I usually get a substantial segment of the class from other disciplines — graduate students who want to do ethnographic work in education, business, sociology, or whatnot and want to see how The Anthros do it. Even though other fields have been doing fieldwork as long or longer than us, we somehow capture the imagination of other disciplines as doing the ‘real’ or ‘most intense’ version of ethnographic work. In fact, often we have a bit of a mystical aura around us since no one can figure out exactly what we do, they just know we do it in some extremely ineffable way. Which, too often, is anthropology’s self-understanding as well.

When we read Marcus-and-Clifford postmodernism in my fieldmethods class, non-anthropology graduate students find their ideas not only uncontroversial, but actually the most scientific of the stuff on the syllabi. While the anthropologists consider postmodern reflexivity to be narcissistic, the non-anthros consider it to be the closest thing our discipline has produced to a ‘methods section’: something in the ethnography that describes what we actually did in the field. While the anthropologists approach collaborative anthropology and the decentering of their epistemological authority with a mixture of erotic longing and dread, the non-anthros consider it to be a sensible attempt to check the validity of research results against the intuitions of research respondents.

I think there’s something deeply ironic — and also very insightful — about this take on anthropology’s now-canonized apostates. But I’m not sure what. That anthropology was so far down the rabbit hole that postmodernism looks like an attempt at answerability? That postmodernism is just common sense about the research process with an -OfTheContemporary suffix attached at the end? Or something else?

Let me know what you figure out.

Writing Culture’s Decomposition by Ayla Samli

There was something right about meeting in an old warehouse to discuss Writing Culture at 25. Like the edited volume did to ethnography, the space of the warehouse had been retooled, a repurposed site now used for humanities conferences and colloquia. Like the edited volume, the space showed its age and its possibilities for refurbishment. There weren’t enough seats in Bay 4, the garage where the podium stood, to accommodate all of the listeners so they watched the streaming video close-by on flat screen TV’s.

In her opening remarks, Laurie Patton, Dean of Arts and Sciences at Duke and professor of religion, called Writing Culture a game-changing book and ultimately cast the tensions between scientific representation and literary representation created through the book as canyons. “Canyons are places of biodiversity,” she advised us, “tend to the canyon well.”

Orin Starn, chair of Duke’s anthropology department, then reminisced about the conditions of the 1980s, when Writing Culture was authored; a time of typewriters, new technologies, and Western Empire. A time which echoed the hubris and possibility in the book’s chapters. Now the presenters and audience endeavored to discuss the state of anthropology and its new possibilities under current historical circumstances.

James Clifford gave a talk on what it feels like to feel historic. Importantly globalization was not indexed in Writing Culture and he reflected on how much things have changed, noting that the volume had been a product of changing times. He praised works that make space for marginalized identities, and noted that “displacement is not disappearance.”

What struck me is the feeling of a kind of uncanny return, the way that the anthropologists involved in the WC moment decenterd anthropology to “give voice” to the marginalized and how they (well, we) are now being displaced by global forces, economically, and ontologically. I see how the force of American power coursed through these writings. Only one who has power can “make space” for other voices and perspectives. There is a difference between willfully moving and being pushed aside and something about this conference intonated the profound loss and displacement of that power.

Clifford contrasted globalization with imperialism because globalization can happen from below. “I cringe a little bit when I read it now. We were telling people how to displace themselves. We were confident in our uncertainty.” Clifford interwove the current global crisis with the loss of the haughty superiority of Writing Culture. Things have changed, back to the factory to figure out how to improve our process.

George Marcus delivered his Powerpoint slideshow, “The Legacies of Writing Culture and Alternate Forms Within and Alongside Ethnography,” inclusive of third spaces, para-sites, and ethnocharettes. He discussed the time Clifford arrived at his department with a book bag, a sacred bundle of books, suggesting that this book bag inspired Writing Culture and asked, “What is in the sacred bundle today?”

Marcus then raised an example of the multiple layers with interpretive possibilities on UC Irvine’s web design, discussing the process of selecting and layering images together. The site has a large Russian ship going through Shanghai, fieldnotes (of kinship charts), a silhouette of two suited men in a kind of therapeutic conversation, etc. The image, powerfully iconic, evokes something about a really big ship sailing into an intimate conversation, and the gloss of ethnographic data, all shaded in stormy blues.

He said that the ship “was plowing through urban space.” I think the image attempts to get at the complexity, specters of power, technologies, and shadowy interviews, as part of the process of writing or hypertexting culture today. It says to me that history is undeniable and that our research as anthropologists is bracketed or pushed by other global forces, and yet something remains recognizable about the work.

Marcus talked about the availability of new forms that did not exist during Writing Culture, new possibilities for experimenting with texts, the modes of representation, the possibilities for collaboration, and the temporality of scale. This resonates with how I see anthropology today—it’s not just works and lives, it’s slippery collaborative projects, momentarily brought together by a common quality or interest, then developed into other projects. It’s experts and activists weighing in on events from a different perspective. It’s rich and messy and yet those earlier impulses of representation remain.

Ayla Samli (Rice ’11) is a lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her research focuses on gendered material culture and new subjectivities in Turkey.

When I was growing up (scholarly speaking) Writing Culture and postmodern anthropology were the enemy. The problems were legion: the navel gazing, the narcissistic obsession with one’s own subjectivity, the reduction of the politics of fieldwork to the writing up of ethnography, the neurotic worrying about one’s one epistemological responsibilities that led the authors to the same sort of straining nervousness that you see in overbred show dogs, a pretension to theoretical sophistication that masked a lack of deeper erudition (especially of the actual ethnographic record), and of course the coup de grace: authors obsessed with prose who were themselves terrible writers.

All of this led to a deep and authentic detesting of Writing Culture. We all knew the world was complicated, the writing was a craft, and that the fieldwork encounter was fraught. Writing Culture somehow took this basic insight into the human condition of our discipline and tried to convince others that it was some sort of enormous problem.

The reaction was particularly severe from the anthropologists who actually had moral confidence: the Marxists. In many ways, they were the ones who introduced theoretical sophistication into post-war anthropology. The Hegel and Kant that were taken for granted by Boas and Kroeber reappeared in the work of authors like Bob Scholte. After a decade of genuine political action, the conservative retrenchment of the 1980s marked the resurgence of the right in a way that threatened the gains of previous years. Scholte’s review of Writing Culture (and Tyler’s response to him) in Critique of Anthropology summarized the problem in nutshell: the next generation of anthropology had responded to Reagan-era neoconservatism with a retreat into aesthetics, as if the response to the revanchist policies of the Republican party was the anthropological equivalent of Twin Peaks or a quirky David Byrne performance piece.

It took me a long time to consider taking Writing Culture seriously, but I did eventually. Mostly because I met people who I respected who cut their teeth on Writing Culture seemingly without being posioned by it: people like Chris ‘No Truth Anywhere’ Kelty and Melissa ‘Screw The Ethnographic Details’ Cefkin. When I started teaching anthropological theory I got around to rereading the work from 1986, and when I started an ethnographic project on elites I started keeping up with what had been done since then. I think that is when my sense of Writing Culture began changing.

The first thing to say about Writing Culture — or the ‘Rice Circle’ as I think they might now be calling themselves — is that the work is smart and deserves to be read for what it actually says. Amazingly, a quarter century after 1986, some people’s emotions are still to raw to do this. Nevertheless, it’s important to note that the works of 1986 ask questions — often carefully. It’s worth reading what they actually say rather than immediately reaching for the nearest stick to hit the snake with.

The second thing that amazes me about Writing Culture is that the authors actually had students. Students who they nurtured and supported. Jim Clifford played a key part in creating Native Pacific Cultural Studies through his support of upcoming Pacific scholars. Although they are not often read, the Late Editions volumes provided an incredible forum for upcoming scholars. Marcus and Clifford regularly cite Ph.D. students they advise in their own work, helping bring attention to well-deserving projects and scholars. This is simply something that not everyone does. Of course, to some this might look like an imperialistic attempt to take over a discipline by overproducing Ph.D.s, throwing whole passles of them on the wall, and seeing what sticks. Except oh wait — that’s my alma mater’s strategy isn’t it…

Finally, as my mention of Late Editions points out, Writing Culture had a program — even if it was not programmatic. People working with and under its authors had a sense of where the discipline was going or at least what exploration space they should be moving around in. I think in this sense the Writing Culture crowd was very successful in creating a sense of direction and space for their students without forcing them into a narrow and ultimately unproductive ‘program’ of research.

There is still a lot that bothers me about the people involved in Writing Culture. Many of them still can’t write. Recent work on ‘paraethnography’ seems like a tortuously overthought attempt to do things in fieldwork that many of us who work in ‘Malinowskian’ locations have been doing in years. I worry about the lack of concern for the political implications of  ’collaborating’ with powerful elites. I appreciate the avant-gardist desire to probe the limits of what anthropology can be, but wonder why we think anyone other than us (read: funders) should care about this sort of work.

In the end I am glad that Writing Culture happened, and I think the network of researchers that resulted have made anthropology a much better place. Appreciating their contribution to the discipline is difficult because of how hyperbolic both the negative and positive evaluations are. Overall, though, I think people like me who grew up hating Writing Culture at an early age should take a step back and both understand and appreciate what came out of it — not only because of how hegemonic it’s successors have become in our discipline, but because of the genuine intellectual contributions its made.

It was a familiar drive for me as I zipped west and then cut south into the Old North State. I earned my degree at UNC-Chapel Hill and got to take a number of courses at Duke during my grad career. Being that I live in Virginia now its a pleasure to make a social call when the opportunity arises. The first panel was scheduled to begin at 10:00am and I was looking forward to hearing presentations from two scholars who have for years been heroes of mine: Michael Taussig and Jim Clifford. Many other prominent figures would be there, plus some of my old running buddies and former professors. And real coffee. My current home, Newport News, is not a coffee town by any measure.

Durham was built on tobacco money, even old man Duke made his fortune off the cancer sticks, and its downtown is still distinguished by the red-brick warehouses that used to store the stuff. But tobacco in North Carolina has gone the way of cotton in Texas, the Lucky Strike smokestack has long since puffed its last toke. One long and narrow loading dock with garages lined up against the railroad got snapped up by Duke and the interior has been refurbished into a chic, modernist conference center. The audience sat beneath a raised garage door. A train’s whistle punctuated Hugh Raffles’ slide show on rocks and storytelling. Was that real or part of a soundtrack? The agro-industrial setting made a perfectly intimate venue for the event.

I first encountered Writing Culture as a junior in college. I found the essays intimidating and confusing, nothing at all like Predicament of Culture which I was reading concurrently or Anthropology as Cultural Critique, which I’d finished only the year before. Predicament‘s blend of poetry with history and theory was an inspiration, it was a major event in my intellectual life, the moment when I finally started to “get it.” Writing Culture just made me frustrated and maybe a little afraid that the possibilities of anthropology were more narrow than I’d hoped. By contrast I found Anthropology as Cultural Critique to be much less strident and more useful too.

It wasn’t until the second semester of grad school that I picked up Writing Culture again. This time it came periodized and prepackaged as the catalyst for the postmodern turn in anthropology, a landmark reconsideration of the role played by the individual ethnographer in navigating the process of encountering others and expressing that experience to an audience. It sparked a debate that, for all its blind alleys, leads up to the present. After surviving the hazing ritual that is the first year of grad school I can’t say that I’ve picked up WC since. Today the volume sits on my shelf stupidly wedged between In the Realm of the Diamond Queen and Works and Lives, my underlines and margin notes no doubt becoming more hilarious by the year.

Do you hold on to books you never use? I have hundreds of books warehoused in my attic, collecting dust, warping in the humidity, supporting multiple generations of spiderwebs. Relics of an earlier self waiting to be hollowed out and refurbished with modernist interiors. But then again, maybe I just have a lot of stuff. When I moved my family to the reservation to conduct my dissertation research I even needed to rent one of those self-storage units to house all my belongings. They are kind of ridiculous, these icons of American material culture where people with too many possessions leave the things they never use but can’t bear to part with.

What is Writing Culture to you? Is it something you keep close at hand where it waits anxiously for you to flit nimbly through the pages, deftly landing on your favorite passages? Has it played a crucial role in your training and professional development as you heeded its call for, in the words of Danilyn Rutherford, not less but more empiricism?

Or is it to you just an assignment you completed in grad school? A parlor trick you learned to please your professors: Look at how smart I am, I can read Stephen Tyler and make sense of it! Is this merely another thing you never use, but yet can’t bear to part with?

What do you see as the role of Writing Culture in anthropology’s present?

It goes like this. The federal government’s response to financial crisis ought to mirror those of a typical family experiencing monetary hardship. If the family has bills to pay and can’t afford its current lifestyle then the parents are going to have to work extra hours or get a second job to supplement income (increase taxes and revenues), everyone is going to have to make do without certain luxuries like cable TV and fancy cell phone plans (make spending cuts), and the family ought to hold a garage sale to sell off extra things (privatization of land and natural resources). I’ve heard variations of this trope, in whole or in part, espoused by people of diverse political sympathies, from participants on radio call-in shows, from reporters and pundits. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear an elected official use it.

What does it mean that people are inclined to think of the federal budget in the subjunctive, as if it were like the budget of a typical household? What “work” does it do for the people who espouse it?

Public administrative budgets are odd things. For the past couple of years I’ve served on the Board of Trustees for my city’s public library system. We have four branch libraries and a bookmobile, scores of employees, and thousands of volumes of materials. I volunteered to join the budget committee and was immediately taken aback by how unintuitive the process was. Even though we are under a tremendous budget crunch we can’t save money by turning down the heat in winter or powering down the computers at night. Nor can you save money by closing early or taking Sundays off. Essentially you have to fire someone and/or convert a full-time job to two part-time jobs. It’s all in how the different kinds of money from different sources get allotted for different purposes.

Another example, this time from the state level. My wife works at public university and she’s gotten but one raise in four years. This year was to be different though, much to our relief. When she received her new contract we were astounded by how much her salary went up; way more than the increase that had been negotiated. But our joy was tempered when we learned that the cost of her state retirement plan had increased by exactly the same amount. Why the state unable to meet its obligation to its employees’ retirement when it was able to give them a raise by exactly the same amount? That’s the magic of budgeting!

A third example. Every department at the university is strapped for cash, probably just like yours. State budget crisis, you know. Across the street from campus Hollywood Video went out of business and the administration scooped up the building to use as the new headquarters for campus police. But before the cops could move in they built an entirely new exterior with red bricks and white columns (after all, every other building on campus has red bricks and white columns). But wait, don’t departments need money for toner? Sorry, that’s not how administrative budgets work.

Money isn’t like water flowing downhill to the lowest point, its sequestered in various ponds like Javanese rice terraces. You might not have enough in your pond to hire an assistant for your overworked office manager, but there’s still enough in the God-Awful-Public-Art pond to afford another gargantuan statue of some founding father or to change out the begonias for pansies when high school seniors come to visit.

It’s easy to see the appeal in a home economics metaphor. Plenty of people are struggling to make ends meet or worse, suffering with low incomes and high costs of living. Using their past experiences people frame the distant, seemingly alien mechinations of Congress in terms of what they already know. People think, “If I’ve maxed out my credit card then its time to cut it up.” But the government has not maxed out its credit card. Its not even remotely the same thing. The metaphor of the family at the dinner table paying bills and opting to eat hamburger instead of steak works first as a Goffmanian frame: it makes the world make sense by organizing inputs in terms of that which is already known, ie. experiences rooted in the past.

It also conveys a moral judgement. Really it is an instance of Othering the federal government and as such fits in with a broader social movement in American society for conservative populism. The actions of elected officials are perceived to be an affront to “common sense”: if someone owes you money then you expect them to pay it back. Is it not True? But we anthropologists know that even what a people takes to be patently the case (especially that) is also culturally constructed. What is it saying, this “common sense”, about the ordinary people who would seek to apply metaphors of home economics to the federal budget?

Clifford Geertz in his “Common Sense as a Cultural System” writes:

It is an inherent characteristic of common-sense thought precisely to affirm that its tenets are immediate deliverances of experience, not deliberated reflections upon it… Religion rests its case on revelation, science on method, ideology on moral passion; but common sense rests its on the assertion that it is not a case at all, just life in a nutshell. The world is its authority.
–Local Knowledge (1983:75)

I can’t help but be reminded of the culture wars of the 1990s when the Right marshaled “family values” as a rallying cry against perceived decadence and decay in US society while the economy careened into post-industrialization and the contemporary neoliberal global flow of capital took shape. “Family values” may be a passe term among the political class and media taste-makers, but the convictions that buttressed it (opposition to globalization expressed as pining for patriarchy) are still in place.

For those of who were infants when Pulp Fiction came out: “family values” sought to valorize something that was perceived to be simultaneously normal but vanishing, nuclear families with firm parental discipline established by male authority, and to stigmatize as “disfunctional” (another passe term) all that which went against the above.

There were, allegedly, some practical advantages to advocating this as social policy along the lines of what George Yudice explored in his Expediency of Culture. If households were arranged by nuclear families with a strong male in charge who wasn’t afraid to spank his kids then our prisons wouldn’t be so overcrowded and, hence, expensive to maintain. If women would just stay home and take care of the little ones then we wouldn’t have to throw away money on things like Head Start. The state, by this line of reasoning, has grown to fulfill a role abdicated by otherwise responsible men because they have been forced to expend extra effort competing with women for jobs. And stuff.

“Family values” posited the nation, epitomized by male-led nuclear families, against the state, epitomized by expensive social programs that spackle over “disfunctional” female-led families like Bondo on a rusty wheel well. The past and older modes of social relations were to be the model for the future. It was preeminently a call to nationalism because it sought to project a unity and consensus from millions of disparate and seemingly unconnected dots – independent households – a stronger nation for a weaker state.

Home economics can also be seen as a similar nationalist response against the state. In its “common sense” approach it diagnoses the pathology at the heart of government by locating the point at which it diverges from the family. It is a symbolic attack on the state, delegitimizing it, and instead acknowledging the authority of local sources of power. It is a rhetorical transfer of symbolic capital from the state to the rugged individual.

Or as Manuel Castells writes in his essay “A Powerless State?”

Indeed, in a world of acultural, transnational global networks, societies tend… to retrench themselves on the basis of identities, and to construct/ reconstruct institutions as expressions of these identities. This is why we witness, at the same time, the crisis of the nation-state and the explosion of nationalisms.
–The Power of Identity, vol.2 (1997:306)

Skimming the Citational Ocean: The Internet has made this seductively easy, and the downside of this method is well-known and often-stigmatized: you never actually read anything, you just become aware that it exists. Of course, this is a good thing as long as you then go on to the next step and read a subset of what you’ve discovered. The danger is going into Overwhelm mode where the vistas of scholarship stretch so endlessly before you that your awareness of the interconnectedness of all knowledge turns into acute agoraphobia, you roll into a small ball, and weep silently about all the PDFs you will never have time to read. You should probably stop browsing before that happens.

Book Mark It: Bookmarking something is basically a way to promise myself I can find it again if I ever need to, and a tacit admission to myself that I will never try to find it again in my entire life. Let’s face it: the vast majority of what you stumble across in your research simply has to be ignored. Much of it can be straight-out ignored because it’s not relevant, and the rest must be gently let down, be told that you just want to be friends with it, that you’ll see it around, that it’s not the information, it’s you. Bookmarking is a way of letting yourself off the hook for the coulda shoulda woulda information out there. After all maybe someday you will have a chance to read that five hundred page definitive history of the Balkans.

There are different ways to bookmark things — I use delicious myself. You can keep a reading journal, or even use the bookmark features in your browser. You can have a special database in your favorite database program. It’s all good. Just fire and forget and let your outboard brain do the rest.

Skim and Note: By skim I mean ‘spend at least one minute with the book open’. By ‘note’ I mean: record what you find out about it. If you are judging a book by it’s cover, that’s fine. But it also means that that book should be bookmarked. If you are ‘spending a little time’ with a book, then you must take a note on it. (‘spending a little bit of time’ is also the aphorism you use to describe your engagement with the book. They: “Good lord, you’ve read all of Simmel’s Philosophy of Money” You: “I’ve spent a little bit of time with it”. Say it with an easy smile to convey the impression that you have achieved a subtle and masterful understatement instead of the actual fact, which is that you have pored carefully over the table of contents). Who wrote the book? Why? Who are they arguing against or in favor of? How long is it? How long did you spend with it? For instance, here in their entirety are my notes on The Imagination of Reality: Essays in Southeast Asian Coherence Systems

An edited volume in honor of Clifford Geertz, with obvious origins in the Deep Seventies. Includes papers by Boon and J.S. Lansing on Husserlian phenomenology in Bali. Also for me the most interesting is the short kalulu [sic] paper by Buck Schieffelin. Authors are focused on SE Asia and the way that cultural experience is a learning process, experiential, etc. as opposed to more cerebral algebraic undersandings of culture as a code. Also very focused on expanding what it is acceptable to study — the arts, not kinship, and way-out groovy experiences as well, although no obvious reference to drugs in the 1 minute I spent flipping through the book.

A lot of time I just copy the top levels of the table of contents, or read the introduction where they explain what it’s about and how the chapters are broken down. Paying attention to topography is important. The question is really just: what did they say? These potted summaries are designed to 1) make you think about the book so that you internalize it in a vague but important way and 2) come back to your notes to remember what you’ve read. You are going to return to this stuff later at some point for some reason… maybe decades later… but you will return to it, right? If not, then it should be bookmarked.

Read and Annotate: As you grow ever more selective in your filtering, you’ve ignored most of what you’ve found, said adieu to the stuff you’ve bookmarked, and left a quick note to yourself on stuff you’ve skimmed. Now it’s finally time to get to that 10% of material that you actually want to read. Or I should say, read and annotate. Reading something without annotating it — well, it’s basically like not reading it. Like all forms of scholarship, reading and annotating is a way of leaving a trail of breadcrumbs Future You can follow to figure out why you thought this stuff was important back when Past You read it. Again, look for signposting and topography: highlight passages that say “in this article I will argue” or “there are three things to remember” and then highlight the words “first” “second” and “third” when the author gets to each of their points. Write summaries in the margins, to make the topology of the piece explicit. Do not underline every time you come to a passage that makes it clear to you at that moment what the author is thinking. Do not highlight the whole article. The maxim is: highlight only those portions of the text absolutely necessary to understand it’s gist. In other words, highlight the minimum necessary for future you to return to the piece and remember it. Don’t drown Future You in tons of annotations, or leave Future You paging in blank incomprehension over tons of unhighlighted pages. Love Future You, care for Future You, nurture Future You with a steady diet of relevant passages.

It is also at this point that you should actually store a copy of the text locally. Bookmarked and skimmed notes are basically about data that lives somewhere else. Read and annotated materials need to be kept on-hand since you have not taken the time to pull full citeable notes from them. You probably also want to store the metadata (i.e. the full citation information) about them somewhere. Some people use programs to store PDFs and metadata in the same place, some people don’t — it’s up to you. The important point is that to own the literature you have to own the literature.

Reading and Note: This is the most intense form of scrutiny you give a text — a close reading to extract from it what you want from it. It’s similar to R&A except that it is more like being a vampire. you are sucking the text dry and using its precious ichor to keep your unholy academic career alive. Funders are attracted by your mysterious and yet dangerous allure. This means doing the same thing as R&A except 1) doing it more carefully and 2) instead of annotating passages, copying them into your personal database of notes. Because it takes more effort to copy and paste (or even — good lord! — copy by hand) quotes you are even more selective in boiling down their essence. In the end you have a (digital) notebook full of quotations, summaries, and your own comments about the reading.

This means that you can dispose of the bodies once they are drained: you only have to refer to your notebook in the future to get the gist of the argument or pull a quote that supports your case. This is really discarding the corpse, as opposed to R&A, which is more like keeping your PDFs hypnotized and locked in some strange pod or suspended animation unit you are ready to feast. This is the kind of research you do in the library or archives (where The Council Of The Five won’t let you check out the humans and take them home) and when you are serious about a book that you don’t want or need to pull it off your shelf. You just can’t compose texts with five hundred books and PDFs open and piled up to your ears, but you can easily do so if all your notes are in a single place. Now the criterion for whether you need to own texts is whether you will likely return to them for another purpose at another time. It’s a handy criteria to have the next time you are trying to decide between Amazon or ILL.

In conclusion, here are a few key points to make:

1. The quicker the pace the less focus is required to do it: You may only be able to read really really difficult material really really closely for, like, three or four hours a day. But there is never a time when you’re so tired that you can’t say to youself: “Why don’t I just read the table of contents for every issue of Dialectical Anthropology eve published?” Matching pace to focus increases productivity. Surf in the evening to set yourself up with something to read carefully in the morning when you mana pool is replenished.

2. Chose a pace and stick with it: If you are annotating, annotate. If you are bookmarking, bookmark. Use your concrete action on the text in order to gauge your genuine level of interest in it, and vice versa (and also, btw, how much focus you’ve got in you). When you fall between the cracks, you are not working efficiently.

4. Use pacing to define your intellectual world. You are interested in a lot of stuff, but what do you need to focus on right now? What is your core competency and what is the stuff you are just vaguely interested in? If you had to chunk your readings into three themes, what would they be? Using choice of pacings to create a ‘literature map’ of your headspace greatly simplifies figuring out what in fact is happening to you, mentally, at this point in your life.

5. Balance balance balance. Hyperactivity and endless browsing is a sign of trouble. Never peeking out from behind your copy of A Thousand Plateaus is not a good sign either. A healthy academic diet involves managing these extremes, and attending to pace layering can help you explicitly recognize what adjustments you need to make to your inputs.

And that’s it! At least for now. Does this jive with how other people take notes or do research?

The point of this conference was to set aside practicality in reimagining the university. Think big. Think utopian. What do we want the university to be? If you could have it all, what would you make the university into?

Clifford accepts this “license to want” as an opportunity to resist being put on the defensive in the never ending contest for scarce resources. Instead he aims to actively combat what he calls “belittlement” or the shrinking of the liberal arts to make way for the practical courses of study that lead to jobs or produce goods for sale on the market.

He imagines a coalition, the Greater Humanities, which he sees as “a deeply rooted configuration of knowledge practices.”

Here’s another sketch map of the Greater Humanities—by disciplines this time, most of them internally divided.
* Literature (a vast archipelago)
* History also very widely extended now (including Art History and Visual Culture, and why not? Archaeology…)
* Philosophy (still divided along “two cultures” lines– hard/soft, analytic/continental. But there are signs of movement along this front?)
* Linguistics (also a divided field: do we need to chose between the traditions of Sapir and Chomsky?)
* All the “studies” inter-disciplines: American Studies, Women’s/Feminist Studies, Ethnic Studies, Cultural Studies, Science and Technology Studies… etc.
* Socio-Cultural Anthropology (my own second home) and Historical Archaeology, Human Geography, Qualitative Sociology, some of Environmental Studies…
* Film, Digital Media, Communications.
* Important sectors of Politics, Economics, and Psychology.
* And what we might call the theoretical “Arts”—including Theatre Arts and performance Studies.
This leaves out a good deal, I’m sure. But the map is, I trust, big enough to make my basic, and rather crude, point.

Drawing these disciplines together is a habitus shared across the humanities, some of the social sciences, some of the arts, and with allies in the natural sciences. Clifford identifies this connective tissue as four “knowledge practices”.

The Greater Humanities are 1) interpretive 2) realist 3) historical 4) ethico-political.

1. Interpretive. (read textual and philological, in broad, more than just literary, senses) Interpretive, not positivist. Interested in rigorous, but always provisional and perspectival, explanations, not replicable causes.
2. Realist. (not “objective”) Realism in the Greater Humanities is concerned with the narrative, figural, and empirical construction of textured, non-reductive, multi-scaled representations of social, cultural, and psychological phenomena. These are serious representations that are necessarily partial and contestable…
3. Historical. (not evolutionist, at least not in a teleological sense) The knowledge is historical because it recognizes the simultaneously temporal and spatial (the chronotopic) specificity of…well… everything. It’s evolutionist perhaps in a Darwinian sense: a rigorous grappling with developing temporalities, everything constantly made and unmade in determinate, material situations, but developing without any guaranteed direction.
4. Ethico-political. (never stopping with an instrumental or technical bottom line…) It’s never enough to say that something must be true because it works or because people want or need it. Where does it work? For whom? At whose expense? Contextualizing always involves constitutive “outsides” that come back to haunt us– effects of power.

As anybody who has ever struggled to find funding can attest the deepest pockets are to be found in the so-called STEM fields. Clifford contemplates how to respond and finds an answer, of sorts, in the foundational thinkers of social science: Weber, Durkheim, Marx, Freud, and others. They were, “non-reductive, imaginative, yes “humanistic” thinkers, concerned with the unconscious, with indeterminate behaviors and complex, over-determined motivations.”

The revolt against positivism wasn’t then (and isn’t now) a revolt against science. But against a narrow, instrumentalist vision of science, a vision that fetishizes quantifiable, auditable outcomes—immediately useful (to whom?) and marketable (for whose benefit?)

It’s hard to look at the contemporary scene and imagine the university as we know it will remain for much longer. For those of us looking to make our livings as employees at institutions of higher learning the future looks very uncertain. And it does seem that anthropology’s share of the pie is shrinking. You can see it now on the horizon, something is coming for our discipline and the institutions that house it.

What is it? And, if we had a choice, what would we even want it to be?

Even when performed correctly, statistical tests are widely misunderstood and frequently misinterpreted. As a result, countless conclusions in the scientific literature are erroneous, and tests of medical dangers or treatments are often contradictory and confusing.

I’m no statistician, so I’ll let the more mathematically literate evaluate the claims in that article. I link to it because it resonates with what my former roommate (and frequent commentator on Savage Minds) once told me. He said that biological anthropologists frequently misunderstand the results of computer programs which produce genetic trees because they don’t properly grasp the underlying math. Some people argue that a similar problem nearly brought down the world economy.

Even when the science is done right, there are some serious problems that need to be addressed. When research isn’t published in fake peer review journals or ghost written by pharmaceutical companies, there are still inherent biases against publishing “negative results.” And even when everything is done right, strong empirical results are often impossible to replicate:

But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable.

But as the title should make clear, I link to these results not to debunk science but to praise it. Michael Bérubé has an intriguing review of the “science wars” in which he argues that both scientists and their critics have a shared interest in trying to move beyond the impasse of the nineties in order to face the twin threats of those who deny evolution (for religious reasons) and those who deny global warming (for economic reasons):

Fifteen years ago, it seemed to me that the Sokal Hoax was making that kind of deal impossible, deepening the “two cultures” divide and further estranging humanists from scientists. Now, I think it may have helped set the terms for an eventual rapprochement, leading both humanists and scientists to realize that the shared enemies of their enterprises are the religious fundamentalists who reject all knowledge that challenges their faith and the free-market fundamentalists whose policies will surely scorch the earth. On my side, perhaps humanists are beginning to realize that there is a project even more vital than that of the relentless critique of everything existing, a project to which they can contribute as much as any scientist–the project of making the world a more humane and livable place.

I sincerely hope that this is the case. What I like about science is that it is not afraid to ask tough questions. There is no reason to think that the scientific method can’t learn from all of the problems listed above and find ways to make scientific results even more robust than they were before. But I don’t think that science can do this on its own. These are also political problems, social problems, institutional problems, psychological problems, etc. and to find ways to make science better scientists will need to work together with anthropologists and others to find ways to overcome these problems. (See James Clifford’s talk on “The Greater Humanities.”) I like science because I think scientists understand this in the same way that the best economists understand that economics alone isn’t enough to solve economic problems.

Rex recently asked for “anthropology creeds” but for the life of me I can’t write one. So instead I’ll write about why I think the task is impossible. An anti-creed if you like.

In short, I think that anthropology, like Christmas, or the island on Lost, is whatever you want it to be. Every discipline in academia also exists as a mirror-self within anthropology: economics, semiotics, medicine, political-science, genetics, religion, history…etc., all have their counterparts in anthropology. And not just one counterpart either. Just looking at economic anthropology, one can take a myriad of different approaches to the subject all of which are called anthropology. Just about the only approach not called anthropology would be that used by economists… and even there I’m sure you can find some anthropologists whose work isn’t too different from what you would find in an economics journal.

Some scholars have tried to do an end-run around the question by defining anthropology in terms of its method rather than its subject matter. This is what the AAA tries to do in defining sociocultural anthropology.  But that runs into two problems: First of all, anthropologists don’t own “ethnography.” Lots of other disciplines now use ethnography as a standard methodological tool. Secondly, not all anthropologists do ethnography. There are historical anthropologists and those in Foucauldian governmentality studies whose research might sometimes include ethnography but is often much more concerend with textual analysis. Then there are archaeologists, biological anthropologists, and linguists who also frequently do work which is not ethnographic (although, again, many do include ethnography). I would even add that a lot of traditional, supposedly ethnographic, cultural anthropology often uses ethnography in a very superficial way. All too often, journal articles invoke ethnography to confer legitimacy on a text which isn’t really ethnographic at all. I don’t say this as a criticism, I personally think anthropologists should be wary of fetishizing methodology. Ethnography is a big part of who we are, but I don’t think we should be defined by it.

Instead of trying to define the discipline as a whole, we are better off thinking of ourselves as social scientists, writ large. To the extent that we function within anthropology departments, publish in anthropology journals, and hang out with 6,000 anthropologists at the annual meetings, we are anthropologists. But within that there are multiple “anthropologies” which function more-or-less independently of the whole. We can (and often do) choose to wear multiple hats, defined by our training (“Temple Anthropologist”), specialty (“Linguistic Anthropologist”), politics (“Marxist Anthropologist”) etc. Sometimes all three (or more!) at the same time – including all the contradictions which come with that.

The real problem, I think, is the way institutions are increasingly forcing us to narrowly define our area of expertise. This is particularly bad in Taiwan where academic evaluations can be down-graded for lacking focus, even when the scholar in question has only two or three areas of interest. I recently read a talk by James Clifford which addressed this issue. He called for “creating a multiplex, adaptive, hyphenating/connecting knowledge space that is…fundamentally interpretive, realist, historical, and ethico-political.” I think this is what anthropology needs to be as well. We shouldn’t settle for anything less.

Addendum: If one were to seriously try to define anthropology, I would probably adopt a prototype semantics approach, defining key features which may or may not be present in the work of any individual anthropologist. Umberto Eco famously did this in his definition of Fascism [PDF]. Perhaps another time…

UPDATE: Proper link to James Clifford’s talk.

The narrative at work seems basically to be this: for decades real, objective, scientific anthropology has been under assault from interpretivists like Clifford Geertz who do not believe in truth. With the new language in the AAA mission statement, anthropologists have given up on truth altogether.

I wish that this were a parody or simplification of the argument, but it is not — this is honestly as it good as it gets from the critics of the AAA: Clifford Geertz is the thin edge of  a wedge inserted into the social sciences by Creationism, Sarah Palin, etc. etc.

The fact that the model used by ‘scientific’ anthropologists has as much complexity as an average episode of WWE Smackdown — with a distinction between the evil ‘fluff-head’ cultural anthropologists and the good ‘scientific’ cultural anthropologists — should be the first sign that something fishy is going on. Is it true, as they claim, that anthropology will lose its public credibility, commitment to accuracy, and claim to speak the truth if the knowledge that we produce is not ‘scientific’? Obviously: No. To see why, consider whether the following questions could be accurately and knowledgeably answered:

1. Did the Battle of Hastings occur on 14 October 1066 or 14 November 1066?

2. Was the moral philosophy of Francis Hutcheson a major influence on Thomas Jefferson when he drafted the Declaration of Independence?

3. How can we best punctuate the classical Chinese on this stele to recover its meaning?

4. What languages are Ugaritic related to?

Are these unanswerable questions? Is the discipline of history impossible, or riddled with postmodernists? One astute blogger noted that by removing the claim to science from the mission statement anthropology opened the door to recognizing the truth claims of indigenous forms of knowledge. This is true, but we don’t have to go that far afield to recognize forms of knowledge that are rehabilitated when anthropology jettisons its label as ‘science’: history, epigraphy, historical linguistics, and the humanities in general. The opposite of ‘science’ is not ‘nihilitic postmodernism’ it’s ‘an enormously huge range of forms of scholarship, many of which are completely and totally committed to accuracy and impartiality in the knowledge claims they make, thank you very much’.

Now, someone might argue that historical work that is committed to accuracy, submits its claims to evidence and scholarly scrutiny and so forth is not actually a form of the humanities, but is itself a kind of ‘science’. In fact one person has made such an argument: Franz Boas.

Throughout his career — for instance in his classic short piece ‘The Study of Geography’ — Boas made a distinction between not between the ‘natural sciences’ and the ‘interpretive sciences’ but rather between generalizing sciences (which study things that happen over and over again, like gravity) and the ‘historical sciences’ (which study things which happen just once in history, like the Battle of Hastings). Boas was not alone in this — he was drawing on a wider strain of epistemological work that he got from Germany exemplified in the work of authors like Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert. Thus for Boas something could be ‘scientific’ even if it did not ape the manners of a chemist in his lab.

On the one hand, then, we need to recognize that knowledge is still knowledge even if it is not ‘scientific’. I think it important that anthropology stand up to people who push narrow and impoverished definitions of understanding and insist that what we do counts, matters, and is important even if it does not look like the kind of knowledge production they are used to

On the other hand, I think it is also important that anthropologists fight to maintain their right to speak within the scientific community to define what science is. The version proffered in the blog posts I’ve read is incredibly unnuanced, unreflexive, and simpleminded. We cannot let voices like this own the definition of scientific work.

At times I feel like the real distinction here is between thoughtful people who are aware of the complexities of knowledge production, and those who are for psychological reasons strongly committed to identifying themselves as scientists and everyone else as blasphemers. This approach is, of course, not very scientific and verges on being the close-minded inversion of the fundamentalist Christianity that thinkers of this ilk so love to oppose.

I think it would not be hard to write a history of how this brand of ‘scientific’ anthropology came to be so meaningful to its practitioners: the loss of epistemological subtlety in anthropology in the post-war period as guileless enthusiasm for ‘science’ overwhelmed the most humanistic training of the earlier Boasians, the important institutional position of know-nothings like Marvin Harris who taught a generation to equate close-mindedness with rigor, the inability (or lack of desire) to move beyond rehashing 80s debates about postmodernism, narrow technical training that blinds one to the wider horizons that a university education is supposed to offer.

I don’t want to descend in ad hominem about/explanations of the views of the people I disagree with here. My point is simply that positions which argue anthropology must be science or it is nothing have not just forgotten a vast amount about the philosophy of science and the other departments they share their universities with, they have forgotten a tremendous amount of the history of our discipline as well. There are lots of reasons to be critical of AAA leadership, but no one is well-served by this shallow, knee-jerk reactionism.

The thing about conferences is that they’re a bunch of people all in the same place. The main point of going to AAAs is, in my mind, to spend time with people. A couple of non-obvious things fall out from this:

Fist, you shouldn’t spend all of your time going to panels where you listen to papers. You can always read papers in your free time, no? I think in general one panel a day is enough — if I don’t go to any at all then I know I feel a little like I’m playing hookey. But this thing that people do where they run all over the place hopping from panel to panel and spending all their time listening to presenations — well, frankly, I think its for the birds.

Second, NEVER attend a panel because you are ‘interested in the topic’. The fact is that most of the panels at AAA are total wastes of time featuring uninteresting people poorly presenting hastily prepared papers that are too short to say anything interesting anyways. Anyone can throw interesting keywords into their papers or panel titles — that doesn’t mean you should go. The AAA is about people, not topics.

Third, if someone you know or are interested in is presenting, go see their paper REAGARDLESS of what it is actually on. For people who are new to anthropology, it can be worthwhile to make the rounds just to look luminaries and other famous people in the eye and see what they’re like. Inded, this seems to me to be the only reason to hold those awful ‘discussion session’ roundtables where five famous-to-us intellectuals sit at a huge elevated table in an enormous empty ballroom and pretend they have something to say: they are just events where these people are put on display for us to look at, nothing more.

Alternately, if someone has written a paper that you teach or you’ve seen them on the web and you’re intrigued, go check them out — just as viewing luminaries at a roundtable can be an incredibly deflationary experience, attending a talk by a fascinating junior person is a great chance to assess who they are and where they’re going.

There is just nothing like meeting someone in person to assess, in flash, whether or not they are actually The Shit.

Because the AAAs are about people and not topics or papers, panels are not just about particular presenters. Someone’s presence on a panel is an implicit endorsement of her fellow panel-mates. There could be some good discoveries to be made, so stick around — or at least make note of who is presenting alongside who.

Even more importantly, remember: the AAA is about people. This means the AUDIENCE is as important as the panelists. Who has come to see the speaker speak? Often times this is more important than the talk that is actually going on.

In fact, the one reason to go to a session because of the ‘topic’ is because ‘topic’ is just shorthand for ‘the entire social network of people I care about will be at this talk’. When topics are viewed as networks of people disguised as — or perhaps united by? — subject matter, then it makes perfect since to go to a panel. And hang out in the audience afterwards.

* * *

You can watch people at panels and meet them afterwards, but the best place to meet them are situations where you can talk to them, There are the obvious ones like parties, planned lunches, social events, and so forth. But chance meetings and serendipity are even better: the enormous lines at the cafe filled with people opposed, somehow, to making coffee in their hotel room; the elevator; the enormous whirling malestrom of social anxiety that is the hotel lobby. Grabbing a drink with a friend whose with a friend whose with a friend.

In this day of search engines we seriously underestimate the lessons that brick and mortar libraries have to teach us: the physical environment is a discovery mechanism, and sometimes the best way to discover new things is literally to run into them.

The AAA is a place where the most terrible, snobbish, and oppressive aspects of our discipline come to the fore: the hierarchical power differentials between tenured faculty, job applicants, contingent faculty, and graduate students. Even worse is the endless rounds of academic one-upmanship, who-is-hot, why-do-you-matter. I mention this because for many people the AAAs is the intellectual equivalent of hypergamy: you want to meet and hang out with ‘famous’ or ‘important’ people who you wouldn’t normally get to see.

Now, if your idea of a good time is performing an anthroplogical version of All About Eve, then a few words of advice: famous people are actually just people, and even the most fame-hungry person wants to stop holding court eventually and just have a drink. For god’s sake don’t tell people how much you enjoyed a book they wrote 20 years ago — chances are they can’t remember what’s in it. As in all cases of brown nosing, talk about what they want to talk about: their cat, the Dodgers, whatever. The more you treat famous people like _people_ (which is what the AAA is all about, remember) the greater chance you’ll have to Know Famous People. In a perfect world you sit down with someone, strike up a conversation about your mutual enthusiasm for X Files Fan Fiction, and then afterwards find out they were Clifford Geertz or something.

But of course — of course! — the AAAs should not be about meeting famous people. Fame is fleeting, academic brownnosing is ugly and, at the end of the day, life is too short. Don’t meet famous people, meet _interesting_ people. If you are a graduate student, don’t feel bad that you are hanging out with the other graduate students while the Famous People are off in some mysterious, glamorous, undisclosed location. Soon you and your new friends will become the Famous People and then your victory will be complete. If you are a professor, the absolute best thing you can do is introduce yourself to grad students and take an interest in what they are doing. Simple acts of kindness like striking up a conversation with The Only Person In The Room Who Doesn’t Know Anyone will be remembered for years. And just think — if someone has the gumption to show up and stand around despite the terribel social pressure of being the odd man out, well…. isn’t that the kind of person you’d be intererested in meeting?

Because people matter and not topics, talk to anyone about anything. You just never know where these connections will take you, both in terms of unexpected institutional perks (“We have money for a Melanesianist? Yeah I know one… I met them at AAA….”) but also the way it broadens your knowledge of topics. Pretty much everything I know about the eighteenth century frontier in the southeastern United States I learned at AAA parties from a friend of a friend — and it became a really important resource to me later on when writing up my own work on contemporary resource frontiers in Papua New Guinea. There is just no better way to have horizons expanded in wonderful, unexpected directions than meeting strangers and always assuming that they have something to teach you. What could be more anthropological?

* * *

For academics whose sense of self is deeply tied to their position in the academic world, the AAAs can an emotional roller-coaster, going from despair and a sense of worthlessness to exultation and feelings of euphoric well-being. Its quite strange when you stop to think about it — although really, all the insurance salesmen and medical equipment suppliers have similar experiences at their respective conferences. The most important thing about AAAs is just to remember to have fun and not let it drive you nuts. Academic conferences, like all of academic life, is really the sort of thing you should really only do because you enjoy doing it. If you don’t enjoy doing it — don’t do it. So if you do do it…. have fun!

There is much think and say about this event and these documents. Apropos recent conversations at SM, I’d like to point out that there are probably better places to say some of these things.

One thing that strikes me as relevant for comment here is the way that ‘facticity’ and authority based in being there are at the heart of some discussions.

Take for example this interview from NPR’s All Things Considered between co-host Robert Segal and Wikileaks mastermind Julian Assange.

Here are the most relevant bits:

Julian Assange: The full story is only going to emerge over the coming weeks as that material is correlated to the witnesses who are on the ground, both the US soldiers and Afghanis

Robert Segal: [Challenging Assange’s comparison of The Afghan War Diaries to the Pentagon Papers] These are raw reports that are not confirmed and edited

JA: This material has its strength in that it is not an analysis, not written at the higher levels so it can be publicly massaged, it is in fact the raw facts of the war

RS: Some people would dispute your use of the word ‘facts,’ or indeed there might be something oxymoronic in ‘raw facts’

JA: The majority of reports are immediate reporting from the field from US military operations

What I see emerging here is an interesting conversation about textual authority, and one that resonates with our own disciplinary claims to authority based on ethnographic experience (see Clifford, Marcus, Gupta and Ferguson, etc. for some classic wailing on that old chestnut).

Assange begins by saying that these raw facts will only be fully cooked into a truthy pie once they are compared to the testimony of “witnesses who are on the ground.” And yet, when Segal notes the criticism that these raw facts are, in fact, too raw to be facts—that they need a little correlation before they can be safely consumed—Assange suggests that it is their very rawness that makes them good: Instead of truthy pie, he changes his order to sashimi.

The thing is, be they raw or cooked, pie or sashimi, these documents are not unadulterated. They are not like snapshots of the war, with all the claims to verisimilitude that visual medium implies (it’s worth mentioning that this connection between verisimilitude and the visual is also one way that witnessing stakes its authoritative claims). So, they are not like photographs. They are documents written within the generic constraints of military field reporting for a particular intended audience of surveilling authorities as official archival records.

Drop weapons are a concrete example of the things that are written out of these kinds of documents. Drop weapons are enemy weapons (like AK 47s) that US forces carry with them so that if they accidentally kill a civilian, they can ‘drop’ them by the body and have documentable proof that the civilian was actually an insurgent.

Drop weapons are useful because they alibi omissions (of the killing of civilians) from the After Action Report (AAR) which is part of the official record. But they are also useful because they enable the inscription of other things (the killing of insurgents) in the official record.

For a different and very interesting example directly from the Wikileaks docs, check out this corrective by Noah Shachtman, one of those on the ground witnesses.

The point is, however we choose to digest these documents, we need to consider them within the institutional and social context of their production, and whatever they are, they are not a diary.

“Dancing Around the Issues” Paper delivered at the 2010 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans as part of the panel, “Racial Circuits.”

“Decolonizing Theater on an Indian Reservation” Paper delivered remotely at the 2011 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Montreal as part of the panel, “When Individuals Inherit Legacies: The Remembering Subject of History and Heritage in Context.”

 
 
Here are some things I’ve blogged about…

Culture and Politics in the U.S.
Home Economics and the Nation Against the State
Codename: Geronimo
Glenn Beck, Archaeologist
On Time Magazine’s representation of women in Afghanistan

Evolution, Ecology, and Science
Darwinian Tax Reform
Darwinian Literary Criticism
Book review- Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human, by Richard Wrangham
Culturomics?
Jenny Don’t Change Your Number

Anthropologia, Disciplinary Concerns, and Pedagogy
Writing Culture at 25, Part II (with Ayla Samli), Part III
We Don’t Need Another Hero
Ethnography as Community Service
Is Email Obsolete?
The Greater Humanities
Multispecies Salon 3: Swarm
The Mr. Potato Head Rankings

The Illustrated Man, an occasional series on anthropology and comic books
#7 Shane, the Lone Ethnographer
#6 Burma Chronicles
#5 Journey to Cahokia and Jingle Dancer
#4 The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For
#3 The Stuff of Life
#2 My Neighbors the Yamadas
#1 American Splendor

One concern that I’ve heard which seems almost equally universal is that in a shrinking job market the most likely people to get shafted are the newly-minted Ph.D.s from ‘not-the-top-schools’. I’m not sure this is exactly true.

At first, it seems obvious that The Top Schools are the most prestigious and their faculty are the most connected. Given this fact, it seems clear that if anyone will be able to get their students hired — irregardless of the quality of the students’ work — it will be The Top Schools. But now that the squeeze is on, academic departments are facing some issues which may not necessarily mean The Top Schoolers are the best fit for the new positions. Consider what schools increasingly want these days:

Teachers: many Top Schoolers do not have a tremendous amount of teaching experience — they are protected from the grind of teaching by scholarships and awards. Even those that do teach often have the luxury of teaching Top Schooler Undergraduates who, frankly, are often so overprepared for college that they will succeed despite the traumas inflicted on them by graduate students. Of course there are large state schools (Michigan, e.g.) where graduate students can pick up some teaching cred, but I’ve seen many Intro To Anthropology syllabi from Top Schoolers concocted for the job market that feature hundreds of pages of Lévi-Strauss and Weber — not really that realistic for a lot of intro classrooms.

Methods: Top Schoolers in cultural anthropology tend, in my experience, to the be extremely laissez faire about methods in fieldwork. For many, this is because they are so theoretically advanced that they have exploded any notion of the text that would require them to take fieldnotes. For many others, they are simple of such a blue-blooded lineage that one simply does not discuss these matters.

As the assessment-and-measurement screw tighten on our discipline, however, departments are more and more interested in people who can teach methods courses — and by methods courses I mean actual courses on how to do ethnography, not the standard Marcus-and-Clifford contemplation of what fieldwork might be like if you did any — for several reasons. First, departments are justifying themselves these days in terms of ‘application’, which means methods. Second, ethnography’s cachet is actually quite high right now and many people from other disciplines (and I’m talking like marketing and stuff) want in on our secrets.

In this kind of environment it seems to me that someone with a degree from a Decent School who has, you know, coded fieldnotes to refer to, is probably going to be better placed than a Top Schooler who snorts in incredulity when someone has the temerity to ask him whether his findings are generalizable.

Research: Another dimension of the holy grail of applied anthropology is that research will actually tell us something about the world, and do so in a timely fashion. In contrast, the dominant mode of production in Top Schoolerdom tends to see ethnography more as a work of art — one which has a topic, to be sure, but whose value really comes from the beauty and value added to it by the ethnographer. In particular, the goal is to ‘make a contribution to theory’, which often means a leisurely and gentile comment on the history of past thinkers. In this case ‘theory’ is a series of conceptual references to important thinkers, often a genealogy created in the act of writing the book, the construal and creation of a genealogy for one’s self out of unexpected thinker being a major part of an argument’s elegance. It is difficult to justify this sort of thing when people want to know what do to with all the graves that are going to be dug up in order to make way for the highway.

Now, I am not sure that I am right about all this, but if I am then I think we can see what the implications are: although Top Schoolers might be best positioned for jobs in terms of their cultural capital, the best people to meet the demand for new jobs might be the Second Stringers of people who come from perfectly decent but not spectacular schools.