COLLOQUY

THE QUESTION

RESPONSES

BACKGROUND

Still, Thu does not overstate the matter when he says that many of our colleagues have been pursuing the trendy at the expense of the reasonable. This development may be most apparent in the research universities, where the political economy of academe impinges most powerfully and directly on the career trajectories of their denizens. What might have been academic debates in a more genteel age become heatedly political issues as recent events in the erstwhile Department of Anthropology at Stanford indicate. Because it is continually self-critical, science demands tolerance of multiple views.

Insofar as other approaches sever the relationships of internal consistency and external adequacy, they become relevant only to themselves. Post modernism and agenda-driven approaches, for instance, both encourage intolerance because they depend on the authority of individuals rather than the disciplined comparing of observations. They become hierarchic rather than democratic because they demand adherence. This can all be neutral to those of us who already have tenure or who are outside the system but to graduate students and junior faculty, such 'academic' issues can become political minefields. Your advisor's agenda doesn't allow for your findings? Try writing a dissertation under those conditions.

No resources or support is available to people with no agenda but curiosity or those who fail to meet some ideological test? Try making it through the graduate seminars. Through such seemingly arcane and petty politics are anthropology departments formed and by such means is the discipline reproducing itself. This does not bode well for the future of anthropology, hence Thu's concern is legitimate. According to the American Anthropological Association, about 93 institutions in the U.S. grant PhDs in anthropology. About half of new PhDs find work outside the academy. About half of new PhDs are in some form of Sociocultural anthropology. About 7% are in some form of applied anthropology. The AAA's 1995 survey of graduate departments continues that doctoral students in their dissertations emphasize (1) science, (2) advocacy, (3) interpretation and/or (4) postmodernism and that there has been little synthesis. They define science as use of replicable techniques and formal methodologies; advocacy as furthering a political agenda or the redress of past wrongs that may value subjects over science; interpretive approaches are those that prefer to speculate rather than replicate and may deny that objective meanings exist; and postmodernism as treating ethnography as biography, emphasizing written texts and preference for subjectivity rather than science. What is alarming is that science is central to only one of these. This is the outcome of the playing out of the political economy of anthropology. What should anthropologists be studying? The human condition. In all it's splendor and horror in all times and places; what we are, how we are, and how we came to be this way. And much of that has to do with what Thu is talking about, how we feed ourselves. And how we feed others by our labor. These are the important questions.

The varieties of answers defines the variety of human experience. For instance, Thu points out that scientific studies have shown for fifty years that the industrialization of agriculture is bad for rural communities. We know of its environmental consequences. The relevant and important question for anthropologists to ask is why do we let such things happen? Is it because policy is not sensitive to scientific findings? Is it because of some fault of our systems of communication such that the findings never reach the ears of policy makers? Is it because there are other interests with other agendas that are more important to determining the shapes of economic systems than policy makers or more persuasive to them than scientific findings? Thu worries that no one would take such warnings seriously from a discipline that trivializes its own work. The condition of anthropology as a discipline does not seem to argue against him. I want to reiterate Thu's optimistic note about the American Anthropologist under the editorship of Robert W. Sussman and recommend that interested people see Alexander Alland's book review essay in the recent issue (December 1998, Vol 100 No. 4:1026-1029) because it deals with related matters. Especially important is the pithy advice toward the end (p 1029), which I quote by way of a conclusion:

1. It is a good idea to know what one is talking about.

2. Not all that is obscure is necessarily profound.

3. Science is not a text.

4. Don't ape the natural sciences.

5. Be wary of argument from authority.

6. Specific skepticism should not be confused with radical skepticism.

7. Ambiguity is often used as a subterfuge.

-- E. Paul Durrenberger, Professor of Anthropology, Penn State (posted 4/30, 5:25 p.m., E.D.T.)

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