Cultural anthropologists are often concerned that their work is not getting the public attention that it deserves. Yet just a few decades ago, cultural anthropology was familiar to a broad audience who thought it to be interesting, thought provoking, and even life changing. In the 1960s and the 1970s, the work of a number of cultural anthropologists found an appreciative public, and their books sold well. These anthropologists wrote in plain English, on eye-catching subjects, and for commercial presses rather than academic presses. Looking back, their work may elicit a mixture of admiration, amazement, embarrassment, and even dismay. Can you identify these anthropologists? (Answers follow the questions.)

THE QUIZ:

1. Name the only cultural anthropologist to win the National Book Award.
2. Name the most recent cultural anthropologist to win the Pulitzer Prize.
3. Name the British anthropologist whose book about an allegedly dysfunctional African group inspired a play by acclaimed playwright Peter Brook that was performed on stage in Paris, London, and New York and that also led to the production of a recent documentary film.
4. Name the anthropologist whose classic work from 1934 on cultural patterns yielded 800,000 copies in print by 1958, making it the best-selling book by a cultural anthropologist to that time.
5. Name the two little-known anthropologists whose book on open marriage in the early 1970s sold millions of copies world-wide, making it the all-time best seller by anthropologists.
6. Name the cultural anthropologist who co-produced an Academy Award-winning documentary in the late 1970s based on her ethnography of an elderly Jewish population in southern California.
7. Name the cultural anthropologist who wrote a monthly column for a mainstream women’s magazine for 17 years during the 1960s and 1970s.
8. Name the cultural anthropologist whose work on shamanism made him an icon of the counter-culture of the late 1960s and 1970s and who was profiled in a cover story for Time magazine.
9. Name the former student of Franz Boas whose work on Africa in the 1940s was embraced by the Black Panthers and black nationalist students in the 1960s.
10. Name the virtually unknown anthropologists who co-authored a popular book about black sexual stereotypes and world of black “players” in the early 1970s and who appeared on the CBS TV series ‘’60 Minutes”.
11. Name the cultural anthropologist whose scathing book-length critique of American culture and advertising was widely read in the mid-1960s.

THE ANSWERS:

1. Oscar Lewis won the National Book Award in 1967 for La Vida; he was a finalist in 1962 for The Children of Sanchez.

2. Ernest Becker won the Pulitzer Prize for The Denial of Death in 1974. Oliver LaFarge also won it in 1929 for Laughing Boy.

3. Colin Turnbull’s controversial best seller, The Mountain People (1972), was the subject of a play, ‘The Ik’, and a recent documentary film, ‘Ikland’ (2012).

4. Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture (1934) outsold all other anthropological books into the early 1960s.

5. Nena and George O’Neill’s Open Marriage (1972), which contained only three pages on “open marriage,” spent 40 weeks on the New York Times’ best seller list.

6. Barbara Myerhoff’s Number Our Days (1976) was made into an Academy Award- winning documentary, co-produced with Lynne Littman.

7. Margaret Mead’s long-running column for Redbook (1962-1978) holds the record for popular magazine articles by an anthropologist.

8. Carlos Castenada wrote The Teachings of Don Juan (1968) and other works that have been very popular.

9. Melville Herskovits’ The Myth of the Negro Past (1941) resonated with black nationalists in the late 1960s.

10. Richard and Christina Milner co-authored Black Players (1971), a book that was featured on ’60 Minutes.’

11. Jules Henry wrote Culture Against Man (1964).

If you missed some of the answers, don’t worry. At least four of the authors are virtually unknown today (Becker, the O’Neills, the Milners, and Henry), and some of the others are not well known. Their popularity and visibility have rarely endured. Today blogs, YouTube, and other on-line platforms offer possibilities for communicating with the public that earlier generations of cultural anthropologists could not have imagined. The sheer number, accessibility, and immediacy of these new venues provide unique opportunities for making our work widely available to a variety of audiences. But will our efforts have the impact we anticipate? Or, given the transient nature of the Internet, will our efforts be less enduring than we hoped?

Paul Shankman is professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Colorado. He has worked in Samoa and is the author of numerous articles about Margaret Mead and the Mead-Freeman controversy including The Trashing of Margaret Mead: Anatomy of Anthropological Controversy (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009, and reviewed here on Savage Minds).]

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” — H.L. Mencken

In a recent blog post, Paul Krugman argues that economists and policy makers have deliberately mystified the current economic situation for political reasons and that the solution to our current woes is actually very simple: we need more government spending to boost demand. He plays off the above Mencken epigram, saying “For every simple problem there is an answer that is murky, complex, and wrong.”

It is interesting to compare the kind of economic fear mongering discussed by Krugman with the role of culture in Ebola fear mongering. In a recent interview with medical anthropologist Theresa MacPhail she criticizes that “horrible and racist Newsweek” cover story on Ebola for the way it blames the spread of the disease on African “culture.”

Burial practices, wild meat consumption, and local reactions to quarantine and isolation have all been described as “cultural” problems that promote the spread of Ebola. As an anthropologist, I think that journalists should be careful when they use “culture” as a rationale. Culture is not an explanation. It’s something that needs further examination. Culture should not be a cudgel used to blame the victims of Ebola for their own suffering.

What struck me about these two discussions is the fact that, when seen side-by-side in this way, they highlight how willingly journalists (and the public) accept the economy as something which is complex and difficult to understand, but treat culture as a kind of self-evident set of practices and beliefs which, once identified, need no further explanation. As such, public intellectuals in economics (like Krugman) spend a lot of time trying to convince the public that economic problems are easily understandable, while a lot of the work we do as public anthropologists goes into trying to make complex what people believe they already intuitively understand.

Thinking about this led me to make some further disparate observations on complexity and public anthropology/economics which I gave up trying to work into a coherent narrative and instead present to you here in this handy list form:

1. While both the mathematical tools used by economists and the theoretical tools used by anthropologists appear as a foreign language to the untrained eye, there is a certain willingness to accept the necessity of translating human behavior into math while there is a strong negative reaction to the use of anthropological jargon.

2. Economic fear mongering can also take the form of simplistic economic truisms, such as the false analogy between national debt and household debt. But there is a difference between arguing that something is counter-intuitive and arguing that it is complex. I think Krugman does a good job of showing that the truism is wrong without resorting to a complexity argument.

3. Often the complexity that anthropologists want to talk about involves the impact of political-economic factors upon culture. This means that we are often arguing against our own particular claim to expertise (insofar as people see anthropologists as experts on “culture”). I think that one reason for Jared Diamond’s success is that (as Rex so eloquently discusses in his article in The Appendix) this is not a handicap for him since he isn’t really interested in “culture” in the first place.

To be sure, neither Hoffman nor Diamond are Michael French Smith, whose readable, thoughtful, and informed A Faraway, Familiar Place is the best book written for a lay audience about Papua New Guinea today. Unlike Smith, neither author has a Ph.D. in anthropology and decades of close connection with a single community in PNG. But Hoffman gets things right that Diamond doesn’t.

First, Hoffman gets his facts straight and Diamond doesn’t. As someone with little experience in Papua New Guinea and West Papua (the two political units that share the island of New Guinea), Hoffman is keenly aware of the need to get his facts straight. As a journalist, he assumes his work will come under scrutiny and has a professional commitment to empirical rigor. Diamond, on the other hand, is almost too anthropological in his reliance on anecdote and assumption that the people he describes will never read what he writes. Does Hoffman make mistakes? Yes, a few. But Diamond’s writings on death and revenge have holes big enough that you could drive a truck through them. Hoffman is a careful professional. And where human reportage is concerned, Diamond is an amateur.

Hoffman’s work is shocking in its willingness to confront the most un-PC aspects of life in New Guinea. You only need to go about 20 pages into Savage Harvest to find a vivid description of people killing and butchering Michael Rockefeller. Most anthropologist and Pacific Islanders will be so turned off by these representations of Melanesians that they will just close the book and walk a way. But Hoffman’s willingness to deal with these aspects of Melanesian culture actually make him more careful about what he is saying rather than less — he clearly knows he needs to tread carefully in this minefield. I am sure many anthropologists will disagree with me when I say that Hoffman is relatively successful in doing this. But most will agree he’s better at it than Diamond, even though Diamond often deals with topics that are not spectacular and stereotypical.

What makes Hoffman’s work more appealing than Diamond’s is Hoffman’s empathy and ability to learn from others. The final third of Savage Harvest describes his time living in West Papua. As he gets to know people — if only briefly — you can clearly see him leaving behind the stereotypes he came there with. Hoffman’s own journey, as naggingly incomplete as it seems to an anthropologist, demonstrates a thoughtful and introspective personality. Diamond, on the other hand, seems genuinely changes by his time in New Guinea, but seems too used to studying birds to really get people. As someone who has conducted fieldwork in a dangerous area of Papua New Guinea, I felt for both of these authors — but felt more for Hoffman.

Anthropologists will find Hoffman’s writings difficult to stomach, given our predispositions. But they are worth reading and assigning in class — especially as a first book about the Pacific, to pique interest for a deeper and more nuanced account of life there. Jared Diamond? Not so much.

Increased productivity
Although we both have very different careers – Pál being a full-time university professor and Joana being a „free-lance anthropolgist“ and running an internet start-up – we have (in addition to many single-authored works) over the last 10 years written dozens of articles and three books together, as well as devised e-learning courses and workshops. One of the reasons for our large output has been that we were able to cover very different audiences in a few strokes. Not only has nearly all our writing been published in both German and English, we also wrote up different versions, one academic, the other targeting a general audience.

With different audiences in mind and living in different social spheres we had access to a large pool of research ideas, thus Pál made us study the lifeworlds of Soviet theoretical physicists and Chinese migrants in Eastern Europe and Italy, whereas Joana got us into the comparative study of mass tourism and pushed our exploration of the pervasive uses of culture outside of anthropology, which would eventually lead to Maxikulti and Seeing Culture Everywhere. Pál was sceptical at first – is this academic enough? Is this interesting enough? – but never regretted having been persuaded. Not all of our ventures ended up in serious research or writing – trips to a monastery in Serbia and to a Mennonite farm in Belize yielded only titbits and a trip to the Turkish coast to study Russian tourists, only a car accident. But they were all fun.

Reaching a larger audience
With access to different networks, we published in academic journals such as Current Anthropology and  Development and Change, as well as in mainstream German newspapers and magazines, such as business monthly brand eins, Geo and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Writing together also counterbalances our weaknesses: Pál‘s tendency to write too densely and Joana‘s inclination to overgeneralize.

How do you write a book together?
Many people ask: „How does writing together actually work?“ Except for a short while, when Pál was at the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin, we have never lived in the same city. Instead we have met in dozens of different countries. When Pál is doing fieldwork, Joana might join him for a few days to get the feel for the place necessary to write about it. We also travelled to many places together, from Central America via Eastern Europe to Russia and China, doing „fieldwork light“ along the way.

When our writing is not based on detailed fieldwork by Pál, we usually devise an outline together. Then it is Joana’s task to collect and aggregate the relevant theses and case studies, as she – as a generalist — has a better overview of relevant anthropological material. After this we meet (in Budapest, Sydney, Nice,  Berlin or Luang Prabang to name just a few of the places) for two or three weeks of intensive writing, both sitting in front of one laptop, with Joana often proposing a general structure of the argument and Pál argueing against or refining it and coming up with the final formulations. Back in our respective homes Joana starts the first revision, sending it back to Pál for a final edit. Thus it is a real joint venture and we feel that very few, if any of our output could have been written by one of us a alone.

And last but not least, one of the main rewards for co-authorship is the fun and inspiration we get from working together.