In the case of arts and science students, the usual openings–teaching, research…–are quite different in kind. The student choosing them does not bid farewell to the world of childhood: on the contrary he [sic] is trying rather to remain with it. The teaching profession, after all, offers adults their only possibility of remaining at school. The arts or science student is characterized by an attitude of refusal towards the demands of the group. An almost monklike tendency inspires him to withdraw… into study and to devote himself to the preservation and transmission of a heritage independent of the passing moment…. In this respect, teaching and research are not to be confused with training for a profession. Their greatness and their misfortune is that they are a refuge or a mission.”

Claude Levi-Strauss, _Tristes Tropiques_, chapter 6: “The Making of an Anthropologist.”

Heehee! This sort of rude diagnosis is what gives functionalism a bad name. But I’m sure this doesn’t describe Rex at all… and definitely not me.

Seriously, the proximate cause of the “derridean deferral” is to be found here. Doing the fieldwork is just a different modality of deferral since it all ends up back in the cloisters.

Thanks for this, John!

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I am myself an idiot child of the petty bourgeoisie, and as a tenured academic my position is exactly middle management. I love my students, who frustrate me in many ways but keep me coming back for more. Even though they’re mostly jocks and business majors and cannot realistically be shaken out of the functional narrowness of those worldviews, they are cautiously open to conversation with other local knowledges. Until the revolution, that’s a perfectly acceptable thing to do with our lives, I’d say.

I’m delighted by what you say about the edginess of formal disciplines (I was more playing with the idea of discipline, in Foucault’s larger sense) and the practical differences of training that produce different dispositions and questions. The tendency to involute is inherent in ritualized group membership, of course. But the disciplines are not mutually exclusive and conversations help us all keep our brains lively, which is why I’m here.

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Then, I am struck, too, by the mention of disciplinary boundaries. If I depended on an academic position for my livelihood, I might get more excited about that. As it is I am free to imagine that it might be a better idea to regard disciplines as nodes connected by edges that represent various kinds of training. Thus, for example, it isn’t what a classic four-field anthropologist studies, as much as it is the fact that his training includes biology, linguistics and archeology as well as social and cultural theory, so his intellectual toolkit is stocked a little differently from that of the sociologist who read the same theory but different, more urban and Euro-American centric case studies, and was made to take statistics and survey research design. They might both wind up doing ethnographic research. Both would observe and listen to what people said; but the intellectual baggage they brought to the field might be very different. And something that those of us in Asian Studies cannot avoid, both may run into historians with far better linguistic skills and a deeper knowledge of textual traditions than the usual practitioner of any of the social science “-ologies” normally brings to bear.

There’s a wonderful bit in this regard in the historian’s introduction to a book titled _Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China_, co-edited by anthropologist James L. Watson and historian Evelyn S. Rawski (1988). Rawski writes,

bq. Anthropologists have made it their business to look closely at death ritual performance “on the ground”; they rarely do diachronic analysis. The cultural “givens” of the anthropologist are all variables in the perspective of historians who want to trace the evolution of death ritual over long periods of time and analyze how and why ritual may have changed…

bq. One of th most revealing events of the conference came at the nightly presentation of slides of funerary and grave ritual taken by anthropologists at their field sites. It was startling for a historian to discover that the six anthropologists present, who had been acquainted with one another for many years, had not previously seen each other’s slides. Since the anthropologist’s “text” (the village studied) is for all intents and purposes inaccessible to other researchers, whose occasional visits cannot provide them with real access to the site, this discovery underlined the latent problem of verification. Without a counterpart to the historian’s primary sources, which can be read and checked by others, how are the anthropologists to defend themselves against charges that their analysis is a personal and arbitrary creation?

The answer at one level is, of course, that multiple studies of Chinese villages have revealed numerous similarities in social organization and ritual behavior, and the published studies have, in effect, become primary sources available to other scholars. This, in turn, has made possible at least tentative steps toward systematic comparison, e.g., a piece I wrote a long, long time ago and published in _Ethnology_ on “Bridewealth and Dowry in Chinese Marriage” (which, to my chagrin, Google Scholar informs me is still my most often cited work). It has also (the really good news) stimulated a substantial body of work by social historians pursuing questions anthropologists’ raised back into the Tang and Song.

The people digging deeply into the texts and the people spending their time watching and talking with people in the ethnographic present have, indeed, by talking to each other, made progress toward that goal Geertz suggests, trying to figure out what parochial understandings can bring to general ones.

Geertz, in his way, is exemplary of the way in which I see our discipline. To read his essays is to read someone conversant with what is going on in other areas and constantly striving to see what his bits of local knowledge can add to those conversations. Thus, for example, philosopher Ryle’s twitches and winks are a useful illustration of the direction in which thick description might proceed, adding layer on layer of interpretation. The story of how the old Jew recovered his stolen sheep vividly drives home the lesson. Vic Turner had a similar knack. He wasn’t exclusively obsessed with what the Ndembu themselves could tell us about their lives. It was when he juxtaposed those lives with Dante, Norse Saga, medieval and Mexican pilgrimages that his ideas came alive and excited the interest of people in literature, theater and the arts.

To me the saddest thought of all is not that careerism may stimulate the production of academic junk but, rather, that anthropology might undergo what, adapting a phrase from Geertz, I’d label “academic involution,” becoming irrelevant to anyone without our peculiar esoteric interests.

But, then again, as Carl points out, a lot of this anxiety is perennial. His “wave a bit of education under the noses of the idiot children of the bourgeoisie” is nasty. Not quite as nasty though as the description I heard uttered by one of my non-anthropological colleagues once a long time ago—”casting false pearls before real swine.”

Personally, I’d rather look for some real pearls and share them with those like-minded souls who do pop up now and again in even the dullest class.

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Neither of these groups is subject to discipline (I am not exempting myself from this analysis), the first because indiscipline is essential for good consumers and the second because any kind of discipline smacks of recolonization.

Top that off with the expansion of the professoriate in mass-education regimes and its attendant growth of dedicated and complicit publication venues and mechanisms and you’re gonna get a whole lot of half-assed undisciplined crap sprayed out into the environment. The good versions of which can be really neat, of course.

The academic market is both less rigorous and less competitive than ever before, but looks more of both to people who have been told that they’re entitled to succeed in it. Yes, spin is easier than scholarship, and its products are increasingly judged by people who got their positions the same way and are ideologically committed to that project. The blind reading the blind.

I’m not saying any of this is bad. It’s probably the case that exactly as much or maybe more good scholarship is being done this way as ever before. There just has to be a way for careers to be made for the other 90% of the academic professionals whose real function is to wave a bit of education under the noses of the idiot children of the bourgeoisie as they credential themselves for middle management.

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In any case, apologies for what looks like a rambling post.

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I ask because it has seemed to me that the current rigors of competition in the academic marketplace must push people in this direction. I.e., you have done your research, written your dissertation, turned it into a book, all this while you have classes to teach, committee work, maybe a family or lover. Tenure or promotion review looms. The people who make the call are looking for papers in refereed journals. A clever bit of theorizing, with the right buzzwords and bows and obeisances (a.k.a., citations); you can knock that out pretty quickly. Additional research? Then having to make sense of it? That will take a lot of time, and with the crunch looming, time is what you don’t have. Spin is easier than scholarship; seems like a no-brainer to me. Or am I being too cynical?

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Sometimes I feel like the discipline as a whole is in this weird Derridian deferral of ever actually trying to find anything out and prefers instead simply to speculate on what would happen if we ever did.

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Add the fact that until after WWII, anthropology was a very small field, a few hundred people at most, with huge ambitions, to cover the entire natural history of humanity, the biology, the linguistics, the archeology, societies and cultures. Start dicing the field by interest and geographical area, and it is not too surprising that anthropological “schools” consisted mainly of a handful of buds with a bit of shared field experience, a teacher or two in common, that sort of thing. Even after the postwar expansion, we are talking about a field with only a few thousand active participants (very small in relation to say, clinical psychology), those same huge ambitions, new interests in places like peasant villages, urban neighborhoods, factories and corporate offices, and access via area studies programs to large parts of the world that had previously been pretty much neglected.

But whatever, we have never been a field where people got much credit for solid replication or refinement of existing paradigms.

The result is, of course, a lot of interesting ironies. Thus, for example, people interested in ‘scapes or the international flows of pop culture icons might learn a lot from prefunctionalist anthropologists, the historicist variety, who were trying to map the distribution of culture traits and constantly arguing issues like imitation versus independent invention (problems that are very hot again, these days, in fields like intellectual property law).

They weren’t stupid. They had a research program. It just ceased to be fashionable for a while. Maybe enough time has passed that someone to re-discover them and build new academic brand for themselves by relabeling their ideas.

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1. I agree with Rex et al that the lack of performed research on the idea of scapes is somewhat surprising given our current anthropological/ethnographic climate (or at least that of the nineties), and that the practice, that in my view seems to be somewhat trendy at the moment, of forwarding many new and interesting theories with very little followup is fascinating but rather unsatisfying. (Disclaimer: at least this practice seemed trendy when I was in school and not out on my own wandering the intellectual byways of the internet for anthropological reading/discussion.) However, I feel that in any academic community there must be room for the free expression of new ideas; I just hope that anthropology and anthropologists can find a way to “center” so to speak while pushing the bounds of imaginative and interdisciplinary research, so that theories don’t become merely proposed, they are also explored in field research, interlinked with other ideas, and can ultimately join into a larger framework of understanding.

2. In direct correlation with the above: I think that one of the most charming and useful aspects of anthropology (and the reason it is often viewed as a somewhat strange animal in academics) is that it allows for, and I would say even demands, the utilization of many different theoretical “formulas” to look at an issue. For instance, the idea of scapes in very interesting, but is only one way of dividing up the great systemic pie in order to pull out a piece and examine it. We can also look at it through the economic flow of goods (as Rex was mentioning with his plastics and metals line above) or through cultural psychology or through the movement of peoples, or, or, or… What I would hope for eventually would be the ability to bring many of these different theoretical aspects together in order to consider a social/cultural/global issue.

3. And in pure response to Appadurai and his ideas, I have my own issue with him. Although he is, as many have already noted, extremely intellectually bewitching, some of his claims seem slightly thoughtless, yet proposed as exciting new ideas nevertheless. In the referenced book, Disjuncture and Difference, for instance, he makes the claim “…the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, a form of work (in the sense of both labor and culturally organized practice), and a form of negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of possibility. This unleasing of the imagination links the play of pastiche (in some settings) to the terror and coercion of states and their competitors. The imagination is now central to all forms of agency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global order” However, I propose the question: at what time was the imagination not a player in the creation of society and the understanding of self within it? The systems of socio-cultural practices, taboos, hierarchy seem to me to be created,furthered, interacted with primarily in Appadurai’s “imagination” – or the mind. Although I do think it is important to see how societies and cultures are linking across space, I question that the framework of what we use to understand culture, society, and ourselves within it has changed (or it would hardly allow for this change to a purely “imagined” scape in so short a timespan in the greater history of our species). I also think that the tone of purely intellectual connectivity that Appadurai seems to submit to the reader is somewhat misleading, for as prior respondents have noted, though cultures may be linking attenuatedly across geographic space, there is hardly a lack of physical trade or tangible repurcussions from these social interactions.

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I don’t have a problem with any of this stuff until the claims get imperial and anti-imperial. Different things are accomplished by views and analyses at different scales, as the posts on Jared Diamond and Gary Alan Fine also show.

I’ve pondered this recently in terms of the familiar question of discipline and interdisciplinarity on my own blog. It’s hard to pull back and see big pictures from within the penetrating focus of research paradigms. It’s also hard to say anything of substance without the sort of reliable information that careful systematic spadework produces. Both are needed.

Different dispositions and talents are also involved, which is why good careful researchers often sound so lame and embarrassing when they tack big claims onto their fine-grained studies, and why synthesizers like Diamond are often so infuriatingly careless with details.

I do think that within the regime of entitled individualism produced by consumer and post-colonial societies it’s difficult to get people disciplined. Without a disposition to rigor, wifty generalization is an appealing fallback and it’s inevitable that the market for flashy conceptual novelties (‘scapes, e.g.) would heat up. Since this is a fad rather than a paradigm dynamic it’s not surprising that nobody took Appadurai up on developing his hypothesis; nor that he himself declined to do so, pushing onward to produce the next jargon commodity instead.

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Or in living rooms in Tokyo. Serendipitously, my wife and I were invited to a dinner party last Saturday, where we and other supporters of a group now called Asian Initiatives heard reports on how our contributions to the M.S. Swaminathan Foundation are being spent and were told, in particular, about a new cause, Urban Typhoon (http://www.urbantyphoon.com/), operating in Dahravi, the biggest slum in Mumbai, some say the biggest in the world.

Another serendipity, our company has been translating materials for Yokohama’s “Creative City” initiative, including several reports/articles concerning attempts to revitalize sections of the city previously renowned primarily for flophouses and low-end brothels.

The intersection that struck me was the rejection in all these efforts of top-down raze-and-rebuild urban redevelopment coupled with insistence on close involvement of local people in creating and implementing development plans.

Bannerjee’s point may already be somewhat dated.

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bq. discover what contributions parochial understandings can make to comprehensive ones, what leads to general, broad-stroke interpretations particular, intimate findings can product. (1968:vii)

Geertz was alluding here to the fact that if anthropology has any broader usefulness than documenting the details that ethnographers discover during fieldwork, it lies in their contributions to conversations that involve people from other disciplines: sociologists, historians, economists, political scientists, policy wonks, people who study literature and the arts, wherever relevance can be found.

This is a theme I found amplified by Marcus and Fischer when they wrote that,

bq. We step into a stream of already existing representations produced by journalists, prior anthropologists, historians, creative writers, and of course the subjects of study themselves.

As a practical matter, I have taken advantage of an odd career path that involved working for thirteen years for a large Japanese advertising agency to write a book for which my informants were themselves researchers employed by an institute set up by the agency to provide a 360° view of Japanese consumer behavior. That book, _Japanese Consumer Behavior: From Worker Bees to Wary Shoppers_, U.of Hawaii (2000), is based on an internal newsletter in which the researchers published their findings, interviews with those who did the research, and background information taken from a wide variety of sources. The opening chapter on Japan’s political economy since WWII is based largely on the work of Japanese economists to whom I was referred by a student, Ken Okamura, who was then employed as an analyst by Dresdner Kleinwort Benson.

My current project will, if all goes well, combine social network analysis of credits published in the Tokyo Copywriters Club Annual, a data set that, should I ever get around to having it all input, stretches back to 1963, extensive reading of works by and about the top creatives who occupy central positions in the networks the social network analysis reveals, together with background information on the advertising industry during the years in question, and, then, ethnographic interviews with at least some of these key people.

Are these projects anthropology? I’d say so. I am still a student of Victor Turner, doing my best to combine personal observations, native exegesis, and a mass of other data and ideas brought to the field from other sources. I am trying to assemble a diverse welter of information into a rich, coherent picture that makes sense of a world that has been a major part of my life, both as participant and observer.

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