Haiti in Fragments: I just got tipped off about the blog on Social Text’s website. Check out the collection of essays written last month by various scholars on (re)considering Haiti, its exceptional history, and its place in a world system.

Development of Memory: English Professor Anne Trubek wrote a piece in the American Prospect on efforts to restore the adolescent home of Langston Hughes as both a memorial to the author and an opportunity for redevelopment in a struggling Cleveland neighborhood. But Trubek’s hesitancy, centered equally upon the difficulties of urban renewal and the politics of memory, propel her to look for other options.

Holding Immigration Suspect: Tony at ethnography.com questions some new research making the rounds of the popular media and that argues that immigrants are more likely to engage in criminal activity than native-born people. There is, he argues, a negative correlation and a much more complicated relationship between immigration and crime.

Modern Trickery: Ok, there’s just too much good stuff on Social Text’s blog, and I need to get it out of my system. Gabriella Coleman wrote a piece considering whether internet hackers could fulfill an archetypal position of the trickster. Check it out.

Call to Unite: Michelle Thomas wrote in with the suggestion that anthropology grad students in programs across the U.S. (and beyond?) should have a central forum to write about funding. She writes:

I recently noticed that our discipline (anthropology) lacks a centralized site for grad students to discuss and commiserate over their experiences with funding. I thought perhaps you could at least draw attention to places where such conversations are happening, in the hopes that more information can be shared (and perhaps someone will even create such a centralized site for gathering information about grants and the review process in future years). In the meantime, here are the sites that I know of, and which I hope you will share with other anthropology grad students:

http://forum.thegradcafe.com/forum/17-the-bank/ http://academicjobs.wikia.com/wiki/Humanities/Social_Sciences_Dissertation_Fellowships_2010-11 http://academicjobs.wikia.com/wiki/Dissertation_fellowships http://www.poliscijobrumors.com/—> see: http://www.poliscijobrumors.com/topic.php?id=874

The Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley has been in a kind of unofficial receivership for a growing number of years now. The reason I can claim this is that we no longer choose our own chair (while this was always technically true, departmental wishes were traditionally respected and continue to be so in other departments). Not only don’t we get to choose, the results of recent polls have not been disclosed nor those of official votes. The results might be “disruptive” we were told by the chair appointed by the administration. Even the Karzai government goes through the charade of holding elections.

We are now in a kind of Stasi-like moment at Berkeley where e-mail is monitored, lists of attendees to public meetings kept, warning messages sent afterwards, students threatened with expulsion but denied the most elementary protection such as having a lawyer present at their hearings. On the other hand, John Yoo is passionately defended as an example of academic freedom.

Is this going on elsewhere?

Huntingtonianism still rules in IR
In international relations, there is little evidence of cultural determinism becoming less popular at the level of explanations, although with the shifts in U.S. foreign policy rhetoric and the fatigue that has set in regarding Iraq and Afghanistan, the emphasis is more on solving day-to-day issues. In China, the local version of “Asian values,” centred on Confucianism, is doing better than ever and is increasingly infused into writings on foreign policy, although it is curiously combined with universalistic claims that suggest a new world system usually signified with the word tianxia, “all under heaven,” understood to mean a kind of non-Westphalian system vaguely reminiscent of tributary relations. (More on this in a forthcoming post.) Ethnic explanations of the “ancient hatreds” kind also appear to remain the most popular in armed internal conflicts.

From multiculturalism to interconfessionalism
The trends we describe in the way most Western states—including Western Europe and Australia—manage diversity continue, too. There remains a tension between the ongoing and increasingly stringent attempts to wrench rights and obligations away from previously designated ethnic “communities” and drag them back onto individuals through all kinds of “integration courses,” citizenship exams and bans on headscarves or arranged marriages, on the one hand, and the promotion of “interfaith dialogue,” with officially recognized religious leaders, on the other. Many of the problematic aspects of multiculturalist policies are now resurfacing in the form of interconfessionalist policies. We are looking forward to the findings of Thijl Sunier, Pál’s colleague, who is beginning a multi-country ethnography of Muslim organizational leadership.

Nor does the proliferation of “intercultural communication” trainings show any signs of abating, and Geert Hofstede’s “cultural dimensions” still rule the seas. We must confess that IC is an area that we particularly enjoyed lampooning; it was a pleasure, for instance, to quote from Brendan McSweeney’s brilliant piece in which he scrutinizes Hofstede’s assertion that Freud’s theories had to do with Austrian culture’s “combination of a very low power distance with a fairly high uncertainty avoidance,” which means that “there is no powerful superior who takes away one’s uncertainties.” McSweeney points out that Adolf Hitler and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, both Austrians of Freud’s generation, were rather keen on submitting to powerful superiors, although in different ways.

The Rat and the Rabbit
And finally, the battle for the group ownership of “native culture” continues. The inclusion of two bronze heads looted from the Summer Palace in Peking in last year’s auction of the Yves Saint Laurent – Pierre Berge collection triggered both official and popular protests in China, which had earlier been relatively subdued about claiming artifacts back from foreign museums. Later in the year, a Chinese archaeologist sponsored by a liquor company organised a high-profile tour of Western museums to take stock of art looted from the Summer Palace. On another front, the New York Times recently (23-24 January) reported that a performance by world ice dance champions Oksana Domnina and Maxim Shabalin at the European Championships that employed Australian Aborigine motives in outfits and music was condemned by the New South Wales Aboriginal Council as another instance of “stealing Aboriginal culture.”

From culture to class, wealth and work?
All that said, we do have the impression, that the world’s mind has been taken off culture to some extent. The perceived (and perhaps real) crisis of “neoliberal” economics means a renewed attention to class, wealth, and work as generators of conflict and common interest. This attention is not always well-conceived and can be downright sinister; it can also resurrect earlier generalizations about group culture, this time linked to money. But it does perhaps generate a welcome opportunity for micro-level studies of powerful institutions.

Exporting Paternalism
A few weeks ago Kerim blogged about David Brooks’ New York Times opinion piece on Haiti, which is squarely in the Harrisonian mold: we need to go in and change their culture so they can develop. He (erroneously, we think) quotes Huntington in his support, but at least, contrary to Huntington’s infamous comparison between South Korea and Ghana (they were at the same level of development in 1960), Brooks’ argument compares Haiti to places like Barbados and the Dominican Republic, which means he operates with more specific cultural categories (which implicitly include political and social history) than Huntington’s “civilizations”.

But what we found remarkable in Brooks’ article was something else:

it’s time to promote locally led paternalism. In this country, we first tried to tackle poverty by throwing money at it, just as we did abroad. Then we tried microcommunity efforts, just as we did abroad. But the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism.

These programs, like the Harlem Children’s Zone and the No Excuses schools, are led by people who figure they don’t understand all the factors that have contributed to poverty, but they don’t care. They are going to replace parts of the local culture with a highly demanding, highly intensive culture of achievement — involving everything from new child-rearing practices to stricter schools to better job performance. It’s time to take that approach abroad, too.

How is this different from what China is doing in poor countries – for which it gets all kinds of flak, none more than from U.S. conservatives?

China’s emergence in the development/aid field – its Eximbank is now a larger lender than the World Bank – is beginning to impact approaches in the whole field. In China, there is little patience for the kind of participatory development approach that has recently been so popular in the West (but is widely criticised as failed) and endless faith in ‘60s-style, highly interventionist development projects that combine large-scale infrastructural development with instilling a “modern work culture,” bodily discipline and all. (China is often described as differing from the West in its lack of a missionary agenda, but this is hardly true for Chinese investors; they are very like so many Henry Fords.) And this approach has appeal. People, at least some people, in Africa and Southeast Asia feel like the hopes for development that existed in the ‘60s and ‘70s have been given back to them.

So where does that leave “culture” in development? Our hunch is that its place has already shifted since we wrote Seeing Culture Everywhere. On the one hand, there is China and David Brooks. On the other, there is a new trend in “development thinking” around the World Bank and elsewhere (like Narayan. Pritchett and Kapoor’s Moving out of Poverty and Jessica Cohen and William Easterly’s What Works in Development) that seem to abandon the term altogether and focus on micro-scale interventions – rightly, we believe.

If the field wants more attention from the press, here are some ideas:

1) Hire good science writers to write and distribute press releases. Believe me, there are plenty of quality science writers looking for work. Journals could easily pay a few of them to write press releases on the top two or three papers per issue. Current Anthropology does this and I’m grateful for the service. Not many journalists (probably almost zero) read the primary anthro journals, let alone secondary journals in the field. We need to be led to the fountain.

• “good science writers” might include all those anthropology MAs and PhDs who didn’t end up going into academia for whatever reason. There are a lot of people on this blog alone who just enjoy keeping up with anthropology and who might have the skills to do just this. unfortunately, the part about hiring them seems pretty unlikely. Editors of AAA journals aren’t even paid, to say nothing of science writers. So this task falls to us (see #4 below) and if I were editor of a journal, I would make it a priority to find people willing to do this task on a volunteer basis—or maybe for a free subscription if they happen to be unaffiliated? If Current Anthropology can do it, why can’t the AAA?

  2) Post those press releases on Eurekalert.org, which is run by AAAS, and on other services science reporters scan for news, such as Newswise.

• this seems like a no-brainer. But upon looking, the only alerts are from Current Anthropology. In order to post an alert you need to be a “public information officer” for an organization of some kind. Does the AAA even have a “Public Information Officer”? A subscription to Eurekalert? I might be willing to renew my membership to the AAA if I knew some of the money went to hiring science writers to promote our research on sites like Eurekalert.

  3) When preparing press releases, try to relate the work to current events. Make it relevant.

• I would return here again to my point about temporality. Anthropologists work slowly, but that can be an advantage. It means that a longer term sense of what counts as “relevant” and how to connect current problems that seem new to long-standing structural and cultural transformations is a great way to do exactly what Brian suggests. Just because our work analyzes a time and period that is now outside of the current news-cycle attention span does not mean that it cannot be made relevant to what’s going on today. Figuring out how to stake this claim is intellectually challenging work, not just publicity pandering.

  4) If you have the aptitude and inclination to write for a popular audience, DO. Write and submit opinion pieces for national newspapers, Nature, Scientific American, and Science. We read these. New Scientist and Scientific American and Scientific American Mind run articles written by researchers (usually they are heavily edited). It’s cheap labor for magazines to do this, and more and more of them are probably heading in that direction.

• I’m not sure I fully agree with this one. On the one hand, those who can and want to should, and will. On the other hand, maybe it only means talking with someone who does like to write for a popular audience about current research, or sending alerts to those who do like to write such things. If I got an email box full of eurekalerts about recent research in cultural anthro, I might read some and write about some on SM. As it stands, I just have an email box full of requests to review such research, which means I can’t write about it, even if it’s interesting. I’d be happy to trade in half my peer review requests for “publicize it” requests. The fact that very few of the leading lights of cultural anthropology deign to do exactly such a thing cannot be good for our business.

  – Prepare for some disappointment. Yes, some journalists will get it wrong. Sometimes you won’t like our pithy language or our need to strip away the caveats and get to the heart of the issue. Well, that’s the price of admission.

• well said, sir brian. Indeed, if obscurity and widespread public ignorance of anthropology is what we want, we’ve already got that in spades, so we can feel free to ignore these suggestions and happily avoid any disappointment.

  – Let me say it again. FIND WAYS TO MAKE YOUR WORK RELEVANT. What does it tell us about something happening now that’s important to large groups of people? What currency does the work have? I once wrote about some studies of infanticide in baboons – and the researcher was willing to draw inferences about human behavior from his work. That made the work newsworthy and interesting.

• and let me say it again: cultural anthropology has a different temporality than journalism, even though they often cover very similar topics. So the art of “making it relevant” is also the art of seeing cultural change and significance at different scales, connecting the just-forgotten with the all-too-present. A lot of what cultural anthropology has to offer is the re-framing of persistently polarized debates. Ours is not a logic of discovery, but one of assertion and reorientation.

Increased productivity
Although we both have very different careers – Pál being a full-time university professor and Joana being a „free-lance anthropolgist“ and running an internet start-up – we have (in addition to many single-authored works) over the last 10 years written dozens of articles and three books together, as well as devised e-learning courses and workshops. One of the reasons for our large output has been that we were able to cover very different audiences in a few strokes. Not only has nearly all our writing been published in both German and English, we also wrote up different versions, one academic, the other targeting a general audience.

With different audiences in mind and living in different social spheres we had access to a large pool of research ideas, thus Pál made us study the lifeworlds of Soviet theoretical physicists and Chinese migrants in Eastern Europe and Italy, whereas Joana got us into the comparative study of mass tourism and pushed our exploration of the pervasive uses of culture outside of anthropology, which would eventually lead to Maxikulti and Seeing Culture Everywhere. Pál was sceptical at first – is this academic enough? Is this interesting enough? – but never regretted having been persuaded. Not all of our ventures ended up in serious research or writing – trips to a monastery in Serbia and to a Mennonite farm in Belize yielded only titbits and a trip to the Turkish coast to study Russian tourists, only a car accident. But they were all fun.

Reaching a larger audience
With access to different networks, we published in academic journals such as Current Anthropology and  Development and Change, as well as in mainstream German newspapers and magazines, such as business monthly brand eins, Geo and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Writing together also counterbalances our weaknesses: Pál‘s tendency to write too densely and Joana‘s inclination to overgeneralize.

How do you write a book together?
Many people ask: „How does writing together actually work?“ Except for a short while, when Pál was at the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin, we have never lived in the same city. Instead we have met in dozens of different countries. When Pál is doing fieldwork, Joana might join him for a few days to get the feel for the place necessary to write about it. We also travelled to many places together, from Central America via Eastern Europe to Russia and China, doing „fieldwork light“ along the way.

When our writing is not based on detailed fieldwork by Pál, we usually devise an outline together. Then it is Joana’s task to collect and aggregate the relevant theses and case studies, as she – as a generalist—has a better overview of relevant anthropological material. After this we meet (in Budapest, Sydney, Nice,  Berlin or Luang Prabang to name just a few of the places) for two or three weeks of intensive writing, both sitting in front of one laptop, with Joana often proposing a general structure of the argument and Pál argueing against or refining it and coming up with the final formulations. Back in our respective homes Joana starts the first revision, sending it back to Pál for a final edit. Thus it is a real joint venture and we feel that very few, if any of our output could have been written by one of us a alone.

And last but not least, one of the main rewards for co-authorship is the fun and inspiration we get from working together.

Our involvement with the „culture of cultures“, as Marshall Sahlins has called it, dates in Joanas case back to her anthropology studies at Berkeley in 1989/90, where she also participated in some intercultural communication trainings and was struck by the complete disconnect between the way „culture“ was used in the anthropology discourse on the one hand and workshops organised for the employees of multinational companies on the other.

After teaming up with Pál, who was at the time researching Chinese migrants in Hungary, we decided to introduce our anthropological perspective into the German management scene and published (in 2001) an article in a leading management journal, critizicing the „intercultural communication industry“ (ICI) for perpetuating reductive views of cultural difference that were based on false premises and, rather than helping bridge cultural misunderstandings, often amplified them.

Where is the alternative?
The article created quite a stir within the German “IC community.” But one reason why intercultural „experts“, as well as books such as Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, were so successful was that they were offering very hands-on advice, whereas we as anthropologists had just been able to deconstruct simplistic notions of cultural differences without offering alternative visions that were as clear and accessible. A growing number of anthropologists—among them Thomas Hylland  Eriksen and Ulf Hannerz—had recognized this as an urgent problem and called for anthropologists to find their way back to the coffee table (our term, not theirs).

Finding a publisher
With two chapters written, we started thinking about publishers. After some tentative questions addressed to famous colleagues who published bestsellers and not getting encouraging answers, we realized we didn’t know how to find a commercial publisher in English – even though this had been our aim. So we gave up and turned to the University of Washington Press, where Pál had good experiences publishing an earlier book. Fortunately (and a bit surprisingly, considering we were not targeting an academic readership), they were interested.

Meanwhile, we approached Joana’s literary agent in Germany and almost immediately received an offer (and an advance) from Campus, a well-known mainstream German publishing house. We weren’t used to this kind of speed: we signed the contract in the summer of 2007 and the book came out in time for the Leipzig Book Fair in March 2008.

Dealing with commercial publishing was a new experience – especially for Pál. A few weeks into our contract, Joana received a phone call from a very agitated editor: She had just received news that the „price winning“ German author, Ilija Trojanow, was about to publish a book also dealing with „culture“ and arguing against a Huntingtonian determinism. We were told that our  topic had thus been taken and the public certainly wouldn’t buy a book about a similar topic a few months later.

A completely new storyline
The editor now wanted a much „lighter“ and shorter version, in which the whole story line was changed. Pál bristled at this, but thanks to Joana, who had had positive experiences with popular presses before, we persevered and ended up with a manuscript less than half the original length. The positive side is that we had a very constructive exchange with the editor and were forced to concentrate on the main messages we wanted to convey and to be as clear as possible.

Fighting about titles
The original English title of the book was going to be “Because It’s Their Culture!” The editor would not have it and in a brainstorming session with marketing reps came up instead with a title we hated. After dozens of rejected counterproposals, we gave in to another title we found embarrassing at best and misleading at worst: Maxikulti. Der Kampf der Kulturen ist das Problem – zeigt die Wirtschaft uns die Lösung? (Maxikulti. The clash of civilizations is the problem – can business show us the solution?) The last part of the subtitle was supposed to resonate with managers—Campus‘ core clientele—and could be vaguely justified by the fact that our last chapter presents the use of ethnography in corporate settings as an alternative to the generally prevalent abstract notions of culture.

Meanwhile, we received a very positive initial response from UWP. But it took another 20 months until we finally, in November 2009, held a first copy of Seeing Culture Everywhere in our hands. Working with UWP was smooth: constructive comments on the book‘s substance and no conflict about titles.

Did we succeed?
While Seeing Culture Everywhere was a success at the AAA book exhibit, it is too early to say anything about its reach and impact. We are very curious to find out whether we have managed to reach a broader readership than professional anthropologists, the „converted.“ Yes, we would love to get reviewed in the NYRB!

The results of the German book are already in. Unfortunaltely, ingratiating ourselves with „the general reader“ didn’t pay off. The book received a number of positive reviews in major German newspapers and radio interviews and was toured through bookstores and universities but still sold badly (We don’t have the current figures, but in the first year only a fraction of the minimally envisioned 4 – 5 thousand copies were sold).

Perhaps the most positive outcome so far is that, through constant arguments with each other and the publisher about the level of nuance needed in order to write such a book, we realised that what we, as anthropologists, deem accessible and relevant, may be cryptic and marginal to the public at large.

Calls to write for a broader audience are regularly made and debated among anthropologists (we recall a post by Lisa Wynn on Culture Matters). It is clear that such writing is done more often and more successfully in some places (notably Scandinavia) than in others. We would be interested in hearing about other experiences with such publications.

Joana Breidenbach (Berlin), Pál Nyíri (Amsterdam)

Joana Breidenbach obtained her PhD in Cultural Anthropology in Munich in 1994.  Since 1992 she has written many books and articles on cultural globalisation, tourism and migration, including Tanz der Kulturen (The Dance of Cultures, with Ina Zukrigl, Munich: Kunstmann, 1998), a book that played a major role in introducing the issue of cultural globalisation into German public debates. She has been a columnist for the German business monthly brand eins and has published in journals as diverse as GEO and Current Anthropology. In 2007, she co-founded betterplace.org, an online market place for social initiative, where she heads the betterplaceLAB. She lives with her husband and two children in Berlin.

Nyíri Pál studied in Hungary, the U.S. and Russia. Most of his research has been on Chinese migration overseas; recently, he has been interested in contemporary Chinese ‘concessions’ overseas. He is Professor of Global History from an Anthropological Perspective at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. His most recent book, Mobility and Cultural Authority in Contemporary China, is coming out this spring from the University of Washington Press.

Seeing Culture Everywhere was written as a plea against the cultural determinism that is so common in today’s public debates, with the non-anthropologist reader in mind. The book traces the emergence of ‘culturalism’ (group cultural difference as an explanatory and normative paradigm) from international relations to the nation-state’s management of diversity and down to corporate trainings, suggesting reasons for the pervasiveness of this approach and advocating its replacement with an ethnographic perspective and practice.

I look forward to reading their posts and bid them a warm welcome!

This is what NCA wrote on their website:

Congress is currently evaluating and considering the expansion of the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System (HTS) program, in which anthropologists have been recruited to assist with counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Please join us in expressing our firm opposition to the program and any expansion by agreeing to add your signature to the “Anthropologists’ Statement on the Human Terrain System Program.”

Modeled after a well-publicized 2008 statement written by economists to oppose the Bush administration’s first TARP program, this statement aims to clearly and concisely state the factual grounds for our opposition. Unlike our previous year-long effort to compile signatures for the Network of Concerned Anthropologists’ “Pledge of Non- participation in Counterinsurgency,” we want to collect the signatures of as many professional anthropologists as possible as soon as possible so that our voice can be heard in the debate about HTS.

To add your name to the statement, please EMAIL your NAME, TITLE, and AFFILIATION to NOHUMANTERRAIN {at} GMAIL(.)COM. Include the subject line “Anthropologists’ Statement.” Please encourage other professional anthropologists to sign as well. Thank you very much for your support!

But one thing I don’t hear people say is that we need more “Anthropology Journalism.” I mean that primarily on analogy with (or as a subset of) science journalism. It is a very rare experience to open up the Tuesday NY Times and see an article about recent research in anthropology—to say nothing of rags like scientific american, Wired, Discover or the New Scientist. Of all the “news alerts” I get, or the RSS feeds I browse from journalistic outlets, few to none ever report new findings, controversies, or questions coming out of the discipline. And I get more news alerts and RSS feeds than I could possibly read in ten lifetimes.

Two qualifiers: first, I mean linguistic and cultural anthropology specifically. Archaeology gets some love, though usually only when the findings are narrativized in a story of human origins or change, or when something truly rare is discovered. Biological anthropology gets perhaps a bit less love than archaeology, though certainly more than cultural or linguistic, and only when it is clearly identified with another discipline (evolutionary psychology, behavioral ecology, evolutionary theory, etc). Jared Diamond, it appears, gets the rest of the attention.

Second, it’s not a total lack. A few weeks back the NY Times magazine ran a story about the Americanization of global mental illness. That article had everything good and bad about science journalism going for it: it reported on recent research, digested it and used to to paint a compelling picture, but it also took liberties with the subtlety of the claims to make an overly broad argument in order to be provocative, and to sell more copies of the journalist’s book. A few years back, Dan Everett got a full profile in the New Yorker. Tracy Kidder recently devoted a whole book to Paul Farmer (though interestingly the publicity only refers to him as a doctor, not an anthropologist). And speaking of Haiti, I’ve heard more anthropologists interviewed in the last two weeks than in the whole of 2009. But basically there is no anthropology journalism to speak of. Why not?

There are a few arguments that are always used to explain why there may be science journalism but no anthropology journalism. The harshest of these is that there is simply no interesting (or objective, or reliable, or novel) anthropology to report on. The argument has a Glenn Beck feel to it, suggesting as it does the decline of western civilization and values and the destruction of all that is Good and Right by the scourge of French philosophy, postmodernism and dissolute tenured radicals. Whatever.

Slightly less annoying is the frequent argument that our writing is inaccessible, jargon-laden, pretentious, or needlessly over-written. This argument fails on the simple grounds that most scientific papers are totally inaccessible to a general audience. Science journalism by journalists trained in science is absolutely essential to communicating what the vast majority of things scientists and engineers are up to today. I won’t defend the wealth of bad writing in anthropology, but nor will I defend it in psychology or chemistry or engineering. Have you read a conference paper in computer science lately? Not only is it likely to be totally inscrutable to you non-computer scientists, but it is also very likely to be extremely poorly written, badly punctuated, and generally abusive of the English language—though very prettily formatted using LaTeX

So let me propose three reasons that people don’t usually seem to offer for why there is no anthropology journalism:

1) because there isn’t as much anthropology as there is science to report on.

This strikes me as a basic difference. The simple volume of papers and reports published in most natural science and engineering disciplines absolutely dwarfs the number in anthropology. Each year at the annual neuroscience conference in san diego there are over 20,000 posters and papers. There are less than 8K anthropologists in the AAA total. It seems entirely likely to me that anthropology is being swamped by other information. However, the proportion in science reporting doesn’t seem to mirror the distribution of disciplines in universities, nor the number of students working on PhDs. Certainly it reflects the relative wealth and prestige of some sciences over others. And compared against the humanities generally, instead of the sciences, the argument makes somewhat less sense. There isn’t much “humanities” journalism (Chronicle of Higher Ed notwithstanding) either, but the amount of reporting on the arts, history, literature or music that draws on scholarly work also dwarfs the reporting that draws on anthropology to explain culture.

2) because journalists already do what anthropologists do, only better.

How many of us have not had the experience of reading a really quality piece of investigative journalism in which the journalist has done her homework, traveled to the right places, talked to the right people, and basically explained a phenomenon in terms that suggest there is nothing much more to say? All kinds of things that graduate applicants write in their statements of purpose are likely to appear the following month or year in a magazine or newspaper, artfully done and reaching a far larger audience. Kudos to the journalists who pull this off. But that’s never the end of the story. Three weeks later, anthropologists are still puzzling over the significance of the phenomena reported on, and 5 years later are publishing articles that I think generally do a better job of explaining, rather than reporting, the causes, effects and long historical twists and turns of cultural phenomena. Journalists tend to move on. The temporality of anthropological research far from matches that of journalists, just as it is far slower than many of our colleagues in the natural sciences and engineering. Changing that temporality might require a different approach.. and this, I think, is the third reason for a lack of anthropology journalism:

3) because anthropologists do not report on their research.

Cultural anthropologists have no tradition of publishing articles that simply describe their ongoing or recent research in brief but detailed, relatively standardized forms. Instead, the journal article in cultural anthropology is a mini-book, replete with complex forms of argument and narrative, rich, detailed description and a complete list of references in the literature. Whereas many scientists write a synthetic review article of research in their field once every couple of years, sub-fields of anthropology get one per decade, if that. Whereas a brief article reporting some results in science looks like “findings,” a brief article by an anthropologist describing a bit or recent fieldwork looks paltry and insubstantial.

One result of this is that I honestly have no idea what the vast majority of my colleagues in anthropology are working on until well after they are done doing it, and this is a real failure when it comes to making anthropological research appear fresh. If I were king, or Bill Davis, I would require every researching anthropologist to publish a paragraph describing ongoing research in a AAA publication at least once a year. Such a resource, if done correctly and made freely available would of its own accord change the dynamics of attention to the discipline by outsiders.

3a) because anthropologists’ scholarly societies do not report on their research

A corollary to this reason is that the AAA leadership, editors of journals, and staff of the AAA have done little to innovate these forms of scholarly communication in the last 100 years, to say nothing of the last 10, when they have done nothing more than resist such innovation, sometimes on principle (preserving a tradition of scholarly production focused on monographs, books and critical distance, I suppose), sometimes out of fear and anxiety about the very sustainability of the scholarly enterprise. Contrast this with the aggressive (and to be sure, questionable) shift in the sciences towards models of open access, publicity hounding, interaction with journalists, and repackaging of research in a range of scholarly forms (think Freakonomics). Perhaps in the long run, the traditionalism of the AAA will defend us against the craven onslaught of pecuniary interest and cozy complicity with neo-liberal capitalism. But it will be a lonely 21st century.

The most poignant part of the lack of an anthropology journalism for me is that there are lots of things anthropologists know and understand about the world that few others know. I never feel like I understand what’s happening in the world when I listen to NPR, however good their reporting. Sometimes I feel a bit more informed by a New Yorker or Atlantic article. But I always walk away from quality anthropology with a sense that my brain has been rewired and that I now know better why things are happening the way they are… surely journalism can amplify that effect rather than dampen it?

Brooks acknowledges that historical factors might be important, but quickly brushes them aside.

Why is Haiti so poor? Well, it has a history of oppression, slavery and colonialism. But so does Barbados, and Barbados is doing pretty well. Haiti has endured ruthless dictators, corruption and foreign invasions. But so has the Dominican Republic, and the D.R. is in much better shape. Haiti and the Dominican Republic share the same island and the same basic environment, yet the border between the two societies offers one of the starkest contrasts on earth — with trees and progress on one side, and deforestation and poverty and early death on the other.

OK, but not all histories of “ruthless dictators, corruption and foreign invasions” are equal. Lets look a little at Haiti’s actual history. A good place to start is Gina Ulysse’s 2005 interview with Sibylle Fischer, which highlights the specific racial dimension of Haiti’s history:

Yes, this association with Public Enemy and Fear of a Black Planet is absolutely right. The greatest fear of the white elites in the slaveholding areas was a repetition of Haiti—of another black state.

She argues that some of the most virulent racism was found right next door, in the Dominican Republic.

even today, anti-Haitian racism is endemic and the human rights situation of Haitian migrant workers on Dominican sugar plantations is appalling.

Or this recent article from the Times (UK), which highlights the tremendous debt burden Haiti faced for much of its history:

After a dramatic slave uprising that shook the western world, and 12 years of war, Haiti finally defeated Napoleon’s forces in 1804 and declared independence. But France demanded reparations: 150m francs, in gold… For Haiti, this debt did not signify the beginning of freedom, but the end of hope. Even after it was reduced to 60m francs in the 1830s, it was still far more than the war-ravaged country could afford. Haiti was the only country in which the ex-slaves themselves were expected to pay a foreign government for their liberty. By 1900, it was spending 80% of its national budget on repayments. … In 1947, Haiti finally paid off the original reparations, plus interest. Doing so left it destitute, corrupt, disastrously lacking in investment and politically volatile. Haiti was trapped in a downward spiral, from which it is still impossible to escape. It remains hopelessly in debt to this day.

What do you know, the Haitian’s did make a pact with the devil – France! I’m far from an expert on the region, but what little I do know leads me to think the combination of international racism towards the freed slaves and crushing foreign debt give Haiti a unique history that is not easily dismissed as identical to that of its neighbors.

But this isn’t the first time that Brooks has argued for a kind of civilizational view of culture as psychology which can explain economic differences between nations. He’s been making similar arguments about Asians for a long time. There is a good debunking of these by Language Log. That link will take you to a page full of earlier Language Log posts trashing Brooks’ often sloppy reading of the literature upon which he basis his claims. Please take some time to click on the links just so you can see how sloppy and misguided Brooks really is.

UPDATE: Anthropology Works has a nice roundup of recent scholarship on Haitian culture and social change.

UPDATE: Joshua Keating to Brooks: “Don’t ignore the politics.”

Brooks’ analysis also seems to assume that all dictators are created equal.

Also, Anthropologi.info is doing a great job of tracking the ongoing discussion about Haiti.

UPDATE: In my rush to post this article I totally skipped over another egregious comment by David Brooks:

There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile.

Fortunately, this has been taken up elsewhere: Razib at Gene Expression, Jim Sleeper at TPM Café, and Jason Pitzl-Waters at the Paganism blog The Wild Hunt. Some of the comments on the NY Times website are worth reading as well.

UPDATE: Sam Martinez has a post on Anthropology Works:

Nothing matches up in Brooks’ linkage of Harlem and Port-au-Prince — the comparison is a total clunker — nothing matches up, that is, other than a discourse of veiled white supremacy designed to blame Blacks for whatever ill God and man throws their way and to provide a white-dominated state with a standing excuse for doing too little, too late.