8 thoughts on “The new ASA blog”

1. Thanks, Rex, for pointing us to the new ASA blog. It looks very interesting, indeed. But while I’m here, let me add a thought concerning the “Why can’t American anthropologists write well?” meme. Until this month, I would have swallowed it with hardly a thought. This month, however, I took a look at some recent issues of American Ethnologist (Vol 34 No. 3 Aug 07) and Cultural Anthropology (Vol 22 No 4 Nov 07). The special sections in both, the AE Forum: Futures We Envision in the former and Essay Cluster: The Coke Complex in the latter are dynamite. The topics are fascinating and the writing far superior to the hackneyed, cookie-cutter academic writing I’ve expected to find in Anthro Journals. I use this opportunity to offer public kudos to the editors of both journals and find myself wondering if there is something stirring again in American anthropology.

2. Well of course I think American anthros write well — my prose is breathtakingly sublime, for instance 😉 — but I do think that they have trouble producing the sort of TLS/NYRB pieces that the Brits turn out so well.

3. What do you think? Is this a question of “Can’t” or “Won’t”? Of lack of training as journalistic writers or, instead, a predictable consequence of a job-and-tenure system in which you score points for grinding out pieces that conform to existing journal styles and the need to cite everyone who might conceivably be offended if their work isn’t mentioned? Whichever the case, the result is a contributing factor to anthropologists’ growing failure to connect with the public at large.

4. It is an interesting question and I honestly don’t know the answer. It might be that professional requirements don’t leave time for outside work. It might also be that American anthropologists have a sort of lingering anti-intellectualism — you know, that playing their banjos is ‘authentic’ but that ‘writing about it’ is a necessary evil. Or it may be the class background of the anthropologists, or their fear of appearing to belong to a certain class. Or perhaps it has to do with poor editorial choice on the part of AN, or other publications?

   Geertz wrote for the NYRB, Micaela di Leonardo writes for, what is it, Atlantic Monthly? And of course there are people who write well. But somehow it just never happens.

5. It would be nice if Anthropology’s PR problem rested on something as easy to fix as writing ability, but I’m skeptical…

   Although there are some scholars who make a splash in the mass media (e.g. Gould or Pinker), it seems to me that most public familiarity with research and academic work is mediated by journalists, and science journalists in particular. So I’m skeptical that the quality of anthropological writing per se plays a major role anthropologists’ lack of connection with the public at large.

   After all, articles in physics journals are hardly well written, but there is significant public interest in some areas of physics.

   Rather, the issue seems to me to be that journalists can find attractive stories of ‘discovery’ and ‘progress’ in other disciplines easily enough, but that such stories are a lot harder to come by in anthropology. (See previous threads here at SM on the dubious position of ‘progress’ in anthropology.)

6. I think it might be useful to separate out anthropology’s presence in the larger public sphere on the one hand from the more specific question of what role it does or does not play in the wider realm of ‘chattering classes’ or ‘intellectual’ rags. Or perhaps, to return to the original point, the different genre expectations of AN versus AT. AT seems much more along the NYRB end of the continuum, albeit also with a very focused professional community and a lively correspondence section. AN seems more like the in-house newsletters produced by the mining and hydrocarbon companies I study: “someone in department X did interesting thing Y this week.”

7. Lev makes a good point. It may be worth observing that the journalists find hard science stories easier to frame in terms of grand narratives of which recent anthropology has been highly critical. But Rex’s point about “a very focused professional community and a lively correspondence section” are also important. The resemblance he notes between AN and corporate newsletters cuts to the bone.

8. Are you ready for the native’s point of view yet? As a former contributing editor to AN, I can testify that there is little “editorial choice” at play. The section editors, and I imagine the editor in chief, are constantly scrambling for content. Hardly anyone volunteers anything to, say, the Society for Cultural Anthropology column or the Middle East Section column. Editors hunt for writers, generally junior scholars hungry to have their work in print. Except in rare circumstances, prominent senior scholars don’t bother because they don’t need this venue to participate in shaping the discipline. (They have their own editorships, departments, centers, positions on boards, etc.)

   The real difference between AN and AT is that the former is, in fact, a corporate newsletter, and there’s nothing about that that “cuts to the bone” except in being quite obvious. What makes AT different is that it’s peer-reviewed. That means that publishing in AT “counts” professionally, and the journal thus has a far broader range of submissions from which it can select, and a greater ability to force authors to revise.

   In the UK, the academic economy is ruled by the RAE (Research Assessment Exercise), a procedure that allocates funding to academic departments on the basis of faculty publication (and, some day soon, on the basis of journal citation). This means that faculty at all levels are pressured to produce far more regularly than they are in the US, since it’s not just the fate of individual careers but the fate of programs that’s at stake. So publications like AT have that working for them as well: although peer reviewed, the articles are shorter than those in JRAI or many other professional journals. This makes AT attractive to American, Swedish, etc. scholars as well. And, let’s face it. What American scholar doesn’t want to publish in a British journal? (see AT 11(4):8-13). It spells words with extra vowels and lets us pretend we have fancy accents.

   The format of AN and AT articles is the giveaway to what’s really at stake here: scholars wanting to think of themselves as intellectuals rather than working stiffs who might be interested in corporate newsletters. AT has endnotes and bibliographies, the scholarly apparatus that makes us feel special and happy and at home.

   I’m guessing that the decline of the public anthropologist (whether of Meadian or Geertzish mien) has to do not only with the difficulty of framing anthropological stories in the press, but with the rise of privately funded think tanks with aggressive PR operations who can place their second-rate gabblers on talk shows and in op-ed columns nearly at will (again, editors and producers are constantly scrambling for content, and will take what comes along).

   That doesn’t solve the NYRB puzzle, but in most academic departments I’d imagine that publication there wouldn’t “count” either. As our British friends might advise, look to the social structure of the profession rather than the culture of writing for answers.

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