Comments on: Factory, lab, guild, studio

By: Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » Two Styles in the Practice of Theory

Thu, 11 Jan 2007 00:30:31 +0000

[…] Sahlins, on the other hand, is notoriously individualistic and does not like being pinned down or described (in fact I am sort of afraid this description of his work will piss him off!). He has never—to the best of my knowledge—encouraged or even tolerated imitators. So if we were to use my earlier typology of academic departments Silverstein tends more to the ‘lab’ model (detractors would say ‘factory’) while Sahlins falls pretty squarely in the ‘studio’ end of the spectrum. It is ironic, but despite (or because of?) his enormous influence on the field, it is hard to imagine what a “Sahlinsian” monograph would be like since the only person who could write one would be Sahlins himself. […]

By: Patricia

Patricia — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 23:39:50 +0000

Thanks for the interesting post! My MA is a product of a “guild” system strained thru a “factory” cheesecloth. The dept I studied in wasn’t prestigious, but certainly opinionated, and Marvin Harris was their God. Guilded faculty attempted to stamp every student with their Harris World View, but it really didn’t sit well with me. Dissent as well as reading work besides Harris was adamently discouraged. Since I didn’t agree with Marvin Harris [more a Geertz fan], I paid the price. This system either stamps a dept’s singular view upon students, or causes them to rebel. I rebelled, making certain my graduate work included healthy doses of not only Geertz but Foucault and Levi-Strauss as well. My dept hated it. Needless to say, I am proud to have graduated sans *stamp*.

By: Disparate

Disparate — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 22:11:46 +0000

A Department Is Like…

Alex Golub on Academic Departments as Factory, lab, guild, studio
An interesting heuristic model. Not too dissimilar from Eric Raymond’s well-known The Cathedral and the Bazaar. More specific to academic departments but some of the same ideas.

D…

By: Ozma

Ozma — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 21:45:35 +0000

Good to think! Working in a department where every faculty member has both an office and a lab (some much larger than others….), and having been an undergraduate science major, I think the lab model is under-utilized in anthropology. Studies have shown graduate students in the natural and physical sciences are generally happier with their programs than those in the social sciences and the humanities and the main reason seems to be because of the more sociable set-up (around a lab) of graduate training on the sciencey-science side of things. I couldn’t help noticing that my friends who went on to pursue natural science PhDs finished much faster, in part because their graduate training quickly took the form of a job with a workplace (the lab) and a boss (their graduate supervisor) and they had to put in a real work week every week.

By: Rex

Rex — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 17:38:30 +0000

Singular they:
http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000872.php

By: Kerim

Kerim — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 12:22:51 +0000

Nicholas: Read this. Rex: Great post! I've often thought about how academia remains an essentially midieval institution, but I now realize that I may have overgeneralized from my own particular experience.

By: Nicholas Sanders

Nicholas Sanders — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 08:04:57 +0000

This may seem a bit harsh, but I simply could not get past the first paragraph of this entry – the switching from singular to plural and back, and back again, renders it quite unintelligible.