I’ve been spending this entire week in San Francisco, attending the American Anthropological Association’s annual conference. Most academics know exactly what the drill entails at such events, a mixture of informal schmoozing (and catching up with old friends) along with more high-stakes panel presentations or (if you’re lucky and a grad student) getting summoned to attend the cattle-call that is on-site job interviewing.

I took part in a few different conference events/activities this week: (i) responding to a new book by sociologist Loic Wacquant, Urban Outcasts, which attempts to challenge common assumptions about the “Americanization” of European poverty — i.e., the idea that European cities are growing into carbon copies of American “hyperghettos”; (ii) talking with several colleagues about the pros and cons of “public anthropology”/”anthropology as social critique”; and (iii) trying to help disseminate information about the theme of next year’s conference in Philadelphia (“The End/s of Anthropology”), a theme that I helped to formulate.

When such conferences are going well, they make you feel good to be an academic. You get re-energized and inspired by meeting up with old friends, getting introduced to new ones, and hearing powerful presentations that provide suggestive models for your own work. The entire thing can be amazingly invigorating.

This year there was also a ton of talk about the President-Elect, and some early buzz about Ruth Behar’s new Chronicle piece on Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, who earned a Ph.D. in anthropology based on ethnographic fieldwork in Indonesia.

Ruth Behar, a filmmaker, poet, and anthropologist based at the University of Michigan, offers an interesting take on the fact of Obama’s anthropological matrilineage — and uses that fact to make a policy plea:

“The fact that Barack Obama’s mother was a cultural anthropologist has been noted with curiosity and amusement. A few commentators dismiss her anthropology credentials by describing her as part of a radical American fringe, while others represent her favorably, but as ‘unconventional’, ‘free-spirited’, or ‘bohemian’. That reputation is based on her two brief (and interracial) marriages and her wanderings through Javanese villages in an era when the stay-at-home mom was the public model of the American mother. Many now find it difficult to comprehend her passion for her adopted culture and her desire to live for years among the subjects of her research and advocacy work, though what she did was nothing out of the ordinary within anthropology.

“As a cultural anthropologist, I think Obama’s family background is something to celebrate. But even more important, I think the time is ripe for cultural anthropology to become a fundamental part of American education and public culture. Anthropology needs to be taught alongside math, science, language arts, and history as early as elementary school and definitely throughout the high-school years. Its insights about the perils of ethnocentrism, racialization, and exoticized stereotypes need to become part of our everyday vocabulary.”

I agree with Behar.

Anthropologists often get lampooned and dismissed by other social scientists (and by those outside of the academy) for their (our) assumed epistemological and presentational excesses — opaque jargon, solipsistic navel gawking, the politicization of research, and on and on. But even though she didn’t raise Obama for the entirety of his childhood, his mother seems to have imparted in him a degree of thoughtfulness and genuine appreciation for cultural differences (as partially manifested in his campaign’s inclusively “multiracial” ground game) that I want to embrace as the best of what the discipline of anthropology can share with the rest of the academy — and beyond.