However, Bourgois and Schonberg are not household names like Margaret Mead was, or like Diamond, Dawkins, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, or Paul Krugman are. Journalists like Barbara Ehrenreich also come close to crossing these intellectual lines through works like Nickel and Dimed. These are authors of what Enkerli refers to as “semi-academic nonfiction.” Emkerli also interestingly suggests that “it shouldn’t be too surprising that books in this genre aren’t typically published by people with an anthropological sensitivity.” Why? Is there something about anthropology in particular that makes crossing over into a popular, mainstream, semi-academic, non-fiction genre particularly challenging? Is there a way to cross-over to speak to the general public in a way that they will find compelling and that will not sacrifice the spirit of anthropological inquiry? Or does lightening up on the theory erase nuances so significant that in doing so it ceases to be anthropological?

Perhaps the change since Mead is not in us but in the fragmented mediascape we encounter. We are not the only academic discipline to struggle with this question, after all. But is this level of celebrity, public intellectual a desirable goal at all?

If you mean people like Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, Jonah Lehrer, Malcolm Gladwell, and Richard Dawkins, it might be a different issue. Bestselling authors of what we could call “semiacademic nonfiction” are rare in anthro (though we do have best selling authors,including some who wrote fiction). Considering the potentially negative impact some of their work may have on topics close to our heart, it shouldn’t be too surprising that books in this genre aren’t typically published by people with an anthropological sensitivity.

Public intellectuals are, as a whole, a very interesting bunch. Few of them are praised by academics from the disciplines they represent. In fact, your Diamond example could be fleshed out with criticism from geographers. On the other hand, such authors often sound insightful to people outside those disciplines. It’s quite interesting to observe people’s reactions when they realize that, say, Gladwell is as problematic a writer in other fields as he is in their own field.

But there are people writing fascinating things which are potentially more grounded in intellectual traditions similar to our own. The most satisfying ones also tend to be the most modest and honest. Apart from the anthros named above, one could add people like sociologist Zeynep Tufekci (not to be confused with anthropologist Zeynep Arsel, the former “Hipsterologist”), David Weinberger, Adam Greenberg, and Steven Berlin Johnson.

Been compiling a list of public intellectuals, from diverse horizons. Many of them are college-educated English-speaking males from privileged positions, but the cultural context privileging individual authordom and authority is patriarchal anyway.

Not to mention mainstream.

I’m not being facetious here – it strikes me that if anthropology is to take back its own territories, we need to dial down the hipster-elitism (and actually subtle classism) of talking about theories and aggressively do what we say we do – listen to, collaborate with, and promote the interests of our others, wherever they’re found (these days, increasingly on social media).