“In moving from experience of social life to conceptualization and intellectual history, I follow the path of anthropologists almost everywhere. Although we take theories into the field with us, these become relevant only if and when they illuminate social reality. Moreover, we tend to find very frequently that it is not a theorist’s whole system which so illuminates, but his scattered ideas, his flashes of insight taken out of systemic context and applied to scattered data. Such ideas have a virtue of their own and may generate new hypotheses. They even show how scattered facts may be systematically connected! Randomly distributed through some monstrous logical system, they resemble nourishing raisins in a cellular mass of inedible dough. The intuitions, not the tissue of logic connecting them, are what tend to survive in the field experience.”

“Social Dramas and Ritual Metaphors.” In Victor Turner, ed., Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Cornell University Press, 1974, p. 23.

My point in offering the previous quotes, from Carl Ally and Tom Kelley, is not to deny the value of theory, but rather to observe that what seems most valuable about anthropology in our classes and seminars and what the world outside the academy finds of value can be very different. Thinking about that difference can be a useful exercise for those compelled to make a living outside the academy or eager to make a positive difference in the world in projects that require teamwork with folk from other disciplines.

Part of the questioning of relevance comes from academic anthropology’s own apathy towards threads outside of the academy, as we who participate or have participated in academic anthropology know. This is not to discount the amount of incredible insight into the human condition anthropology generates. But as Tim Ingold has well-argued, the current run of academic anthropology and its adherence to being a science has divorced curiosity from care. That we are, and always have been, embedded in the lives and publics with whom we work. (Ingold goes further to argue that it is rather ethnography, or the writing up of our work into theory and anthropological knowledge after the fact that tends to solidify this divorce – something we need to keep in mind when we weigh the benefits of ethnography vs anthropology). This is akin to what you point out with Fassin’s idea, but taking things to the next step. As anthropology out of the academy continues to be seen as ‘sideline’, we are, in essence, “subaltering the subaltern” – to borrow your title.

A second issue has to do with formatting inside and outside the academy. Irrelevance can rear its head, fairly or unfairly, when academics refuse to alter our formats of producing and disseminating knowledge – 1. namely using esoteric and difficult to understand language that the public, let alone some anthropologists can find difficult to follow, 2. theories that by and large serve only to converse with other anthropological knowledge (which is fine for a discipline to do, if that’s its goal) rather than give back or offer solutions to the communities and questions we first sought to answer, and 3. through publishing methods that require the first two issues in spades. There is also a fourth part regarding publishing-is-more-important-to-your-career-than-teaching in many elite universities which further sidelines sideline anthropology. We aren’t often heard (or lose out to other disciplines for public attention) because we refuse to produce our knowledge in a way that can be heard, or at least in a way that publics are used to hearing. Yes, this opens up power, institutional, and structural issues, but lets us question how we relate to and are embedded in public life. 

I too struggle with the relevance question as a PhD student. But as publicly-engaged anthropologist, I don’t. I struggle more with how to best format anthropological thinking and doing in ways that are accessible to help people think more holistically and solve problems.

I do wish that someone else would join this conversation. Meanwhile, let me offer a few more thoughts.

When, in the early 1980s, when I stumbled out of academia and into a job as an English-language copywriter for a Japanese advertising agency, I became a “creative.” I was strongly motivated to learn more about this mysterious process called “creativity.” The most memorable thing I read was a comment by advertising legend Carl Ally,

“The creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kinds of things: ancient history, nineteenth century mathematics, current manufacturing techniques, flower arranging, and hog futures. Because he never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen six minutes later or six years down the road. But he has faith that it will happen.”

He sounded like an anthropologist to me.

Many years later, still interested in the topic, I read Tom Kelley’s Ten Faces of Innovation, where, I was fascinated to discover, the anthropologist was No. 1. Kelley is founder and CEO of IDEO, one of the world’s most successful industrial design firms. Here is how he describes the anthropologist.

“The Anthropologist is rarely stationary. Rather, this is the person who ventures into the field to observe how people interact with products, services, and experiences in order to come up with new innovations. The Anthropologist is extremely good at reframing a problem in a new way, humanizing the scientific method to apply it to daily life. Anthropologists share such distinguishing characteristics as the wisdom to observe with a truly open mind; empathy; intuition; the ability to “see” things that have gone unnoticed; a tendency to keep running lists of innovative concepts worth emulating and problems that need solving; and a way of seeking inspiration in unusual places.”

What I observe in reflecting on these two texts is that neither how I was taught to describe anthropology, a four-field discipline concerned with the whole of human evolution from prehistory to the present, nor the way you have described it in what you have written here, appears in them. Neither author is concerned at all about the disciplinary boundaries and “critical theory” that seem to have been the focus of your training.since I have no career at stake in this discussion, that does not bother me at all. But I wonder what you will think of this difference I have pointed out.

I agree that the way anthropology is usually taught has a lot to do with subaltern position in which anthropologists now find themselves. I note that in your sources you make no reference to EPIC, the Ethnographic Praxis in Corporations group (https://www.epicpeople.org/), the Journal of Business Anthropology (http://ej.lib.cbs.dk/index.php/jba) or the recently published Handbook of Anthropology in Business (http://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Anthropology-Business-Rita-Denny/dp/1611321719). While peripheral, and indeed largely ignored by academic anthropology, there is a growing community of anthropologists who, in many cases, not only do good work but also do well for themselves by doing it. The progressive puritans among us may be revolted by the thought of doing work for corporations, but if we can get over that, and if fieldwork teaches nothing else it means learning to live with—critiquing but also learning to adapt to—things that disturb us, a fruitful conversation should be possible. It might even be profitable.