@John: so when you write “To succeed you have to be a hustler with a gift for gab and spinning minor insights into what looks like a big deal.” You’re saying we _have_ become like bench scientists? 🙂

The new academia is no place for someone who will need a long time to digest large amounts of either quantitative or qualitative evidence to produce something solid. To succeed you have to be a hustler with a gift for gab and spinning minor insights into what looks like a big deal.

I want to think that doesn’t have to be the case. Where else are the primary documents going to be edited for publication and the dictionaries of languages with 250 speakers going to be put together (neither of which tends to garner as many tenure points as does a single peer-reviewed journal article, I am told)? I want to think that some of those self-promoters are only doing the work of getting their foot in the door for their big project and that they won’t succumb to their own cleverness. But you know what they say about the monkey house…

One must remember, too, that the structure and demands of academia were changing. Had I been born in, say, 1941 instead of 1944, I would very likely have wound up a tenured professor, not such a big deal in the sixties when a couple of articles in reputable journals and being an amicable colleague was sufficient to achieve tenure. By the time my tenure decision was made and I was off the academic track, the baby boom-driven expansion of higher education was ending, conditions were stiffening and the clueless, tactless, self-centered young prick I was didn’t do himself any favors. Everything I’ve heard or read about sense suggests that the academic marketplace has only gotten worse. People have to work insanely hard even to be considered for tenure, and with lots of talented people competing for every tenured position, the smallest perceived character flaws can be a guillotine in waiting. This perception lies behind my analysis of the interpretive turn. The new academia is no place for someone who will need a long time to digest large amounts of either quantitative or qualitative evidence to produce something solid. To succeed you have to be a hustler with a gift for gab and spinning minor insights into what looks like a big deal. And, like I said, it is much, much easier to write critique than do what serious scholarship requires.

That said, there are corners of even anthropology where good stuff is produced. A lot of good work has been done in East Asia, where Asian studies folk from different disciplines often collaborate and read each other’s stuff. Work like Ted Bestor’s _Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World_ or Ellen Oxfeld’s _Blood, Sweat and Mahjong_ haven’t made any huge theoretical waves — they are too solidly focused on detailed empirical data—but I am confident that both will continue to be read fifty or a hundred years from now, when the current buzzwords are dust in history’s ash bin.

How did work like this get done? Recall the Vietnam War, the years when it looked like “Japan as No. 1” was the fate of the world economy, the emergence of China as the world’s factory, the world’s largest market for automobiles and a whole lot of other stuff, and a serious new contender for super power status (Why was it, I wonder, that the Western news services appear to have totally ignored China’s latest effort in space, the flawless flight of three astronauts and a smooth as silk docking with China’s own space station, just last week?) Can you say corporate and political interest? In this part of the world, academia has not been immune from the funding squeeze and the crisis of too many graduates pursuing too few jobs, but the downturn has, in relative terms, only begun and in some areas, business anthropology in China, for example, signs of growth are still perceptible.

The outcome of the interpretive turn wasn’t a paradigm at all, let alone a post-paradigm. It was, in the best sense, finding a license to pursue interesting hobbies and acquire a bricolage of interesting bits of knowledge […] loosely clustered around knowing a bit more than most people did about some part of the world where we’d spent a year or two, privileged to poke around and ask questions about whatever seized our imagination.

Hmm. Everyone seems so excited about a life spent making that small contribution to that grandiose aspiration when they go off to do fieldwork. Most do when they return, too. But from what I have seen, most of those who make it into a tenure track end up recapitulating what you describe here. Could it be that what they always wanted was something more conventional and comfortable? Or is it more about the structure and demands of academia pushing people towards that?

There may be a clue here in, “But I think there are probably other reasons as well — like a lack of computing power which stymied the development of their work. What’s more, the program that a lot of ethnoscientists were pushing required a lot of training and a lot of specialization.” It was much, much easier to go literary, pontificate about “theory” and cherry-pick anecdotes for a living. Much safer, too, for career-building, until the academic bubble burst. After all, whipping off a few pages of “critique” is so, so much easier than the hard work of crunching numbers by hand or learning enough about seriously alien languages and customs to make a small but solid contribution to a collective enterprise with grandiose aspirations to understand everything.

The outcome of the interpretive turn wasn’t a paradigm at all, let alone a post-paradigm. It was, in the best sense, finding a license to pursue interesting hobbies and acquire a bricolage of interesting bits of knowledge — a bit about African folklore here, a bit about Chinese bronzes there, rice paddies, baboons, queer ideas about multiple souls, and challenging ideas about Inuit child-rearing, not to mention state formation, exotic kinship systems, feuds, vendettas, and Leopard-skin chiefs, loosely clustered around knowing a bit more than most people did about some part of the world where we’d spent a year or two, privileged to poke around and ask questions about whatever seized our imagination.

It was great, great fun until someone turned off the funding spigot and the jobs got scarce. A scientific paradigm? No way.

There is more to say about Goodenough — that culture is not like phonemes (which apparently are not like phonemes in the 1950s) so componential analysis is theoretically problematic, that he reduced shared meaning to internal cognition, and other critiques of his work — but he deserves to be remembered for the solid, intelligent work he did, and for the movement that he did (or didn’t) spearhead.

Yeah, generative phonology is about features and processes happening in the mind. I know that Zellig Harris and Floyd Lounsbury provide some of the bridge from structural to generative linguistics. I don’t know how Goodenough might fit in there, though I wouldn’t be surprised if he did given the association with Yale.