Tag Archives: Public Anthropology

Anthropology, Dialog, and “Intellectual reconstruction”

Over at the “Democracy in America” blog at The Economist, M.S. has a new post that replies to Florida Governor Rick Scott’s recent “we don’t need no anthropologists” statement.  The author provides a rehash of the whole debacle, and then quotes Arizona State University president Michael Crow’s response to the situation:

[R]esolving the complex challenges that confront our nation and the world requires more than expertise in science and technology. We must also educate individuals capable of meaningful civic participation, creative expression, and communicating insights across borders. The potential for graduates in any field to achieve professional success and to contribute significantly to our economy depends on an education that entails more than calculus.

Curricula expressly tailored in response to the demands of the workforce must be balanced with opportunities for students to develop their capacity for critical thinking, analytical reasoning, creativity, and leadership—all of which we learn from the full spectrum of disciplines associated with a liberal arts education. Taken together with the rigorous training provided in the STEM fields, the opportunities for exploration and learning that Gov. Scott is intent on marginalizing are those that have defined our national approach to higher education.

M.S. argues that Crow’s statement is “a solid response,” but that something more is needed: “What it lacks are rhetorical oomph and concrete examples.”  So what can provide that extra OOMPH and rhetorical power?  Actual examples of anthropologists putting their training and knowledge to work:

Some of the best analysis of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, and of the ongoing follies on Wall Street these days, has been produced by the Financial Times‘ Gillian Tett. Ms Tett began warning that collateralised debt obligations and credit-default swaps were likely to lead to a major financial implosion in 2005 or so. The people who devise such complex derivatives are generally trained in physics or math. Ms Tett has a PhD in anthropology. Continue reading →

Anthropologist Bites Dog

I recently had an opportunity to watch José Padilha’s “Secrets of the Tribe” which purports to put “the field of anthropology… under the magnifying glass in [a] fiery investigation of the seminal research on Yanomamö Indians.” This film has been a big success at festivals, screening at Sundance, Hotdocs, etc. and has also been shown on HBO and the BBC, making it one of the most successful recent films about anthropology, yet it seems to have gotten scant attention from anthropologists.

What attention it has gotten has largely been positive, such as this glowing review in CounterPunch, or this blog post by Louis Proyect. A review in VAR was slightly more critical, but not by much. Still, the following comment from Stephen Broomer’s review gets to the heart of the matter:

Padilha’s contribution to this debate is confined within the limits of documentary form. Secrets of the Tribe is a narrative-driven documentary, and as such it privileges dramatic contrast over the reinforcement of facts or proof.

Indeed, I would go much further. The film struck me as little more than tabloid journalism, reveling in salacious scandals, academic cat fights, and conspiracy theories in the name of discussing research ethics and scientific methodology. It reminded me of one of those local news stories where a reporter exclaims how shocked he is to discover that there is prostitution in his city while the camera indulges in digitally blurred closeups of exposed female flesh.

In comparing this film to tabloid journalism I don’t mean to impute Padilha’s motives. Padilha is clearly someone who cares deeply about Brazil’s indigenous population. He also deserves credit for actually interviewing Yanomami for the film. But Padilha is not an anthropologist. As one review put it: “A student of math and physics, Padilha turned to filmmaking after a brief, unsatisfying career in banking.” (He is most famous for “Bus 174” about a hijacked bus in Rio.) For this reason he seems unable to meaningfully engage with contemporary debates about fieldwork practices or the nature of anthropological research.

I don’t really know which bothered me more: the lumping together of pedophilia accusations against Jacques Lizot and Kenneth Good with Patrick Tierney’s accusations against James Neel and Napoleon Chagnon, the fact that the film completely ignored Tim Asch even as it relies extensively on his footage, or the way it presented anthropological epistemology as a simplistic choice between the hard-science of sociobiology on the one hand and mushy-headed cultural relativism on the other.

What really upsets me is that these are serious issues, which warrant serious discussion. By simplifying the scientific debates and lumping them together with pedophilia accusations, the film missed a unique opportunity to make an important contribution to the popular understanding of anthropology. Too bad.

Governor of Florida: We don’t need no anthropologists

News from the “why don’t you all just get a real job” front.  Who cares about anthropology?  Who thinks that anthropology matters in the 21st century?  Well, it’s definitely NOT Florida Governor Rick Scott.  Yesterday, Governor Scott made his opinions about anthropology loud and clear during a radio interview:

We don’t need a lot more anthropologists in the state. It’s a great degree if people want to get it, but we don’t need them here. I want to spend our dollars giving people science, technology, engineering, and math degrees. That’s what our kids need to focus all their time and attention on, those types of degrees, so when they get out of school, they can get a job.

Daniel Lende provides a good recap of the situation and some of the reactions with this mega-linked, all inclusive post.  Jason Antrosio has also weighed in on the matter–his post also includes a link to the AAA response, which is here.  Jason sees this as an opportunity to rally anthropologists:

Not only does this give anthropology an opportunity to emphasize our scientific side, it could also be a rallying point for social science and humanities disciplines that were equally dismissed. It seems worth mentioning that while Scott dismisses everyone except math-science-engineering, it is at a time when other countries are seeking the lifelong thinking and creativity developed in a Liberal Arts education.

In another piece, John Hawks discusses some of the possible avenues for responding to this debacle.  How can or should anthropologists make their case?  He writes:

It’s very difficult to come up with a rapid and effective reply from an organization or department, so I understand these aren’t as punchy as they might be. Still, it seems to me a vastly more effective response would describe the economic impact of anthropologists in Florida, the dollar amounts of federal and private grants they bring to Florida universities, their role as custodians of natural and cultural history, and their history of engagement with indigenous and immigrant peoples in the state.

One of Scott’s underlying arguments is that anthropology doesn’t produce JOBS, and this is an argument that seems to get a lot of mileage by certain folks who aren’t exactly fans of social science (Tom Coburn, anyone?).  I am going to leave off with a few questions for all you Savage Minds out there: What do you think about this tactic of using jobs as the sole calculus for measuring the value of a discipline?  Should anthropologists be completely focused on producing jobs, or are there other elements that matter in a valuable and worthwhile education?  What about the value of teaching students how to think critically and holistically about the world around them?  Why say you, readers?

Imagined Anthropological Communities (that’s right: another post about publishing & open access)

Benedict Anderson’s* classic text “Imagined Communities” happens to be a pretty fascinating book to read while thinking about academia, communication, open access, publishing, and the formation of community.  Anderson’s argument is that print capitalism provided a critical medium that facilitated the production of national identities:

Speakers of a huge variety of Frenches, Englishes, or Spanishes, who might find it difficult or even impossible to understand one another in conversation, became capable of comprehending one another via print and paper.  In the process, they gradually became aware of the hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people in their particular language-field, and at the same time that only those hundreds of thousands, or millions, so belonged.  These fellow-readers, to whom they were connected through print, formed, in their secular, particular, visible invisibility, the embryo of the nationally imagined community (2006: 44).

However, as Anderson goes on to point out, there are limits to this construction of imagined communities: “The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations” (2006: 7).  Nations have edges–they do not include every possible member of the human species.  These communities are inclusive and exclusive all at once.  Language, transmitted through a particular medium (in this case print capitalism) can be marshaled to engender powerful shared social meanings and connections.  But the reverse is also true.  Language and communication can also be used (purposefully or not) as a means of exclusion.

Think about those ideas on a much smaller scale.  Way smaller.  Academics–and anthropologists in particular–form a certain kind of imagined community as well. Continue reading →

We Don’t Need Another Hero

This quarter’s American Anthropologist reprints two distinguished lectures from AAA conferences past, including Jeremy Sabloff’s excellent “Where have you gone, Margret Mead? Anthropology and Public Intellectuals.” Even though I was in attendance at the 2010 conference in New Orleans I somehow missed this talk. You can be sure that my absence had nothing to do with Bourbon Street, seafood, bread pudding, or cruising city neighborhoods with lost cab drivers looking for avant garde art installations. Nothing at all.

Which is a shame, because I’m heartened by the AAA’s earnest interest in exploring the public role of our discipline although I am skeptical as to whether this will amount to more than a trend to be tossed aside when something else bright and shiny catches the discipline’s attention. Maybe I’m reminded of similar calls for anthropology to be interdisciplinary only for that to amount to so much lip service. You can’t make a career publishing in journals of history, American studies, or education. If you want to be an anthropologist you are expected to publish in anthropology journals. Interdisciplinarity be damned.

If you are a dues paying member of the AAA then you can read the text of Sabloff’s plea for heightened public engagement behind a pay wall. While blogging does feature in his essay (with mad shout outs to Daniel Lende and Michael Smith), whether the Association’s decision to pursue a toll-gated publication regime managed by Wiley-Blackwell is at odds with his call for public engagement is, unfortunately, not addressed.

Did you see what I did there? Public. Publication. Eh? Eh? Continue reading →

The search for anthropology in public, part II

Whenever I go into a bookstore, I always check out the anthropology section (see part I here).  A curious habit, or custom, or something like that.  What can I say?  I have my routines.  I like to see what happens to be on the shelves and compare that to my own understandings of what contemporary anthropology is all about.  I imagine that this is some sort of litmus test that tells us something about the state of anthropology in the public sphere.  Maybe, maybe not.  More about that shortly.  So, the last time I did this informal empirical investigation, the results were similar to past experiences: not phenomenal.  The most “anthropological” books included:

  1. Composing a Life by Mary Catherine Bateson

  2. The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond

  3. 1491 by Charles Mann

  4. Food of the Gods by Terence McKenna

Bateson’s was the only book I saw that was written by an actual anthropologist.  How it is that only one anthropologist happens to be in the anthropology section is beyond me.  This was a particularly skewed sample, I’ll admit–usually there’s at least a Wade Davis, Margaret Mead, or even Sir James Frazier in the mix.  Not this time.  The rest of the section was incredibly eclectic, and included everything from books by Drew Pinsky to one by Maira Kalman (which does look pretty cool, though not what I would define as anthropology).  Some of this eclectic-ness had to be due to some restocking malfunctions, undoubtedly, but overall the section on anthropology was, as is often the case, a strange and somewhat askew reflection of the discipline.  Yes, that is an opinion.  And now, it’s time for some questions: Continue reading →

The Vonnegut factor

I just spent the last few days driving across the massive territory that is the United States via the hot, humid route known as the I-40.  (The heat index in Oklahoma City was 118, by the way.)  I-40 happens to be strewn with that ever interesting media known as the billboard, which got me thinking about how and why we (anthropologists) use our particular forms of media to communicate information, ideas, and concepts to diverse audiences.  Yes, this post has something to do with anthropology AND Kurt Vonnegut.  Just wait.

So all of those billboards kept blazing past me.  They had all sorts of messages on them, from the blandly utilitarian and boring (THIS SPACE AVAILABLE) to the humorous/weird (JEAN SHORTS ARE NEVER OK*) all the way to the erotic (XXX MEGA ADULT SUPERSTORE NEXT LEFT).  There’s certainly no shortage of themes and styles.  The billboard medium has certain constraints, of course (size, font, images, and the fact that drivers are gunning their engines anywhere between 60 and 100 miles per hour and only view those masterpieces of highway art for a few wondrous seconds).  So billboard artists and advertisers have to make important decisions in order to broadcast their messages effectively and efficiently.  They can go with humor, or shock, or offer alluring information that weary road warriors just can’t resist (HUGE, SPARKLING CLEAN RESTROOMS 25 MILES).  Similar messages or information can be transmitted to viewers in radically different ways–there are numerous methods for telling drivers to pull over and buy some crap at the next exit. Continue reading →

Can We Still Write Big Question Sorts of Books?

[Savage Minds is very happy to welcome guest blogger David Graeber.]

About a year ago, I gave my old friend Keith Hart a draft of my new book, Debt: The First 5000 Years, and asked him what he thought of it. “It’s quite remarkable,” he ultimately replied. “I don’t think anyone has written a book like this in a hundred years.”

The reason I’m not embarrassed to recount the incident is because I’m still not sure it was meant as a compliment. If you think of most books of the sort people used to write a hundred years ago but no longer do—Frazer’s Golden Bough, Spengler’s Decline of the West, let alone, say, Gobineau’s Inequality of the Human Races—there’s usually an excellent reason why they don’t.

But in a way, Keith had it exactly right. The aim of the book was, indeed, to write the sort of book people don’t write any more: a big book, asking big questions, meant to be read widely and spark public debate, but at the same time, without any sacrifice of scholarly rigor. History will judge whether it’s still possible to pull this sort of thing off (let alone whether I’m the person who will be able to do it.) But it struck me that if there was ever a time, the credit crisis —and near collapse of the global economy in 2008—afforded the perfect opportunity. In the wake of the disaster, it was as if suddenly, everyone wanted to start asking big questions again. Even The Economist, that bastion of neoliberal orthodoxy, was running cover headlines like “Capitalism: Was It A Good Idea?” It seemed like it would suddenly be possible to have a real conversation, to start asking not just “what on earth is a credit default swap?” but “What is money, anyway? Debt? Society? The market? Are debts different from other sorts of promises? Why do we treat them as if they were? Are existing economic arrangements really, as we’ve been told for so long, the only possible ones?”

That lasted about three weeks and then governments put a 13-trillion dollar band-aid over the problem and started the usual chant of “move along, move along, there’s nothing to see here.” Continue reading →

Making the (Funding) Cut: The NSF, Anthropology, and the value of social science

Social science research isn’t on the firmest ground in these days of economic malaise, but it’s not like this news is exactly exploding into the headlines across the nation.  Funding cuts, like the recent “trimming” of the Fulbright program,* seem to take place somewhat under the radar.   The same can be said of the recent debates about the value of social, behavioral, and economic (SBE) sciences that took place about a month ago in a congressional hearing on June 2, 2011 (this link has PDFs of the introductory statements and the testimony of all the witnesses).  The social sciences face an uphill battle, in part, because some folks see them as mere “soft sciences” that do not merit public support.  The House panel subcommittee meeting was about assessing the relative merit of the social sciences and how federal funding should or should not be allocated to researchers.  Did you hear about this?  Well, I didn’t–at least not until just a few days ago.  Funny what can happen in the middle of the summer, isn’t it?  Anyway, here’s a recap of what went down according to a summary from the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA):

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) chaired the panel, which included the testimony of four witnesses:  Myron Gutman (Assistant Director for NSF’s SBE directorate), Hillary Anger Elfenbein (Olin School of Business at Washington University, St. Louis), Peter Wood (President of the National Association of Scholars), and finally Diana Furchtgott-Roth (Senior fellow at the Hudson Institute).  Here’s how Brooks described the basic purpose of the hearing:

The goal of this hearing is not to question whether the social, behavioral, and economic sciences produce interesting and sound research, as I believe we all can agree that they do. I come from a social science background. I have a degree in political science and economics. Rather, the goal of our hearing is to look at the need for federal investments in these disciplines, how we determine what those needs are in the context of national priorities, and how we prioritize funding for those needs, not only within the social science disciplines, but also within all science disciplines, particularly when federal research dollars are scarce.

Brooks’ language sounds cool, rational, and impartial.  However, according to journalist Jeffrey Mervis:

Brooks may have been pulling his punches. In comments to ScienceInsider after the hearing, Brooks expressed serious doubts about the value of the social sciences. The freshman legislator said he “understands the value of basic research” because his constituents in and around Huntsville, Alabama, make up “one of, if not the most, highly educated districts in the sciences.” Brooks did say that “my priorities would be to protect basic research in the sciences as much as possible, even to the extent of cutting entitlements, in order to generate enough funding for basic research.” But his definition of the term “basic research” turns out to be synonymous with the so-called hard sciences, and to exclude the social sciences.

Continue reading →

Eco-Chic Burning Man Hipsters

That curious identity politic that mixes neo-primitive fashion, ecological coolness, spiritual openness, upper middle class ambition, multiculturalism, and conscious consumerism can be coalesced under the moniker eco-chic–an elite contradictory expression of social justice and neoliberalism. It will be explored in the conference Eco–Chic: Connecting Ethical, Sustainable and Elite Consumption, put on by the European Science Foundation in October. The conference organizers see this expressive culture accurately in its rich contradictions. Eco-chic “is both the product of and a move against globalization processes. It is a set of practices, an ideological frame and a marketing strategy.” If you’ve spent anytime in Shoreditch, Haight, Williamsburg, or Silverlake you’ve got some experience with these hip, trendy elites. Ramesh calls them “Burning Man Hipsters.” I’ve been studying new media producers in America and eco-chic describes an important cultural incarnation of these knowledge producer’s value set. As far as anthropology is concerned, meta-categories such as eco-chic, liberalism, or transhumanism that cross cultural boundaries while remaining bound by class, challenge our discipline to revisit totalizing notions such as “culture” and “tribe.”

Eco-chic, like many other socio-cultural manifestations of neoliberalism is rife with contradiction. The fundamental contradiction being that it is a social justice movement within consumer capitalism. The producers of eco-chic goods and experiences are structured by capitalism’s profit motive. Likewise consumers of eco-chic goods and experiences are motivated by ideals that try to transcend or correct the ecological or deleterious human impacts of capitalism. Thus both producer and consumer of eco-chic are caught in a contradiction between their social justice drives and their suspension in the logic of neoliberalism. Eco chic events such as Burning Man and television networks such as Al Gore’s Current TV also express the fundamental contradiction between the social and the entrepreneurial in social entrepreneurialism. How do the contradictions within eco-chic represent themselves in American West Coast’s cultural expressions such as Burning Man and Current TV? Continue reading →

Costs of War: Doing the Numbers

If you Google “$3.7 Trillion” and “war” today, you’ll find a torrent of news coverage about the newly released Costs of War report authored by the Eisenhower Study Group based out of Brown’s Watson Institute for International Studies.

I was part of the interdisciplinary group, co-directed by Catherine Lutz, that co-authored the report which aims to comprehensively explore the vast scope and scale of the impacts, the many kinds of costs, of the U.S. military response to 9/11. So, not surprisingly, the mood strikes me to tell you something about it.

There were more than 20 of us who contributed to the project, and anthropologists were well represented alongside historians, journalists, political scientists, economists, and others.

One of the great strengths of the report and it’s interdisciplinary approach is that it brings together numbers (like international civilian casualty rates) and issues (like impacts of deployment on the children of U.S. service members) that are often disarticulated or overlooked all together.

Now, for better or worse, numbers make good headlines, and this report is chock full of them. We noted that:

The wars have created more than 7.8 million refugees in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan; U.S. veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are 75% more likely to die in car crashes than their civilian counterparts; Military responses to terrorism have been successful in only 7%of the 268 examples since the late 20th Century; An M-1 Abrams tank gets about half a mile per gallon of gas; In the U.S., the proportion of hate crimes against Muslims has risen 500%since 2000, even though overall hate crime rates have gone down; And, as everyone from The Washington Post to The Toronto Sun noted, the report estimates an (incomplete) price tag of between $3.2 and $4 Trillion.

These numbers are compelling. And, true to the axiom “if it’s integerial, it leads,” (that’s how it goes, right?) numbers make good copy.

But as an anthropologist with a healthy disciplinary skepticism of faith in statistics and all their quantitative kin, and one who worked with injured soldiers and their families and wants people to know about their struggles, I was torn between the power of contagious numbers, and their simplifying and sometimes anesthetizing effects.

Thinking that some of you folks might be too, I thought I would share a few other findings of the report; findings that speak to the power of absent numbers:

The $4 Trillion number leaves much uncounted. For example, it doesn’t count ‘solatia’ payments that the U.S. makes to the families of some Afghan and Iraqi civilians killed or the cost of Predator and Reaper drones (we do know, however, that Predators cost $4.5 million each, and that more than one third of them have crashed).

Project Co-director Neta Crawford’s contribution on casualties begins with a poignant description of the historical, logistical, and political reasons that a death, especially, but not only, that of a civilian can be made uncountable.

Political scientist Alison Howell and I note the way that sensational statistics, like divorce rates, can mask the strains on military families, the very things for which they’re supposed to stand as proxy.

Matthew Evangelista’s contribution offers some important historical lessons using unexpected numbers often disappeared from amnesiac comparative histories of terrorism including those related to organizations active in the 1970s like Germany’s Red Army Faction, Italy’s Brigate Rosse, and Quebec’s Front de Liberation du Québec.

So, though Reuters has made $3.7 Trillion the headline of the Costs of War report, it seemed you might be interested in other ways the rest of us are doing the numbers.

What Tim Hetherington Offered to Anthropology

Tim HetheringtonOn March 15th, I moderated a panel at RISD called Picturing Soldiers: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Contemporary Soldier Photographs featuring photographers Lori Grinker, Jennifer Karady, Suzanne Opton, and Tim Hetherington, who as killed today in Libya.

One of the amazing things about the work of each of these artists is how resonant it is with what we do as anthropologists. Like ethnography, their images are not simply about ‘documentation.’ They are about conveying something of lived experience that allows us, provokes us, to ask questions about how some particular lives come to look they way they do. They invite us to linger on the lives of soldiers long enough to think about how they are, and also are not, like others.

It strikes me that in our disciplinary conversations about what various modes of anthropological engagement might look like, we often fail to recognize the possibilities of such resonances. These possibilities are especially promising when the lives we explore are characterized, in one way or another, by war. Here, issues of politics and ethics lie both close to the surface and close to the bone. Tim Hetherington’s work was powerful proof of these possibilities.

For example, he said many times that he hoped Restrepo, his thoroughly ethnographic Afghanistan war documentary, co-directed with Sebastian Junger, would offer a new and more productive starting place for thinking about the war and US military intervention.

As Tim put it in an excellent interview at Guernica where he responds to Leftist criticism of the film:

While moral outrage may motivate me, I think demanding moral outrage is actually counter-productive because people tend to switch off. […] Sure, the face of the U.S. soldier is the “easiest entrée into the Afghan war zone” but it has allowed me to touch many people at home with rare close-up footage of injured and dead Afghan civilians (as well as a young U.S. soldier having a breakdown following the death of his best friend). Perhaps these moments represent the true face of war rather than the facts and figures of political analyses or the black and white newsprint of leaked documents.

In a more personal mode, Tim offered the experimental film Diary, which reflects something of the compulsions, rhythms, and senses of his movement into and out of ‘zones of killing’, as he suggested we might think of such spaces. Here too, we can find resonances with anthropological explorations of the particular vertiginous experiences of being in and out and in such spaces of violence, and of the uneven geographies of deadly violence.

News continues to unfold about the incident in Libya that may have also killed photographer Chris Hondros, and that seriously injured photographers Guy Martin, Michael Christopher, among others. And as we continue to hear more of Tim Hetherington’s death, and more remembrances of his life and work, I’ll also be thinking about what his work, and the work of other artists and journalists, has to offer us anthropologists; the places where our various projects meet, and the possibilities for thinking and acting that might begin from there.

Ethnography as Community Service

The city manager’s FY11 budget for Newport News has eliminated funding for our bookmobile. This was a great concern for all of us on the board of trustees for the city library system. We knew budget cuts were coming and worked hard to come up with a scheme that distributed cuts across departments so that we wouldn’t have to reduce hours or services. What a disappointment for us to see those cuts made and then the bookmobile taken out as a line item too. The board wrote a letter to the mayor and council. From there it was up to us to act as individual citizens and write, call, or show up at a city council meeting designated for budget concerns.

I was telling this story to a friend of mine from grad school who used to work in a youth treatment facility in Durham. He said he used to go to city council meetings all the time to persuade them to keep funding the rehab center. “You take some personal stories with quotes add statistics to back up your point and you’ve got a one-two punch.”

That’s when this light went on over my head. Duh! I’m an anthropologist. This is what I was trained to do!

I emailed the director of the city libraries and okayed the plan. Then one morning I followed the bookmobile to a couple of different stops, made some observations and talked to people. I spent one evening writing up a short presentation and spent another evening waiting for my turn to come up at the city council meeting. I gave my talk and it totally killed, there was about fifty people there and they gave me a round of applause. A community news website published my remarks.

All in all it amounted to about twelve hours of effort. I don’t know if this counts as applied anthropology, activist anthropology, or public anthropology. Maybe none of the above. But it really wasn’t that hard and it made me feel really good, folks at the council hearing seemed to really appreciate it too.

If anyone has the opportunity to do something like this you should. It’s not difficult to use anthropology to make a modest contribution where you live. Did it make a difference? I guess we’ll see in four weeks time when the council votes on the budget. Keep your fingers crossed!

On the Front Lines in Wisconsin

by Gwen Kelly

Last Monday, February 14th, having heard a preview of the budget proposals to come, the Teaching Assistants Association (TAA) of the University of Wisconsin, Madison decided to try a different sort of tack in protest. Perhaps one that had never been tried before. They organized a campaign to get thousands of undergraduate and graduate students to sign valentines, big cards with hearts on them, saying “I <3 UW. Governor Walker, Don’t Break My Heart” (image below). It was a great idea, or at least it seemed so at the time, when we didn’t realize just how uncompromising Governor Scott Walker was going to turn out to be.  It goes to show how naive we were.  We knew something bad was coming, but we didn’t know how bad it would be.

Continue reading →

Human Nature: It’s Not What You Think

Over at Neuroanthropology Greg is asking how anthropology can best brand itself. Its a long entry, but don’t worry, you can just make a point of only reading the passages which have been bolded. I’ve argued for some time that anthropology’s brand is diluted by popular representations of it but I’ve never really sat down and attempted to reduce to a few bullet points what exactly that brand is or ought to be, as Greg has done. Greg focuses on five main things that anthropologists do: make discoveries, interesting stuff, fieldwork, science, and advocacy. I like many of these but I think I’d like to offer a twist on some of them here, and if I had my druthers for a central message out of anthropology I think I’d go with this instead:

Human Nature: It’s Not What You Think

I like this motto because it, like a forty pack of pudding cups from the pak-n-save, be broken out into separate containers which can be sold separately:

Anthropology: We Own Human Nature

Anthropology is a four-field discipline, and the main reason it needs to stay that way is to keep what we know about human nature from being forgotten. Other congeries of disciplines have their own take on human nature, often derived from models of how they imagine people work, or people in highly artificial lab-based experiments. We need to emphasize that our models are reality-based: empirical, from a wide sample of places and times, and based on naturalistic human behavior. Lab work is great for some things but in the final instance actual human behavior should be used to explain actual human behavior: this is a central Boasian lesson. I personally work far away from the seam where biology meets culture (or rather, where those two terms are no longer analytically useful because they collapse into one another). But I, like all anthropologists, need to attend to that boundary and have a basic idea what goes on there. We started out as human nature experts and we need to stay that way.

Masters of the Unexpected

The fundamental insight of anthropology is that most people mistake convention for necessity and that our intuitions about what humanity as a whole are like come out of day-to-day experiences which are quite parochial. This should make us masters of the unexpected, purveyors of surprises and strange twists on common sense: the very stuff of headlines. Too often, however, we use our awareness of cultural relativism as a cudgel, telling people how ‘limited’ and ‘blinded’ they are by their culture. How much press is there in that?

This is a bit like Greg’s idea of ‘making discoveries’ but I really think we need to embrace — without fear of exoticism — the idea that people can find our work interesting without us becoming bad people. On this point I’m in agreement with Greg: we need to get over knee-jerk fears of exoticism even as we take seriously realistic critiques of the colonial and colonizing origins/impulses of our discipline.

The Everything-Studiers

Greg emphasizes that we need to embrace fieldwork as distinctive. However for me what is amazing about anthropology is not that we go places to study people — it’s where we go and who we study. Anthropologists know we study everything from Polynesian outliers in Micronesia to investment bankers in wall street to sky divers to people who eat their dead relatives to hip hop in Brazil. We love our freewheeling ability to take absolutely anything seriously. We need to play not only the “I’ve Been To Burma!” card (to quote an Eric Overmeyer line) but also that we study things that people didn’t think you could study because they are so close to home: Walmart. Guitar Hero experts. Graffiti. Corgie fanciers. Close-up magic. Pro-anorexia websites. We think of it as a committed comparativism, but it is a short step (often, the walk between the lecture hall and the local pub) from comparativism to this-is-to-cool-to-not-study. Anthropological careers have been launched with the sudden insight “I didn’t even know you could study that” and I bet public interest would be as well.

Science? Yes. But more than science, too.

For most reasonable, un-shirty definitions of science, cultural anthropology is a science. The other three fields are even easier to brand as science. Greg is right that incredibly subtle discussion about the status of Reality and Truth need to take a back seat to public professions that we actually know what we are talking about since we do (or at least we should). At the same time, what makes anthropology unique is that we go further than just facts and theories — the type of knowledge we offer is further, deeper, different. This “bonus insight” is not an alternative or criticism of ‘science’ (I am all for criticisms of shirty definitions of science) but an addition: the extra mile we go to that makes what we do even richer and more valuable than a ‘just the facts’ lab-coatism.

People are not stupid. Unfortunately, most science education takes the form of teaching students that people in lab coats know The Truth and that they should shut up and not ask any questions because they wouldn’t be able to understand the answers anyway. And by and large people do do so. But we all know that we learn with our hearts, that our knowledge of the world is enriched by time and experience, that key events in our lives broaden our perspectives, that there is something you get out of a great work of fiction that should be counted as insight.

Anthropologists should be honest with the public and admit what we ourselves have known all along: that fieldwork provides both data and personal transformation, that cultivation and knowledge are broader than just an analysis of cultural systems. Of all the social sciences anthropology (and perhaps certain of the more outré versions of symbolic interactionism) is willing to recognize different and broader forms of knowledge. And even, at times, provide them.

Call it the Carlos Castaneda pathway to fame and fortune, but I think we need to grasp the nettle on this one and point out that beyond science there is an additional kind of insight we provide — one which people might more intuitively recognize as similar to a kind of understanding they are pursuing. And let’s be honest — the great ethnographies provide us with this bonus insight without having to fabricate shamanic visions or choke down jimson weed smoothies.

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Greg focuses on activism as a hallmark of anthropology, which just doesn’t spring to mind for me. I believe that activism — like diversity — has a special history in anthropology and needs to be protected as a main part of our big-tent tradition of inclusion. But I think you can be an anthropologist without being an activist. I don’t know I could be wrong. I think I just came up with four bullet points and then pooped out. In the end I think that Greg is right about one particularly important point: we need to ‘do anthropology’ in public, whether that is fieldwork or just presenting arguments from the ethnographic record so that people can watch us doing anthropology, rather than just describing what goes on behind closed doors. Speaking of which, I have to get back to my book manuscript…