Comments on: how to think like an anthropologist

By: Michael Powell

Michael Powell — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:54:38 +0000

Not that I feel it’s necesseary to defend Stephen Tyler, but he was one of my professors in graduate school and I think of him as a friend. My sense is that he would enjoy this debate a lot, as he always entertained my more optimistic take on the usefulness of anthropology. As I see it, the critique of representation in the 1980′s, particularly as it is found in Writing Culture, was also a debate and not an agreement (compare very carefully, for example, Tyler’s essay with Rabinow’s essay in that volume). Some felt that the critique of representation deconstructed anthropology itself (Tyler), while others felt that this critique could be more of a tool that would help anthropology shift its focus from studying behavior and the immediately observable into a study/critique of knowledge production in the contemporary world (Rabinow) in multiple connected sites and spaces. So, to some extent, I see great value in this and can understand why it became such a difficult matter to grapple with, theoretically and academically. Where things got lost, I think, is in all of the academic posing, posturing and arguing. And here is where Steven Tyler would be the first to agree…After all, he was originally led down this path by rebelling against the academic rigidity of an early advisor, Gregory Bateson. After Tyler wrote the book on Cognitive Anthropology, he started to change his mind. But Tyler, too, got caught up in the theoretical rigidity of poststructuralism, ironically enough, and he fully recognized the conundrum that Grant points out. The way he described a career in academia? He recommended that I read the Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse. From there, I think he was telling me that I should make up my own mind on how to play the game.

By: Anthrodiva

Anthrodiva — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 12:33:42 +0000

I think it may also be because most ‘academic’ anthropologists rarely do much fieldwork. They go one place, a few times, and write about it the rest of their lives in an echo chamber with other anthropologists. Getting out there and actually doing it requires concision and clarity.

By: kayt davies

kayt davies — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 00:38:34 +0000

I’m interested in where journalism sits with all this because I suspect that it is the new growing generation of long-form journalists who will end up drinking with the last of the old school anthropologists and taking their wisdom forward (feel free to go nuts with random mixed metaphors about being the grail knights of anthropology or something).
I just read a brilliant NYT piece called “the trolls among us”, similar in style to the much-syndicated “Naked on the internet” piece and several Chris Anderson classics, these stories are ethnographic in their process and anthropological in their attempts to read patterns in the data, and they are travelling the world and being consumed by magazine readers and not just academics. They are doing the work of facilitating social understanding.
In my own faculty there is a clear divide between the journalism academics and ‘those cultural studies types’ and it is precisely over journalism’s natural fondness for solid reality and cultural studies aversion to it.

This is the nexus my own study is sitting on and so your post was really relevant.
Thanks

By: nick gogerty

nick gogerty — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 18:20:21 +0000

Excellent post. Anthropology has indeed fallen under the spell of the other social sciences where paragraph long sentences with obtuse verbage count as legitimate contribution. Bring back amateurs like Boaz!

Lets hope the spartan prose of the field anthropologist returns.

In my work with various scientists at an advanced research lab (starlab) modelled on the MIT media lab, I always found those who could communicate the most clearly were the only one who truly had something to say or work to show. Those seeking legitimacy stood behind postmodern purple prose piled on by the poound with a “you just don’t get it look of conceit.”

Almost to a one there efforts were as banal as their posturing. Currently as an anthropologist, hedge fund guy, I believe in field work combined with tight sharp reporting.

By: John A Arkansawyer

John A Arkansawyer — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 22:57:11 +0000

When you say, “What he means is: In the second expedition, Don Quixote’s adventures have a simple pattern: something happens” you miss a detail: Watt specifies that Quixote sees something–it’s not event-driven, but specifically sight-driven.

Is that important? I don’t know. That you take the detail out suggests you don’t find it so, but I’d have to read the original to know for certain.

By: Christopher

Christopher — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 18:06:46 +0000

I was trying to explain to someone (much younger) the other day about what it was like to be an undergrad in the early 1990s; the post-modern war was raging high. It was the old guard against the new guard! And both exhilarating and a little bit confusing for a 19 y.o. But it seemed right at the time, as a queer northerner in the middle of Mr. Jefferson’s Virginia, I wanted to, of course, rebel against anything and everything I could. (All that tradition that was both attracting and repelling. All those young good old boys (who were both sexually attracting and repelling) and southern chivalry and history and tradition that I didn’t understand.)

So I often found myself on the side of the PoMo. But of course, this did have a downside that I was immediately aware — what I really wanted to study was sort of a made up Urban Studies curriculum. (There’s that rebelling again, I was in the middle of the American pastoral ideal and wanted to study the city.) And that meant trying to forge something multidisciplinary — mixing in architecture history and sociology and urban government. Sociology, though, and government were all sort of the enemy of the anthro department, so although I wasn’t prevented from taking classes there. It definitely raised eyebrows. And drew some comments of displeasure. And there was downsides that perhaps I was only aware of later, manly that the intellectual battles as it was is and was interesting and should have been commented on more, instead we were forced to pick sides. I barely knew who I was.

But this isn’t to bemoan my failed educational goals. Well not the big ones, just the smaller ones. Roy Wagner did and does teach in that department and I did take a fantastic class from him — the Anthropology of Everyday Life — which still influences me (and got me on a lifelong habit of Michael Lewis. We read Liar’s Poker for Wagner.) But your post reminded me that I never took Wagner’s Castaneda and Don Juan. Perhaps I need to add that to my reading list, and throw in some Wagner as well. Thanks.

By: Jamie Gordon

Jamie Gordon — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 17:06:21 +0000

how are you not perpetually exhausted?

By: Amy Alkon

Amy Alkon — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:01:56 +0000

Sorry – the html didn’t work — can you please toss some quotation marks around the sentence of yours in my comment above that I tried to italicize?

“Anthropology looks for the core of the thing, its defining characteristics, its essence.”

By: Amy Alkon

Amy Alkon — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 13:58:31 +0000

Grant, I just love your blog. Discovered you the other day via my pal Virginia Postrel’s blog.

Anthropology looks for the core of the thing, its defining characteristics, its essence.

There’s a book I want to recommend – just started reading it, and it’s on this topic, by an evolutionary psychologist I know, Lisa Zunshine, from University of Kentucky, but now teaching on a Guggenheim Fellowship at Yale.

Just started reading it, and it’s as fantastic as her last one (“Why We Read Fiction,” on Theory Of Mind). This one’s called “Strange Concepts and The Stories They Make Possible.” Hope you find it interesting.

Anyway, I’ll be back, and I’ll link to you. Thanks –a treat to read you.

By: JT

JT — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:18:09 +0000

Random, lazy, layman speculation: I wonder if the circularity of postmodern thought derives from the structure of French.

Great post.