Tag Archives: History of Anthropology

Margaret Mead and the Arapesh

Despite the decades that have passed, Margaret Mead remains the Anthropologist You Are Most Likely To Be Asked About By The Person Sitting Next To You On The Plane. Her legacy is, to put it mildly, mixed. Many view her as the last really good ‘public anthropologist’ and an exemplar for female scientists everywhere. Others are much more critical — Michaeala di Leonardo (whose name I can never spell right) works hard to debunk the image of Mead as a proto leftist-feminist in Exotics at Home, for instance, and many anthropologists have taken issue with her fieldwork. The most obvious here is Derek Freeman, who spent much of his career launching extremely critical work on the fieldwork that resulted in Mead’s classic Coming of Age in Samoa.

To keep a long story very, very short: it appears that although Mead’s work on Samoa was problematic to the point that she probably ‘got it wrong’, Freeman himself was so vitriolic and (probably) mentally ill, that it is difficult for anyone to write a measured, reflective criticism of Mead without sounding like they are allying themselves with Freeman.

All of which is to say that if you are looking for a measured, reflective criticism of Mead, look no further than Ira Bashkow and Lise Dobrin’s “The Historical Study of Ethnographic Fieldwork: Margaret Mead and Reo Fortune among the Mountain Arapesh” which is “available free and open access for anyone to read”:http://www.virginia.edu/anthropology/faculty/Bashkow-Dobrin-2007.pdf. It is a great piece and I recommend it to all and sundry. It is very clearly written, short, and elegantly relates their analysis of Mead’s Arapesh research (which she got wrong) to a more fruitful discussion of how the fieldsite is co-constructed by anthropologists and their hosts.

So… if you only read one 7 page PDF on the history of Melanesian anthropology before World War II today… make it this one!

Explaining Disjunctures and Differences

Between the demolition of the Berlin wall and the fall of the twin towers, ‘globalization’ happened to anthropology. One of the most influential essays of the period (probably because it was ahead of the curve) was Arjun Appadurai’s Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy (originally appeared in 1990, iirc). As an article it is both alluring and infuriating. In it, Appadurai proposes the notion of different sorts of ‘-scapes’, a model which has been tremendously influential but which he (and pretty much everyone else) fails to develop in any real way in any future work. Similarly, Appadurai argues that we need to develop models similar to those based on chaos theory and fractals if we are to undersand the global cultural economy. As a bow to the popular science of the time this was very trendy (Gleick’s Chaos came out in 1988, when the article was being writen, I reckon) but again not something that he has followed up on — although quite a lot of people who work on social networking have done so.

For me, Appadurai is like Mahler — I recognize the genius, I understand why it appeals to some, but at the end of the day all it does is make me queasy (I should say that I am talking about his writing — Appadurai is a very nice guy in person). I began to ask myself: why does this article appeal? Or, more specifically, why did it appeal in the context of the late-80s early-90s?
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News on Cambridge Anthropology

William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology:

The Cambridge University Department of Social Anthropology has great pleasure in announcing the election of Professor Henrietta Moore to the William Wyse Chair of Social Anthropology. Professor Moore will take up her appointment on October 1st, 2008. She is currently Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Culture and Globalization Project, at the London School of Economics. For three years (2002-05) she was the Deputy Director at the LSE. Professor Moore’s very distinguished research career encompasses anthropology and psychoanalysis, anthropological theory and cultural analysis, culture and globalization, and gender, sexuality and social change. She has conducted research in East, Central and West Africa, Europe and India. The Department is greatly looking forward to welcoming her to Cambridge and to working closely with her in the years to come.

Professor Moore succeeds Professor Dame Marilyn Strathern, who was elected to the William Wyse Chair in 1993. In this her retirement year, the Department wishes to express its deep and abiding appreciation to Dame Marilyn for the unfailing dedication, collegiality and scholarly leadership she has provided over the last 15 years, and to pay tribute as well to the unique contribution she has made to anthropology both in the UK and worldwide.

Camelot Revisited: The Department of Defense’s New Plan for Academia

In a recent speech before the Association of American Universities, Defense Secretary Robert Gates described his ideas for a new military-academic partnership. The “Minerva Consortium”, as he calls his vision, would offer funding and research assistance for researchers across academia, in order to build up the military’s understanding of the world the operate in and create a pool of experts the military can draw on.

At first blush, it seems Gates — a former university president — has learned some of the lessons of the past that led to the meltdown of the Cold War military-academic partnership in the Vietnam years. Most notably, he has come down against secret research, and claims to encourage critical responses to Department of Defense programs and practices.

“Let me be clear that the key principle of all components of the Minerva Consortia will be complete openness and rigid adherence to academic freedom and integrity. There will be no room for ’sensitive but unclassified,’ or other such restrictions in this project,” Gates said. “We are interested in furthering our knowledge of these issues and in soliciting diverse points of view — regardless of whether those views are critical of the department’s efforts. Too many mistakes have been made over the years because our government and military did not understand — or even seek to understand — the countries or cultures we were dealing with.”

University presidents are, of course, thrilled at the prospect, dreaming of university coffers flush with DoD funds once again. But academic researchers, particularly anthropologists, should be very nervous about Gates’ plans. This kind of direct involvement in the funding and direction of academic research, even without the veil of secrecy that military-academic partnerships have often had in the past, threatens to powerfully influence the shape of our discipline — even for people who reject military funding.

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A Special Offer and a Note About Blogging

Everyone’s arguing lately about Savage Minds — it’s “civil society” or lack thereof, its institutional position in the field of anthropology, it’s Euro-Americano-centrism, and so on. What’s missing, I think, is that while Savage Minds is a “place”, a “publication” of sorts, with some cohesiveness, it’s also a somewhat random collection of individual anthropologists bound together by no shared theoretical orientation, area specialization, political stance, or academic genealogy. I think it’s clear that we don’t always agree — in fact, we’ve disagreed quite sharply at times. More to the point, we not only blog about different stuff but we blog for different reasons.

For me, Savage Minds has always been a place to “mess around”, anthropologically speaking. A place to try out new ideas and thin hypotheses, a wall to throw stuff onto in order to see what sticks. A place where I could try my hand at the kind of argument Yehudi Cohen makes in Disappearance of the Incest Taboo (that’s an AnthroSource link, for those with access) and string together some ideas about the end of marriage, or muse about the moral underpinnings of anthropology. A place to incubate arguments and positions — and to receive feedback from my peers both inside and outside of the field.

It’s been invaluable to have this kind of forum, away from the main channel of academic thought — the journals and academic presses that are our disciplinary mainstream, even if many of them have lower readerships than Savage Minds. So valuable, in fact, that I felt it absolutely necessary to include Savage Minds in my “Acknowledgements” when I published Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War. Here’s what I wrote:

Over the years, two online communities have proven invaluable as both a source of new ideas and a place to rehearse my own fevered anthropological imaginings. To the members of ANTHRO-L (especially Ron Kephart, John McCreery, Richard Senghas, Jacob Lee, Richard Wilsnack, Anj Petto, Ray Scupin, Robert Lawless, Wade Tarzia, Lynn Manners, Martin Cohen, Bruce Josephson, Richley Crapo, Tom Kavanagh, Scott MacEachern, Mike Pavlik, Thomas Riley, and Phil Young) and my fellow Savage Minds, (Alex Golub, Kerim Friedman, Chris Kelty, Nancy LeClerc, Kathleen Lowery, Tak Watanabe, and newbies Thomas Erikson, Maia Green, and Thomas Strong) I offer both my gratitude and respect.

In the end, I’m not sure I could have written Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War without having had this forum to develop those ideas. The other Minds and the many people who comment here not only helped me to refine my thoughts on anthropology and its role(s) in society, but to rethink myself as an anthropologist.

By way of gratitude, then, I asked my publishers if I could offer at least a little something back to this community which has offered me so much. They responded enthusiastically, providing me with a discount code to offer Savage Minds readers. So here’s the deal:

  1. Order Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War from U Mich Press.
  2. At checkout, enter the coupon code: WAX08UMP
  3. Enjoy a 20% savings!

With the coupon code, the US price is $26.00 instead of the usual $32.50. As far as I know, this offer is not limited to US buyers, but I’m pretty sure the price of international shipping will eat up any savings over buying the book at full price locally. The coupon code expires on May 30, 2008.

For more information about the book, check out the review by Penny Howard at the Socialist Review. More reviews and information about the book will be posted at my personal site on the book page as it becomes available.

And if you’re not interested, for whatever reason (maybe your mother was cruel to you as a child?), that’s cool, too — I offer you as a member of the Savage Minds community my thanks.

But really, buy the book. Buy the book or I shall plug at you a second time! Tphptptptptp!

Anthropology and Global Counter-Insurgency Conference in Chicago, April 25-27

I’ve been invited to speak at a conference hosted by the University of Chicago later this month on the topic of “Anthropology and Global Counter-Insurgency”. Other speakers will include David Price and Hugh Gusterson, who are doing yeoman’s work on the issue. Despite the fact that my introduction to Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War discusses issues related to counter-insurgency at some length, it is because of my work here at Savage Minds that I’ve been invited to speak. Take that, traditional publishing models!

Here’s the skinny on the conference, from the organizers: Continue reading →

“Scale Making” In My Ear

Two years ago Savage Minds, together with our readers, spent the summer reading Anna Tsing’s book Friction. Although I was somewhat underwhelmed by the book at the time, I have to admit that certain ideas have crawled in my ear and wrapped themselves around my cerebral cortex like a ceti eel. Specifically the notion of “scale making” discourses. At the time I criticized her use of the term for emphasizing vertical relationships over horizontal networks, but for various reasons I won’t go into now, the concept of scale is very useful for thinking about my current research with indigenous communities in India and Taiwan. For this reason I decided to investigate further.

Tsing is not particularly forthcoming about the genealogy of the term , but I’ve recently discovered that Google Scholar is an excellent way to identify the most widely cited source for a particular academic keyword. A search for “‘scale making’ globalization” yielded up two very useful essays. Both from 2000: The first is Sallie Marston’s “The social construction of scale” (Sage subscription or purchase required). And the second is an article by Tsing herself, entitled “The global situation” (Scribd iPaper link).

I’ll discuss Tsing first. I realize I must be one of the few idiots who hasn’t already read this piece – so I apologize to all our erudite readers for whom this reference is obviousness itself. But I want to say how much I loved this article. It is clear, insightful, and critical. It is especially critical of the triumphalist and “charismatic” discourses of globalization which so prevailed in 90s anthropology. It made me a Tsing fan in a way that Friction had not. But while the article elaborates her theory of “scale-making” it still doesn’t give us much of a sense of the genealogy of the term.

For that, I had to turn to Sallie Marston’s workmanlike piece. Marston, a human geographer, is well situated to give us this genealogy since it seems to have first caught on in English within that discipline. She traces it back to the work of Henri Lefebvre (a nice article on Lefebvre by Stanley Aronowitz can be downloaded here) and places special emphasis on the work of Neil Brenner (lots of downloads available there) and Peter Taylor (alas, no downloads). (Taylor is the only name from this article which appears in Tsing’s bibliography from the same year.)

In the last decade it seems that the term has really taken off – and has even begun to be criticized for its various inadequacies. I’m still exploring this literature and trying to figure out how to make use of it in my own work. I’m sure our readers will berate me for overlooking some obvious and important sources in my quest to trace the origins of this particular academic meme – and I look forward to it!

Reed’s Warm Springs Project

finalfrench.jpgReed Magazine has published online a lovely account of the Warm Springs Project of David and Kay French. Robert E. Moore writes:

The Warm Springs Project was a multi-year collaborative program of anthropological and other field research organized by David French ’39 (1918–1994), who taught anthropology at Reed from 1947 to 1988, and his colleague and wife, Kathrine S. (Kay) French (1922–2006), also an anthropologist (both held Columbia Ph.D.s). Combining outside funding from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation with support from the college, the Frenches brought a series of Reed students to live and work on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Central Oregon (100 miles east of Portland on the Columbia plateau). The project was active between 1950 and 1956—mostly in summer, with shorter trips during the school year when possible.

Moore is the literary executor of the French papers, and his essay beautifully evokes the conviviality, intellectual vitality, and lasting influence of the project. With modest funding, the project “left—through the subsequent activities of its participants—a remarkable impact on anthropology, and on the arts and sciences more broadly.” For example, Dell Hymes was one illustrious participant (and the essay notes many more). Moore’s essay is accompanied by pieces on Hymes, and on other folks associated with the project, including Gary Snyder. I especially liked Stephanie Snyder’s article on the Frenchs’ basement study.

The Road to Published: The Making of an Edited Volume (Part II)

If you haven’t already, read these first: Part I – In which I manage to get a publishing contract

Part Ia: Writing a Prospectus – In which I detail how I wrote my prospectus

You’d think that selling a publisher on your book idea would be the hard part.  Once you have a contract in hand, the rest should be easy, right? After all, in my case, the contributors had already presented their work, so they already had at least a draft to work from — all that’s left is for each person to clean up their draft, maybe expand a piece here and there, and tidy up their references.  Right?

Right?!

Wrong.  You’ve heard the expression “herding cats” before, right? Well, I decided that getting an edited volume put together was a lot like herding glaciers.

What I’m saying is, it goes a bit slowly.

Part of the problem is the academic schedule.  Most academics are bound to a semester-by-semester schedule that a] changes frequently, and b] puts us through periods of intense work interspersed with periods of intense inactivity. During the school session, for all our good intentions, non-teaching projects tend to fall by the wayside.  Some academics are lucky: they have tenure, 1- or 2- class per semester teaching loads, and committee work they’ve learned how to blow off.  Those are not the kind of academics one would expect to find contributing to an edited volume by an unknown grad student.

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The long historical essay as anthropological theory

As the spring semester approaches my fellow hemisphere mates and I, I am putting the final touches on my ‘theory’ syllabus. I’ll share it with SM soon (the initial draft is not very appetizing), but I thought it would be interesting here to blog about something I will not be teaching — the long historical essay. As I’ve mentioned in past posts, anthropologists have come, for some reason, to ‘do theory’ in the form of the disciplinary history. This includes monograph-length studies, of course, but one particular genre that seems particularly anthropological is the long essay in which anthropologists describe ‘their theory’ or a more general ‘world view’ by constructing a genealogy whose telos they are. So in honor of Christmas — which involves its own teleological understanding of my own tradition — I thought I’d try to make a list here of classic ‘long essays’ in anthropological theory. Let me know if you can think of any more:

Blurred Genres, Clifford Geertz
Theory in Anthropology Since The 60s, Sherry Ortner
“As People Express Their Lives, So They Are…” in the Symbolic Anthropology Reader
Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems, Michael Fischer
Anthropos, Edmund Leach
The Use of Anthropology: Critical, Personal, Politics, Dell Hymes

The genre is pretty fuzzy, but I hope this gives readers of these works some sense of what I’m talking about.

I’m not actually assigning any of these essays to my students (they can read them on their own if they want). They are very tricky. Often presentist and self-serving they require very sensitive antenna to read through to get some actual sense of the literature they cover. At the same time working through the motivations of their orchestration of the literature is in itself a good way to get some sense of the scene when the author was writing. But at any rate I think given the limitations of class time it is better to get students to actually read the material rather than read about it. What do you think?

The Road to Published: The Making of an Edited Volume (Part Ia — Writing a Prospectus)

I was going to save this for Part II, but when I looked back at my prospectus I decided that a deeper exegesis of what I had done might be useful — I know I floundered quite a bit figuring out what a prospectus should look like, what its tone should be, and so on. So here’s a blow-by-blow look at the prospectus I sent to Pluto Books. I’m not saying this is the best proposal ever, or that I didn’t make mistakes, or that I wouldn’t do things differently today — just that this one worked, for whatever that’s worth.

I talked before about the need for a prospectus that really sells your book proposal. As academics, we’re used to writing proposals that highlight ideas, theories, methods — none of which is all that useful in a prospectus. Although an editor is (hopefully) going to be interested in what a book says, that interest has to be subsidiary to what kind of interest the book will generate and how many copies they can sell. Every publisher has a minimum number they need to sell to break even on a book — your prospectus has to convince them that they’ll sell more than whatever that number is.

Here’s the prospectus I sent to Pluto Books in 2005, modified somewhat to remove personal information. Continue reading →

Is It Paranoia if Everyone Really Is Out to Get You?

This article in Inside Higher Education, which comments on a survey showing that more professors today feel their academic freedom is threatened than did during the McCarthyist era, is the kind of thing you’d expect me to have a lot to say about.

Gross surveyed social science professors last year about whether they had felt that their academic freedom was threatened, and found that about one-third did. In 1955, Paul Lazarsfeld, the late Columbia University professor, did a similar survey and found only one-fifth of professors feeling affected by attacks on their academic freedom.

However, I’m going out of town with my family in a little over an hour and won’t be back until the weekend, so I don’t have time to comment on it very fully. So here’s your assignment: imagine what you think I’d say about it, and then argue over what you’ve imagined in the comments.

Thanks — you’re a lifesaver!

From “gay pirate criticism” to “queer bucaneer theory”

One of my fellow alumns told me years ago of the one of my undergraduate professor’s quip about the historical moment when, as he put it, what has once been “gay pirate criticism” turned into “queer bucaneer theory.” I’m not sure what he meant by this phrase, but to me its always been a nice way of encapsulating the historical shift from a somewhat nebulous interdisciplinarity (think “blurred genres”) to the birth of ‘theory’ as a consolidated thing that academics ‘did’ (think the “culture/power/history” reader). The transition — here somewhat spitefully dismissed as mere relabelling — definitely happened. But when? At what point did the confluence of philosophy, literary criticism, and social science become ‘theory’ in the sense embraced by some, and denounced by the detail-minded? It’s a question that has been on my mind as I think about the spring class on “contemporary anthropological theory” that I’m supposed to be teaching at my university.

But at last, my friends, the question has been answered, for I have discovered “Sodomy And The Pirate Tradition: English Sea Rovers In The Seventeenth-Century Caribbean”:http://www.nyupress.org/books/Sodomy_and_the_Pirate_Tradition-products_id-812.html.

Behold! In the mere hours since I have discovered this book at a used book sale, my entire intellectual landscape has been changed. There is actually a book on queer bucaneer theory — and one that is endorsed by Johnny Depp no less.

The original title of the hardcover edition (released in 1983) was Sodomy and the Perception of Evil but the paperback edition of 1984 was retitled Sodomy and the Pirate Tradition. This is, to my mind, definitive: ‘theory’ (at least of the queer bucaneer variety) began in 1984.

Anthro theory timeline

In my Copious Free Time I’ve been playing around with The SIMILE Project’s excellent open-source tool timeline  — its very easy to use (although I haven’t used it much so far) and so I knocked up a flashy ‘web2.0’ time line of books written by anthropologists in the 1970s — you can see the very rough anthro theory timeline here. I think its incredibly cool and that we should fill in All Relevant Dates going back to League of the Iroquois. But then again that just might be me. So… how would you populate it?

Shweder on Geertz on Tiger

When Geertz passed away a while back, we linked to numerous obituaries and remembrances and (as I said in a previous entry), including “Lionel Tiger’s harsh assessment of Geertz in The Wall Street Journal”:http://henwood.blogspace.com/?p=4167. Richard Shweder has recently prepared a rebuttal to Tiger’s piece to be published in Common Knowledge and has made a “preprint available on his website”:http://humdev.uchicago.edu/shwederGeertzMemorial.doc. It’s an interesting piece that attempts to locate Geertz intellectually (a difficult if not impossible task, as Shweder admits) and to rebut Tiger’s piece about him (quite easy). Along the way we get some thoughts on tendencies in anthropological thought in recent decades and the Geertz almost (but of course not quite) fits into them. It’s a nice read.