Kerim, what I find interesting in your initial post, and also in the discipline and beyond currently, are the range of new meanings given to “ethnography” as a noun. Ethnography is no longer (just) the written monograph, but has become a method unto itself, often one quite distinct from what ethnographic fieldwork might look like (i.e., observation in a natural setting vs. participant-observation). How does it change things to say we do ethnography vs. do ethnographic fieldwork, to shorthand a noun for an adjective? I can hear my own voice speaking to students as I type this, saying you need to “do ethnography” but in reflecting on things what I really mean is ethnographic research.

Thanks for the prompt on this, and I think you’re right in posing the question in terms of method, subject method, and the discipline–good food for thought.

…it takes a long time for society (and individuals) to absorb contrary or non-reinforcing complex ideas; not so long to absorb self-reinforcing narratives.”

I think this statement is a very important, and currently overlooked, aspect of the debate. This lies not in university politics, but between academics and practicing folks. Anthropology as currently taught is a very chauvinistic, and elitist discipline. I think there are many academics that are afraid to leave, because they are afraid of having to deal with people that just can’t come to their level in understanding complexity. Some academics entering the applied world often can’t deal with the fact that they actually have to contribute to solutions, and work on teams, and answer questions; that people get so frustrated with them that they either fire them, or lose faith in what we can bring to the table.

I can promise you that the above statement is not only wrong, but totally without evidence. It’s a narrative that only exists in our minds. It was in my mind to when I was a student, but I was cured very quickly. In fact, I think it’s us that have trouble dealing with the fact that people understand complexity all too well, but that they are also busy actually dealing with it on a day-to-day basis. It’s not only lazy, but damaging to assume you know what’s going on in complex situation in simple, pomo-leftist terms. I’d be happy to give ya’ll detailed first hand accounts of the kind of complexity that good, well-intentioned people have to deal with in making hard choices in the world. The politics of univ depts is closer to high school politics, than it is actual politics.
It’s easy to sit in the cheap seats and toss shit at others. People with other educational backgrounds are not stupid. Hell, I’ve worked with people without degrees that I’d rather have on my team than PhD anths. I can get the global thinking without the attitude.
I think much of the heat over this, applied work, or even the HTS can be boiled down to simplistic narratives of either stupid people or evil people, misapplying or misusing anthropology. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I think I’ll clarify more of what I mean, with some detailed examples in a Part II, blog post on applied work on Ethnography.com.

can you point to some examples of work more recent than Geertz and Levi-Strauss (both of whom were, at least, public intellectuals on what I think of as the New York Review of Books circuit) that has actually changed public opinion on some important issue?

This, and Strong’s response with some names of contemporary good work, brings up two recurring issues for me:

1) anthro is beleaguered in some institutions, and ignored by the public, mostly because it doesn’t want to help the status quo and no one likes to have themselves problematized… in other words, what other disciplines have public intellectuals influencing public opinion? Economics and sociology, whose pop sci books, articles, and public figures, tend to support the status quo with all they say. Also evo-psych, which also tends to reinforce privilege.

2) I’ve heard it said a few times that it seems to take 40-60 years for anthro work to percolate into general public consciousness. e.g., Avatar is stuck back in the mid 20th C.

Maybe #1 is part of the reason for #2 – it takes a long time for society (and individuals) to absorb contrary or non-reinforcing complex ideas; not so long to absorb self-reinforcing narratives.

In understanding human variation, it’s pretty clear that in-group/out-group dynamics are formed not due to a lack of variation among in-group members, but by defining one group in some opposition to another. Without science that last statement would never be more than intuition, BTW. So, let’s strip away that which we are not, and it’s should be clear what anth isn’t.

We are not, for example, journalists, which is seems many anthropologists would like to be. We don’t just tell people what happened in one place and time in unconnected terms but, using the above example of social theory, look for patterns and similarities across culture, time and place, in order to predict and test. That is a difference of science, not discursive induction alone. Part of the problem comes from academics who don’t work with people outside the discipline, which has a bit of a superiority complex. There are plenty of people can can tell a great story about what’s ‘really going on in a place’, from an ‘insider’s point-of-view’. I’ve seen people without graduate degrees, or social science backgrounds, write amazing articles that could easily rival anything in AA. They can’t, however, create a proper research design for systematic data gathering and preplanned analysis, using theory as a guide. Two philosophers can argue forever with each other, precisely because they don’t have a way to test what they are saying in a way that is credible to everyone.

The amazing intuition of individual anthropologists to figure out what’s going on in a single place or situation, doesn’t add to the discipline as a whole. All those anthros that seem to do just that whose names are getting thrown around, were all still classically trained and still attempted to contribute to the discipline as a whole. This is why even if some individual academics are not themselves scientists, the discipline must be. The best jazz players usually know all the rules well enough to choose to break them; whereas, I’m not convinced that some anthros that get by on their own inductive intuition, like any smart person can do, ever bothered to learn the rules well enough to consciously break them.

From my limited experience, just as the rhetoric of multidisciplinary engagement is reaching a fever pitch within many aspects of (at least) American Academic culture, a counter effort is going on to increasingly redefine the boundaries of each discipline. The next result has been a number of very interesting young scholars whose work is fundamentally and deeply anthropological ending up landing outside the discipline because they don’t fit neatly enough into perceived disciplinary boundaries.

Couple this with the increasing competition for limited resources on campus (a topic brought up in a previous post) and the discipline’s continued struggle with the loss of “culture” and “ethnography” as a unique differentiators (though I am not claiming for a moment, that either is or should be unique to anthropology) and it’s easy to see where at least some of this angst is coming from.

I think that the reason that Astrophysicists

“get their share of both attention and money without burdening themselves with the mandate”

is that they’re differentially situated in the reproduction of the social world that we live in. Anthropology, at this moment, isn’t particularly central to state power (warts and all), while astrophysics has all kinds of direct implications for the reproduction of the nation-states in which it is practiced (defence and surveillance pop into my head). The state can tolerate a level of paradigmatic pluralism and discord in anthropology that would be unthinkable in astrophysics. Hence, we get our own little crisis of definition, while they get DOD, NSF, and NASA money.

However, I don’t see how that matters to the present discussion. If anthropology is in decline, it isn’t because of a decision taken at the November 2010 AAA conference… evidently, if your take is that anthropology doesn’t get good PR, this has been a problem for a very long time. As we’ve been fond of noting elsewhere on SM, it’s been a problem since, say, 1935:

/2008/03/03/anthropology-out-of-date-since-1935/

But, going on to your second point, if it is true that, “What matters is the work that anthropologists are actually doing,” can you point to some examples of work more recent than Geertz and Levi-Strauss (both of whom were, at least, public intellectuals on what I think of as the New York Review of Books circuit) that has actually changed public opinion on some important issue?

And yeah, @John is right. If we can’t define our discipline in a simple, concise way, we not only have a problem, but we also have no right to take up the public’s time or money.

It’s really not that hard to do. Sense 1 from the OED article is quite succinct: “The science of man, or of mankind, in the widest sense.” “I study human variation” is concise, as well.

Regardless of the degree of difficulty, astrophysicists get their share of both attention and money without burdening themselves with the mandate.

Speaking from a department that is going through this exact problem, I think Kerim has hit the nail on the head here. At an institutional level it makes sense that they would want each department to have a “unique selling proposition,” and it’s not easy to convince people that breadth of approach fits that bill.

That sounds just fine to me, though I would also hasten to add that AAA does not in fact uniquely define anthropology globally. (There are other distinct traditions, and it is a bit US-centric to worry about the repercussions of this AAA debate for ‘anthropology’ as a science.)

Generally, I think the importance of anthropological work for the public is negligibly influenced by planning documents. What matters is the work that anthropologists are actually doing.

And yeah, @John is right. If we can’t define our discipline in a simple, concise way, we not only have a problem, but we also have no right to take up the public’s time or money.