Dead Wrong Scholars or Future Collaborators?
We’ve all been there. You’ve read a book or article closely aligned to your own research. In your opinion your peer has made one or two mistakes, one factual, malum in se, or dead wrong, and another, malum prohibitum, or theoretically suspect. What to do?
You’ve got several options, 1) write a book review, tearing apart the author for poor research, 2) kindly fold in a gentle critique into your future writing, or 3) contact the author with the goal of establishing a collaboration. Scholars deal with appearances of theoretical mistakes, oversights and overstatements, or malum prohibitum, all the time. It is our engagement with what we perceive as disciplinarily not accurate in generative and creative ways that builds theory and nudges the future of the discipline. This is theory building and this is what we do.
But what is our professional responsibility to malum in se, claims that are factually wrong? I am talking about the very quotidian error when a writer notes the wrong dates for events and misnames a person. I am also talking about the questionable representation of reality in those necessarily interpretive instances, like when a practice first began, or by whom, or what was the dominant influence behind the emergence of that practice. For example, synchronic work from a diachronic perspective is always somewhat limited. Such historiographical debates are generative. My point is that errors run a spectrum from the incontrovertible to malum prohibitum—from my perspective it is not as right as it could be. Again, these debates are what we do.
As anthropologists, we are going to always be able to critique most other even softer sciences for their methodological inadequacies. As I come in contact with more work in cultural, textual, media, and other hermeneutical studies I entrench more into empiricism and pragmatism. The anthropology of emergence, I think, is at its best when it is focused first on description. These other disciplines often skip that part and jump right into theory; making factual errors in the process. For those of us doing the rigorous movement through our data and the lives of our subjects identifying malum in se in this work is easy. But what to do?
I agree with one of my mentors, Tom Boellstorff, who is adamant that budding anthropologists studying related areas be collegial. He chides us to not get into the seductive trap of trying to make a career out of denouncing our colleagues. I’ve taken a look at the anthropologists researching one of my major foci, the internet, and I can count them with one hand. With and not against these colleagues I will attempt to first accurately describe and secondly carefully theorize this emergent culture. Thus I am going with option 3 and contacting the dead wrong scholar and future collaborator.
Adam Fish researches the intersections of culture, power, and technology. He focuses on how media corporations and political movements imagine themselves and the social and political relevancies of the internet and television. Adam investigates America-based cable television networks attempting to balance neoliberalism, federal policy, and social media in their pursuit of profit, social justice, and improvements of the public sphere. This focus on applied anthropology was developed in over ten years as an indigenous and federal archaeologist. Fish also works for public anthropology through television and film production. You can see his television documentaries at mediacultures.org and follow him on Twitter @mediacultures.
I’m glad you broached this very delicate topic.
I am in a slightly different situation. I am a grad student in anthropology researching a politically sensitive topic — “Islamist” political violence — and constantly come across factual errors (including of the harmful variety) in the work of people writing in _other_ disciplines or lines of work: journalists, think tankers, and some scholars. Some of these people simply have political agendas that render them impervious to any correctives, but a few may be well-meaning and open to some kind of engagement.
In one such case, I contacted the person directly about a source that he had misrepresented; he responded with a (perhaps feigned?) expression of confusion over the error and promised to send along another source substantiating his claim. Sure enough, he never followed up.
I’d appreciate any thoughts from you or other Savage Mind readers.
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Nice one, Adam. I, too, have encountered published texts about indigenous peoples and their communities that if showed to the locals or natives who are the subjects of the said studies, the authors’ irresponsible exaggerations and baseless interpretations that are far from the truth will become evident. I suspect such anomalies in ethnographic research happen due to the goals and expectations of some anthropologists to come up with studies that are strange, different, complex, and difficult. Who would want to spend a lot of time and resources to go to a jungle to study how power or labor, for example, is conceptualized and practiced by a nomadic group just to find out that it is no different to that of homeless itinerants in San Francisco?
Why do the mala you listed happen in anthropological research? Is it due to lack of check and balance in the discipline? Is their a problem in academic transparency and sharing data? Who can verify the veracity of an ethonographic research if its author is the only one who does such study?
I see three collaborative solutions:
1) Comparative sociocultural case studies should be the research norm in anthropology.
2) Scholars in the West should make the translation of local studies done by non-Western scholars a project.
3) Local professors who are experts of the areas foreign anthropologists study should be employed by universities and publishers as research readers or consultants.
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And now a semi-comical question to ponder: Why would we want dead wrong scholars to be our future collaborators? ;o)
To seriousness now, we can only agree to the corporate “team-spirit” slogan here. Yes, it’s irrefutably senseless to attack others as a person for the ideas they hold. So many forget that politics must be completely kept out of genuine academic debate. Of course one should not make a one-sided career out of denouncing others but should balance any necessary critiques with one’s own unique contribution to the debate so that one may be in turn critiqued.
Yet if one argues that one should fear confronting others’ errors head on for fear that our place in the delicate social order might be upset and that collaboration will be denied us, isn’t this just an empty appeal to popularity? What sort of scholar do we want to be really? The extreme socially-loved kind with nothing substantial to convey? Doesn’t the “right choice” fundamentally involve scholastic principles above the idle sentiments of people around us? Or is this nihilistic societal obsession with “likability” now irreversible? I wonder what dear Galileo would have to say about all that.
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*there
If one wants to get a tenure or work in the academe, exposing or attacking a senior scholar’s blunders and mistakes is not a good idea. Ass-kissing is still the norm in academic departments. Maybe giving undergraduate students and foreign scholars publication opportunities in academic journals will help, since they are not part of the local professional hierarchy.
Nobody questioned Erdos’ absurdities because of self-interest. He could easily dismiss a mathematician’s work as not elegant by saying “it’s not in the book,” and nobody really knew or questioned what the book was. It was all in the mind of Erdos. How could a mathematician question him since he wanted to publish with Erdos or his protegees and colleagues and have an Erdos number? Ass-kissing explained!
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I think a big question is whether it is “collegial” to vehemently disagree with our colleagues? The Tom Boellstorff quote seems to suggest that the social norm is to practice academic patricide/matricide in order to promote our own career. I think this is very far from the truth. I would go so far as to suggest that there is a disciplinary norm in anthropology to “be nice” and not raise awareness of our colleague’s shortcomings. I feel that the myth of the scholar stepping over the corpses of his/her colleagues is precisely intended to perpetuate this “collegial” atmosphere. But I would suggest that it is possible to be collegial without necessarily giving our colleagues a pass when it comes to close scrutiny of their work. All too often I hear senior colleagues criticize each other behind their backs, but rarely putting their snide comments in print. Perhaps open debate would be more collegial? It is striking how the few big debates in anthropology have been sensational enough to make headlines – perhaps it needs to be a far more common occurrence?
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Perhaps one answer is to turn the question around and ask what the best policy is when someone reveals that *you* have been wrong. I think collegiality is a fine thing; I think a lot of it should come from the humility of “senior” scholars seeing the exposure of their faults as an opportunity for growth — and perhaps future collaboration. As opposed to questioning wether the gadfly is being nice enough or not.
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