As for “good but merely competent work”… I don’t mean to sound obnoxious here, but I have absolutely no worries that there is plenty of it out there. Some days it feels like I review most of it for various journals. Check any cutting edge monograph and the bibliography will be filled with things that the author is citing merely because it appears to be about the same subject– even if there is nothing gleaned from it. This hardly counts as “accumulation of knowledge” but by contrast it doesn’t mean that the only thing out there is cutting edge work. It has shaped that cutting edge monograph in subtle and important ways… indeed I wish there was less anxiety about citing everything that has ever been done on a subject and more risk-taking in terms of only using the things that help form a work. quite frankly the same is true in science and engineering. There are tons and tons of papers out there that are compentent, but do not represent breakthroughs… how do scientists know which is which? culture my boy, culture 🙂

You sound like a great teacher. My mentors at Cornell were more in the “Jump in and see what happens. See you in a couple of years, hope you have something interesting to say” vein. Or perhaps it was me, wanting to do my own thing and insufficiently aware that some things might be more salable in the academic job market.

But, enough of trips down memory lane. I agree pretty much absolutely with what Marilyn Strathern says about improvisation in the field and also with your conclusion that there is no one best way to do anthropology.

That, however, leaves us with a puzzle much like that confronts critics and connoisseurs of art. How do you discriminate between the genuine breakthroughs, the good but merely competent, and schlock?

If I understand you correctly, you are constantly pushing your students toward the frontiers where the current conversation seems most interesting, where breakthroughs seem most possible. That’s a process I think I understand. It is characteristic of all the good creative directors I’ve worked with in the advertising business. Their focus is always on push-the-envelope innovation.

That raises a second question. If anthropology has no room for good but merely competent work, have we ruled out a priori the steady accumulation of knowledge? So that, at the end of the day, anthropology becomes yet another fashion industry, endlessly pursuing what’s “in” this season, with occasional bouts of nostalgia resurrecting ideas from the past?

“What research strategy could possibly collect information on unpredictable outcomes? Social anthropology has one trick up its sleeve: the deliberate attempt to generate more data than the investigator is aware of at the time of collection. Anthropologists deploy open-ended, non-linear methods of data collection which they call ethnography; I refer particularly to the nature of ethnography entailed in anthropology’s version of fieldwork. Rather than devising research protocols that will purify the data in advance of analysis, the anthropologist embarks on a participatory exercise which yields materials for which analytical protocols are often devised after the fact. In the field the ethnographer may work by indirection, creating tangents from which the principal subject can be observed (through ‘the wider social context’). But what is tangent at one stage may become central at next.”