In 2004 I suffered the strange fate of being universally misrecognized at the AAAs as Matti Bunzl. While I always knew that Matti was very successful professionally, I had no idea just how successfully as numerous people came up to me to offer their congratulations to me on this and that publication, my tenure, my directorship of a new institute, and so forth. In fact it ws not until I demurred and told someone that I had no idea what they were talking about that I was finally told who I looked like by one drunk grad student, who insisted that I was Matti Bunzl but that I was pretending not to be because I was mean and didn’t want to talk to them. The result was a very interesting conversation in which I tried to prove that I wasn’t somebody.
Although Matti’s interests are wide-ranging, I’ve always been particularly fond of essay “Franz Boas and the Humboldtian Tradition: From Volksgeist and Nationalcharakter to an Anthropological Concept of Culture.” In History of Anthropology, which absolutely nailed down connections and genealogies that we all knew a little about and really nail them down. More recently the “issue of American Anthropologist”:http://www.anthrosource.net/toc/aa/2004/106/3 he helped put together seems to me to be the definitive statement of a younger generation’s reaction against the excesses of postmodernism — a movement I might gloss “unnew anthropology” (to steal a term from James Boon) and in which I consider myself a member.
As a result I particularly appreciated his recent article in Anthropology and Humanism entitled “Anthropology Beyond Crisis: Toward an Intellectual History of the Extended Present”:http://www.anthrosource.net/toc/aa/2004/106/3. Not only is it a piece on the history of anthropology after 1942 (/me glances at oneman) but it is a very nice potted history of some of relationships between the earlier ‘crisis of anthropology’ of Hymes, Berreman, and (I was particularly glad to see Matti pick this up) Bob Scholte and the ‘writing culture’ stuff of the late 1980s. Like Regna Darnell (in her chapter on Writing Culture in Invisible Genealogies)
Matti is concerned here to demonstrate how the ‘writing culture’ crowd exhibit continuities with earlier anthropological work such as Hymes et. al. (Darnell goes further, seeming at times to simply consider them Radin warmed over). I find his argument persuasive, and agree with him that understanding the relation of these two movements is a valuable building block in “anthropology’s post-postmodernism redisciplinization.” And frankly, at a mere nine pages long, it is also a great quick read for people trying to get upto speed on the history of anthropological theory.
While I heartily reccomend Matti’s essay, I do have one question: if Darnell gives us a ‘usable past’ by reconstruing the Boasians, and if Matti traces continuities from the 1960s forward, then when were the Bad Old Days? This is not a rhetorical question. To oversimplify the history of American anthropology way too much, I wonder what it was about anthropology in the 40s and 50s that people were so upset about? I am thinking here of Linton and Redfield in particular, but perhaps a few others as well. Was there some sort of post-Boas red-blooded technocratic Science Of Man In The World Crisis-ism that we can locate as canonical?
This Bunzl character looks intriguing, but only because Alex does. On a tedious logistical note, your link for the Anthro and Humanism article is wrong. If you’re at U of Chicago, the link is:
http://www.anthrosource.net.proxy.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1525/ahu.2005.30.2.187?prevSearch=authorsfield%3A%28Bunzl%2CMatti%29
If not, and you’re not in the AAA, then the message (from the AAA) is apparently that you have no business reading this. Sad.
Yeah I know. I would have linked to the abstract if such an abstract was available to avoid the non-authorized from being bounced, but A&H doesn’t do abstracts, only the fulltext is available on AnthroSource.
Actually you should be able to view it at many anthropology campuses. I live on campus at my current institution and I can read it as could professors in their offices or people in the library.
anthro campuses should read university campuses
Since I received a sideways glance in this post, I feel it incumbent on me to comment 🙂 I’m more than happy to see Bunzl moving into the “extended present” — his work on Boas has been top-notch. I actually felt ashamed of myself for my own work on Boas’ Jewish influences (part I at http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/jewish_american_history/32804) after hearing Bunzl’s far more sophisticated and nuanced take at the AAAs a few years ago. His new piece brings a nice overview perspective to the theoretical shifts of the last 40 years, although as a lot of intellectual histories do, it presents history as embodied in books, as if _Writing Culture_ itself reasponded to _Orientalism_ and _Reinventing Anthropology_ responded to _A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term_. He does mention the influence of ’60s radicalism and the effect of the decolonization of many of anthropoogy’s fieldsites, but where are the practices of reinvented fieldworkers, where the historically embedded writers of these works, where the institutional shifts that undergirded anthropology’s expansion throughout the ’60s and ’70s and its diminishment since the Reagan years? Ok, ok, it’s 6 1/3 pages (9 *with* the bibliography) — more of a precis towards an in-depth history than a history itself.
In response to the last question — when were the bad old years — I think it has to depend at least in part on whether you think Darnell has been wholly successful in “reclaiming” a usable Boasianism. And, too, a great deal of the 40’s-50’s upheaval was institutional as much as ideational.
Oneman: you realize this brings the number of pieces written on post-1942 anthropology up to 11, don’t you 🙂
More seriously, have you looked at “Exotics at Hom” by Micaela de Leonardo? I thought it was quite good (in a sort of relentless, polemical sort of way) on anthro in the most recent decades.
Ok, point taken — there are more than 10 pieces of history of anthro dealing with the post-WWII era.
However. The kind of history that Stocking writes, or Suzuki, or a handful of others is exceedingly rare. The kind where the actions and interactions of people are described, that is. Far more common are pieces like Bunzl’s mentioned or Ortner’s “Theory in Anthropology Since the ’60s” — work that details the theoretical developments and how different theories or bodies of work relate to each other. There is nothing wrong with this kind of work, of course — ideas are important, and this kind of wider perspective can help revive or evn resuscitate work which has fallen by the wayside, when it’s done well, or inspire new developments — but it’s not the kind of work I think of as “history of anthropology”. Maybe that’s just a personal quibble, or maybe I need to sit down and put together a post on the subject.