[Russell Berman] and five other professors at the university have produced a paper that calls for a major rethinking at Stanford — a reduction in the time taken to graduate by Ph.D. candidates in the humanities, and preparing them for careers within and beyond the academy. The professors at Stanford aren’t just talking about shaving a year or so off doctoral education, but cutting it down to four or five years — roughly half the current time for many humanities students.

This includes getting an MA (they suggest a two year review to decide “which students will advance to candidacy, and which will receive a terminal M.A.”). Now I can’t remember where I read it, but I believe that the average time to Ph.D. in anthropology is roughly what they say it is in the humanities: about nine years. How feasible is it that this time could be cut in half?

Part of their plan involves making better use of the summers: “Unfunded summers impede progress.” I can see how this might have speeded things up for me, maybe shaving off a year or even two, since not only would I not have had to work summers, but funding would have made it possible to start my fieldwork sooner. Lets say students receive full funding and aren’t required to teach (as I was) and I think one could go from an average of 9 years to 7. Of course, the reality is that funding is getting cut these days so I remain skeptical that we’ll see many universities increasing funding even if it means getting students out sooner.

Can we get it below 7? At my four-field program I took three years of courses. The only way I can see that being cut down is if they eliminated the four-field approach. That would be unfortunate. While I resented it at the time, I’ve really come to appreciate my four-field training in subsequent years. Actually five fields because we also had a visual anthropology program with its own requirements. But even if we are talking about a straight cultural anthropology program anthropologists still need pretty broad training. Usually we need additional courses on the language, culture and history of the region we intend to study – often outside of our own department. Language study alone can take at least an extra year (or two). On top of that we might need to brush up on an area of study related to our research topic, such as immunology, second language education, environmental science, etc.

And then there is fieldwork. I’ve seen some recent Ph.D. thesis from universities which have instituted drastically reduced time-to-Ph.D. constraints and you could really see it in the mismatch between the theory and the ethnography. It might be possible to do fieldwork in a few months if you’ve already spent a year or two somewhere during grad school, but I don’t think it works for graduate research. And if you don’t get a chance to really “be there” as a graduate student when will you have that opportunity? As a professor trying to get tenure?

Three years of course work, a year of language study, a year in the field, plus at least a year or two for exam prep, proposal writing, etc. not to mention the dissertation… I just don’t see how anyone could do it in less then seven years unless they were doing the research in their own backyard, already spoke the language, and had already gotten more than enough specialized training in the culture and topics they are studying before starting an Anthropology degree. And remember, seven years is predicated upon 12 months of full funding for each of those seven years. Have to work summers and part-time to make ends meet and we get back up to the current average…

Who is the audience for academic knowledge? When does that audience include not just fellow academics, but also the public? These questions are harder to answer than they should be. Our courses require enrollment and tuition. Our writings require effort to find and afford and read. Our conferences tend to be closed to outsiders and sometimes even to other scholars. As a profession, we simply do not have spaces where we regularly talk with an interested public about our research.

This is a story about academics silencing a public audience. It is about Ivory Tower condescension and how I once defended Adam Yauch’s right to ask a question. Here is what happened:

In April 2002, I participated in a conference on Tibet and the Cold War at Harvard University featuring distinguished scholars of China, India, and Tibet. The conference was a perfect fit with my research on Tibet and the CIA and was fantastic in many ways, until it wasn’t. 

Around 100 Tibetans attended the two-day conference. These were regular community members of all ages, college students and older people, whole families even, and they outnumbered the “academic” audience. For me, it was an unexpected but welcome opportunity to present my research to an audience composed of both academics and the general public. Yet there was discomfort from a handful of other participants about having a non-academic audience. Why was this? Did they think a section of the audience was going to start yelling “Free Tibet” and rush the stage?

Cold War Tibet is a political topic, and sparks flared up periodically between panelists. For their part, the audience—Tibetans and non-Tibetans, academics and the general public—respectfully engaged the presenters, asking questions and offering comments. Then on Day Two controversy arose when a member of the audience asked a question of the panelists. The audience member was Adam Yauch and his question was relatively simple. Why, he wanted to know, did the Chinese care so much about Tibet. “I know why Tibet is an emotional issue for Tibetans,” he said, “but why is Tibet such an emotional issue for the Chinese?”

Who is Adam Yauch? I’m not sure if many of the conference participants knew who he was. In the context of the conference, it didn’t really matter. But it mattered to me. While to my Tibetan friends, Adam Yauch was often simply “Adam,” to me he was MCA of the Beastie Boys.

I was in high school when the Beastie Boys’ debut album Licensed to Ill came out in 1986. In the twenty-five years since, the Beastie Boys have been a consistently incongruous and fun part of our musical and cultural landscape. In the 1990s, Adam Yauch became a practicing Tibetan Buddhist. He co-founded the Milarepa Foundation to support Tibetan artists, and also started the hugely successful Tibetan Freedom Concerts that ran globally from 1996-2003, raising money for and generating awareness about Tibet among young people and musicians. His sincere participation in the Tibetan community extended to his attendance at the Harvard conference. He was there anonymously, not in any sort of “Sabotage”-style disguise, but just incognito as himself at an academic conference. He was quiet until close to the end when he posed his question.

Before anyone on the panel could reply, one of the conference organizers—a Harvard professor—stood up and said forcefully that this was an “academic conference” and that “emotional” questions would not be entertained. He made it clear we were here to discuss real politics in an academic, dispassionate manner. That is: in discussing politics we were to be apolitical.

This was wrong on so many levels.

1. It was the bluntest academic putdown of the public I have ever personally witnessed, an appalling example of academic snobbery.

2. It was also flat-out incorrect; Adam Yauch’s question was entirely academic. It was a question about nationalism, the über-topic of the 1990s, including for cultural, historical, and political scholarship on both Tibet and China.

3. It was an abdication of the political, of the responsibility to speak to difficult issues. And, it was a renunciation of our responsibility as scholars to dialogue with an engaged public.

Immediately after the organizer’s dismissal of the question, I and several other panelists spoke up: the question from the audience was legitimate, this was something scholars absolutely do study, and about which we had things to say. Despite our comments, something had shifted. The audience had been disciplined and spoken down to; the message was ‘you can listen, but we might not let you speak if we don’t like what you have to say.’

At the next break, I went over to Adam Yauch and introduced myself, apologizing for what had just happened and saying that his question was indeed academic, an important and legitimate query, and a question that scholars also ask. He was incredibly gracious, saying he hadn’t meant to cause any friction. We chatted for a short while, talking about China, Tibet, and the value and politics of audience participation in academic conferences. It was a serious and thoughtful conversation with someone who in that moment was simply a member of the public audience, not a famous musician.

This incident has bothered me for a long time. Dismissing individuals who turn to us as experts for answers to their questions is not right. We have multiple spaces where academics can and do speak privately amongst ourselves, and these are important spaces. But we need also to speak publicly. We need to create and embrace occasions to speak directly with communities interested in our research. We need to do this even if it feels uncomfortable; we need to do it especially if it feels uncomfortable.

Ten years have passed since the Harvard conference. I had not planned on writing about what happened there; it was an ugly side of academia and involved a celebrity; the whole thing had felt surreal. Then word came on Friday that Adam Yauch died of cancer after three years fighting the disease. I thought of his music and his commitments, and about his question about people’s attachments to things, about China’s attachment to Tibet, and about our responsibilities as scholars, and I decided it was time to write. This post is a tribute to someone who was our perfect public audience member. Interested in the topic, he came to the conference. Curious to learn more, he asked a question. Committed to the issue, he pressed on after the conference, for as long as he could.

RIP Adam Yauch (August 5, 1964-May 4, 2012).

Carole McGranahan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Colorado and author of Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War (Duke University Press, 2010). She wrote this post while listening to Paul’s Boutique and Ill Communication.

Doing a ‘literature’ review, then, basically means creating a series of dossiers of the scholars with whom you will be interacting. The more creepily complete, the better.

A lot of times you will know who to Google first because you have at least some clue of who is who in your field. Those of you attending schools with high levels of cultural capital have probably met them already. If worse to worse your advisor can throw out a few names: “Why haven’t you read, oh you know, X, Y and Z”? After you get the a few leads, this is what you do:

Get a CV: The best way to get a CV or list of publications is, imho, to google “[name of professor] department” or “[name of prof] professor department”. Googling for ‘CV’ will get you the CVs of everyone whose committee your prof was on. Googling ‘anthropology’ won’t work because often these people aren’t in anthropology departments. Sometimes ‘professor’ won’t work for non-US schools because they might be ‘senior lecturers’ or something like that.

Download Orgy: download every article and publication, conference paper and report. Often the shorter informal pieces are better because they get to the point quickly and give you a sense of the person. This phase is enjoyable because you have the illusion of making progress merely by right-clicking. Find everything. The more obscure the better. Never give up, never surrender.

File your articles: don’t let them pile up in the downloads folder — get them all in your bibliography or note-taking program with as much decent metadata as you can manage.

Read the acknowledgements of their dissertation, and maybe the first chapter: People thank their advisors. Once you know where they come from you know where they are going. If you do this enough after a while you will start to sense the names of the people — and the places, department culture is very important — who influenced them.

Look at the big picture: At this point you should have a good sense of where institutionally they’ve taught and been taught. You know their topic and main intellectual preoccupation. With their works all arranged chronologically in Zotero you can see patterns start to emerge: their dissertation, the article summarizing their dissertation that they published when they were on the market, the book of the dissertation they published to get tenure, the crazy project on Goth Fashion they began once they got tenure because they wanted to study something ‘fun’. Just having a chronology of their work already tells you most of what you need to know about them.

Read selectively: Now you have a sense of who this person is and how they are related to you. Is this going to be your main ally or opponent in your dissertation? If so, then you should read very very closely. It may turn out they are related but tangential to your project. In this case a brief look at the abstracts of a couple of articles should be ok — you can always come back to this person’s dossier later now that you have it in place. For most scholars you will be somewhere in-between, and choosing how deeply to engage is itself a statement of who you are as a person.

Bibliography Crawl: read the bibliography of that person’s articles and look for people who are cited repeatedly, or with great vehemence. These are the next links in the chain — start compiling a dossier on them.

An article a day: once you’ve sussed out someone, then you can always return to their work in the course of your normal article-a-day reading.

Check for Updates Manually: The key to the literature is to keep up to date. Once someone is on your radar look out for new work by them, and occasionally Google Scholar them to make sure that you are up to date. Reading the newest latest really does matter for the relevance of your project to granting agencies, and it’s deeply ingratiating to your fellow scholars to be told at a conference that you’ve read their newest paper. The goal is to get them to say “Really? I didn’t even know that was out yet.”

The thing about this method is that you have to do it and do it and do it. After a while your sense of the network will grow to the point that your dossier-gathering will be finished almost as soon as it starts: “Oh, someone at X studying with Y on Z? Well I guess I know what they’re up to.” Additionally, because dossier-gathering can be done in about the time it takes to read an article, it can actually be done quite quickly and as a result you get a sense of the network and it’s alignments — and by the time you have that sort of big-picture view, then honing in on the nodes is almost an after-thought. This method can be done even if you have limited access to Closed Access databases because even the most sinister Big Content publisher will give up an abstract for free. Sometimes, just the citation is all you need for big-picture purposes. And frankly, for a lot of the more decorative and scene-setting citations you do in theses and grant applications, the one-sentence overview is all you really need, but you need like fifty of them. So go forth and get mapping!

Jonathan Marks recently posted a A rant on race and genetics, which despite its provocative title is really about how people need to take account of over a century of anthropological study on human variation. For that he gets branded a “Boasian Cultural Marxist race denier” (perhaps a compliment, really). My recent Race redux hasn’t drawn the same ire, but I’m really wondering how to respond to the idea that “agonies” about health inequalities for U.S. blacks are “misdirected” or if I want to “risk the outer darkness” where Charles Murray resides. Similar things, or much worse, happen across the blogosphere, like when female anthropology bloggers write about gender.

It is in this context–and let’s just be honest here–that at least some readers consider Discuss White Privilege to be associated with internet-troll behavior. I’ll immediately note the irony that the prototypical internet troll is a white adolescent male. So it may not be fair, but people who have been blogging much longer than me tend to tune out and never reply to certain kinds of comments. Of course, the designation of troll signifies a less-than-human status, which is what Discuss White Privilege has been trying to get people to discuss. Unfortunately, in the context of the internet, adopting a name like Discuss White Privilege is almost guaranteed to provoke exactly a dehumanizing reaction, and I actually think some of the shorthand replies to @ DWP might be an attempt to humanize the addressee through initials.

Where should anthropology blogs go?

Unfortunately my anthropology blogging is not yet paying the bills, and so it’s always difficult to know what to do. Do I try to answer that whole race-intelligence thing? Do I head over to try and help Marks, seizing the Boasian Cultural Marxist race denier mantle? Take a swipe at John McCreery? And then of course it strikes me that this is all blogging anyway, and the comment stream at that–does anyone actually care? Shouldn’t I be more involved in these issues on my campus? Or doing some real political work?

Plus, it seems a lot of this blog back-and-forth is rather like something I’m again dimly remembering of an anthropologist from the Manchester School punching out a fellow Brit in an all-white bar in colonial Africa for insulting blacks (apologies again for not having a reference–grateful for help!). In other words it’s a white-male brawl over who gets to speak about others, something DWP has been saying. I paste below the poster she discussed in her previous comment, a “deeply racist–though ‘well-intentioned’–poster.”

I do wonder if Adam Fish is correct to argue for post-anthropological approaches, as invoking anthropology may just too inevitably call up all those worn ideas about race, bounded non-West cultures, and the racist merging of gorilla-indigenous on this poster. Or these days, get you labeled as–oh, those people who aren’t science anymore. Is it time to jump ship on the anthropology brand?

I think not. Drawing on the anthropology brand means drawing on some of the best thinking on human origins, variation, and diversity:

Anthropologists are well placed to face these changes, first by documenting them in ways that are consistent with our disciplinary history. The populations we traditionally study are often those most visibly affected by the ongoing polarization brought about by the new spatiality of the world economy. They descend directly from those who paid most heavily for the transformations of earlier times. . . . We cannot abandon the four-fifths of humanity that the [ 1% ] see as increasingly useless to the world economy, not only because we built a discipline on the backs of their ancestors but also because the tradition of that discipline has long claimed that the fate of no human group can be irrelevant to humankind. (Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations, p.138)

Moreover, and to simply be crassly opportunistic and pragmatic about this, there seems to be a growing interest in anthropology–internationally, at the undergraduate level, and if the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics can be believed, even for job growth in the U.S.

Savage Minds is undoubtedly the core of the anthropology blogosphere, and is a logical place for hashing out these issues. But it does seem important to note that most all of us are here because in some sense we are not exactly part of that academic anthropology core–although of course it is important to immediately add that many of those inequalities get echoed in the anthropology blogosphere and exclusions are not all equivalent. But I do hope we can work on ways to work together, or at least productively disagree. There is a need for anthropology, and an anthropology blogosphere–I’m grateful to Savage Minds for all the blogging they have done and for a chance to share some thoughts.

Some of my mentors, none of which are in anthropology departments, prefer to say “trained as an anthropologist, so and so, investigates…” as opposed to “so and so is an anthropologist.” If you are on the job market this may be hard to do as you are likely to have just become a PhD wielding anthropologist for the first time in your life and quite proud of the moniker and achievement but the shift in self-definition is important for you and your future academic home, I would argue.

I just went through the whole job-hunting process before signing a contract on Monday to become a Lecturer in media and cultural studies in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University. I was able to apply for a silly amount of jobs, get a bunch of interviews and campus visit requests, and have some choices and grounds on which to do some humble negotiating. I think my trick was post-disciplinary research and (a considerable amount of) cross-disciplinary publishing. I could apply to communications, media studies, anthropology, information studies, STS, sociology, television studies, American studies, and internet studies. If I were desperate I could apply for archaeology and film production positions. Postdoctoral positions, particularly those financed by the Mellon, are all about interdisciplinarity as are jobs looking for digital humanities scholars.

So I’d encourage my fellow freshly minted ABDs and PhDs to begin seeing their research and their teaching across at least 4-5 large disciplines. Be able to realistically apply to 4-5 departments. One can put this together variously by publishing in different journals, collaborating with colleagues from different fields, or simply working the boundaries of one’s discipline in necessarily interdisciplinary ways. (All I can say is that I hope this is not my internalization of the precarity of neoliberal governmentality in the education sector.)

And there is something said for responding (in non-trendy and timeless ways!) to emergent patterns in industry, politics, and social movements. The departments recognize that what is in the news is what the students want to study. In my case this amounted to a recursive loop from the hype surrounding new media –Arab Spring, Anonymous, Wikileaks, SOPA, PIPA, and Occupy– to departments requesting applicants with expertise in social media and political movements. Oddly enough, if the academic job thing doesn’t work out this type of preparation in the now prepares oneself better for a post-academic profession. In academia the joy of investigating emergent practices is that there is no syllabus. You get to design your own. And in the classroom you are not pulling teeth, the issues are on students’ minds. It is relevant.

I may sound heretical to some of you by suggesting that post-anthropological disciplinary affiliations are necessary. But one gains much less than one loses by fundamentally aligning oneself with the orthodoxy of a specific discipline. One one hand, the qualitative and critical social sciences are converging. Critical theory and ethnographic or textual methods run across all the disciplines above. On the other hand, replicating the discourses specific to a discipline is important for the survival of that discipline and I am glad some people are monogamously “physical anthropologists” or whatnot. But my argument is that this practice of disciplinary orthodoxy is dangerously myopic for a discipline and puts the job hunter in a situation with few options. I preferred to bring scholarship from other disciplines to anthropology, and though it proved difficult to buck anthropological tradition by studying contemporary technoculture in America, it provided me a wider repertoire of skills that apparently translate into numerous disciplines and a blessed job offer.

Good luck! Tell us how it goes for you.

A true story in which Jared Diamond plays a key role: During my undergrad I had two back-to-back anthropology classes. One was an archaeology/ethnohistory class about the European conquest of the Americas. The second was a course focused on pastoralism that took a cultural ecology/environmental anthropology approach. Both were excellent classes that I remember well to this day. Fantastic classes, actually.  One day, Diamond came up in class #1. My prof said: “Don’t waste your time with Guns, Germs, and Steel. Diamond’s arguments are terrible and full of environmental determinism.” In the next class, on the same day (no joke), my prof in class number two also brought up Guns and said, “It’s a GREAT book you have to read it.”  He was emphatic.  Considering the strong opinions: I read the book.* Now, there are plenty of ecological and environmental anthropologists who could certainly teach Diamond a thing or two…but I can’t think of any who have written a comparable book that’s going to end up in a lot of hands in the general public. So, by default, Diamond wins.  Besides, if Diamond has all these people reading his book, well, maybe we have something to learn from what he’s doing.  Style?  Presentation?  Choice of publisher?  What’s he doing that we’re not?  Hmmm.  Something to think about.

So, how should anthropologists respond to the likes of Diamond (and others like Charles Murray)? Well, here’s my solution: write better books than those folks, and get them out in public view.  Done.

If you look at the sheer number of Amazon reviews of Diamond’s Guns it’s pretty interesting: 1,265 total reviews. People *read* that book…for better or worse. In contrast, Richard B. Lee’s ethnography of the San people has 16 reviews. Roy Rappaport’s classic Pigs for Ancestors has one review. Susan Stonich’s 1999 The Other Side of Paradise: 2 reviews. Anna Tsing’s excellent Frictions: 5 reviews. Ben Orlove’s Lines in the Water: 2 reviews. Questioning Collapse has 11 reviews.

Compare with other books that cross into somewhat anthropological territories:

Charles Mann’s 1491: 309

Stephen Jay Gould’s Mismeasure of Man: 106

Murray and Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve: 217

Natalie Angier’s Woman: An Intimate Geography: 142

Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas Friedman: 294

The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman: 207

Rachel Carson’s classic Silent Spring: 191

Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: 492

Diamond’s Collapse: 509

Diamond’s Third Chimpanzee: 114

Interesting, no?  Are the number of Amazon reviews the best indicators for assessing impact? Maybe, maybe not. But they do tell us a little something about what general readers are willing to take the time to read and discuss. And contemporary anthropology isn’t exactly getting a lot of air time. People outside of our own circles aren’t talking about what we’re doing, and the Charles Manns and Jared Diamonds of the world are doing our anthropology for us.

However, books like David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years and Gillian Tett’s Fool’s Gold give me hope. Anthropologists have plenty to add to all kinds of important conversations that truly matter today.  There is plenty of excellent anthropology out there. This isn’t just a bunch of now-I’m-ending-the-post-on-a-good-note-feel-good-puffery.  I am dead serious here.  We have no shortage of good material and ideas to add to the maelstrom that is public discourse.  Now we just have to write the books that need to be written–and find ways to get those books to wider audiences, one way or another.**

*How could I NOT read that book after two of my favorite profs had such clashing and very visceral reactions?  Seriously.

**Of course it’s easier said than done!!!  This is a blog post!  What do you want from me?  Now, let’s all get to work writing 500 page masterpieces.

These days, Diamond gets criticized mostly for not reading or potentially libelous composite misreadings. But I want to dial this back to Diamond’s 1987 article “Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” when Diamond obviously takes anthropology from Richard B. Lee–mongongo nuts with no acknowledgment–and also reproduces Lee and Irven DeVore, again with no credit for what almost any professor would call plagiarism.

Did people challenge Diamond for this taking of anthropology in 1987? Could a more forceful response have cautioned Diamond from appropriating anthropology with impunity and “diluting the brand“? Would Jared Diamond have become… JARED DIAMOND?

Does Jared Diamond read?

Anthropologists have criticized Jared Diamond for not reading, or not understanding what he says he has read. In Questioning Collapse, Norman Yoffee says Diamond has misinterpreted his book as well as Joseph Tainter’s work, the first two sources cited in the “Further Readings” section of Collapse (Yoffee 2009:177). In the same volume, Drexel Woodson “wonders how discerningly Diamond read the five books on Haiti” (2009:278). Rex’s Savage Minds review of Questioning Collapse notes that Diamond apparently did not read the critiques very closely: “The kindest thing one can say about Diamond’s position here is that it is unintelligible, because the alternative options are that a) Diamond’s personal animus against the authors was so intense he could not understand the content of the book or b) he simply did not read the book he is reviewing.” And of course at iMedia Ethics, evidence that Jared Diamond’s 2008 New Yorker article was a “fictional composite constructed from random stories.”

Long before all this, however, Diamond’s 1987 Discover Magazine article “Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” read and took anthropology too closely, especially from Richard B. Lee. Although this article might seem to be in the distant past, it is still a staple for Introduction to Anthropology readers like Applying Anthropology and continues to draw commentary on the internet.

Mongongo Nuts

Diamond obviously uses Richard Lee–without any referencing–for that famous quote about mongongo nuts:

It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, “Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?” (Diamond 1987:65)

Now, as Diamond’s article continues to circulate, some associate the quote more with Diamond than with Lee (see the 2009 BBC blog-post “Do hunter-gatherers have it right?” which mentions “one Kalahari Bushman quoted by Jared Diamond”).

Why did Diamond not mention Lee? One idea woud be that in a three-page popular article like “Worst Mistake,” there simply is no space for citation. However, that doesn’t make sense. First, Diamond used the same phrase about the mongongo nuts in his book The Third Chimpanzee (1991). Diamond mentions Lee one time, at the end, in a suggestion for “further readings,” but he does not get a specific reference, even in a book-length treatment. Second, it is not as though Diamond did not mention any academic researchers in “Worst Mistake”–he does cite George Armelagos, whose name is longer than Lee’s.

Another idea is that Diamond takes Lee’s work just because it is ethnography–and since ethnography is often viewed as “hanging out” (as the commenter Strong points out in the recent discussion about Hau), then it is free for the taking. Therefore Armelagos, who does real research and analysis in a lab, gets cited, while Lee is just overhearing things while hanging out. This view would certainly match with Diamond’s later work, in which a bit of hanging out while doing other scientific studies makes Diamond eligible to write something like ethnography in the “Annals of Anthropology.”

However, I don’t think this explanation would make as much sense in relation to Lee’s work–anyone with some familiarity would know how much Lee was measuring, quantifying, counting, analyzing, with just as much rigor as in a laboratory setting.

Interplanetary archaeologists to fellow spacelings

Perhaps more seriously, compare what Lee and Irven DeVore write for the introduction to Man the Hunter (1968) with how Diamond concludes “Worst Mistake”:

Did anyone confront Diamond?

As far as I know, this article has not been discussed on Savage Minds and I haven’t seen other anthropology blogs tackle it. Somehow 10 years later what Diamond once labeled the “Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race” became The Explanation for Everything, as early agriculture adoption leads to Guns, Germs, and Steel. So I’m hoping for comments about this episode of anthropological history. Did anyone take Diamond to task for plagiarism? Could an earlier and forceful response had given Diamond pause before later anthropological appropriations?

My feeling is many anthropologists have deferred to Diamond in part because he seems to be standing for good things–the inaccuracies of The Third Chimpanzee could be excused because Diamond emphasizes evolution; the geographic determinism of Guns, Germs, and Steel OK-ed because it is supposedly anti-racist; the choose-to-fail account in Collapse let stand because of Diamond’s concern with climate change. Still, has Diamond moved public opinion at all with regard to evolution, anti-racism, or climate change? Would it really be worse without Diamond?

This earlier episode, as Diamond plagiarizes the agricultural revisionists, offers potential insight for anthropology’s dance with Diamond and how anthropologists might change the terms of debate going forward.

The time is gone when anthropologists could find solace in the claim that our main civic duty–and the justification for our public support–was the constant reaffirmation that the Bongobongo are “humans just like us.” Every single term of that phrase is now publicly contested terrain, caught between the politics of identity and the turbulence of global flows. Too many of the Bongobongo are now living next door, and a few of them may even be anthropologists presenting their own vision of their home societies, or studying their North Atlantic neighbors. The North Atlantic natives who reject them do so with a passion. Those who do accept them do not need anthropologists in the welcoming committee.
–Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations (2003:137)

Trouillot is then outlining a vision of anthropological duties and risks, include making native voices more full interlocutors, identifying the ultimate targets of anthropological discourse, and publicizing the stakes of anthropological exchange.

To what degree do Open Access efforts–specifically Hau–move us in that direction?

Allow me to first state that I am very encouraged by Hau and its potential. I also do not want to take away from the many interesting comments. However, from that discussion, I am left wondering:

1. As Rex identified in his initial post, “I don’t see a role for indigenous anthropology (i.e. by and for indigenous anthropologists) in this program at all.” David Graeber challenged this, but Rex challenged back–and so it seems the question is still on the table: To what degree might open access also be a place where indigenous anthropologists, native voices, and internal others have a chance to become more full interlocutors in anthropological conversations?

2. Are we “identifying clearly the ultimate listeners,” those Trouillot called “the Sepulvedas of our times” (2003:136)? Hau admirably aims to make “anthropology itself relevant again far beyond its own borders” (2011:viii) and is specifically launched against insularity and triviality. At the same time, the observation of “parochial irrelevance” is followed by lamenting that the Deleuzians, Speculative Realists, Lacanians, and Foucauldians are not taking classic anthropology into account, “a colossal failure of nerve” (2011:x). But are these the Sepulvedas of our times?

3. Trouillot was not talking about Open Access, but he did discuss accessibility: “Media claims notwithstanding, the influence of academic research that could be labeled politically ‘progressive’ has decreased–if only because these works are increasingly inaccessible to lay readers” (2003:137). And so I here wonder–even if every article in American Anthropologist were declared Open Access today–to what degree would it make a difference for the Bongobongo and the Sepulvedas of our times? I do not mean to be too harsh–Trouillot recognized the need for “a technical vocabulary to which research contributes and without which it cannot be sustained” (2003:137, and of course Trouillot’s Global Transformations is rather out-of-reach for many lay readers)–but it is worth thinking about how Open Acess and accessibility could and should interact.

This also seems related to Rex’s analogy to Academia as Music Industry. “Platinum hits” may be rarer, but the irrepentant Sepulvedas of our times keep churning out multi-nationally financed blockbusters.

But what happens when mp3 proliferate, multiple indie labels spring up, and the center falls out of genres like, for instance, hip hop, as they fragment into multiple different audiences and communities? Revenues drop, for one thing, and the publishing industry attempts to litigate or legislate away the new-found freedom that these communities have, attempting to make sharing illegal so that they can continue to profit from the scarcity they are architecting into what was formerly an open system.

For music listeners, rather than publishers, an issue of ‘importance’ arises — how can you tell that the assistant musician in your department is ‘important’ and deserves tenure in an era when platinum hits are getting rarer and rarer? What counts as importance is itself shifting. I can see a number of ways out of this dilemma but whatever route departments chose will require a choice. And standing up and deciding for yourself how to handle something as important as the professional credentialing of the professoriate is a big challenge which requires a lot of confidence in one’s own academic judgement. Which means, of course, that it is the sort of decision that the vast majority of us will hope is made by someone else! But at the end of the day, that is the sort of decision will have to be made.

[I realize the irony of prominently citing American Anthropologist during the Open Access debates--I do end with a call to support Rex's proposal to read and talk about HAU]

–Andre Gingrich, Transitions: Notes on Sociocultural Anthropology’s Present and Its Transnational Potential, December 2010:555

–Karen Brodkin, Sandra Morgen and Janis Hutchinson, Anthropology as White Public Space?, December 2011:545

I am hoping in these guest posts to examine episodes of how anthropology gets taken–starting with a follow-up to Kerim’s archive on Jared Diamond, and then tackling the Anthropologie Store, the TV series Community, and other instances where anthropology either gives stuff away or gets hijacked. But I’d also like to write about taking anthropology back, in alliance with what Rex proposes around Hau or Matt suggests about the AAA.

As an introduction, I would like to use the two articles above, from the December 2010 and December 2011 issues of American Anthropologist, to assess anthropology’s current position, to evaluate resources and risks.

Andre Gingrich’s article hit the press just as the AAA science and mission statement issue really earned anthropology some great NY Times coverage. If anyone is working on a “careful and balanced history” of the autocritique, please let me know–in the wake of old wounds and new emotions about science, such accountings became nearly impossible. Bad feelings and suspicion persist, and for those in adjacent disciplines, anthropology can now always be dismissed with some lines about how it is “at war with itself” and “got rid of science.” This only exacerbated the way the autocritique had been misused, as Giovanni Da Col and David Graeber argue in the inaugural issue of HAU:

The anthropological auto-critique of the 1980s was made to serve a purpose for which it was never intended. In fact, anthropology has been since its inception a battle-ground between imperialists and anti-imperialists, just as it remains today. For outsiders, though, it provided a convenient set of simplified tag lines through which it was possible to simply dismiss all anthropological knowledge as inherently Eurocentric and racist, and therefore, as not real knowledge at all. (2011:xi)

This debate also proved how much the tag line postmodernism still serves as a convenient device to lump all opponents. Such lumping ignores how accusations of postmodernism tend to conceal more than they reveal about actual positions, and that there were legitimate critiques of normative science from Marxism and feminism long before–and that did not depend upon–this so-called postmodern critique.

Andre Gingrich could also have hardly known of all the other minor and major assaults in the works for anthropology in 2011, including the backlash from the “F— You Republicans” e-mail as a minor ambush and then the Florida Governor’s declaration of a no-anthropology-needed zone, which together with the heightened threats to educational funding and continued use of “economic crisis” to discipline and informalize academic labor, amounted to a major assault. However, Gingrich did have pertinent and rather prophetic words of advice for navigating these episodes:

Opponents will not remain inactive. In times of crisis, it is not difficult to predict that some forces will emerge that will argue either for an intensification of anthropology’s applied subordination and instrumentalization at the service of other needs and fields or for anthropology’s radical downsizing–or for both, as one step toward its dissolution. (2010:558-559)

Nevertheless, as of December 2011 there were good reasons to be hopeful. In contrast to the December 2010 science-in-anthropology incident, the AAA swiftly responded to Florida Governor Scott; anthropology bloggers like Daniel Lende and students like Charlotte Noble provided round-the-clock coverage and response, coalescing in what seemed to be anthropology’s first-ever rapid action team.

Meanwhile, the Occupy movement dramatically re-framed issues of plutocracy, wealth, and power, with anthropologist David Graeber playing a critical role. As a record number of attendees headed to the AAA annual meetings in Montreal, there were certainly reasons for optimism.

It is in this context that the December 2011 article “Anthropology as White Public Space?” was a particularly painful reminder of incongruities and what anthropology has been unable to accomplish. Anthropology as an academic discipline has generally been more willing to engage in autocritique and to take this further than other disciplines even begin to ponder. Anthropology also claims an anti-racist heritage and position. But though the authors found “some improvement” the overall tenor is that “many of the same exclusionary ideological and structural elements that the Committee on Minorities and Anthropology encountered [in 1973] are still prevalent in many anthropology departments” (2011:546).

This is a must-read article for anthropology. As the 2012 U.S. election season unfolds, vitriol and vicious denials of any kind of bias or structuring along lines of race, class, and gender will undoubtedly intensify. This is no time for anthropology to turn away from these issues.

Can a beleagured discipline simultaneously go through a transition to transnationalism and at the same time “take seriously the points of view of those who are internal others” (Brodkin et al. 2011:555)? I believe these issues can and must be linked and tackled together. But it requires awareness and political will.

Of most immediate relevance, and since I have the honor and privilege of blogging on the most distinguished of anthropology blogs, is how those of us who write and read anthropology blogs might contribute to this realignment. Anthropology blogs could potentially be a transnational hub and a place to embrace anthropologists of color, but I don’t think we are there yet.

Rex’s proposal to read and talk about HAU has real potential to address the kinds of “minimum consensus about transnational quality standards” Andre Gingrich discusses: “I would have great difficulties envisioning future postdocs in anthropology who have never done any fieldwork whatsoever, who speak no other language than their own, and who have never heard or read anything about Franz Boas, Bronislaw Malinowski, or Marcel Mauss” (2010:557). HAU precisely asks us to consider ethnographic insights, prominently includes translated works, and brings classic authors and basic texts to our attention.

At the same time, I want to highlight the insights from Karen Brodkin, Sandra Morgen, and Janis Hutchinson:

The heart of our conclusion is embarrassingly obvious. It is this: the defamiliarizing insights and analyses generated from vantage points developed by anthropologists of color are better tools for diversifying departmental organization and culture (among other things) than hegemonic ones, and anthropology departments should embrace them instead of marginalizing them. Alternatively put, anthropology has made its mark on understanding cultures by taking seriously the points of view of those it studies. We suggest it needs to take seriously the points of view of those who are internal others to better understand and diversify itself as well as enhance its theoretical robustness. (2011:555)

But, in case you don’t feel like scrolling right now, how about a couple of nice selections from the AAA response:

We write today to make the case that while we share the mutual objective of enhancing the public understanding of scientific enterprise and support the wide dissemination of materials that can reach those in the public who would benefit from such knowledge (consistent with our association’s mission), broad public access to information currently exists, and no federal government intervention is currently necessary.

Also:

We know of no research that demonstrates a problem with the existing system for making the content of scholarly journals available to those who might benefit from it.

Emphasis mine in both cases.  Take the time to check out the comments, which you can download as a PDF and share with your friends and colleagues (just an idea).  Comments?  Thoughts?

Update: Here is the direct link to the PDF of the AAA comment.

Update II: A few reactions from around the web:

Daniel Lende: American Anthropological Association Takes Public Stand Against Open Access

Dienekes Pontikos: The American Anthropological Association opposes open science

Michael E. Smith: American Anthropological Association joins the dark side of the force (with appropriate imagery)

Update III: For some background on what’s wrong with the RWA, check out this post by Barbara Fister

Update IV: Kristina Killgrove makes an excellent point about grad students who find themselves outside of the system, here.

Carr starts off the post by expressing his concern that academia is using practices like peer review as a way to segregate itself from wider audiences.  He argues that peer review is, at heart, not a bad thing, since it provides a way of vetting ideas in an important way.  But, he writes:

the practice of peer review in contemporary academia has turned really problematic. Most respected journals are more expensive than ever, making access to them the near-sole province of academics with access to libraries willing to purchase such journals. The pressure to publish increases all the time, both in rising demands on individual researchers (my requirements for tenure were much tougher than most requirements from a generation before) and in terms of an ever-expanding academic community.

One of the deeper issues, Carr argues, is that peer review can be riddled with politics that end up “slowing the flow of innovative ideas into academia” because those ideas may “run contrary to previously-accepted ideas upon which many reviewers might have done their work.”  Ultimately, Carr writes, these issues with peer review certainly don’t do much to help with the public image of academia (although he is speaking more specifically to geographers here, this applies to academics in general).

Here’s Carr’s solution, or, at least, his ideas for a way to start digging out of this trench:

So, a modest proposal: senior colleagues of mine in Geography – yes, those of you who are full professors at the top of the profession, who have nothing to lose from a change in the status quo at this point – who will get together and identify a couple of open-access, very low-cost journals and more or less pronounce them valid (probably in part by blessing them with a few of your own papers to start). Don’t pick the ones that want to charge $1500 in publishing fees – those are absurd. But pick something different . . .

Again, although he is speaking directly to other geographers here, I think this proposal applies to and should resonate with the anthropological crowd as well.  For Carr, such a move would be a critical step for opening up academic publishing to wider possibilities, conversations, and collaborations.  I agree, and I think he is right that certain established faculty members are in an important position for inciting and promoting change.  It’s a matter of interest and desire.

At the same time, coming from the position of a graduate student, I can’t help but wonder how those of us on the, well, lower rungs of the academic ladder, can do to actively foster these kinds of changes.  Since we are all encouraged to publish publish publish, maybe it would be a good idea to start thinking more strategically about how and why we are publishing, and more importantly WHO we decide to publish with.  If every graduate student and new professor is constantly upholding the current regime by basically giving up the fruits of their labor (and effectively providing certain publishers with a never-ending stream of valuable products), why WOULD anything change?  So, in the end, I think that Carr is definitely right, but that many of these changes are going to have to start taking place on multiple fronts as well.

On that note, check this out.

They haven’t yet, but they are supporting SOPA, a bill that attempts to roll back Web 2.0 by making it easy to shut down entire sites like wikipedia and craigslist if they contain any user-submitted infringing material. (Here is a hypothetical airline-oriented version of SOPA, with only a little hyperbole about planes in the air.)

I think that appealing to Elsevier’s love of open scientific discourse is misguided. Individual employees there might be civic-minded, but ultimately they have $10 billion worth of reasons not to let the internet drive the costs of scientific publishing down to zero. Fortunately, their business model relies on the help of governments and academics. We can do our part to stop them by not publishing in, or refereeing for, their journals (the link describes other unethical Elsevier practices). Of course, this is easy to say in physics, harder in computer science, and a lot harder in fields like medicine.

That was via this post (thanks to Paul Manning on FB).  Michael E. Smith over at Publishing Archaeology is on it with news about related issues as well.  Now, some words from John Hawks about the NIH, public funded research, and open access:

Today’s NIH repository and the data access provisions of NSF grants were established by acts of Congress in the late 1990s. In my opinion, the agencies have in many areas gotten away with the bare minimum of compliance with these regulations. Worse, far from strengthening open access to publications and data, some in Congress want to reverse them. The current effort owes much to lobbying by academic publishers, and large campaign donations from officers and employees of those publishers to key Congressmen.

Read the rest of Hawks’ post here.  Just a few days ago, Rex wrote a post here on SM called “Why HR 3699 Sucks.”  Oh, and it does suck.  If you haven’t read it, then read it now.  He uses a nice analogy to explain what’s going on with academia and publishing, comparing the fruits of academic labor with public works like roads and highways.  Imagine if we all had to pay tolls to actually use highways and roads that are funded by public money.  Get it?  Ya, that’s what’s going on.  Here’s where Rex really lays down what’s what when it comes to the current state of open access affairs:

I can see why Big Content is afraid: we, the construction workers, engineers, and planners, are all willing to work for free to make roads for whoever wants to use them, and we have free software that basically will run all the back office stuff. Do you see the beauty of this situation? It’s the executives, not the workers, who are afraid of being laid off once people realize that 90% of the people actually building the roads can do it without the help of the guys in suits.

Now it might be true that the small amount of work that these back office types do is of a higher caliber than that done by our automated software. But it might not be — and they are working hard to make sure that we don’t find out which way the cookie crumbles.

In case you haven’t gotten the punchline yet: academic publishing is highway robbery, and academic publishers make Rupert Murdoch look like a socialist.

Now, go back and read the rest.  Be sure to read the other links too.  Then feel free to provide your own responses, thoughts, and links in the comments section here.  As John Hawks reminds us: “public comment on access to federally funded research ends this Thursday, January 12.”  From Michael E. Smith: “For more information about the bill and about WHAT U.S. CITIZENS CAN DO about this, see the Alliance for Taxpayer Access.”  Thoughts?

…a lot of time when tenure committees speak half-heartedly of ‘publishing in major journals’ or citation statistics what they really mean is that they want junior faculty’s names to appear on the things that they read — to see them (although probably not read them!) ‘around’ in ‘important places’.

John Hawks followed with a great one liner posted just below, indicating that Rex had indeed hit the mark.  He’s onto something.  It’s the part about appearing in “important places” that really got my attention.  If getting tenure is all about being in these important places, here’s my question: Who defines what is and what is not an important place?  And, if this is one of the primary functions of our current publishing (and tenure) model, what does this say about the current state of affairs?

Just a few questions for today.  What I appreciate about Rex is that his posts and comments always keep me thinking–and asking questions.  Maybe too many questions sometimes.  As a graduate student who is still somewhat on the outside of things looking in, however, these kinds of questions matter.

Also, what would be a good way of meeting this person without being all stalker-y?

Today’s adventure: headed to the Perry Library for a copy of William Rathje’s Rubish! and tracked the one copy down to a part of the building under renovation. The hallway was sealed off with heavy plastic sheeting and duct tape. It reminded me of the end of some X-files episode, you know, the one’s where Mulder and Scully wind up quarantined from an ancient virus? There’s literally like this slit floating there for the workers to enter in and out of. “Hello?” I called into to the work area, but everyone was on lunch. And I can see into the area with the books and they’re all on moveable stacks.

So I’m thinking I could just get my book and nobody would know the difference, but then I’d have to rearrange all the stacks to get it. I was checking out my surroundings to see if anyone was around me and nearby I found an office with people in it. Now with librarian in tow we headed into the work area and the guy is giving me a tour of the construction. Once we get to the stacks we can see that each individual moveable stack cart is wrapped in heavy sheeting.

So we’re pressing the plastic up against the stacks trying to find the TD973′s, move all the stacks wrapped in plastic, and then press the semi-transparent plastic up on the spines of the book. I tell him, “We’re going to need a pocket knife,” and he takes out his key chain and just gauges it open. “Aw its probably around here.” Reaches in there and pulls out my book.

I like librarians.