For me Schlitz and Shiites are both very cool topics (the former I drink and the latter I actually study). I definitely embrace the savage and don’t apologize for it as I grew up around my subject matter of research. So far I haven’t been on the radio or news so I don’t think the public cares unless I started writing for National Geographic…hmmm…. not a bad idea actually.
:)

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Yeah, I haven’t even thought about it since I wrote it, or written my old professor to get the reference. I’m in the middle of transcriptions, and a report. The only reason I post here, is because it is a distraction during breaks between work.
I apologize for doing what I said I was going to do. If I don’t reply back (I forget), you can remind me over on Open Anthro. Cooperative. Full name Rick Holden.

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Your comment that “The only journal that has tried to combine the works of historians and anths. failed. Cronnon write about it, and why it failed” still needs fleshing out. Since there are several journals that combine the work of historians and anthropologists, all of which are thriving as far as I am aware, I remain curious about your claim.

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I didn’t feel right about that name, so I looked it up in my Endnote.

Cronon, William
1992 A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative. The Journal of American History 78(4):1347-1376.

This is a largely reflexive commentary of history from a rather anthropological perspective. It is in another paper of his that he describes being an editor of a journal that tried to incorporate social science and history, and the many conflicts that came about as each side accused the other of poor scholarship, because of the differences in the way each produce knowledge. We do things through a body of theory, which is not found in the humanities. I think it was Cronon that wrote the article. He’s a historian of anthropology among other things. It was about 5 years ago that I read it, so I’m fuzzy on the details.

“It’s not the point of the thread, but one does wonder what Rick could mean?”

Do you talk about people in 3rd person when they are in the room?
I’d have to say that these disciplines are getting along much better now, and that this is a story of the past with recorded the first attempt. I guess it survived, or was brought back, or it was a different journal. I don’t know. It wasn’t something that I cared much about at the time.

Sharing profs. across depts. has become very normal at my last University as well. Great way to save money, I guess.

“global knowledge that once defined the field, we have shattered into fragments such that people can earn degrees from programs whose overlap with other programs, in terms of readings, methods, geographical areas, etc., etc., etc. have little in common”

I agree. Culture became a buzzword among org. studies and business people in the 1980′s, and they largely used an idealizational form of the culture concept. Right now ecologists are all about developing “social capital” for sustainable development, but there is no idea of how to do this among them. Everywhere I go there is a very strong felt need for what we can do, and very little idea that someone should call us to actually do it.

That’s why I think its funny that there is this meta-narrative in the discipline that anyone actually cares or knows about what we can do. So many people of us are so concerned with protecting an image of anthropology that no one else even knows about or cares about. People don’t care about anything other than what you can do, and if you can do it for them.

I think that profs. should tell grad. students that don’t know what to study, to simply walk into any office (of any NGO, business, gov’t), and ask them what they are doing and what they need. Tell them what the student can do for them, and watch their eyes light up. They won’t have to invent something to study, there are plenty of people that have questions that need answering.
Recently I was told by my client that all the consultant in the past have come in and recommended things, sometimes without even visiting the various places in question. The simple fact that I spent all my time actually hanging out and talking with stakeholders was revolutionary to them. Some of the stakeholders actually cried, because it was the first time that someone actually asked them what they thought and actually listened to them. I think we forget what a revolutionary act that is.

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Are you referring to “History and Anthropology”? “Comparative Studies in Society and History”? As far as I know, these are thriving. The mashup of history and anthropology has been extremely successful, in more ways than I can touch upon even briefly. The last two hires in our history department were (1) a PhD from Michigan’s anthropology and history program, and (2) a historian of indigenous Brazil who consumes more anthropology than the Tupinamba consumed captives. And all of our recent hires in anthropology pay significant attention to history in their work.

It’s not the point of the thread, but one does wonder what Rick could mean?

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That said, I do believe that your opening remark reveals a serious issue for anthropology. Having abandoned the grand narratives and expectations of global knowledge that once defined the field, we have shattered into fragments such that people can earn degrees from programs whose overlap with other programs, in terms of readings, methods, geographical areas, etc., etc., etc. have little in common — that, nonetheless, present themselves as exemplars of anthropology writ large.

Thus, to you, the failure of a journal described by someone named Cronnon, whom I had never heard of before you mentioned the name, is evidence to you that anthropologists and historians don’t get on very well. Meanwhile, as an East Asianist, I can point to a substantial and, as I said, growing literature to which both anthropologists and historians have contributed, with each citing and responding to each other. Had we not met here, we could easily have gone our separate ways.

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Speaking about our savagery. In one dept., I was in about 5 of us were former military guys and gals. All of us were in the army or navy, and went back to school. We were all drawn to it, because we had spent a large part of our lives traveling all over the world, and doing and seeing things that most people can’t imagine. Then we had to come back and we were so scared of getting stuck behind a desk and loosing our sense of adventure.

I’m predicting that now that more and more veterans are going back to school on the GI bill, that many will be drawn to anth., and the discipline may become more colorful.

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Quote: “I see culture, and thus religion within culture, as a repertoire — not a smoothly coherent system but a lumpy and varied accumulation of models, systems, rules, and other symbolic resources, differing and unevenly distributed, upon which people draw and through which they negotiate life with one another in ways intelligibly related to their own experiences, places in society, and purposes. It is by drawing on and choosing among the cultural resources available to them that human beings show themselves as cultural actors, as constant makers and remakers of culture, not simply as middlemen through whom culture somehow does its inexorable work.”

Source: Hymes, Robert (2002) Way and Byway: Taoism, Local Religion, and Models of Divinity in Sung and Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, p.5

Comment: Hymes is an historian, one of a small but growing group of historians of premodern China who are familiar with the work of anthropologists on Chinese religion and interact productively with it.

This sort of interaction is fairly common in East Asia, where the interests of anthropologists, historians, literary and art historical types often overlap.

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I also don’t see in principle why it is a bad idea for anthropologists to study something that the public may find interesting (note: I don’t know how many anthropologists actually think like this, anyways) or meaningful. Personally, though, I’ve always been suspicious of the appeal to the “general public”: most of the anthropologists who seem to think in such terms are the most disconnected from whatever they mean when they speak about this group of people.

Digression: Outside of the discipline, I don’t know anyone who reads anthropology and the only time that someone talks to me about an anthropologist, it is always some geezer talking about Margaret Mead. Part of the reason that they liked the good old days of anthropology is because those authors wrote about stuff people were unfamiliar with in relatively clear terms. The current proliferation of ethnographies which have embraced the (‘exoticize the everyday’) are occasionally good, but by and large even I would rather read something that I find more topically interesting, unless the book is truly exceptional.

I’ve seen Bourdain’s show a few times. I think it is okay as far as most TV goes, and it does a fairly good job attempting to ‘exoticize the everyday.’ For example, although he often hangs with several famous chefs wherever he goes, he also visits hole in the wall places and eats very average, local meals (which if you’ve ever been to some of these places, you know are not very good). I think that he is able to find the ‘good’ in the unglamorous; perhaps even the subtlety.

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I think all that matters is how relevant the work is to both knowledge and policy change. Mintz has done amazing and powerful work on the political economy of surgar, chocolate, and McDonalds. One of my food anthro. professors, James McDonald, did a paper on the effects of the narco-economy in Mexico on small-holder farmers. All of that is highly relevant work.

What needs to be avoided, I think, and what is far more common is grad. students who study something for convenience, just because they can get a paper out of it. I think there should be more ethnographies on organ trafficking, etc… That’s important work that if relevant and needs to be done. So what if it makes the news? That’s good for all of us.

I have a buddy right now doing a project for the YMCA of Houston on the subject of prostitutes that were smuggled into the US as under aged sex-slaves, but who are now too old for any of the benefits or help available to minors. I apologize, but I feel like that is necessary work.

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