Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by John McCreery on June 10, 2010 at 1:00am

Keith Hart writes,

But my main thesis is that our amateur investigations of everything under the sun lead us to retreat into our own company for purposes of mutual protection and to shun the public.

Ouch. I predict a stunned silence in response (hoping, of course, for the opposite). For my own part, I pose a question: Can we make a case for the usefulness of "amateur investigations"?

I recall an interview with Sekizawa Hidehiko, then director of the Hakuhodo Institute of Life and Living (HILL), whose research provided the substance of my book on Japanese consumer behavior. We were talking about how HILL researchers were recruited. They were, it turned out, seconded from Japan's second largest advertising agency, Hakuhodo, chosen, he said, for their curiosity about consumer behavior. I asked if HILL ever hired academics. No, said Sekizawa, they are all too narrow-minded. If you hire a sociologist or economist, all you get from them is sociology or economics. We like to think of ourselves, he continued, as a group of "high amateurs" (amateurs with serious expertise), like British intelligence during WWII.

In Sekizawa's comments I detect a sensibility like that of Tom Kelley, one of the founders of IDEO and author of The Ten Faces of Innovation. The first face is the anthropologist, described by Kelley as follows,

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

Two additional favorite citations come to mind.

Richard Schechner writes of the work of Victor Turner that,

Turner, who specialized in the liminal, the in-between, lived in a house that was all doors: every idea led to new ideas, every proposition was a network of possibilities. I think he was so long interested in performance—theatre, dance, music, ritual, and social drama—because performance is the art that is open, unfinished, decentered, liminal. Performance is a paradigm of process.

Reading Schechner, I find myself reminded of a remark attributed to advertising legend Carl Ally.

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


All of these remarks point to the value that the thoughtful amateur's eclecticism can bring to debates where professionals blindsided by reality are blinkered by their professional focus. Perhaps, in the spirit of Queer Theory, anthropologists, too, should embrace a term intended as abuse and proclaim proudly, yes, we are amateurs, amateurs and connoisseurs of the riches of human variety. Need a fresh perspective? Look for an anthropologist!

The tricky bit, of course, is living up to the advertising.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Philip Swift on June 10, 2010 at 4:28am

John’s critical observations, and Keith’s recent, pivotal intervention have forced me to seriously re-think my position.
I can see now that what I was defending was just the academy as an idea, rather than the bureaucratic reality it seems to have become – a heavily audited system, as Keith implies, that is increasingly geared towards the production of calculable outcomes.

Since Neil’s debates were inspired by Aquinas, I feel that a confession wouldn’t be out of place here. I must admit that I myself was one of the few students who was awarded funding, but in the end I never got the doctorate – a darkly depressing, toxic experience. As a consequence, I can no longer join the club, because I lack the credentials. Hence, I’m as passionate as anyone to reconfigure an anthropology that isn’t beholden to the academy. So it’s strange, then, that I should seem to give such an affirmative description of the place when I’m stood outside, as it were, looking through the windows.

The reason is that I have an ambivalent attitude towards academia. On the one hand – to speak of the anthropology of Japan (I subject I know something about) – while there is, no doubt, good stuff being done in western universities, a lot is also horrendously pedestrian; academically competent (it ticks boxes) but completely devoid of imagination. Talk about lack of inspiration! Such work – and this holds for a lot of academic output generally – such work is written in a lifeless language, incorporating unthinking thought, undead analysis; a dead-eyed, zombie anthropology.

And yet, on the other hand, I’m absolutely devoted to anthropology, I have a respect for the history of its coming to be as a discipline, and so I want to defend some kind of coherence for the subject. It’s a personal anecdote, but during the (failed) appeal for my PhD, the two examiners (neither of whom were anthropologists) asserted that they both understood anthropology perfectly well, thank you very much, and were therefore completely capable of judging an anthropological thesis. (This coming from two academics who couldn’t understand when I wrote that rituals, according to my informants, were doing something. How can rituals really do something – it’s just not possible, they said. Because that’s what my informants were saying, you bloody idiots.) Thus, I want to defend to the death the hijacking of anthropology by academics, for example, who claim that they know what it is just because they have a passing understanding of participant observation, or who might have read a few articles by Geertz. For me at least, anthropology is so important because its message is potentially so radical. The message is: people in other places (even next door) are not necessarily thinking about the same things, and until we take that thinking seriously, we’ll never get anywhere.

A quick coda: The thought I was trying to express in my earlier contributions to the debate was that anthropology, whatever it is, can’t be just the field. It has to be the field plus something else. It requires some collective. A number of visions have been proposed: Frazer’s ‘clearing house’ at Cambridge (facts in; theories out), the academic model we have now, the parliament of things (Latour), the blogosphere – e.g., the OAC.
Perhaps the latter, then, could be one kind of crucible for re-forging anthropology as we know it.

(Apologies to Neil – my contribution hasn’t really respected the terms of the debate as you set them out.)

And, since I've just seen John's contribution, I think that the advertising guy you quote about creatives is in agreement with Deleuze: 'Dont interpret. Experiment!' That happens to be my favourite model of how knowledge should work.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Keith Hart on June 10, 2010 at 9:04am

Thanks, John and Philip. There's life in the old dog yet, anthropology that is, which I firmly believe is on the edge of becoming what it was always meant to be, because the social and technical conditions for it are at last being put in place. I too am devoted to the academy which has served me very well (but my timing of entry was excellent). That is why I am so bitter about what it has become. From an individual's point of view, it is still a haven where imaginative scholars can find the time to research, think, teach and write. The main point is never to let the academy define the horizons of your activities and this becomes more difficult as time goes by.We should not be seduced by the notion that universities are 1,000 years old. In their present form they are only 100 years old or even less and they were designed to meet the needs of a social project (Hegel's) whose sell-by date is over, national capitalism. I still advise any young scholar to get a toehold in them if they can and anyone a bit older to get out if they can, at least partially.

Professionalism has its downside too. I once founded the small triple a, the amateur anthropological association, and I wasn't kidding. Amateurs do it for love, but they have to make a living too. I know what professionalism is from the inside. I was trained as a classicist at Cambridge. My teachers were the best in the world: Page on drama, Jones on Roman history, Guthrie on philosophy, Kirk and Raven on the Presocratics. But the life I was being prepared for as a literary critic was deeply dispiriting. I wanted to study and write about Aeschylus and Catullus, but they had been done. The job was to consolidate and expand the textual tradition. This meant arguing about whether a letter in a 12th century Spanish manuscript was an alpha and an eta. For my PhD I would be lucky to get some fragments of an obscure 4th century Roman satirist. The atmosphere in seminars was mean and pedantic.

I met Jack Goody in the college bar. He said he was organizing an anthropology seminar on clientship and I volunteered to give a paper on Roman clientship, then forgot about it. He reminded me two days before. I was desperate. For an undergraduate tutorial essay on the subject, I would have been expected to read all the Latin sources -- Cicero, Tacitus etc -- and build an argument using them. But I had no time for that. I went to the college library amd mugged up a couple of secondary sources like the Cambridge Ancient History. My paper was received rapturously by the anthropologists. I asked myself if these people knew anything at all about the methods of scholarship and decided they didn't.This was great. I was free. I converted to social anthropology like a shot, but it did seem like I was being transferred from AC Milan to Stockport County.

I have taken full advantage of the intellectual freedom that anthropology gave me, but I picked up some disciplines along the way: kinship algebra, statistics, historical linguistics, economese (how to write like an economist with no formal training in the subject, gained from moonlighting for The Economist), consultancy for the World Bank and so on. When I was teaching at Yale, my students were keen to discuss the theoretical positions in anthropology proposed by Chicago and Columbia. One day a voice spoke to me in the shower (I am bipolar, not schizophrenic) saying "Why read Marvin Harris when you haven't read Immanuel Kant?" and I resumed the course of a classicist, reading the major texts in the tradition in the original if possible. Taking advantage of anthropology's freedom is fine, but you have to do some serious intellectual work too, usually outside the academic discipline. Walk on two legs, I say, one foot inside and one outside, moving forward opportunistically in response to contingencies.

The fact is that anthropologists have achieved a lot by their amateurism. It's just that the benign academic conditions in of the 60s and 70s are fast disappearing. I have cited this before, but it is still the most pregnant short diagnosis of our predicament that I know. Foucault ended his “archaeology of the human sciences” (Les mots et les choses, The Order of Things, 1966) with some reflections on why psychoanalysis and social anthropology (ethnologie) “…occupy a privileged position in our knowledge”:

“…because, on the confines of all the branches of knowledge investigating man, they form a treasure-hoard of experiences and concepts, and above all a perpetual principle of dissatisfaction, of calling into question…what may seem, in other respects, to be established.” (1973 : 373) “[They] are not so much two human sciences among others, but they span the entire domain of those sciences, they animate its whole surface…[They] are ‘counter-sciences’; which does not mean that they are less ‘rational’ or ‘objective’ than the others, but that they flow in the opposite direction, that they lead them back to their epistemological basis, and that they ceaselessly ‘unmake’ that very man who is creating and re-creating his positivity in the human sciences. (Ibid:379)

Foucault attributed anthropology’s originality to its being both “traditionally the knowledge we have of the peoples without histories” and “situated in the dimension of historicity”, by which he meant “within the historical sovereignty of European thought and the relation that can bring it face to face with all other cultures as well as with itself” (ibid : 376-7). He was sure the human sciences had reached their limit and this was doubly true of a discipline whose premises were being undermined by the collapse of European empire. Given the disappearance of the traditional object of anthropology, we have to find not only a new one, but also a theory and method appropriate to it. This means identifying the historicity of our own moment, as well as complementing ethnographic fieldwork with world history and humanist philosophy.

In a lecture that I published almost 25 years ago (Heads or tails? Man 1986) I wrote of the anthropological study of money that:Malinowski (1961 [1922]) set a trend for anthropologists to dispute economic universals in polarised terms, juxtaposing exotic facts and western folk theories, without acknowledging the influence of contemporary history on their own ideas. My lecture had three parts which, taken together, constituted a method.

“First, we should be more explicitly aware of the concrete conditions which stimulate our interest in some abstract problems rather than others. This means asking what it is in the world as we experience it that informs our researches, whether directly or indirectly. Second, it is no good taking potshots at vulgar reductions of economic ideas, when the intellectual history of western economic thought is itself extremely plural, even contradictory. A constructive reading of that intellectual history might have served Malinowski’s ethnographic analysis better than the straw man he chose to attack. Finally, when historical awareness and a more sophisticated intellectual apparatus are combined with our discipline’s standby of ethnographic fieldwork, the resulting anthropological analysis offers a more secure foundation for critical understanding of the world in which we live.” (Hart, 1986 : 637).

So I first located the problem of money in contemporary economic history, arguing that state control of money was being undermined in the leading capitalist societies. Then I traced two strands of western monetary theory explaining money as a token of authority issued by states or as a commodity made by markets. These strands came together in the writings of Keynes (1930). But, rather than acknowledge the interdependence of top-down and bottom-up social organization (“heads and tails”), economic policy has swung wildly between the two extremes (“heads or tails?”). Last I showed that the token/commodity pair could inform a reanalysis of Malinowski’s ethnography.

“Anthropologists have to be capable of comparing their exotica with a more profound picture of ideas and realities in the industrial world that sustains us. Conventional economic reasoning fails to enlighten us because it is so unremittingly one-dimensional. The coin has two sides for a good reason – both are indispensable. Money is at the same time an aspect of relations between persons and a thing detached from persons….Today’s effort is an act of bricolage rather than brokerage, formed from a vision of the anthropologist as a handyman who can help repair the damage done by professionals.” (Ibid : 638-9).

So there we have it:back to bricolage, the anthropologist as tinker. The main problem is who is going to pay for it? I never bought the idea that I would be safe as a proletarian in the employ of the universities and always had an escape route to earn my living as a professional gambler. And boy was I professional! It was so boring that, as soon as I got offered a chance to come back into the universities, I grabbed it. Academic life is actually more entertaining than most ways of earning a living. We sell ourselves short, but the range of skills we have to master to get by is impressive compared with almost any other job.

So there is an affinity of sorts between life in the academy and that of the freelance bricoleur. It just takes some courage and pateince to work out how to combine them or. if not, to support a genuinely free existence as an intellectual who loves anthropology. Remeber that freedom always come from accepting necessity in some other part of your life.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by John McCreery on June 10, 2010 at 2:01pm

The audience rises, the applause shakes the rafters, "Encore! Encore!"

P.S. Philip's description of the anthropology of Japan is, in my view, spot on.

Keith Hart said:

Thanks, John and Philip. There's life in the old dog yet, anthropology that is, which I firmly believe is on the edge of becoming what it was always meant to be, because the social and technical conditions for it are at last being put in place. I too am devoted to the academy which has served me very well (but my timing of entry was excellent). That is why I am so bitter about what it has become. From an individual's point of view, it is still a haven where imaginative scholars can find the time to research, think, teach and write. The main point is never to let the academy define the horizons of your activities and this becomes more difficult as time goes by.We should not be seduced by the notion that universities are 1,000 years old. In their present form they are only 100 years old or even less and they were designed to meet the needs of a social project (Hegel's) whose sell-by date is over, national capitalism. I still advise any young scholar to get a toehold in them if they can and anyone a bit older to get out if they can, at least partially.
Professionalism has its downside too. I once founded the small triple a, the amateur anthropological association, and I wasn't kidding. Amateurs do it for love, but they have to make a living too. I know what professionalism is from the inside. I was trained as a classicist at Cambridge. My teachers were the best in the world: Page on drama, Jones on Roman history, Guthrie on philosophy, Kirk and Raven on the Presocratics. But the life I was being prepared for as a literary critic was deeply dispiriting. I wanted to study and write about Aeschylus and Catullus, but they had been done. The job was to consolidate and expand the textual tradition. This meant arguing about whether a letter in a 12th century Spanish manuscript was an alpha and an eta. For my PhD I would be lucky to get some fragments of an obscure 4th century Roman satirist. The atmosphere in seminars was mean and pedantic.
I met Jack Goody in the college bar. He said he was organizing an anthropology seminar on clientship and I volunteered to give a paper on Roman clientship, then forgot about it. He reminded me two days before. I was desperate. For an undergraduate tutorial essay on the subject, I would have been expected to read all the Latin sources -- Cicero, Tacitus etc -- and build an argument using them. But I had no time for that. I went to the college library amd mugged up a couple of secondary sources like the Cambridge Ancient History. My paper was received rapturously by the anthropologists. I asked myself if these people knew anything at all about the methods of scholarship and decided they didn't.This was great. I was free. I converted to social anthropology like a shot, but it did seem like I was being transferred from AC Milan to Stockport County.

I have taken full advantage of the intellectual freedom that anthropology gave me, but I picked up some disciplines along the way: kinship algebra, statistics, historical linguistics, economese (how to write like an economist with no formal training in the subject, gained from moonlighting for The Economist), consultancy for the World Bank and so on. When I was teaching at Yale, my students were keen to discuss the theoretical positions in anthropology proposed by Chicago and Columbia. One day a voice spoke to me in the shower (I am bipolar, not schizophrenic) saying "Why read Marvin Harris when you haven't read Immanuel Kant?" and I resumed the course of a classicist, reading the major texts in the tradition in the original if possible. Taking advantage of anthropology's freedom is fine, but you have to do some serious intellectual work too, usually outside the academic discipline. Walk on two legs, I say, one foot inside and one outside, moving forward opportunistically in response to contingencies.

The fact is that anthropologists have achieved a lot by their amateurism. It's just that the benign academic conditions in of the 60s and 70s are fast disappearing. I have cited this before, but it is still the most pregnant short diagnosis of our predicament that I know. Foucault ended his “archaeology of the human sciences” (Les mots et les choses, The Order of Things, 1966) with some reflections on why psychoanalysis and social anthropology (ethnologie) “…occupy a privileged position in our knowledge”:

“…because, on the confines of all the branches of knowledge investigating man, they form a treasure-hoard of experiences and concepts, and above all a perpetual principle of dissatisfaction, of calling into question…what may seem, in other respects, to be established.” (1973 : 373) “[They] are not so much two human sciences among others, but they span the entire domain of those sciences, they animate its whole surface…[They] are ‘counter-sciences’; which does not mean that they are less ‘rational’ or ‘objective’ than the others, but that they flow in the opposite direction, that they lead them back to their epistemological basis, and that they ceaselessly ‘unmake’ that very man who is creating and re-creating his positivity in the human sciences. (Ibid:379)

Foucault attributed anthropology’s originality to its being both “traditionally the knowledge we have of the peoples without histories” and “situated in the dimension of historicity”, by which he meant “within the historical sovereignty of European thought and the relation that can bring it face to face with all other cultures as well as with itself” (ibid : 376-7). He was sure the human sciences had reached their limit and this was doubly true of a discipline whose premises were being undermined by the collapse of European empire. Given the disappearance of the traditional object of anthropology, we have to find not only a new one, but also a theory and method appropriate to it. This means identifying the historicity of our own moment, as well as complementing ethnographic fieldwork with world history and humanist philosophy.

In a lecture that I published almost 25 years ago (Heads or tails? Man 1986) I wrote of the anthropological study of money that:Malinowski (1961 [1922]) set a trend for anthropologists to dispute economic universals in polarised terms, juxtaposing exotic facts and western folk theories, without acknowledging the influence of contemporary history on their own ideas. My lecture had three parts which, taken together, constituted a method.

“First, we should be more explicitly aware of the concrete conditions which stimulate our interest in some abstract problems rather than others. This means asking what it is in the world as we experience it that informs our researches, whether directly or indirectly. Second, it is no good taking potshots at vulgar reductions of economic ideas, when the intellectual history of western economic thought is itself extremely plural, even contradictory. A constructive reading of that intellectual history might have served Malinowski’s ethnographic analysis better than the straw man he chose to attack. Finally, when historical awareness and a more sophisticated intellectual apparatus are combined with our discipline’s standby of ethnographic fieldwork, the resulting anthropological analysis offers a more secure foundation for critical understanding of the world in which we live.” (Hart, 1986 : 637).

So I first located the problem of money in contemporary economic history, arguing that state control of money was being undermined in the leading capitalist societies. Then I traced two strands of western monetary theory explaining money as a token of authority issued by states or as a commodity made by markets. These strands came together in the writings of Keynes (1930). But, rather than acknowledge the interdependence of top-down and bottom-up social organization (“heads and tails”), economic policy has swung wildly between the two extremes (“heads or tails?”). Last I showed that the token/commodity pair could inform a reanalysis of Malinowski’s ethnography.

“Anthropologists have to be capable of comparing their exotica with a more profound picture of ideas and realities in the industrial world that sustains us. Conventional economic reasoning fails to enlighten us because it is so unremittingly one-dimensional. The coin has two sides for a good reason – both are indispensable. Money is at the same time an aspect of relations between persons and a thing detached from persons….Today’s effort is an act of bricolage rather than brokerage, formed from a vision of the anthropologist as a handyman who can help repair the damage done by professionals.” (Ibid : 638-9).

So there we have it:back to bricolage, the anthropologist as tinker. The main problem is who is going to pay for it? I never bought the idea that I would be safe as a proletarian in the employ of the universities and always had an escape route to earn my living as a professional gambler. And boy was I professional! It was so boring that, as soon as I got offered a chance to come back into the universities, I grabbed it. Academic life is actually more entertaining than most ways of earning a living. We sell ourselves short, but the range of skills we have to master to get by is impressive compared with almost any other job.

So there is an affinity of sorts between life in the academy and that of the freelance bricoleur. It just takes some courage and pateince to work out how to combine them or. if not, to support a genuinely free existence as an intellectual who loves anthropology. Remeber that freedom always come from accepting necessity in some other part of your life.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Neil Turner on June 10, 2010 at 6:19pm

Excellent...totally excellent. Thanks to everyone.

tchau...

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Neil Turner on June 14, 2010 at 10:22pm

Thanks to all the comments from the membership during the points of information phase. The debaters will take a short period to assimilate what has been offered and a second round will begin shortly.

tchau...

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Huon Wardle on June 16, 2010 at 11:09am

I finally had time to look through this: it is great! Neil, can you remind people what you are expecting from the debate - I have to admit I am still unclear about the 'rules'. One of the major givens of the internet is people's unbelievably short attention span - me culpa.

Neil Turner said:

Thanks to all the comments from the membership during the points of information phase. The debaters will take a short period to assimilate what has been offered and a second round will begin shortly.
tchau...

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Neil Turner on June 16, 2010 at 1:59pm

Dear Huon,

Briefly then, the debates are an experiment; an attempt to bring “inclusiveness of mind” to the discussion forums. That is, to combine and synthesize several different oppositions, points of view, and commentaries in order to acquire (at least, I hope to acquire) some sort of clarity and profundity in our field. It is an opportunity for debate and dialogue on some of the most controversial of issues that we as a body of professionals and students of the discipline can produce. The purpose of which is to enhance the quality of our discussion forums and at the same time promote the OAC as a new resource for collaboration and exposure of anthropology on a global level.

As for rules, it is my hope to continue the OAC tradition of un-moderated discussions. However, there is a short rubric which you can find under the heading of debating procedures.

I hope this helps. Thanks.

tchau…



Huon Wardle said:

I finally had time to look through this: it is great! Neil, can you remind people what you are expecting from the debate - I have to admit I am still unclear about the 'rules'. One of the major givens of the internet is people's unbelievably short attention span - me culpa.

Neil Turner said:

Thanks to all the comments from the membership during the points of information phase. The debaters will take a short period to assimilate what has been offered and a second round will begin shortly.
tchau...

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Philip Swift on June 18, 2010 at 4:11am

Having gone over the posts again, including Keith’s latest, enlightening offering, I’ve been thinking for some time about how to reply, and even now I’m not sure.
So, if I’ve resolved to carry on the game of the debate, my response is more of a hesitant murmur than a booming vuvuzela.

I sought to argue against the motion by contending that the divide between the academy and the field isn’t so much a problem as it is a precondition for the possibility of anthropology in the first place. (However, to repeat an earlier point, although it’s in the wording of the motion, I don’t much like the word ‘dividing’; I find that I relate better to ‘relating’). In any case, if there’s no doing away with the divide, then there are better and worse ways of practicing it.

But while I discussed the divide, the focus of the debate seemed to shift towards the issue of the academy. Anthropology needs the field – everyone, I think, would probably agree to that – but does it need the academy?

Now, the finicky academic in me wants to return to the terms of the original motion, since it seems to (this side of) me that the question of the necessity of the academy is a different question; something more straightforward like:

Is the academy good for anthropology?

On the other hand, another part of me (possibly my inner anarchist) thinks that arguing about the academy is rather more interesting.

Anthropology, as Keith reminds us (after Foucault) is a counter-science. If so, then it is also, potentially, counter-academic, in so far as this marginal discipline seeks its reasons and inspirations in the margins in order to critique the concepts of the centre, including (why not?) the idea itself of the academy as centre.

So (and in entertaining this question, I still feel I’m going beyond the limits set by this particular motion), if anthropology is to bid farewell to the academy, then what kind of collective is to re-constitute it? In his vision for a democratized science, Feyerabend’s slogan was ‘citizens’ initiatives instead of philosophy!’ I would have liked this idea more had it not been subsequently stolen by David Cameron (the current British prime minister), for what he, at least, seems to mean by it is business as usual: the minority get well paid, while everybody else works for nothing.

So what kind of collective is anthropology to be? After all, we require some kind of definition, some kind of – I dare say – division that defines what we do. After all, we are (all of us) unquestionably natives; but not all of us are (or want to be) anthropologists.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Keith Hart on June 18, 2010 at 7:56am

That's a good way of putting it, Philip. Historically, anthropology found the field before the academy and the division we are discussing only took off when anthropologists established themsleves in the latter. An examination of this process will reveal how recent academic anthropology is and how anomalous it is to debate the whole project's future with the explosion of the universites in the 60s and 70s as a norm.

The Victorian armchair synthesizers sometimes had a home in the universities, but no way of reproducing themselves there. Then the subject was reinvented as field science around 1900, bringing a ragbag of people together for expeditions and the like who also had no prayer of establishing anthropology as an academic discipline. Remember that the disciplines of the academic division of labour as we know it were formed in the perod from the 1890s to the 1920s. Anthropology was defined as a residue: the parts the others couldn't reach, exotic peoples. The drive to establish departments of anthropology was largely an exercise of mid-century and many of the classical field monographs were already written by then.

The anthropologists needed an academic home because they had no other way of traning their replacements. It was a struggle. There are national differences in this story of course. The post-war boom created entirely new condition, the possibilit yof mass enrolments and publications aimed solely at academic anthropologists and their students. That system has now played itself out. But anthropology became once more a species of writing. You are right Philip to argue that, if anthropology is a counter-science, then it has also been anti-bureaucracy, a luxury the bureaucracy could once afford, but no longer.

So the question is not only what collective form anthropology might take, but for what purpose, if the old one was social reproduction in the revived guild system of the twentieth century university? And a return to the old issue of how to combine the field and writing up might be one way of raising that.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Huon Wardle on June 18, 2010 at 11:59am

It may be worth reminding ourselves that the distinction field/academy was built on distance in time and space. The Torres straits were far away in terms of the time it took to travel the 13000 miles or so by Steam. The Iroquois were on Morgan's doorstep by contrast.

The current context is one where the communicational distance has reduced to days or hours or simultaneity. But the guess work concerns the relation of academy plus field plus internet, the emergence of which coincided with the PoMo argument that anthropologists write literature about places that don't exist in the stable form they claim. John makes some interesting comments on the bottom line of the new medium in another thread (below:). The latterday academy-field relation will take whatever form it does from whatever workable relationship it can create to the possibilities of movement, fieldwork, internet communication etc. Field and academy are places to be for sure: ‘academy’ tends to be in relatively predictable geographical locations but this is changing quite fast and in some ways independently of internet communication which is still dominated by English plus North American cultural norms (outside the closed world of Mandarin): ‘field’/ object of study remains to some extent predictable in terms of topics that are acceptable or fit the bill for reproduction of ‘academy’ but this is also changing because what went before is ever more implausible.


the emergence of an Internet... mirrors the GINI coefficient in descriptions of national economies. In this respect the mathematics of the new social network physics are remarkably accurate. The net as a whole conforms to power laws which ensure the emergence of a few giant hubs and long tails of less well-connected nodes. Geeks dream of futures in which every notebook, tablet and phone is a wireless router, and the net is freed from dependence on communication monopolies. The fact remains that every additional petabyte of data requires expansion of already massive server farms, investments in routers with the capacity to power what Cisco calls "the human network." These, in turn, require growing amounts of electrical power, still largely generated by fossil fuel or nuclear powered generators. The need for industrial-scale capital investment has not gone away.

• ▶ Reply

Permalink Reply by Neil Turner on June 18, 2010 at 2:54pm

Footnote: Thanks to Philip for submitting his comments for the second round and although Joel still has to submit his rebuttal for the second round, I took up John's suggestion to extend a personal invitation to Huon Wardle to comment. I would like to thank Huon for adding to the debate.

tchau...


Huon Wardle said:

It may be worth reminding ourselves that the distinction field/academy was built on distance in time and space. The Torres straits were far away in terms of the time it took to travel the 13000 miles or so by Steam. The Iroquois were on Morgan's doorstep by contrast.

The current context is one where the communicational distance has reduced to days or hours or simultaneity. But the guess work concerns the relation of academy plus field plus internet, the emergence of which coincided with the PoMo argument that anthropologists write literature about places that don't exist in the stable form they claim. John makes some interesting comments on the bottom line of the new medium in another thread (below:). The latterday academy-field relation will take whatever form it does from whatever workable relationship it can create to the possibilities of movement, fieldwork, internet communication etc. Field and academy are places to be for sure: ‘academy’ tends to be in relatively predictable geographical locations but this is changing quite fast and in some ways independently of internet communication which is still dominated by English plus North American cultural norms (outside the closed world of Mandarin): ‘field’/ object of study remains to some extent predictable in terms of topics that are acceptable or fit the bill for reproduction of ‘academy’ but this is also changing because what went before is ever more implausible.


the emergence of an Internet... mirrors the GINI coefficient in descriptions of national economies. In this respect the mathematics of the new social network physics are remarkably accurate. The net as a whole conforms to power laws which ensure the emergence of a few giant hubs and long tails of less well-connected nodes. Geeks dream of futures in which every notebook, tablet and phone is a wireless router, and the net is freed from dependence on communication monopolies. The fact remains that every additional petabyte of data requires expansion of already massive server farms, investments in routers with the capacity to power what Cisco calls "the human network." These, in turn, require growing amounts of electrical power, still largely generated by fossil fuel or nuclear powered generators. The need for industrial-scale capital investment has not gone away.

• ▶ Reply

▶ Reply to Discussion

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• Next ›
• Page