.
I taught cultural studies in a well-respected dept in the US. I then began conducting consultation work with media companies. The companies are open to cultural studies theories, but they also need ethnographic studies, focus groups, and God forbid, surveys (at times) to back up the theories. I am now ostracized by my university peers for conducting such work.
While I had the full vote of my department in regard to tenure, the dean vetoed the vote because my BOOK (published by a preeminent press), and all of my peer reviewed articles focused on “popular culture.” The dean’s decision reminded me of Stuart Hall’s famous claim in the early 1960s, that cultural studies was then seen as a treason of the intellectuals.
I have nowhere to go at the moment, so I landed a consulting job. Since the time of my dismissal from the university (3 years ago), I have published another cultural studies book, numerous articles, etc. but no department will touch me, I am “tainted” because I work “for the man.”
Did these scholars ever consider that their universities/colleges are ALSO corporations, run by heady marketing executives?? Without marketing/consulting work, they’d not have enough students to teach.
In addition to the above, I know of several cultural studies-oriented Marxists who live quite contradictory lives. Huge homes. Dinner = $125 dollar bottles of wine and $40 entres, etc.
I give.
1) I think that people should be able to study whatever they want, whether it is ‘popular culture’ or not. I have issue with the _object_ of study cultural studies. What’s the difference between reading women’s magazines for your Ph.D. as opposed to my example of working with a corpus of sermons from rural England?
2) I am also not particularly concerned with the arrangement of academic units. If people are doing good work I don’t care if they’re in Astronomy of Assyrian Studies, I want to talk to them about their work.
3) I think that part of the sour grapes is the sense that ‘cultural studies’ (again, a strawman here) has been successful even as (or perhaps _because_) it assumes the underdog role, and when we strike it down it become more powerful than we can possibly imagine.
but
4) I think the issue for me is not the apoliticized image of ‘progress’ in the discipline (as Tim puts it) but really whether the work is any good or not (*ahem* the same could be said of ‘applied anthropology’). “I read some (sermons from Derbyshire/fashion mags) and it kinda made me think about this thing in Foucault….” is different from a real — I keep using the work — rigorous understanding of fashion mags. The thing is that it may also be an image of anthropological practice, while we tell ourselves it is something that only ‘cultural studies’ does….
Settle down, Rex, I was responding to David Taylor.
[REx says:
Cultcrit: what part of “And there is the final problem with all of this—that there are now departments of cultural studies with people doing cultural studies, and none of this finger pointing addresses the quality of their work or even what it is.” didn’t you understand?]
Try this perspective on the turf issue, Grad Student Guy: I’m glad if there are more programs in which anthropologists can get jobs. You may be too, one day.
Rex wrote:
2) I am also not particularly concerned with the arrangement of academic units. If people are doing good work I don’t care if they’re in Astronomy of Assyrian Studies, I want to talk to them about their work.
You might care when you are department chair, and you have to fight for resources. I won’t bore you or SM readers with a long recitation of the many issues, but I’ll make the simple observation that when it comes to academic departments, size matters: budgets gets bigger, more graduate students get supported, there is more money to pay for everything from faculty conference travel to new laptops.
That sounds dreadfully serious – and having been a department chair for 8 years I know it’s not fun to have to compete with excellent departments for access to money, faculty lines, assistantships, etc – but I hope I retain a sense of humor in my mock outrage! And in the same spirit I’ll say that I find the best Cultural Studies work to be the worst: when I read a really outstanding piece by someone who identifies themselves as a prof. of English Lit I regret that they are not in an anthropology department…
The institutions of academia and education really perpetuate this notion of intellectual territory and spheres of disciplinary expertise; “dont briing your airy fairy theories to my backyard”. And it is interesting how a lot of the discomfort and frustration expressed here about different kinds of work are linked with money, jobs and administrative problems. Of course, the study of culture is such a ridiculous thing to pin down to any one discipline and Im excited that there are great English profs whose work on culture or the like makes some anthropologists envious; why should this be so? I know the reality is that academia like most aspects of our world is competitive and nasty, but why take such a confrontational stance? It doesnt matter what banner the work sails under; its the cargo that matters. I could care less about the financial aspects; we all need money, jobs and opportunities.
What I think about this is simple: I believe in the value of fieldwork, and I believe in the experience of spending (a decent chunk of) time trying to understand social relations in a particular place. I think that experience is essential both for thinking about social life in that particular place as well as thinking about social life more generally. If people are doing that, I don’t care really whether they’re in anthropology, sociology, geography, whatever (and it’s worth noting that I have met a number of anthropologists for whom this field experience seemed somewhat minimal). The problem I have had with the cultural studies people I’ve met is pure and simply that the value of fieldwork has been minimised, and they often seem more interested in trying to draw out tenous connections with their favourite theorists than actually telling us anything about the ‘culture’ they are ‘studying’ – which, given that they’ve hardly spent any time in that ‘culture’ is not surprising. Now, there may be more fieldwork driven cultural studies people around; I just haven’t met them yet. I’ve only met the bad kind.
David: Sorry I should be more specific — I don’t care about academic units from the point of view of intellectual conversation. I CARE VERY MUCH about how the university is organized in terms of resources, etc. So I completely agree with you there. Uh… in fact it is so important that I am not going to say in public what series of events prompted me to write this post… 🙂
Richard: I understand the value of fieldwork. But don’t you think there are other disciplines that don’t do field work but still study people that do good work? What is the difference between those fields and cultural studies that makes you like the former but not the later?
This thread hit both a nerve and silly bone with me, so I have to disclose at the outset my posting is innocent of any critical rigor whatsoever.
I took the initial post by Rex as an inquiry on usage, “cultural studies” as a term of abuse, and so reply from an actor-centered POV, along the lines of Grad Student Guy’s things that irritate me about cultural studies.
While I’d never dismiss any scholarly work as mere “cultural studies,” (not even “mere statistics!”) I’ve got to admit getting pretty irritated myself, not at the institutional level (which I don’t yet know about), but in terms of the discourse.
Sure, some of my attitude toward cultural studies is chauvinism pure and simple, and boundary policing, but I confess a skepticism of anything called “studies” whether visual studies, media studies, women’s studies, or cultural. As an undergrad, I used to call it “Madonna studies.” In unguarded moments, I’ve said “studies” was a euphemism for “without discipline, as in we haven’t yet decided on our major.” Mean and reductionsit? Yes, indeed, but a bit of healthy rivalry strengthens the spirit, no?
And, of course, none of this precludes reading Raymond Williams, or Stuart Hall, or any current work, or brightly covered anthology, that interests me simply because it is cultural studies. But it does, I think, reflect some genuine gripes of content, not reducible to power moves and games of rhetoric or to scientistic, positivism. Of course, looking at those gripes with critical rigor isn’t in the cards today.
I was, however, inspired by this thread, to want a late-night-show style “Top 10 Things That Irritate Me about Cultural Studies,” by A. Anthropologist.
I know many, if not most, SM readers could come up with much funnier, more incisive ones than these, and I implore you to improve on my humble efforts and share your gems. Meanwhile, here are my lumps of coal…
“Top 10 Things That Irritate Me about Cultural Studies,” by A. Anthropologist
1. Culture is pre-conscious, it has more to do with how you blow your nose or wipe your ass than conscious expressions of identity.
2. Damn, poachers! Culture’s our dinner, go find your own.
3. Academic poaching license, feh, we anthropologists invented it!
2. The magazine and TV advertisement is not the archetype of all cultural communication/reproduction.
3. Mass observation: all the spectacle of fieldwork without the overnight stays.
4. Symbols are not vehicles or windows onto “culture” but operators in social processes of culture. (Some insights aren’t fun.)
5. Culture is the product of human evolution and agency, not the top-40 x a Fruitopia of difference.
6. Culture and society, not just a book by Raymond Williams, but concepts to reflect on, grasshopper,
7. “Cultural Studies,” what doesn’t that cover? Could you be less ambiguous, something say, like, “the study of humanity.”
8. Getting a henna tattoo isn’t participant-observation.
9. Look, this culture concept is muddled enough without you guys coming in here with your free-wheeling notions and literary filigree.
10. It’s all about the book covers.
Superb Jenny! This is now my Official Savage Minds Favorite Post.
Wow, with that kind of encouragement, I can’t hold back from posting this one that would be on the lsit, if one could edit after posting. It might be a bit esoteric for non-gamers, though.
11. UR in my base interviewing all my d00dz.
Richard–poor Richard, of course once you step into real life and get a real job outside of talking all day with the rhetoriticians of academia–you are working for the ‘man’ – the patriarchy!!
And re: “surveys to back up the theories. I am now ostracized by my university peers for conducting such work.”
You mean , like a survey of college prof’s who expound upon how ‘white’ men objecify and sexualize everything from ducks to black men to women?
And then, after the slideshow of all that ‘white male gaze’ of oppression and stereotyping,the lecture about pickininnies and watermelons and the never satisfied “man eating Venus” the ‘feminist’ female prof says about the black athlete….”and girls he is sooo sooo hooOOOOt, isn’t he *drool*?!”
You sound bitter…..;-)
I am an anthropologist who reads and respects the work of many scholars in cultural studies. In some of that work, I should note, “anthropology” is occasionally used as a term of abuse-usually by scholars who want to disassociate themselves from anthropology’s origins in colonialism. Both forms of discipline-bashing are disingenuous, irritating and unproductive.
When I was in college, I majored in anthropology and worked as a research assistant for an English professor who was also a burgeoning Cultural Studies scholar. In fact, she taught the school’s first “Introduction to Cultural Studies” class. What bothered me about Cultural Studies was not the subject matter–I found it rather liberating that the subjects of analysis *could* be fashion magazines–but rather the methodology, or lack thereof. If all you do is read the fashion magazines and analyze them using Foucault or Lacan or Barthes, you’re simply doing literary analysis. You’re not analyzing culture writ large, because you’re not figuring out how the fashion magazines were produced. If you interview editors and writers and photographers and spent a good deal of time at the magazine’s offices, and you interview readers and newsstand owners and advertisers and critics of the products, then you’ll get an idea of how this stuff is made, interpreted, and utilized. And maybe you’ll be able to actually prove something Foucault said. When I’ve said such things as thing to grad students in Cultural Studies at my current institution, I’ve been met with, “Oh, you want consensus. Boring!” That’s an actual quote.
Rudi — the issue here is that discipline is in fact productive. Its (re)productive of attitudes of academic cultures and styles which articulate with very real institutional realities. I agree with you that I don’t really want to perpetuate it, but however annoying it is I think it is also something that can be analyzed.
Bit late obviously, but Rex to comment on your comments in 12 above:
1) Obviously only the oldest of fogies would object in principle to the idea that studying anything from dark matter to dark metal is fine, as long as you can make something of it. But still, I am not really convinced that all grist is equal, any more than that all mills are equal. Thin grist + poor mill = unsatisfying bread, like what Marcus and Fischer (I think) call “thin ethnography”. Its the combination that causes people to think a study is not worthy of interest. But there is still a traditional bias too – Mary Douglas wrote about Leviticus, but it is not on most anthropologists radar, no matter how good.
2) Me neither. Except that we probably are, depending on what we accept as having ‘good’ foundations. Are you really dead keen on talking to someone doing ‘good work’ in Astrology, or Cryptozoology or Psychiatry? [joke]. There’s still a black boxed definition of good (science?) in there somewhere. In principal I like talking to and reading the work of Historians, in practice I often get frustrated because there is not enough interpretation to satisfy me. But anthropologists are less likely to object to History than Cultural Studies because a) the data boundaries are clearer, b) tradition, c) common commitment to an apolitical project (see 4 below).
3) Agree.
4) Its hard to see how to do much more with women’s mags than just reiterate some lesson from Birth of the Clinic or whatever if all you do is read them. Lots of anthro students do projects like that, and we let them because they are proving they can perform coherent research. But it is not the anthropological ideal – which would be something like what ted suggests. Example: we accept STS because of methodological depth. And someone like Daniel Miller can write 3 different books on shopping, because he does it through the lens of sacrifice, kinship…in a thick description ethnographic way. Its good because his terms of reference are broad, holistic, drawn from a wealth of other ethnographies etc… it is satisfying, rigorous.
Making the same political points over and again with different data is not as satisfying, but it is political. I think the political factor is important because it colours expectations about what is ‘good’. If your purpose is to deploy your “radically contextual…articulations of knowledge and power” to political ends then all those ethnographic details are less important than your wider project of challenging The Man. Its ‘good’ because its right on. Thus your career can be “tampon ads and the construction of feminine subjectivity” followed by “celebrity gossip and the construction of feminine subjectivity” followed by “high fashion and the construction of feminine subjectivity”, or “Jane Austen and the construction of feminine subjectivity”… because at least you have a coherent political project however obtuse. The same is true for Applied Anth, and for Indigenous Studies, and lots of those other “studies” that Jenny mentions. So I think the standards are different, there’s a different aesthetic stance (e.g. the students quote from ted). I think of those debates between Trask and Keesing, and Obeyesekere and Sahlins…
Tim, your post wasn’t too late to enlighten me, thanks. I think you and ted (post 23) are exactly right: the issue is one of methods. I got a glimpse across the divide in a conversation with my best friend a few months back. She is a rhetorician who studies digital media; and also one of the most erudite, rigorous, and prolific scholars I know.
Thus, it surprised me to hear her complain that she could always tell when editorial reviewers were social scientists because they invariably made inquiries about her methods. She said she felt it was ethnocentric to expect that from all scholarly papers; “that’s something you guys do, we don’t do that,” she said.
I wanted to reply that when reading and writing various kinds of texts is the method everyone uses, then it’s understandable that’s assumed and not addressed explicitly. And when texts are the objects of knowledge, it’s pretty clear from reading a paper which particular texts were read. However, when you venture to study something like the rhetoric of game developers, and write about people’s beliefs and practices, it is not unreasonable to expect a word or two about how you know what it is you say you know. Rather than ethnocentrism, I’d say that good evidentiary practice compels it.
Of course, methods are no fun to write about and I’ve often viewed them as a chore, but I was completely floored at how foreign the concept was to my colleague. She very much has a discipline, but one that, much like Anthro, has spilled over it’s traditional banks, and I keep wanting to point out the many things on these shores that (a) are not texts, and (b) are not like texts in some pretty salient ways.