Let’s say I’m going to give a lecture on the anthropology of money. I do this every year and I think I do a decent job of it, but I’d be a fool not to think that David Graeber, Richard Wilk, or Keith Hart couldn’t do it better. The problem is, even if I could find entire lectures by them online, I probably wouldn’t do so. I’ve never liked using class-length lectures by other scholars in my own classes, even something like Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey which I think is great. Class-length lectures from someone else’s syllabus don’t easily fit into my own syllabus unless I work the whole syllabus around those lectures. Nor do I think any of us are comfortable giving our entire class over to pre-recorded lectures. Not only is it boring for students to watch, it just feels lazy.

But imagine that Graeber recorded a five minute lecture on the economic myth of the origins of money, and Richard Wilk recorded a five minute lecture on Polanyi, and Keith Hart gave a five minute lecture on money in West Africa, etc. Each lecture could be used by teachers as the focus of class discussion, or the basis for a collaborative interrogation of those ideas. They could also be used entirely on their own for self-study by students. In any case, they would be a valuable resource for students and teachers alike.

So here’s my suggestion: someone (OAC?, HAU?, Living Anthropologically?) creates a site which allows people to post topics they’d like to see covered, has a searchable index and perhaps some kind of a rating system as well. The lectures themselves could be hosted on Archive.org under a CC license, so people could edit and remix the lectures as they see fit. All that shouldn’t be too hard – it’s just a database. The biggest problem would be getting anthropologists to actually make and submit content. Still, it might be fun to try if someone has the energy to do so. Maybe someone could even set up a room at the AAA to help record scholars who would like to participate but aren’t comfortable around a video camera… I’m just throwing this out there, I don’t have the time to follow through, but if anyone would like to get the ball rolling, feel free to use the comment thread to discuss how such a plan might actually work.

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.

AF: Sherry Ortner sent me a link to her article on neoliberalism that opens the online journal you founded and edit, Anthropology of this Century (AOTC), which debuted in 2011. It’s got an awesome title. There are 88 more years in ‘this century.’ This is different from a journal with the same title coming out in 1988, which would necessarily be diachronically focused. So how do you conceptualize AOTC’s predictive focus on the emergent? Do you see its status as an online and open journal in terms of this predictive and emergent capacities?

CS: I find myself wondering what anthropology is going to do THIS century, by contrast with the interesting things it did in the last one. Anthropological theory has been stuck for a while, in my view. We need iconoclasts like Edmund Leach – who said that accumulating cultural descriptions for the sake of it isn’t good enough. Obviously, a handful of articles in AOTC won’t sort out the future of the discipline. But I’m hoping we might help a few colleagues think more clearly about some important questions. As for the open/online format, the main advantage is that AOTC is there for anybody to read, including the many anthropologists who lack easy access to journals and other publications. Our latest issue, which went live last week, has already been looked at by people in 84 countries.

AF: AOTC is mainly composed of reviews of anthropological work. Is this because you’ve found this an important component lacking in the anthropological journalistic sphere or because it lends itself nicely to the online format?

CS: It’s easy to find reviews of anthropology books. Having said this, you’ll almost never find them in London Review of Books, New York Review of Books, etc. And the ones at the back of anthropology journals tend to be short, and are written for specialists. Our reviews are longer than average, a bit more reflective, and we’re basically saying that ANY of them should, in theory, be of interest to ANY anthropologist – as well as to scholars and students from other disciplines. So, for example, you might not especially care about Mongolian shamans, but in the latest AOTC there’s a fascinating article by James Laidlaw (a review of Morten Pedersen’s new book) that should, I think, convince you that they are worth thinking about.

AF: I am probably overdetermining the journal as a form of critique but to me AOTC represents the application of much of our theoretical antagonism against closed and privatized journals. Am I overdetermining this analysis? What is the ideological origins of AOTC in relationship to the present state of academic publishing?

CS: The current academic publishing model doesn’t work very well for anthropology, in my view. Obviously things are going to change in the next few years – perhaps dramatically – because of the internet. Having said this, there are costs involved in supplying outstanding content to readers, regardless of the delivery method. So I think some degree of commercialization or subsidization (which is really hidden commercialization) is inevitable in academic publishing.

AF: I noticed on your online list of publication that you cite your written work at AOTC. You are considering it a legitimate location for publishing. How would you like AOTC to develop as a space for publication for the professionalization of anthropologists?

CS: We are not going to start publishing large numbers of peer reviewed research articles on AOTC, if that’s what you mean. That is a huge amount of work, and we don’t have the institutional backup for it. Our niche, at least for now, is just to comment on research published elsewhere. So to an aspiring anthropologist I would say: you should try to write an important and ambitious book so that we can publish a glowing review of it on ANTHROPOLOGY OF THIS CENTURY.

AF: AOTC’s design is vivid with its playfully bricolaged nomeclature set against its stark black background. It’s an excellent and simple example of stylistic possibilities available for journals online. You must have an excellent team on the design side of things. What’s AOTC’s style logic?

CS: All of the design ideas in AOTC come from one person, the art director, Ed Linfoot. Luckily, he is very, very good at what he does.  The logic is in his brain.

AF: Its a simple one but one of the affordances that internet publishing has over hardcopy publishing is the capacity for fast dialogic commentary and the modeling of a virtual public sphere. As one of the moderators of this blog Savage Minds, I understand the work entailed in moderating commentary but I still find it a necessary component of online writing. Considering this, why don’t you allow comments on the articles?

CS: The question you ask is one that I anticipated. Not only does AOTC not have serious interactivity (e.g. readers’ forums etc.), we don’t even have a letters page! This may seem odd for an online open access journal. But if people want to respond to our articles my advice is that they should stop – think carefully – and then publish a response elsewhere, either on a blog (such as yours), or in an article, or a book. The instant response is in some ways antithetical to scholarship. I’m not a big fan of it, except in the context of research seminars, such as the anthropology seminar we hold on Friday mornings at the LSE. There I can be extremely critical of someone’s ideas but this is followed by us having a drink together, and then lunch, which obviously transforms the whole interaction.

AF: I am sure others might like to replicate your experiment with AOTC. In terms of cultural and social capital what does it take to pull off a journal like this?

CS: You need a lot of friends.

Could anyone recommend some accessible anthropology literature? What would be 5 (or so) good books a generally educated person could read?

I think this is a great question.  I actually asked a similar question last August in this post, and while there were a few people who provided their 5 picks (here and here), I’d like to raise this question again to see what we come up with here.  If you had to pick 5 anthropology books that best represent the discipline, and that are also accessible to general readers, what would they be?  Just to get the ball rolling, here’s my new list:

1. Debt, the First 5,000 Years by David Graeber
2. Paradise in Ashes by Beatriz Manz
3. Culture on Tour by Edward Bruner
4. Righteous Dopefiend by Bourgois and Schonberg
5. Behind the Gates by Setha Low

My list is by no means definitive, and it’s almost impossible to pick only five. My list also obviously has a socio-cultural anthropology slant.  So it would be great to see suggestions from linguistic anthropologists, biological anthropologists, archaeologists, medical anthropologists, etc.  What books would you pick?  Let’s hear it.

PS: Thanks, Michael, for bringing up this question.

SAA and other groups, such as SHA, have already prepared and sent strong letters condemning both of these programs to the production companies, networks, and others. Copies of the SAA letters can be found on the SAA website (http://bit.ly/w2MHJM, and http://bit.ly/wzT7IA). The letters provide details on why we are so concerned. Up to this point Spike TV has not responded to the public outcry. Leadership of National Geographic, however, has indicated that, while they are unable to stop the showing tomorrow on such short notice, they will place a disclaimer into the show that speaks to laws protecting archaeological and historic sites.

Read the rest of the post.  While I’m not really surprised that Spike TV is doing something like this, the fact that the folks at Nat Geo even considered this is ridiculous.  If you have updates about this, please share in the comments section.  Thanks to the U of Kentucky grad students, Michael, and everyone else for working to get the word out about this issue.  Definitely no time to be passive when it comes to archaeological, historical, and cultural heritage.

As if Amalgamated couldn’t bear to lose a fraction of a percent of profits by employing a few more than the absolute minimum of bodies they have to, or by storing the merchandise at halfway ergonomic heights and angles. But that would cost space, and space costs money, and money is not a thing customers could possibly be expected to hand over for this service without huffily taking their business elsewhere. Charging for shipping does cause high abandonment rates of online orders, though it’s not clear whether people wouldn’t pay a few bucks for shipping, or a bit more for the products, if they were guaranteed that no low-income workers would be tortured or exploited in the handling of their purchases.

Is it anthropology?  Does that question even matter?  I think there is plenty of relevance here.  The article is worth a read.  But, in regards to anthropology, this article has me wondering whether or not there are anthropologists out there exploring similar issues.  If so, who?  If not, why not?  Another example of a pervasive, everyday issue that anthropologists are in a good position to thoroughly explore.  McClelland’s narrative and discussion is based upon a relatively short stint with the company, and I’d be interested to hear about similar projects, as well as others that are based upon longer-term experience.  Anyway, if any of you Savage Minds out there know of related work, let me know about it in the comments section.  Or, let me know what you think about McClelland’s investigation and article.

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.

Mr. Murray’s newest book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 (Crown Forum), makes a pretense of making nice. It bills itself as an attempt to alleviate divisiveness in American society by calling attention to a growing cultural gap between the wealthy and the working class.

Focused on white people in order to set aside considerations of race and ethnicity, it discusses trends, like the growing geographic concentration of the rich and steadily declining churchgoing rates among the poor, that social scientists of all ideological leanings have documented for decades. It espouses the virtues of apple-pie values like commitment to work and family.

The thing about Murray, Schmidt argues, is that he is particularly prone to controversy, and this book is no exception.  Ironically, as Schmidt points out, one of Murray’s underlying themes is the social fabric of society has broken down–his book is in part a call for a return to the days of mutual trust and togetherness.  However, Schmidt writes, here is where the argument heads down a path that stirs up heated reactions and controversy:

In the midst of all of his talk about togetherness, he puts out there his belief that the economic problems of America’s working class are largely its own fault, stemming from factors like the presence of a lot of lazy men and morally loose women who have kids out of wedlock. Moreover, he argues, because of Americans’ growing tendency to pair up with the similarly educated, working-class children are increasingly genetically predisposed to be on the dim side.

Here is the link to Schmidt’s article again.  Check it out.  See what you think.  Murray sells a lot of books, and has a certain amount of influence in the policy world…and he also treads into social science territory.  His messages definitely get heard.  These are absolutely the kinds of conversations that we, as anthropologists, can and should find a way to address.

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.

[R]esolving the complex challenges that confront our nation and the world requires more than expertise in science and technology. We must also educate individuals capable of meaningful civic participation, creative expression, and communicating insights across borders. The potential for graduates in any field to achieve professional success and to contribute significantly to our economy depends on an education that entails more than calculus.

Curricula expressly tailored in response to the demands of the workforce must be balanced with opportunities for students to develop their capacity for critical thinking, analytical reasoning, creativity, and leadership—all of which we learn from the full spectrum of disciplines associated with a liberal arts education. Taken together with the rigorous training provided in the STEM fields, the opportunities for exploration and learning that Gov. Scott is intent on marginalizing are those that have defined our national approach to higher education.

M.S. argues that Crow’s statement is “a solid response,” but that something more is needed: “What it lacks are rhetorical oomph and concrete examples.”  So what can provide that extra OOMPH and rhetorical power?  Actual examples of anthropologists putting their training and knowledge to work:

Some of the best analysis of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, and of the ongoing follies on Wall Street these days, has been produced by the Financial Times‘ Gillian Tett. Ms Tett began warning that collateralised debt obligations and credit-default swaps were likely to lead to a major financial implosion in 2005 or so. The people who devise such complex derivatives are generally trained in physics or math. Ms Tett has a PhD in anthropology.

M.S. then links to a 2008 profile of Tett by the Guardian’s Laura Barton.  Here’s a key selection that quotes Tett speaking about how she put her anthropology background to work:

“I happen to think anthropology is a brilliant background for looking at finance,” she reasons. “Firstly, you’re trained to look at how societies or cultures operate holistically, so you look at how all the bits move together. And most people in the City don’t do that. They are so specialised, so busy, that they just look at their own little silos. And one of the reasons we got into the mess we are in is because they were all so busy looking at their own little bit that they totally failed to understand how it interacted with the rest of society.”

The Economist article ends with a little chiding of our dear Governor Scott, saying that it’s never too late to learn, and that maybe he should take a course or two in anthropology for good measure.  He could, of course, just ask his daughter.  Sorry, I couldn’t help that one.

The broader point here is about liberal arts education, society, and anthropology.  Interestingly, what a lot of this comes down to is a perceived clash between SCIENCE and other perspectives that are, according to some, less worthwhile and meaningful.  If you take a look at the comments section for the article, you’ll see evidence of this version of events (some comments mention the supposed division in anthropology about the whole “science” issue).  The basic argument for folks who make this sharp science vs humanities division is that the former is useful and important to society (because it supposedly produces jobs directly) and the latter is nice, but not really all that necessary.  I think Rex did a pretty good job of explaining why a well rounded liberal arts education does indeed, matter.  And he used Thomas Jefferson’s words to do it.  Nice work, Rex.

So what does Gillian Tett add to the picture?  I think she’s an excellent example because her work illustrates what anthropology can bring to the table when it comes to everyday processes and behaviors that get taken for granted.  Economics is just one area where anthropology has a lot to add to the discussion–the discipline has a deep history of empirical and theoretical research on human economic systems (Malinowski was, after all, questioning arguments about “Economic Man” way back in the 1920s).  Business, finance, and economics are all issues that get a lot of attention, day in and day out, from the general public, politicians, and pundits.  The financial crash of 2008 has made these issues even more important.

But if you look at a lot of business and economics and finance books, theories, and models, there’s a lot missing.  History is one key ingredient, as Jason Antrosio argues.  A recent article called “Economics has met the enemy, and it is economics” points to other glaring issues in the discipline.  Anthropology is certainly well-placed to contribute to a rethinking of economics…in theory and actual practice.  There are, in fact, lots of economic anthropologists doing just that.  It would be nice to see more of their names in the pages of publications like The Economist, for starters.

But there’s another important point here.  In their 2011 book Economic Anthropology, Chris Hann and Keith Hart write, “The project of economics needs to be rescued from the economists.  Economic anthropology, in dialog with neighboring disciplines, as well as with more flexible economists, could be part of that process of intellectual reconstruction” (2011: 162).  Hart also argues that anthropological critiques and contributions to economics have to move beyond simply bashing on individual economists or the discipline as a whole:

It is convenient to beat up on the economists, but I wouldn’t be an economic anthropologist if I didn’t believe in the historical project of economics which has been debased by the economists, especially in the last half- century. We should not allow our disgust with the blatantly ideological uses of neoclassical economics in producing undemocratic outcomes in our societies to lead us to discount the marginalist revolution (Hutchinson 1978) which launched modern economics in its present form. We should remember that economics was the first social discipline to introduce a subjective theory of value. There are all kinds of problems with this particular theory, especially its reliance on prices as a proxy for value. Nevertheless, it provoked and encouraged some of the most progressive social thought that we still rely on today, such as Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Talcott Parsons and others (Hart 2011: 7).

What this means to me is that increased engagement from anthropologists requires something more than just critique.  It requires actual participation in debates, and well-argued contributions.  For me, this is a crucial point, and it applies across the board.  Anthropologists can and should add to wider, more public debates about issues like economics–and other critical subjects such as race, culture, human nature, and so on.  Jason Antrosio makes this case pretty powerfully in a recent post about how a critically informed and yet morally optimistic anthropology can challenge many contemporary economic assumptions.  Absolutely.

I appreciate Antrosio’s combination of critical anthropology with the morally optimistic arguments of Michel-Rolf Trouillot.  In his 2001 book “Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value,” David Graeber makes a similar argument when he balances the relentless criticism of Marx with the moral optimism of Marcel Mauss (Graeber 2001: 255-56).  Unending critique, Graeber argues, can lead to “a picture of the world so relentlessly bleak that in the end, criticism itself comes to seem pointless” (2001: 256).  Hann and Hart focus their argument on the idea of interdisciplinary dialog and–the part that I find most appealing–intellectual reconstruction, rather than critique alone.  Teaching, as Alex Golub and many others point out, is a fundamental part of that reconstructive project.

Politicians such as Governor Scott wave the banners of science and technology in the name of producing jobs.  Scott seems particularly enamored with engineering, technology, and mathematics.  Anthropology, which is uniquely positioned between the so-called hard sciences and the humanities, can illustrate the fact that science does matter.  Engineering matters.  Physics and biology matter.  Mathematics is indeed important.  The larger point here is that it’s not an either/or choice that we need to make.  Science is fundamentally important…but that’s not all we need.  Economists, for example, love to spend their time with numbers, statistics, and complex models. What anthropologists can add to the discussion is not just a critical assessment of how such models play out on the ground, but also what those numbers actually mean in particular social, cultural, political, and geographic contexts.

Anthropologists can add to these discussions through teaching, and through their research.  The main objective is to find ways to share such discussions about both of these aspects of the discipline with wider audiences–and to do this in creative, dynamic, informative, and challenging ways.  The best counter to ill-informed, instrumentalist arguments against liberal arts education, social science, and anthropology is, as the post on The Economist blog illustrates, with concrete evidence.  The proof, the saying goes, is in the anthropological pudding–all the way from Franz Boas to Gillian Tett.

References

Graeber, David.  2001.  Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value.  New York: Palgrave.

Hann, Chris, and Keith Hart.  2011.  Economic Anthropology.  Malden: Polity Press.

Hart, Keith.  2011.  Building the human economy: a question of value?  Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society.

What attention it has gotten has largely been positive, such as this glowing review in CounterPunch, or this blog post by Louis Proyect. A review in VAR was slightly more critical, but not by much. Still, the following comment from Stephen Broomer’s review gets to the heart of the matter:

Padilha’s contribution to this debate is confined within the limits of documentary form. Secrets of the Tribe is a narrative-driven documentary, and as such it privileges dramatic contrast over the reinforcement of facts or proof.

Indeed, I would go much further. The film struck me as little more than tabloid journalism, reveling in salacious scandals, academic cat fights, and conspiracy theories in the name of discussing research ethics and scientific methodology. It reminded me of one of those local news stories where a reporter exclaims how shocked he is to discover that there is prostitution in his city while the camera indulges in digitally blurred closeups of exposed female flesh.

In comparing this film to tabloid journalism I don’t mean to impute Padilha’s motives. Padilha is clearly someone who cares deeply about Brazil’s indigenous population. He also deserves credit for actually interviewing Yanomami for the film. But Padilha is not an anthropologist. As one review put it: “A student of math and physics, Padilha turned to filmmaking after a brief, unsatisfying career in banking.” (He is most famous for “Bus 174″ about a hijacked bus in Rio.) For this reason he seems unable to meaningfully engage with contemporary debates about fieldwork practices or the nature of anthropological research.

I don’t really know which bothered me more: the lumping together of pedophilia accusations against Jacques Lizot and Kenneth Good with Patrick Tierney’s accusations against James Neel and Napoleon Chagnon, the fact that the film completely ignored Tim Asch even as it relies extensively on his footage, or the way it presented anthropological epistemology as a simplistic choice between the hard-science of sociobiology on the one hand and mushy-headed cultural relativism on the other.

What really upsets me is that these are serious issues, which warrant serious discussion. By simplifying the scientific debates and lumping them together with pedophilia accusations, the film missed a unique opportunity to make an important contribution to the popular understanding of anthropology. Too bad.

We don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state. It’s a great degree if people want to get it, but we don’t need them here. I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, and math degrees. That’s what our kids need to focus all their time and attention on, those types of degrees, so when they get out of school, they can get a job.

Daniel Lende provides a good recap of the situation and some of the reactions with this mega-linked, all inclusive post.  Jason Antrosio has also weighed in on the matter–his post also includes a link to the AAA response, which is here.  Jason sees this as an opportunity to rally anthropologists:

Not only does this give anthropology an opportunity to emphasize our scientific side, it could also be a rallying point for social science and humanities disciplines that were equally dismissed. It seems worth mentioning that while Scott dismisses everyone except math-science-engineering, it is at a time when other countries are seeking the lifelong thinking and creativity developed in a Liberal Arts education.

In another piece, John Hawks discusses some of the possible avenues for responding to this debacle.  How can or should anthropologists make their case?  He writes:

It’s very difficult to come up with a rapid and effective reply from an organization or department, so I understand these aren’t as punchy as they might be. Still, it seems to me a vastly more effective response would describe the economic impact of anthropologists in Florida, the dollar amounts of federal and private grants they bring to Florida universities, their role as custodians of natural and cultural history, and their history of engagement with indigenous and immigrant peoples in the state.

One of Scott’s underlying arguments is that anthropology doesn’t produce JOBS, and this is an argument that seems to get a lot of mileage by certain folks who aren’t exactly fans of social science (Tom Coburn, anyone?).  I am going to leave off with a few questions for all you Savage Minds out there: What do you think about this tactic of using jobs as the sole calculus for measuring the value of a discipline?  Should anthropologists be completely focused on producing jobs, or are there other elements that matter in a valuable and worthwhile education?  What about the value of teaching students how to think critically and holistically about the world around them?  Why say you, readers?

Speakers of a huge variety of Frenches, Englishes, or Spanishes, who might find it difficult or even impossible to understand one another in conversation, became capable of comprehending one another via print and paper.  In the process, they gradually became aware of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular language-field, and at the same time that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged.  These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community (2006: 44).

However, as Anderson goes on to point out, there are limits to this construction of imagined communities: “The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations” (2006: 7).  Nations have edges–they do not include every possible member of the human species.  These communities are inclusive and exclusive all at once.  Language, transmitted through a particular medium (in this case print capitalism) can be marshaled to engender powerful shared social meanings and connections.  But the reverse is also true.  Language and communication can also be used (purposefully or not) as a means of exclusion.

Think about those ideas on a much smaller scale.  Way smaller.  Academics–and anthropologists in particular–form a certain kind of imagined community as well.  This community, based upon a certain set of supposedly shared concepts, ideas, and texts, expands around the world–at least in theory.  These networks definitely do extend across political and social boundaries, even if there are definite limits.  But there is certainly an imagined anthropological community out there, even though the vast majority of us “anthropologists” will never meet one another.  Fascinating, isn’t it?  But this isn’t just about anthropologists, it’s about the formation of community.  What borders surround these imagined anthropological communities? What allows people in, and what keeps them out?  More importantly, what purpose is served by these borders and boundaries, and why are they upheld?

Our use of media (print, visual, etc) is one key factor, and this is why I am so fascinated by the recent discussions about open access and publishing in anthropology (see this link for a collection of some of these recent posts).  It matters, in the end, how we use media.  It matters who reads and “consumes” everything that anthropologists write and create.  So it makes sense to start thinking about how anthropologists produce and disseminate their ideas through media, where those ideas end up, and how they are received by different audiences.  It probably makes even more sense to actually do something about these self-induced and not-so-necessary borders.  I have already mentioned this before, but Harry Wolcott once wrote that much qualitative social science is basically a closed system.  In the case of anthropology, it is anthropologists who read and consume what other anthropologists produce.  As Barbara Fister might say: We pretty much tend to our own little “walled gardens.”  Why?  Do we think that our ideas only belong in our own social circles?

So then…what will it take to begin opening the gates to our little enclosed academic gardens?  Should be follow the path that economists have taken?  Should we get inspiration from some early pioneers of open access?  Does anthropology need to look to the future and go for the gold?   When are we going to really start looking outside of our walled gardens?**  What really needs to happen to make this a reality?  Is there a need for more media-based training in anthropology grad programs?  Do we need to rethink how we write and produce media?  What about adding an emphasis on audio-visual training, design, etc?  Photography?  Video?  Or maybe it’s time to encourage more collaboration with other depts in the production of anthropological media?  Are some programs already doing things like this?  What other avenues are out there?

Benedict Anderson argues that communities can be distinguished not by their relative authenticity, but instead “by the style in which they are imagined” (2006: 6).  So how do anthropologists distinguish themselves as a community?  As members of the general public or isolated specialists?  How do we imagine ourselves?  More importantly, how should we re-imagine ourselves in order to transform the community that is anthropology?

*We share the same last name, but that’s about it.  To my knowledge I am not in any way related to Benedict Anderson.  Just FYI.

**My first glimpse outside the walled garden that is anthropology was when I was doing some research for a paper on the INTERNET while I was an undergrad.  For some, that is a crime right then and there.  By happenstance, I stumbled upon this site called “Project Gutenberg.”  Maybe I wasn’t the most savvy of undergrads, but this was my first run-in with open access publishing.  Entire books, for free?  Admittedly, many of them were old, but there was (and still is) a lot of good stuff to be found there, and the overall aim of the project is definitely admirable.  It was a sign of things to come.

Which is a shame, because I’m heartened by the AAA’s earnest interest in exploring the public role of our discipline although I am skeptical as to whether this will amount to more than a trend to be tossed aside when something else bright and shiny catches the discipline’s attention. Maybe I’m reminded of similar calls for anthropology to be interdisciplinary only for that to amount to so much lip service. You can’t make a career publishing in journals of history, American studies, or education. If you want to be an anthropologist you are expected to publish in anthropology journals. Interdisciplinarity be damned.

If you are a dues paying member of the AAA then you can read the text of Sabloff’s plea for heightened public engagement behind a pay wall. While blogging does feature in his essay (with mad shout outs to Daniel Lende and Michael Smith), whether the Association’s decision to pursue a toll-gated publication regime managed by Wiley-Blackwell is at odds with his call for public engagement is, unfortunately, not addressed.

Did you see what I did there? Public. Publication. Eh? Eh?

To the tune of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson,” Sabloff pines for the day when our discipline had a public intellectual in Margaret Mead, one who captured the nation’s imagination, her commentary circulating freely in popular culture. Excepting the important contributions made by practicing anthropologists and professionals engaged in cultural resource management, Sabloff rightly perceives a great gulf separating anthropology from mainstream American society as well as public policy.

We need a celebrity intellectual, he writes, on par with Richard Dawkins, Henry Louis Gates, Paul Krugman, or Cornel West. Sabloff convincingly argues that the structure and traditions that bind professional academia inhibits the creation of such figures. (It’s worth noting that Mead spent the bulk of her career outside the tenure track at the American Museum of Natural History or laboring as an adjunct professor.)

Indeed, I am struck by how the American academy functions as a highly efficient Frankfurt School-esque Culture Industry, siphoning off organic intellectuals from their native communities and sequestering them in ivory towers of silence. Its spooky how effective it is at reaching that goal. Almost as if by design.

The academy gives little incentive for anthropologists to engage the public, with the emphasis falling instead on the publishing of research. Calls such as Sabloff’s for the expansion and reevaluation of criteria for hiring, tenure, and promotion to include such outreach dovetail nicely with ongoing discussions here at Savage Minds and elsewhere on the state of academic publishing. I think this connection should be explored further.

While anthropology does have a figure like Paul Farmer, he is rather low profile in terms of his pop culture cache. For Sabloff we need anthropologists represented in “highly visible media,” butting heads with Bill Maher, taking phone calls from Katie Couric, and trading jokes with John Stewart (his examples).

I thought these choices were kind of odd and to be honest they rubbed me the wrong way. There are anthropological shows on television already or at least shows where a relationship to anthropology is overt and lies on the surface: Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations, Antiques Roadshow, the lamentably deceased Postcards from Buster. What Sabloff seems to be saying is that while there currently exist shows on, say, the History Channel that are relevant to themes in anthropology, authentic anthropologists do not play a starring role in them and so mainstream society does not associate them with the anthropology “brand.” But this is not my main beef.

I’m going to come out and just say it. We don’t need another Paul Farmer.

No! Wait! I take that back. We do need more Paul Farmers. We need as many Paul Farmers as we can get, the man is incredible. Maybe what I mean to say is that I’m no Paul Farmer and I hazard to guess that you, gentle reader, are no Paul Farmer either.

I’m definitely not showing up in “highly visible media” any time soon but I am really, really good at teaching Introduction to Anthropology. I think getting more of us engaged in public policy is a terrific idea, but I’m not sure what the policy implications to my research on American Indian theatrical productions for tourists would be. Urging the AAA to get someone to helm public relations sounds keen. But what does it have to do with my everyday responsibilities?

What if instead of celebrity intellectuals we think of what can be done with the AAA’s rank and file. There are, relatively speaking, very few elite professors at prestigious universities compared to the large cohort of professionals at land grant, directional and second tier state schools, HBCU’s, liberal arts colleges, and community colleges. There are hundreds more adjuncts and small timers. If public anthropology is to become a social movement within the field we don’t need rock stars, we need foot soldiers. Encouraging professors to get behind a television production initiative sounds worthwhile, but it also sounds really easy. Especially for me because I won’t have to do a damn thing!

I guess begging anthropology to produce celebrities rings hollow to me. Like one time at a SANA business meeting someone rose from the audience to say, “SANA should do something about xyz” Really? And how do you suppose professional societies ever manage to do things? SANA is you. What you’re actually saying is that you should be the one doing something about xyz, only you don’t realize it yet.

In Errol Morris’s cult documentary “Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control,” the director juxtaposes interviews of four eccentric personalities to mind blowing effect, including robotics engineer Rodney Brooks. It’s Brooks who in his fantasies of extraterrestrial colonization coins the phrase that Morris gives as the film’s title. You see, in its exploration of Mars, NASA has relied upon a large, elaborate, and expensive robot – if it breaks then you’re out of luck. The robots Brooks proposes to send are about the size of a dinner plate and far less expensive, so you can send many more.

What I’m trying to say is don’t sit around waiting for the next Margaret Mead. And anthropology doesn’t become more relevant to Jose Six-pack once we cross Marshall Sahlins with Marshall Mathers. We can all be public intellectuals of a local, non-celebrity sort. Find something where you are, some way to play a role however small and do it. It doesn’t have to be hard. You don’t have to write a grant. Just share what you know and what you do with the people around you. Let public anthropology be fast, cheap, and out of control.