So, I ended my last post (a pithy rant about anthropology’s potential relevance vis-a-vis our contemporary efforts to fix the economy) with a list of themes that have been proposed as part of this year’s American Anthropological Association meeting. And the early critique has been simple and certain: Anthropology’s relative marginalization is a function of its obscure and useless jargon. Anthropologists only speak to themselves, the argument goes, and in obfuscating language (faux theory) that alienates most readers. But I don’t buy it.
Anthropologists don’t corner the market on disciplinary jargon.
How about legalese? That’s the quintessential example of purposefully opaque language. And lawyers own the public sphere.
My last post was specifically about economics. And that field clearly has its own investment in jargon.
Of course, the argument can be made that economists are exploring genuinely complex ideas, which merits complicated language — even demands it. Anthropologists are deemed to just dress up common sense in fancy rhetoric (as one comment to my last post put things). For economists, it is necessary. Bricks and mortar to build concrete theorizations. But for anthropologists it is dismissed as mere smoke and mirrors, something hiding the fact that no edifice exists at all.
Who decides which theories matter and which others merely mask? And what criteria do we use? Public acceptance? Policy efficacy? University salaries? The size of people’s datasets?
Anthropologists need to do a better job taking their arguments to the streets. True. At least some of them. The others can stay where they are and wait for their interlocutors to find them, no? And jargon shouldn’t stop them — even if its supposedly “leftist” slant does.
