But isn’t focussing on the nature of the content something of a red herring? Since whilst the AAA has now allowed everyone access to the research paid for by our grandparents, the public and the universities still must pay twice for today’s research.For those of us currently producing research this new measure is ‘useless’ because it offers us none of the routine OA benefits such as increased impact for our own work…

typo alert – that does at the top should be a doesn’t?

I’ll also weigh in as a law student and occasional fiction writer, I’m very glad they’ve done this because old anthropological works are interesting and useful for so many things. In fact, I’d guess that it is professional anthropologists that are most concerned with cutting edge work, not students and outsiders.

P.S. This blog is fantastic.

We have, of course, unlearned a lot in the last half century. Both the mosaic view of cultures as discrete entities and the grand narrative of scientific progress that underlay my training have been discredited. The question I ponder, however, is what should replace them.

Thus, when Ruth and I were asked to write a chapter about Japan for Ray Scupin’s _Peoples and Cultures of Asia_, I chose deliberately to limit discussion of theory to three authors: Ruth Benedict, Chie Nakane, and Dorinne Kondo. The first two were chosen because, for better or worse, the ideas expounded in _The Chrysanthemum and the Sword_ and _Japanese Society_ (whose original Japanese title is _Tate Shakai_ “The Vertical Society”) still resurface constantly in both popular and academic discussions of Japan. Kondo was chosen in part because I like her work immensely but also to represent an alternative to the grand, essentializing theorizing found in Benedict and Nakane.

The point to which I direct your attention, however, is the amount of space in the chapter devoted to the historical framing of these works. The discussion begins by reminding students that every example of anthropological theory is composed of ideas created by specific people, writing in and responding to specific historical situations. Benedict is writing at a distance, in the context of World War II, about “The most alien enemy” the United States had ever faced. Nakane is a Japanese woman writing in the late 1960s, as Japan begins the remarkably rapid development that made it the world’s second largest economy. She is trained in social anthropology in Britain, does fieldwork in India, then returns to Japan to turn her native anthropologist’s eye on her own society. Kondo is Japanese-American, returning to Japan in the 1980s in search of her Japanese roots. A pivotal moment in the book is when she sees her reflection in the glass covering a neighborhood butcher’s meat case and realizes, to her horror, that she looks just like the young Japanese housewives shopping around her. Roots as difference, that’s OK. Roots as this is who I am, this is what I’m stuck with–that’s an entirely different matter.

Whether this effort succeeds with undergraduates, I don’t know. I’ve never taught the book; I just co-authored a chapter. But it seems to me that one way to address Chris’s concern is to start right away in Anthro 101 with a small set of questions about who the anthropologists they study were as people, what was going on in the world at the time their studies were done, what ideas were popular and how they responded to them.

Celebrating/recognizing the quality and value of the pre-70s material is separate from discussing the downsides of what is about to happen, relative to such things as delivery platforms, progress toward actual OA, JSTOR revenue impacts, AAA governance, etc.