Cocktail conversation in Berkeley, California. ‘Sarah’ (not her real name) is also an anthropologist. We are introduced. She says, with sarcasm: ‘So you’re the “Oceanic anthropologist.”‘ Her tone is demeaning. Why, yes, I study Papua New Guinea. What do you study? ‘World music.’ Neat, I say. Will you be attending the AAA meeting this fall? ‘Yes, I’ll be the anthropologist not wearing a native artifact.’ I think to myself: charmed.
Some of us can probably relate encounters not dissimilar from the above. There are anthropologists who appear to regard other anthropologists who study people in tribal settings with suspicion and even with disdain. I’m told this has been true for decades. But I sometimes wonder: What motivates someone who regards anthropology’s aesthetic and topical proclivities with suspicion become an anthropologist? Why consign themselves to a discipline they are apparently ashamed of?
I wonder if the sarcasm wasn’t defensive….driven by the ambivalence and possibly weak job market positioning resulting from a topic, world music, that may sound “with it” in current cultural studies terms but risks being seen as an academic lightweight without the stomach for “real”, a.k.a., more prototypically anthropological, fieldwork.
Easy – Anthro is where the big bucks are at.
Ha ha. A friend of mine used to answer the question, “Why anthropology?” with the response: for the money. She was joking of course.
Defensiveness all around: those of us who work in postcolonial settings are not unaware of anthropologists’ complicated roles in relation to administration. So we are a bit defensive too.
I note the potentially gendered aspect of defensiveness; is ‘real’ fieldwork macho?
Anthropologists generally seem to have an extremely negative view of their own disincline, probably because it spends so much effort consciously invalidating itself.
Has she been to the AAA lately? Very few anthropologists are dressed in anything remotely “native” unless you consider Land’s End, LL Bean, or J Crew to be “native”…
Whether anthropologists have a negative view of their discipline may depend on which anthropologists we are talking about. I vividly remember being, a few years back, in Seattle where the meetings of the American Ethnological Society and the Society for Applied Anthropologist were both being held on the same weekend, only a few blocks from each other. The mood at the AES was grim. Conversation in the halls seemed to return repeatedly to gloomy predictions of the imminent demise of the discipline. In contrast, the mood at the SfAA meeting was bouyant and businesslike, with participants eager to share what they had learned applying anthropology in settings ranging from hospitals and schools to the World Bank and advertising agencies. I noted that at the AES most of those encountered in the halls were anxiously searching for academic jobs or promotion. At the SfAA, the presenters were people who had found jobs and material validation for their career choices in all sorts of non-academic settings and students who expected to follow their example. They were not, for the most part, getting rich. They did, however, share the experience of having what they did for a living approved and respected by non-anthropologists as well as members of the anthropological tribe.
I think the macho issue in fieldwork is interesting, at least in so far as ‘shame’ between anthros is concerned. My fieldwork concerns a reasonably macho subject matter (forest politics) but in a much less macho setting – I’m interviewing conservation biologists and foresters and etc. in a well-off university town, living in a comfortable little house with my wife and kid and a DSL connection. Some of my classmates are in grass huts as we speak – how am I going to swap fieldwork stories when we get back? When it comes to writing the work and the resulting theory I don’t think what I’m doing will seem any less ‘real’ than any more classical anthro fieldwork, but in the realm of corridor talk it does leave me feeling a little self-conscious, at least.
Still, I’m thinking that the person in Strong’s anecdote sounds less like she’s specifically embarrassed by her discipline, and more like she’s dealing with the sort of refracted self-loathing many of us go through in academic training. We’ve given up a lot to spend years dealing with poverty and menial tasks in hopes of being allowed to compete madly with our peers for a handful of stressful low-paying jobs. It tends to color everything, and snide jabs at the research and fashion of our peers are right up there with heavy drinking as grad student coping mechanisms.
A related theme is the shame of being an academic, as opposed to being (variously) a person with a ‘real’ job, an activist, or a creative artist. I see a lot of self-deprecation around that in my peers and the people I read as well. It’s refreshing to see folks like those on Savage Minds, for example, who are thrilled with the chance to be academics and believe in the real value of what they do.
of course, you are supposed to have an ethnic trinket from outside :your: particular area, like an wearing a peruvian vest or a tibetan hat.
i would agree that there aren’t as many of these among the graduate students at my institution, but there are still a good number among the faculty. it seems to me it was worse in the late 1980s (my only possible comparison, sorry)
i bet among fellow “world music’ aficionados she’s seen far too many ethnic artifact/accessories….
Yeah, since when does any actual anthropologist call it “world music?” I guess it’s OK if she meant it like, ethnomusicology, but that’s not gonna fly if she’s talking about the stuff on the Putamayo CDs you buy at the checkout at Whole Foods.
I woulda thought the Putamayo stuff to be prototypical world music…
But I got a similar (over)reaction several years ago when I said I was doing a PhD in “cultural studies”–a fellow student nearly bit my head off as she decried my failure to belong to a “real discipline” and bemoaned my imminent hungry and dirty gutter-residence.
I didn’t bother to say I could still play an orthodox anthropologist when required to do so. I was just blown away by the vehemence of her misplaced concern.
(Does this sound defensive?)
I’m guessing that this is what Andrew Abbott would call a “classic fractionation attack”. Anthropologists separate themselves from other disciplines as being the left and oppositional discpline, but then this division is made within the division itself — so that Strong is labeled as insufficiently left and oppositional because he studies subsistence farmers, which is automatically assumed to be essentializing and orientalist.
I’m sure that at yet another level of scale this distinction repeats itself such at that woman in question will be accused of being exoticizing and orientalist for studying world music by some researcher whose program is even more outre, and so, fractal-like, it goes on forever now matter how closely you zoom in on it. “Anything you can do, I can do meta.”
Oh also — fashion at AAA does tend, imho, to the idiosyncratic and ethnic in a “My adopted grandmother gave this bag to me the day I left the field!!!” sort of way.
Isn’t much of what people are talking about here another version of the methods/theory distinction found in area studies/linguistics/physics/, etc? To be specific, doesn’t it assume that the balance between learning to do practical work thought of as a means, and abstract thinking thought of as an end, is a zero-sum game?
Rex: It doesn’t sound to me like this woman was claiming to be leftist or oppositional. If anything, she sounds like she is more concerned with her cultural capital than her politics…
And I really think the “ethnic garb” stuff is out at the AAA. At least compared with a decade ago. Maybe we should run a AAA fashion section this year? Does CTaylor want to come and shoot the photos?
Really interesting read, guys! It invokes some strong feelings in me. I’ll try to put these in a non-cynical and perhaps useful (?) train of prose.
I’ll say straight up that I’m Australian, living and working in Australia as an anthropologist (have been employed in anthro for 9 yrs). My reflections and experiences relate to the Australian experience.
On wearing expressions of one’s objects of research focus:
I don’t really see how it’s different from wearing a Cross to signify you’re a Catholic, or a Pentagram to signify you’re Pagan. Or, for that matter, donning the latest fashion or an old hessian sack!
However, it does raise in me the same cynicism and disdain in me that it did in the ‘world music’ afficionado.
I though about this for a while -why I feel this way- and my thoughts went something like this:
The wearing of trinkets invokes in me the applied vs academic divide, which is very strong in Australian anthropology (see below).
However, it also raises the idea of professionalism vs non-professionalism; by this I mean the divide between grad students dressing in a relaxed manner and professional anthros dressing in a … well… professional manner. I must say that a lot of anthros in Australia are …umm.. relaxed, if not downright sloppy in their dressing. They also take on this tired old left (note I said ‘old left’!!!)advocacy/adversarial position against so many things (ie government, media, markets), adopting the ideologies of an era when most of them where not even born.
So basically, I resent that people are living in the past, when the ‘left’ is so re-vitalised, and we should be embracing the amazing cultural changes and shifts around us with a fresh and sharp eye.
Maybe I am wrong about this, but hey, when I started to analyse my feelings, this is what I came up with, so please don’t flame me as this is all subjective, inner dialogue!
On the Australian Anthropological scene:
Thanks to Aboriginal land rights and native title, it’s not that difficult to find a job in applied anthropology in Australia – especially in Central and Northern Australia. Land Councils (who generally prepare land and native title claims) snap up young, post-Honours students with great gusto, harness their ideology to tired leftist 1970s indigenous advocacy (read: modified white paternalism), use them up, burn them out and spit them out 12-18 months later so that they leave anthropology altogether, or high-tail it overseas.
Alteratively, there are few positions in academia, and some anthropology departments have disappeared or been amalgamated with others (excluding older, established univerisities).
So my point is: there is a sharp divide in Australian anthropology. The academics tend to look down their noses at the applieds, and the applied say they are out doing work that matters. In my humble (and probably misinformed) opinion, we need both kinds of anthro.
However:
I do recall being very disenchanted with anthropology when giving my PhD mid-term review, and being endlessly harangued by another post-grad about Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity (his thesis topic) and its relation to my thesis topic (conservation agencies and their approach to joint management of protected areas). Husserl and this student’s persistant questions about its relationship to my research (none, nothing, zippo!) seemed to sum up for me someting of why applied anthropologists curl their lips at academia. So many PhD topics are well… not particularly conducive to gaining you employment in a post-PhD world (expatriate Timorese Youth choirs in Eastern Sydney, for example). I know, I know … a PhD doesn’t have to be instrumental, but I guess if it’s tied to putting food in your mouth, a roof over your head and clothes on your back, then perhaps it should be something you at least consider.
But again, maybe this is just my take on the world, and it’s all wrong, wrong ,wrong.
I’d welcome any reflections…
Aston —
Good (as they say over in your neck of the woods) on you mate. For the record, do you know the work of Britta Duelke? Probably the best place to go if you want to see stuff on native land tenure in Oz AND Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity.