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Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist. His current research focuses on coastal conservation, sustainability, and development in the Californias. He also writes about politics, economics, and media. You can reach him at ryan AT savageminds dot org or @anthropologia on twitter.

Sunday Open Thread: Not enough anthropology?

I tried an open thread here on SM a while back, and it worked out pretty well.  Time for another one?   Let’s give it a go.

So…a couple of readers have posted new comments (here and here) about the content here on SM.  They argue that there has been a bit too much coverage of issues relating to academia, and not enough anthropology.  One reader asked us: “Where’s the beef?”

What say you readers?  Too much about academia and not enough anthropology?

Feel free to share your thoughts, and also post comments and links about all things anthropology on your mind.

Finding value: Theory, abstraction, and fieldwork

I am still obsessed with the concept of value.  What is value?  What does it mean to say something has value?  How do we decide what something is “worth”?  How are different ideas about value connected to meaning–and action?  How do our ideas about value, worth, and meaning relate to our actions?  How is value connected to money (in its various forms)?  How are different forms of valorization (economic, cultural, moral, political) connected?  Where and when are they disconnected?

When I started on this exploration of the idea of value, one of my friends told me that if I’m really serious about looking deeper, then I should start with David Graeber’s book on the subject.  I did, and have subsequently read that book–and his book about Debt–and taken tons of notes.  My friend also said that my search for the meaning of value is going to head back to Marx one way or another.  And it did.  But it also led to Adam Smith, Clyde Kluckhohn, David Harvey, Noel Castree, Julia Elyachar, and many others.  This search for value has led me down many different side streets and avenues, and there’s still a lot of ground to cover. The most recent book that I am reading is James Buchan’s book Frozen Desire.  The money/value question, especially as it relates to land, real estate speculation, and development, is what has been keeping me occupied for some time now.  The more I look into value, the more I want to keep looking.  It’s a bit like an endless economic rabbit hole.

Now, I am definitely fascinated with the idea of value, but I am also willing to admit that it’s a massive, if not vague, concept.  Graeber said pretty much the same thing in the beginning of his book.  The word “value” can refer to a range of things: from prices and money values all the way to moral values.  So there’s a bit of fuzziness and abstraction going on, simply because of the wide array of ways in which people use the term.  Sometimes it’s hard to tell when one usage ends and another begins.  There’s a lot of contradiction and overlap going on.  I hate to say it, but the whole idea of value gets complicated–and really, really abstract at times.  Maybe too abstract? Continue reading →

Being more than an “administrative convenience”

This is a brief post to keep the conversation about adjuncts, anthropology, and academia going.  Check out this piece over at Anthropology News* about the “Challenges to Organizing Academic Labor.”  Here is one choice selection to think about:

Eli Thorkelson (U Chicago) and Ryan Cook (Saint Xavier U) observed that accepting the culture of academia makes contingent faculty complicit in the system. Graduate students and recent PhDs hold on to the promise that professionalism, hard work and talent will eventually be rewarded with membership in the guild. The graduate teaching assistant, adjunct or visiting assistant professor believes, at least initially, that the position is a stepping-stone when, in reality, it may be no more than an administrative convenience.

I don’t know about the rest of you out there, but I sure didn’t go to grad school to become an administrative convenience.  You?

In related news, since student debt is one of the big problems that keeps coming up in these conversations, check out the Project on Student Debt.

Lastly, check out the New Faculty Majority site, which focuses on doing something about the issues that face adjuncts and contingent faculty.

Let’s keep the conversation going, folks.

 

Update I: For one example of an alternative model, check out The Saxifrage School.

Update II: Definitely check out the video from the Saxifrage folks.  I like how they are thinking about education, especially within the context of local communities.  Here’s a direct link to their video on YouTube.

 

*Thanks to Savage Minds reader Keahnan Washington for sending me this link.

 

Adjuncts & anthropology: What now?!?

This is a follow up to last week’s “Dear AAA: Sink or Swim?” post from last week, which generated a good number of comments here and elsewhere (over at Zero Anthropology and also on the Environmental Anthropology listserv, which is a great forum, but I wish more folks would post comments here as well).  There were a lot of comments, ideas, thoughts, and personal stories posted here, at Zero, and on e-anth.  But there is one question that came up several times and I want to highlight it here to see what you all think:

What now?

If we know there are serious problems in academia, and that those problems are clearly affecting anthropology, then what can be done?  This question came up at the end of the SM post, and it came up quite a lot more on the e-anth listserv.  Here are some of the ideas that were being thrown around (in no particular order):

  1. Unionization or some form of collective action for adjuncts.  One person proposed “A day without adjuncts.”  Organize.  Take a stand.

  2. Rethink the idea that anthropology PhDs must lead to a career in academia.  Scour the world for other jobs and opportunities.  Do not pigeonhole new grads into narrow options.  Diversify.  Open things up.  Don’t depend so much on the academy.

  3. Address the massive problem of student debt.

  4. Share and expose the stories of adjuncts who are trying to make their way through this system.  Publicize and humanize the problem.  Make the problem well known, and encourage more people to speak up.

  5. Build support and solidarity between tenured and non-tenured faculty to deal with the problems we face.

  6. Build support across disciplines, since this is not just a problem in anthropology.

  7. Create new models for higher education: Cooperative or alternative universities.  A number of people have been talking about this idea.

So what can be done?  How can we address the problems we face?  Do we need more analysis and critique?  Do we need to organize?  Do we need to completely rethink higher education?  Or do we do nothing?  Is it simply too late or impossible to make changes?  Is our university system doomed, or is there something we can do to change course?  Please share your thoughts.  Other ideas?  Let’s hear them.

 

Solidarity among the ranks of anthropology

This is going to be short and sweet, and then it’s sharing time.  I just want to make it clear that the most important take-away point of the last post about academia, anthropology, and the current adjunct situation was the need for this:

sol·i·dar·i·ty
noun, plural sol·i·dar·i·ties.

1.union or fellowship arising from common responsibilities and interests, as between members of a group or between classes, peoples, etc.: to promote solidarity among union members.
Ok, I’m glad that’s cleared up.  Next, I want to share a link that was just sent out on the environmental anthropology (e-anth) listserv this evening.  It’s a post called “How the American University was killed, in 5 Easy Steps.”  Here’s a little snippet that has some relevance to many of the recent discussions about the state of academia:

I’d like to mention here, too, that universities often defend their use of adjuncts – which are now 75% of all professors in the country — claiming that they have no choice but to hire adjuncts, as a “cost saving measure” in an increasingly defunded university. What they don’t say, and without demand of transparency will NEVER say, is that they have not saved money by hiring adjuncts — they have reduced faculty salaries, security and power. The money wasn’t saved, because it was simply re-allocated to administrative salaries, coach salaries and outrageous university president salaries. There has been a redistribution of funds away from those who actually teach, the scholars – and therefore away from the students’ education itself — and into these administrative and executive salaries, sports costs — and the expanded use of “consultants”, PR and marketing firms, law firms.

It’s a long post, but well worth a read.  Read the rest here.

Dear AAA: Sink or Swim?

This statement, written by Jason Antrosio, Eliza Jane Darling, Sarah Kendzior and myself, is a response to a post on the American Anthropological Association blog that discusses our recent writings about adjuncts, anthropology, and academia.

We are gratified that the American Anthropological Association has taken note of our critical commentary on the vagaries of the academic career, and we thank fellow blogger Joslyn O. for publicizing our work on the Association website. However, we would like to clear up a few misconceptions.

The AAA post suggests we represent two “camps,” but we share only one: a commitment to ending precarious intellectual labour. We protest the transformation of our profession into a swelling Hooverville congregated on the margins of universities whose dwindling tenured citizenry is bankrolled by our low-wage, low-benefit, low-security, low-respect work.

The bleak future of the aspiring anthropologist is not a concoction rooted in cynicism. It is an empirically demonstrable, material condition that speaks its truth in the language of debt, dependency, discouragement, and occasionally, the dole. We queue up for the work time and again because we deeply value anthropology. There is little other reason to plough the terrain of a field whose prospects for success resemble a lottery more than a competition. But as the national belt tightens in the face of prolonged economic crisis, contingent workers are increasingly unable to afford to subsidize the discipline financially, however highly we regard it intellectually. And the dignity deficit takes its toll on us all.

Anthropology is, and is not, “what we make it.” The most powerful producers of anthropological policy and practice seldom include the ranks of the precarious, yet even the privileged can lay no proprietary claim to a field whose fate, like that of its sister subjects in the social sciences, arts and humanities, rests at the mercy of profitability. Nonetheless, anthropology’s commitment to the science of social justice makes the studied ignorance of its own internal inequities insupportably ironic.

The resolution of these contradictions is served by neither silence nor sympathy, but solidarity. An academy structured upon the division of a two-tiered labor market discourages such an alliance. Yet we hope that anthropologists will join together to fight for the value of our work beyond the barometer of the bottom line. We must, for the same structural forces that divide tenured and contingent faculty threaten to subsume us all beneath a wave of public retrenchment, whose end game will inter us on the same sinking ship if we do not turn the tide. While the reserve army may constitute the foot soldiers in this battle for survival, the generals are hardly immune to the war on intellectual value.

The AAA can play a role in promoting solidarity. The first step is acknowledging that we are a house divided: not into camps which value, or do not value, the craft of anthropology, but into classes which are unevenly able to extract a living wage from that craft. The second step is to extend the professional respect and responsibility the Association demands for students, informants, the public and science itself to our fellow workers, within and without the academy. This solidarity is not only desirable but vital, for the future of anthropology is far more than academic.

Ryan Anderson
Jason Antrosio
Eliza Jane Darling
Sarah Kendzior

 

Update 9/2/12: Also check out the discussion over at Zero Anthropology, here.

Opening our anthropological conversations: An Interview with Tom Boellstorff

I had the chance to conduct an email-based interview with Tom Boellstorff during this past month to explore some of his views about Open Access (hereafter OA) publishing in anthropology.  Update: You can download a PDF of this interview here.

Ryan Anderson: First of all, thanks for taking the time to do this interview, Tom. Here at Savage Minds we write about Open Access (OA) a lot, and many of our contributors seem to be in agreement about the need to look into alternative publishing options. But not everyone knows about OA or is in agreement with the push to head in that direction, and this includes many people who are well established in anthropology. So, what’s your opinion about OA? Is this an issue that should matter for anthropologists who are already successful within the current publishing regime, for example?

Tom Boellstorff: I think there’s an urgent need to build on the advocacy work a number of people have been doing within and outside the AAA to reach the goal of “gold” OA (meaning that articles are freely available to download online). In my September 2012 “From the Editor” piece in American Anthropologist I try to set out my current thinking in regard to this issue. If I can quote from that piece:

There are three primary reasons why this transition to gold open access is imperative, reasons that are simultaneously ethical, political, and intellectual. First, there is a fundamental contradiction between the often-repeated goal of making anthropology more public and relevant on the one hand, and the lack of open access on the other hand. Second, there is an incompatibility between the broad interest in transnationalizing anthropology and the lack of open access. Third, it is wrong for any academic journal to be based on a model where the unremunerated labor of scholars supports corporate profits. I see no way that the current subscription-based model can be modified so as to adequately address these concerns.

In terms of people not being in agreement to head in that direction, which as you say “includes many people who are well established in anthropology,” I think we need to reach out and work with those folks. The reality is that running a journal well takes money, particularly a larger journal, and I don’t think we want a future where publishing relies on unpaid graduate student labor, farmed-out copy editing, and so on. For me, the issue is that (1) regardless, we need to find a way toward gold OA, and (2) I just refuse to believe that so many smart people can’t find a way to do it. Continue reading →

The adjunct anthropologist’s open thread

Dear all of you adjunct anthropologists out there,

Well, it looks like 2012 sure is your year, with all of the attention you and your academic kinfolk have been getting of late.  So tell me, how’s everything going?  Are you teaching 6 classes in three different colleges?  Debating whether or not to go on an all top ramen diet so you can afford to go to the AAAs this year?  Selling lemonade on the corner to get enough cash to print syllabi for class?  Are you too busy already with the madness of the semester to even think about posting a comment on a silly little blog?  Or, on the other hand, are you doin just fine, thanks and wondering what the hub-bub is all about?  So what’s your story?  Savage Minds would like to know.

That’s right anthro-adjuncts, this thread’s for you.  Use it to express your views about the wonderful (or not so wonderful) place known as adjunct-landia.  Please feel free to post anonymous comments if necessary.

Good night and good luck.  Ok now, don’t be shy, fire away.

Anthropology minus one and counting

Another testimonial from the trenches of academia.  This one written by Eliza Jane Darling over at Zero Anthropology.  Her post Less Than Zero Anthropology speaks to some of the same issues that Sarah Kendzior brought up in her piece (see this post here at SM).  Darling’s essay is also a powerful biographical look into the kinds of not-so-inspirational “challenges” that many freshly minted and aspiring anthropologists face these days.  Here’s a selection:

A few weeks back I turned 40, the age at which I once pledged that if academia didn’t throw a real job my way, I’d kick it to the curb and do something else with my life. It was an arbitrary number based on the calculus of shame, a countdown to the break point of infantilisation tolerance that reached Anthropology Zero in early August and is now ticking away into negative figures. From my perspective on the launch pad to a brave new world beyond the university, it dawns on me that I’ve left my mid-life crisis a bit late. The problem with spending twenty years learning how to do anthropology is that it doesn’t leave vast amounts of spare time to learn how to do anything else. Continue reading →

Academia, closed

I just read Sarah Kendzior’s article “The closing of American academia.”  Not uplifting.  My first reaction:

When is enough enough?  Seriously.

The main point of Kendzior’s article is that the high rate of adjuncts in academia is a sign of serious problems within the academy:

My friend is an adjunct. She has a PhD in anthropology and teaches at a university, where she is paid $2100 per course. While she is a professor, she is not a Professor. She is, like 67 per cent of American university faculty, a part-time employee on a contract that may or may not be renewed each semester. She receives no benefits or health care.

That’s right: 67 percent. Continue reading →

Passing the 50 yard line of fieldwork

In the beginning, there was all the time in the world.  In the beginning, there were seemingly endless days, weeks, months, and minutes to get this “fieldwork” thing done.  In the beginning, a year seemed like some massive field of Ansel Adams-esque black and white sand dunes that stretched out across a desert landscape with broad horizons unencumbered by…

This is taking too long.

Look, when it comes to my fieldwork, I am running out of time.  To cut to the chase: once I had lots, now I have much less.  If my time was a jar of change, I would start thinking about rolling up the nickels and dimes.  You know what I mean?  I am not thinking about pennies just yet, but those wonderful quarters are gone, my friends.  So things are not frantic or desperate, but it’s time to start coveting what’s left.  The other day it really struck me: several months have passed by, and I am on the downward slide of my being-out-there-in-the-world phase of my dissertation research.  Fast.  Times.

Ya, time flies and all that stuff.  And then you start looking at the number of interviews, meetings, transcriptions, and thousands of other tasks that lay ahead…and you freak out a little.  At least, I do.  Continue reading →

The Mark Regnerus Controversy & Social Science

This story first took off about a month ago, when UT Austin sociologist Mark Regnerus published the article “How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study.”  Regnerus also published a piece on Slate.com, in which he asks whether “it makes any difference if your parents are straight or gay.” The goal of the study was to challenge the idea that there are “no differences” between children who are raised by heterosexual parents versus those who are raised by same-sex parents.  Regnerus sums up his overall argument on Slate:

On 25 of 40 different outcomes evaluated, the children of women who’ve had same-sex relationships fare quite differently than those in stable, biologically-intact mom-and-pop families, displaying numbers more comparable to those from heterosexual stepfamilies and single parents. Even after including controls for age, race, gender, and things like being bullied as a youth, or the gay-friendliness of the state in which they live, such respondents were more apt to report being unemployed, less healthy, more depressed, more likely to have cheated on a spouse or partner, smoke more pot, had trouble with the law, report more male and female sex partners, more sexual victimization, and were more likely to reflect negatively on their childhood family life, among other things.

The basic conclusion of the study is that children who are raised by homosexual parents are “different,” and that they have more problems that kids who are raised in two parent same-sex households.  These conclusions have resulted in a storm of media controversy, a flurry of critical responses, and even an investigation into whether or not Regnerus committed ethical violations during this research. Continue reading →

Open access introductory anthro courses?

One of my colleagues from the U of Kentucky just posted a request on our grad student listserv asking for advice about which texts people are using for intro courses.  I replied with the book that I used during the two intro to anthropology classes I taught while at UK, but then added that the book was lamentably expensive at around 100 bucks.  And that got me thinking.

I wonder if at some point there will be such a thing as an open access intro to anthropology course, where all of the texts and articles are not only current, but readily available.  Just an idea.  The cost of textbooks was one of the big frustrations for me when I was teaching–but I went along with things anyway because there were few alternatives.  And then there was the issue with articles: some are a lot easier to find and access than others.  Some articles are just plain not available.  Not to mention the fact that there are all sorts of restrictions about how articles can and cannot be shared with students.

I know that textbook publishers aren’t exactly going to be thrilled with this conversation, but what would an open access course look like?  I know that these kinds of things don’t happen for free, of course, so I am wondering how such a thing could be created, funded, and implemented.  Has anyone else out there been looking something along these lines?  I’d love to hear about it.  Or, if you think this is an insane idea that would never work in the real world, I’d like to hear what you think just as much.  Right now I am imagining a larger project along the lines of Wikipedia where different scholars write and publish open access articles specifically for introductory courses.  That of course could be combined with material that’s already open (like articles from AA that are more than 35 years old).  Hmmm.  Thoughts?

 

PS: Ya, when I start thinking about OA I get on a roll.  What can I say?  I have my streaks.

Speaking of open access…

This is a follow up to Chris’s post about the American Anthropological Association and Open Access.

The subject of open access publishing gets a fair amount of press around here at Savage Minds. For good reason, in my opinion, because the publishing regime that we currently have needs a little…rethinking.  Going “open access” is, of course, one possible option.  But what is this open access thing really all about?  If we’re going to consider OA, it’s probably a good idea to look deeper into the issues involved.  It’s definitely not some magical thing that will just happen overnight.  It will take work, planning, and cooperation among lots of people.  Anyway, here are some sources to look  into regarding anthropology and open access:* Continue reading →

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, 1949-2012

Michel-Rolph Trouillot passed away a few days ago on July 5, 2012.  Anthropology Report, edited by Jason Antrosio, has a page dedicated to tributes, memorials, and news about his passing.  Another page on the site has a nice bibliography of Trouillot’s work.  Antrosio has another must-read piece over at Living Anthropologically called The Headline We Should be Reading: Anthropology Changed Everything.  Some very strong points about the current state of affairs in anthropology today.  Antrosio wonders why, for starters, there has been relative silence among the anthropological community about the passing of Trouillot:

My sense is that it has a lot to do with timing–some of the leaders in the American Anthropological Association are attending international conferences but have promised a posting soon. Once the AAA gets the ball rolling, we should see more. So, although I am puzzled by a lack of postings on anthropology blogs–I’ve seen tributes mostly from archaeology, history, and Haitian sources–there will surely be due commemoration in its time. The larger issue is why we don’t read headlines about Trouillot and how anthropology changed everything.

That is the big question.  Why aren’t we reading about the impacts of Trouillot’s life and work in broader media outlets?  Definitely take the time to read that post.  I’m interested to hear what some of you think about this.

Also, if you have any comments, thoughts, or links about this news, please feel free to post them here.

Hat tip: thanks to SM reader CarlosFM for bringing this to my attention.  Much appreciated.