I wonder. I know that in my own case going off to study Chinese popular religion was a flagrantly Oedipal reaction to my pious Lutheran upbringing. What, after all, could be more rebellious than taking serious people who were into incense, burnt offerings, and graven images. I can still remember the first time someone handed me lighted incense and expected me to bow toward the idol on a temple altar–I froze, waiting for The Lord God Jehovah’s lightning to strike me. Got over that, but….

Mary Douglas was a lifelong, practicing Catholic. Victor Turner converted to Catholicism. Max Gluckman, I recall being told, was an Orthodox Jew. Could one reason for the decline of the anthropology of religion have been anthropology’s ceasing to attract what Max Weber called “religiously musical” people?

Castañeda also brings up another important point during this period — it seems to me that anthropologists stopped producing popular books for he general public around this time and turned more inward. Or the people that were producing popular books were not sending the sort of counter-cultural messages the public was expecting: i.e. Marvin Harris’s debunking scientism and Mead’s conservative columns in Redbook.

The point here is that the “professionalization” of academic disciplines aspires to the same model; but unlike medicine or law, there are no legal sanctions involved. There is only the consensus of groups of peers who agree on the conditions under which membership in the discipline will be recognized. Thus, for example, to be recognized as a physicist requires a certain course of training and the ability to do things that other physicists require as essential. There are no legal sanctions, however, against anyone calling him or herself a physicist.

What, then, are the conditions under which the consensus that professionalization demands can be achieved? Returning to Kuhn, each discipline has a paradigm (or at least an acceptable range of paradigms). But how can a paradigm be established when a relatively small number of people of highly diverse interests suddenly becomes a group two orders of magnitude bigger? Especially during a period of rapid and unconstrained growth when individuals were free to pursue their separate interests and divide themselves into smaller and smaller factions cross-cut by areal as well as topical interests? And now what ground do they have to assert a shared identity and responsibility to each other? These are the issues that now confront not only anthropology but the other social sciences and humanities as well. When academic freedom meets the McDonaldization of education in straitened economic times, something has to give. A return to (to borrow the title of a great book) The Way We Never Were is impossible. Is there a vision of the future around which we can unite?

Also, just to state the obvious (which is probably on your timeline): Wagner’s Invention of Culture came out in 1975.

In my case, just one data point, I chose Cornell over Chicago because, like the Honors College at Michigan State from which I got my undergraduate degree, there were no strict distribution requirements. I can still remember going to Jack Roberts, whom I had met at an NSF funded summer program in quantitative anthropology the summer before I started graduate school, and asking what he thought I should be taking my first semester of graduate school. He said, “John, the whole point of being a graduate student is to stop being a student. See that library over there? Go use it and figure out what you want to study.”

As a result, I did one course in Chinese archeology, mostly Neolithic pottery and Shang bronzes, a course in Bloomfieldian (pre-Chomsky) linguistics, a course on the ethnography of Mainland Southeast Asia….and something else; I forget what. Sucked into the China program, I never did do any physical anthropology.

My introduction to the anthropology of China was heavy on kinship, marriage and ancestor worship. The key text was Maurice Freedman’s Lineage Organization in Southeast China, itself largely inspired by Fortes’ work among the Tallensi. Pushed toward British social anthropology, excited by reading Vic Turner and Mary Douglas, and having a whole lot to learn about China and places in Southeast Asia where there were lots of overseas Chinese, I never learned much about any other part of the world except Africa. Instead of a well-rounded four-fielder, I became a kind of intellectual patchwork doll. I may have been an extreme case, but I think this happened to a lot of us in my generation.

The last sentence of John’s comment is indicative of another shift that I wanted to mention but didn’t — I think by the 1970s the 4 field paradigm had really vanished amongst high table anthropologists. In the fifties Marshall Sahlins published on primatology, but it was unimaginable that Geertz (or Appadurai!) do so.

Jay thanks for the heads up on visual anthropology, which I’m not familiar with. It sounds like the pattern I’m describing.

Joseph I think you make some good points about periods that I only touched on here. My point that 1974 was a year in which the discipline’s interests solidified. The case of anthropology of religion, which died in the 1970s and stayed that way for decades is a case in point :!) You describe change in undergrad enrollments as gradual, but I would argue that higher education growth was explosive, not gradual. This is true for anthro Ph.D.s as well: In 1961 there were about 50 anthro Ph.D.s awarded in the US. In 1976 there were 450. I do think you are right, however, to point out how this changed the association — it went from being the size of a private club to the size of a large high school… and I fell like the quality and quantity of gossip in the discipline is reflected in this change!