Please indulge us by taking this informal reader poll. The poll will close in 7 days.
UPDATE: Sorry, I posted this when it was still supposed to be an internal draft. If you voted before the “undergrad” category was added, please vote again. And sorry about slighting independent scholars in the previous version!
As an anthropologist (serious sort of fellow who has published several articles, a couple in leading journals, and a not half-bad book) who is a self-supporting independent scholar, I find being relegated to the “Other” in this scheme offensive.
John,
Sorry, fixed. Please vote again.
I do not propose changing the survey tool, but it might be interesting to think aloud about the distinction between :anthropology professor” and “professor who is an anthropologist” or “professor who was trained in anthropology.” Indiana University is not unique in employing anthropologists in many departments (religious studies, linguistics, informatics, communication and culture, criminal justice, etc.). I have always seen such patterns (and their expansion) as a very good sign for the field of anthropology. Consider, on other campuses, those anthropologists working in history and philosophy of science programs.
There are also people trained in interdisciplinary settings who come into close alignment with anthropology, with or without working in anthropology departments. Some such people adopt “anthropologist” an identity. I also feel positively about such patterns.
There is also the matter of anthropologists working in research settings where “applied anthropology” does not quite fit. Here I am thinking of a diverse range of settings where anthropologists do “basic research” without professing.
Museum anthropology is one zone with a strange relationship to both normative applied anthropology and university-based anthropology. There are people with joint appointments in museums and universities. There are also people trained in anthropology who work in museums in roles that are not directly marked as anthropology (registrars, educators, technologists, etc.). The meaning of “applied” looks very different in museums, where curators and others do basic research but also translate it into forms intended to reach very broad audiences.
Nice point, JBJ. Although my degree is in “intellectual and cultural history,” my old teacher H. Stuart Hughes referred to himself as a “retrospective cultural anthropologist” and many of us think of what we’re doing in something like that way.
That said, I’ve taught philosophy, sociology, human development, and history and I only get to do that because I have a sense not just of the ‘materiality’ of each field but of their ‘disciplinarity’ as well. We may study many of the same things, but we ritualize competence in quite different ways, based on different canons, questions, debates, and so on. So I don’t mind being ‘othered’ by the survey. (And I know that wasn’t your point.)