A report from The Stanford Daily:
Nine months after the University decided to combine the Anthropological Sciences and Cultural and Social Anthropology Departments, some professors continue to voice concerns about the administration’s handling of the merger…
What should have concerned ‘some professors’ is the original handling of ‘the split’, back in the good ol’ days when Condi Rice was provost and professiorial egos were somewhat enlarged. Frankly, it is all to the good that this disgraceful incident was unceremoniously put behind us by reuniting the Anthropology Department as it was and always should have been.
I actually wonder what good can possibly come about, by forcing an unwieldy number of people who can’t stand one another to remain together. It sure wouldn’t work for the Yanomamo, and I don’t understand the basis for thinking it should work for the Stanford Anthropamo.
The Duke split was really unrelated to the Stanford split. They had a lot of cultural anthropologists and a lot of primatologists/anatomists. There were no archaeologists, who have been known to serve as a kind of intellectual bridge, and if memory serves, they had nobody in bio-anthro who actually studied humans. The department of Biological Anthropology and Anatomy was constituted around 1989 in the medical school, and tried to model itself on a medical department, and I think was largely unsuccessful. They are in the process now of being rethought as “another” biology department in Arts and Sciences.
Since these were interesting ideas in the field twenty years ago, Harvard is getting around to it now.
I’m not really wedded to the concept of the 1,2,3,4 fields, since that really was born in a pre-modern American historical moment (comprehensively othering the Indians in the late 19th century). However, I am wedded to the concept of anthropology as an anti-reductive endeavor, which necessarily incorporates critical approaches to biological and cultural ideas, and a broad base of knowledge.
Actually I think the four-field structure of some of the larger departments has contributed to part of the problem in the field. We all know that there is some relevance of ancient bones, DNA, and monkey doings to anthropology. But a couple of generations ago, as anthropology departments were rapidly growing, a lot of people to occupy those faculty slots were recruited from cognate fields, like human genetics, human biology, animal behaviour, medical anatomy, etc. Some actually learned anthropology; many did not. They continued to think of themselves as real scientists, or even as biologists stuck in with a bunch of anti-science navel-gazers. They were then in the position of reproducing themselves, and, valuing competent biologists over competent anthropologists, they began populating the major departments with bio-anthropologists who, like themselves, knew little anthropology and had little interest in anthropology.
When sociobiology came along in the 70s and evolutionary psychology in the 90s, these are the people that said, “At last, science! Woo-hoo!” And they were busily training the next generation of bio-anths. Bio-anths who think of themselves as anthropologists became rarer, and also began to have less of a direct impact on graduate students. So now you read Henry Harpending’s review of Susie McKinnon’s little book in AE (I’ve read the review and the rebuttal, but not the book itself, which I expect I will enjoy reading someday), and you ask yourself, How can any knowledgeable person say stuff like this??? And then you realize he’s in the National Academy of Sciences, and is one of the highest ranking members of our field. He’s the one, for example, that Nicholas Wade relies on for the idea that Jews are the products of natural selection for intelligence.
Maybe you find that very depressing. The solution is to aggressively participate in the recruitment of bio-anths yourselves, and frankly to vet them carefully (at the AAA meetings!) to see if they actually even know anything about anthropology. You will need to ask them what they’ve read in anthropology lately, and what they think the hot issues are, and what they think of them. Believe me, you will identify candidates who look good on paper, and who think that the only anthropology worth knowing is by Napoleon Chagnon, Derek Freeman, and Richard Dawkins. Whether you want to hire them is your own business, but at least you won’t be surprised when you get them.
When we recruited a junior bio-anth a few years ago, perhaps half of the applicants for the position couldn’t even consider going to the AAA, not only on the off-chance of finding some intellectual stimulation there, but not even to look for a job in an anthropology department! If you are a cultural-anthro looking for a bio-anthro colleague to interact with productively, you are probably unlikely to find such a person coming out of the “split” departments. They simply haven’t been educated to see you as an interesting colleague.
The most interesting thing percolating just below the surface of our inter-subdisciplary rift, IMHO, is that the really interesting “biological” anthropology is coming from medical anthropology and biosociality – people like Rayna Rapp, Gisli Palsson, Karen-Sue Taussig, Margaret Lock, Sarah Franklin, etc. – whose work is unfortunately not widely read by biological anthropologists.
I agree with you on the 4-flelds, we don’t need that 19th century left over. But the fragmentation of anthropology and the abandonment of a committment to a synthetic approach to human experience I do lament. That is what allows a class of bio anthros who do not think of themselves as anthropologists and who come up with such genetic reductionist, pseudo-darwinist nonesense as Evo Psych. That’s why I think even a shotgun marriage is a better arrangement until the field comes to its senses, (which probably won’t happen in the US.)
I really think that a lot of this crap is perpetuated at the graduate level. When you have people of any discipline who aren’t even willing to “hang out” with people of other disciplines, that’s a big problem. I’ve heard many horror stories about departments in which grad students from various subfields will refuse to hang out with each other, even if some people are making a concerted effort to hang out with people outside their. I understand if people have personality conflicts with others but it is extremely problematic to not give people the benefit of the doubt just because you know their subfield. It takes a very special level of “assholeness” to write people off without ever interacting with them.
I feel lucky to be in a department where I can go to the bar and relax with people of all disciplines. While there are personality conflicts and “factions,” they aren’t drawn along disciplinary lines. This is the way it should be.
Whoops, sorry for the typos.
“even if some people are making a concerted effort to hang out with people outside their.” should have the word “sub-field” added to the end.
Alas, the news is bad, my friend. Ten years from now, when you have a family and a very different metabolism, you won’t be able to go out for beers with your colleagues and discuss the critical intellectual issues of the day quite so readily. The time to act is now. Organize a Thursday afternoon discussion group (with beer – graduate students across all subfields will not turn down beer, and that’s a cross-cultural universal) to discuss some key texts that everyone can read, and that are actually shaping public opinion on anthropological issues. Here are some suggestions: Jarhead Diamond’s “Germs Guns and Steel” or “Collapse” – there’s a thread about the former elsewhere on this list. (Norm Yoffee organized a AAA session last year on the latter which showed that there is no archaeological evidence that anybody has ever followed the scheme Diamond lays out.) Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” (Is it possible to write a book about religion without the word “Durkheim” appearing in the index? Yes!) Likewise there are books about memes and cultural evolution that make no references to Leslie White. Is it possible they’re missing something? On the good side, there are things like “Why America’s Top Pundits are Wrong,” edited by Gusterson and Besteman (who sound like a law firm, but are really anthropologists, and damn fine ones).
I think they (whoever the others are at your institution) will come. And if they don’t come, publicly taunt them until they do. At very least, you’ll have an enlightening discussion group amongst yourselves, not to mention a party.