Q: Are any of the Savage Minds regular contributors tenured professors of anthropology?
A: I have no idea. You’d have to ask them. I believe a few are. The three most active contributors—Kerim, Oneman, and Myself—most definitely are not. We are just beginning our careers. This makes us either wet behind the ears pups or hip young professors, depending on what sort of value you place on age.
Q: How is linguistics different from anthropology?
A: In some senses there isn’t a clear difference. You might want to think of strongly technical linguistics at one end of a spectrum, and think of anthropology at the other. In the middle — or indeed, at most points along the spectrum except the extreme ends — there is a mutual interest in language as the cultural system that is most clearly systematic and amenable to study. Another way to think about this would be to say that ‘hardcore’ linguists tend to analyze language as system removed from it’s use in concrete speech situations, while ‘hardcore’ anthropologists examine topics with little relation to language use and focus on things that will be familiar to, say, nutritionists or demographers. The cases of overlap — which I’d say are the majority — involve understanding language not only in it’s systematic aspects, but how it functions in practice and how it is connected with larger cultural themes. In the United States, and in many other countries, linguistics and anthropology often developed within the same disciplines and departments.
Q: How is cultural studies different from anthropology?
A: Cultural studies (like comparative religion) is a discipline whose interest often ends up overlapping with anthropology’s. So in some cases the work seems quite similar. The genealogy of cultural studies, however, is quite different than anthropology — it is a discipline or movement that is much younger. In some ways, cultural studies uses the techniques of literary analysis to study things that are not literature or considered ‘high culture’. For this reason, some people consider it rootless, unscientific, and lacking in rigor. In fact the terms is often used perjoratively. There are some branches of anthropology that use similar techniques and to which the same critiques could be made. Other parts of anthropology, tend to be hostile to cultural studies and level these critiques at their colleagues. Of course, if one is critical of social science’s claims to objectivity and so forth, then this ‘softer’ approach will seem to be positive feature of cultural studies. I personally am not super-enthused about cultural studies myself. But that’s just me.
Q: I don’t have time to read all these posts because I am reading and writing scholarly articles and a book; do Savagemind posters publish books and articles, or is this all you do?
See “about” sections at right. Personally I am trying to finish writing two books, translate a difficult part of Deuteronomy, and keep my feet warm (these are all true, most urgently the feet!)
Again, I’ll let other Minds speak up on their own here. IN my case, I try to keep a relatively up-to-date list of representative pieces here:
http://alex.golub.name/log/things-ive-written/
I am trying to publish, teach, and stay connected to a scholarly community all the time. SM seems a good forum for that. I feel pretty honored to be included in this group of super-smart, super-serious (but not *too* serious) folks.
As I wrote in an earlier post, anthropological thought often bleeds into the everyday life of anthropologists. We reflect (too much sometimes!) all the time on our lives with the analytic lenses that anthropology sharpens. Wouldn’t a ‘blog’ be a good framework for making those reflections into something more than the paralyzing reflexivity to which we are subject as intellectuals?
I’m not super-enthused about cultural studies either, and I have a Ph.D. in it. 🙂 Seriously, though, your characterization of cultural studies is a good one, except that I’d add two common (though certainly not required) characteristics of cultural studies projects: they tend to interrogate power relations and they thus tend to have a political agenda.
I do enjoy many aspects of cultural studies, but as I’ve undertaken my own research projects, I’ve found a decided lack of models within cultural studies. My criticisms of cultural studies–at least as I’ve experienced it in the U.S.–are that it doesn’t focus enough on 18th- and 19th-century culture, that many of its projects could benefit from a broader and deeper sense of history, and it could do more with material culture.
I’m enjoying reading Savage Minds. Keep up the good work.
Re: research, along with teaching and the ever-present dissertation, I am currently editing a book on cold war anthropology which is rapidly approaching my publisher’s deadline so should be in press pretty soon. This project grew out of my dissatisfaction with the available literature I was reading for my dissertation — essentially, if I couldn’t find good references, I would “commission” them.
As Strong says, I think SM is an important part of my academic life, keeping me in touch with the larger academic community as well as keeping a non-disciplinary audience ever-present. This is especially important, I think, in terms of the “bleed” between disciplinary and everyday life that Strong mentions. In any discipline, there’s the tendency to only want to discuss Great Important Matters with the luminaries in your field who you know will understand you; being an SM’er, however inactive, means approaching the world not just as an anthropologist but as an anthropologist who may well try their hand at explaining the world to a popular audience.
Here here!
“lack of models within cultural studies”
That is programmatic. Translated to anthro terminology this means Grounded Theory.
Are we talking, perhaps, about the lack of hands-on experience, like that described by Matthew Crawford in Shopclass as Soulcraft?
Generalized assumptions however aren’t helpful to clarify the subject that is talked about. En ce qui concerne the academic project of Cultural Studies I propose either having a look at its origins (= read Hall) or it’s contemporary representations (= read Grossberg).
I won’t argue with anyone who criticizes what has been conducted under the Cultural Studies label in between.