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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind John L. Jackson Jr.

Anthropology: The Softest Social Science?

I did a foolish thing last weekend. I performed a Google search on my new book — just to see if there were any references to it online that I hadn’t already seen. (Of course, I realize that the Web can be merciless on the thin-skinned, but most authors can sometimes be gluttons for such surefire cyberpunishment, pretending that the one gem they might unearth could ever outweigh the playa-hating hordes.)

I found quite a few references to the book, mostly in fairly obscure/specialty venues, the bulk of them positive. But I was blown away by one interesting dismissal of the work, a dismissal seemingly tethered (in the first instance) to my academic background as a cultural anthropologist. My training as an anthropologist was the first strike against me.

Why are people sometimes so dismissive of anthropology?

In the era of Franz Boas and Margaret Mead, anthropologists were public intellectuals of the highest order. They wrote for popular magazines and challenged Americans’ too-quick assumptions about the hard-wired ‘nature’ of social life.

But that was then. Now, anthropologists seem mostly relegated to the very back of the line when it comes to assessments about the value of social-scientific attempts to make sense of contemporary issues.

For instance, there are so many anthropologists who study academic underachievement among Black and Latino students, people such as Signithia Fordham, Prudence Carter (a qualitative sociologist), Mica Pollack, and many, many others. They do in-depth, long-term ethnographic studies. They proffer compelling analyses that nuance discussions of academic underperformance, explaining when and why it happens (for instance, in specific types of schools with a particular demographic mix of students). They even write up their findings in accessible language, with an eye toward the interested audiences beyond their academic field. However, CNN’s recent “Black in America” segment on the issue chose to focus almost exclusively on the experimentalist work of an up-and-coming economist, Roland Fryer, with only the slightest nod to the legion of qualitative folks working in this area. What gives?

It is probably a combination of what people don’t like about anthropology and what they find most powerfully persuasive about the harder sciences.

Anthropology often gets characterized as a “postmodern” cesspool, a discipline that wallows in pseudo-theoretical (even literary) waters, embraces the most solipsistic form of navel-gawking introspection, and has recanted most of its earlier commitments to ‘objective’ outsiderism. At the same time, economists are thought to occupy a firmer space much closer to the normative benchmark that is the natural sciences, crunching numbers in ways that purport to eschew the ideologically-driven meanderings of those softer social sciences.

There is a general pecking order in the social sciences. We all know that. It moves from economics down through the likes of political science and psychology, finally landing in the realm of sociology and anthropology. The closer one gets to serious mathematics as constituitive of the center of the discipline’s exploits, the higher one’s salary, the less diverse one’s colleagues (in terms of categories such as race or gender), and the more powerful one’s academic department. There are exceptions to this formulation, but it holds true quite a bit of the time, no?

We all genuflect to the seemingly sanitized power of numerical calculation, even as we sometimes remind ourselves that researchers can ventriloquize numerical analyses (based on how they set up their research designs, word their questions, etc.), so as to make them sing any number of different ditties.

It is a commonsense colloquialism: Statistics lie. But we also think of them as the best chance we have at some kind of hard-and-fast access to social truth.

As an anthropologist who respects the beauty and elegance of mathematics, I just wish our everyday privileging of its explanatory powers left a tad more room at the table for differently pitched methodological attempts at truth-telling.

Posted at 09:30:25 AM on July 29, 2008 | All postings by John L. Jackson Jr.

Comments

  1. “It is probably a combination of what people don’t like about anthropology and what they find most powerfully persuasive about the harder sciences.”

    As an economist, I will have to disagree a little bit. The issue has little to do with economics as a hard science. It actually has to do with the trend in economic research towards what some call “coffee table economics”. You work on a topic with a cute title, have a simple hypothesis that everyone understands, and use simple statistical techniques to test the hypothesis. A group of average individuals can talk about the study in their living room for a couple minutes, have a good laugh, and then move on.

    You can find some comments here
    http://gemini.econ.umd.edu/jrust/research/keane_comments.pdf
    on pages 2 and 3 about Mr. Freakonomics.

    Interestingly, the criticism from economists comes because this line of research is not hard enough. I’m not in any way critical of Mr. Fryer or his research, only the fact that his research fits this mold and that is what gives him the opportunity to be on TV.

    In spite of how it might look from the outside, economists do believe non-mathematical research is very valuable. We actually understand the limitations of the so-called ‘hard’ approach. Anthropologists have a great deal to contribute to the debate. It’s a shame when they are not consulted in such circumstances.

    Again, I’m not attacking Mr. Fryer, I’m attacking the willingness to ignore those who do not do ‘cute’ research.

    — me · Jul 29, 12:45 PM · #

  2. The cogent observations missed what I think has vitiated anthropology; i.e., the dominance of cultural anthropology and the notion that anthropology is tantamount to cultural anthropology. This has come about because the four-field approach to anthropology (cultural, physical, linguistics, and archaeology) was abandoned years ago. The last 3-named fields gave anthropology a sense of rigor. Cultural anthropology (Professor Jackson’s anthropology), on the other hand, is enamored of theory,and whatever theory is popular at the moment draws cultural anthropologists, and the more ethereal and abtruse the theory the more attractive it ibecomes. As one who was fortunate enough to have had graduate courses under such luminaries as Morton Fried (cultural), Joseph Greenberg (linguistics), Alfred Louis Kroeber, Margaret Mead,
    Harry L. Shapiro (physical), Wm. Duncan Strong (archaeology), Julian Steward (cultural) et al., like Professor Jackson, I lament the present state of cultural anthropology but for slightly different reasons.

    — Peter T. Suzuki · Jul 29, 12:48 PM · #

  3. Both points are well taken. There is certainly a way that economics gets packaged to the public that is part of the issue, even though I still believe that its potential interest to the public is predicated (for most folks) on its relative hardness as a social science, no?

    And the four-field reminder is of major importance, too. It shouldnt’ get left out of the conversation.

    Thanks for both of these responses/critiques.

    — John Jackson · Jul 29, 01:21 PM · #

  4. Re: John L. Jackson, “Anthropology the Softest Social Science?” (07/29/08. Good article! If I may point out a fundamental fallacy in mathematics it is the premise that one plus one college-educated professional equals two of them. In the case of anthropologists and civil engineers the two elements are often diametrically opposed and unequal on several levels. I took an MA in anthropology in 1980 and got a job in state government. We practiced bureaucracy, not my academic focus, so I left after a year or so and took a job in real property acquisition for transportation projects. Engineers, mathematicians with imagination, do not like social scientists, especially those who do cultural studies which may thwart their designs. Neither do they like bureaucrats who spend big amounts of project money on relocating property owners away from proposed highways. Ultimately the split seems to be a good thing, each factor moderating the other. The disparity in salaries appears to be a result of supply versus demand. There are many more social scientists than mathematicians, after all. That is simple economics. Speaking of which, I recently took another MA in history to prepare to teach the subject to young adults. My approach to the success of a fifteenth-century administration in Spain was an economic one. When powerful people mixed long-standing cultural imperatives with a realistic analysis of concurrent economics the world changed forever. Sociologists and mathematicians are now dealing with runaway population increases and the cultural barriers that inhibit the correction of political problems. And the cycle goes on, somewhat like a clock, but then the measurement of time is a mathematical construct.

    — Charles Carrrillo · Jul 29, 01:23 PM · #

  5. Actually, any physicist will tell you that mathematics is the hand-maiden of physics and physics is the apex of science.

    Yet, physics, too, has its theoretical bent and its experimental wing, with theory dominating the duo, of course. And the theories deal with uncertainties and hypotheses all of the time. Was it Heisenberg who wrote a book called Physics and Philosophy?

    All of the humanities could take a lesson from the hard sciences where the cult of personality is always subject to the consensus of community. In the humanities, unfortunately, very often the reverse is true.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Jul 29, 02:38 PM · #

  6. Surely it’s not coincidental that the quantitative branches of the social sciences tend disproportionately to be the handmaidens of state and industrial power, serving instrumental functions for corporate and governmental chiefs, while the “soft” branches tend to be where what’s left of the anticapitalist left, and in general critical approaches to society, congregate?

    — Roger · Jul 29, 03:00 PM · #

  7. Yes to both #s 2 and 6. One of the issues facing cultural antropology is its move away from any real attempt at objectivity, beginning some forty years ago when field workers began to think of themselves as advocates for the people they studied.

    The fact that so many extreme leftists have burrowed into anthropology and sociology hasn’t helped the situation in the least.

    — Ethel · Jul 29, 03:34 PM · #

  8. The “critical” in critical theory well be a big part of why it gets side-shelved. But even among those who might be more politically aligned, one of the most common complaints about critical social science is that it offers critique and not solutions. But “solutions,” by which the complainants typically mean something I can do tomorrow to fix everything, don’t apply to mindsets and cultural frames, which don’t get “fixed” quickly or fully. One of the striking features of our contemporary culture is our collective desire for nameable and discrete problems with specific, targeted solutions. (Hence our difficulty addressing “de cardio racism,” which even its sufferers can’t accurately describe.)

    And quantification fits well in our era of accountability and profit motive. You’ve got to have a business plan to get your work into the market. In fact, the ability to predict with numerical confidence is often far more important than the ultimate accuracy of those predictions, which rarely get checked on.

    But let’s look at what we interpretive scholars do that holds our work at a distance. Peter’s comment on the dominance and abstruseness of theory is true in its way, but I think there’s a related but worse problem at work. Who do we write for? Other scholars (because of P&T pressures). How do they judge our work? On the basis of interpretive — that is, theoretical — merit. How does a larger public, on the other hand, judge the value of writing? I’d argue that readership and understanding rely on portraying a circumstance fully and richly, bringing readers fully into what it’s like to be part of those relationships. It relies on dense and accurate dialogue that captures real people’s voices. It relies on the telling detail: the blue cigarette smoke in the nightclub air, the knifing of fresh butter from a ceramic crock, the snap of a Scrabble tile onto a concrete table in Washington Square.

    But instead, we summarize and condense all the stuff that might actually make our ethnographic work compelling. We give up the stories. And we replace those stories with the overview and the theoretical frame, and in the process lose our potential readership.

    Lots and lots of people voluntarily read Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family, a ten-year ethnographic account of marginalized teens. According to her MacArthur Award bio, she got a B.A. in sociology from Smith, an M.A. in philosophy and modern literature from Oxford, and an M.A. in law studies from Yale. And in the period between the modern lit and the law degrees, she’d been the fiction editor of Seventeen magazine. THAT’s the kind of training that allows you to write about important public issues for a public readership rather than a P&T file.

    (Shameless plug, and I promise not to do it again…) I humbly recommend the 1998 article “Kinder Ethnographic Writing” from Qualitative Inquiry 4:2, pp. 249-264.

    — Herb · Jul 29, 04:31 PM · #

  9. Anthropology, in its best interdisciplinary sense, can serve as a bridge among social, behavioral, biological, and physical sciences. My impression is that not all anthropologists take scientific methods very seriously. The work of those who use objective and quantitative methods is taken more seriously than those whose approach is primarily speculative or theoretical. It seems to me that the same is true in my field, psychology. Biological psychologists and biological anthropologists are pretty often taken seriously as competent “hard” and quantitative scientists. I’m afraid many people just don’t get what the use of statistical analysis and inference is about—thinking somehow they (or others) can use (or misuse) statistics to “prove” some theory or hypothesis. And, of course, many who scorn the use of quantitative methods, for whatever reasons, have not mastered these methods sufficiently to use them appropriately themselves nor to appreciate how they are correctly (or incorrectly) used by others. Then, of course, there are those who use quantitative methods to dazzle and dominate those who do not understand what is being done to them. Personally, I think we should all be using the tools that are available to us to acquire and evaluate knowledge and enhance understanding. That is why we all need to become more interdisciplinary and more communicative across the traditional disciplinary and sub-disciplinary boundaries.

    — Joe Erwin · Jul 29, 05:34 PM · #

  10. One cannot ignore the multitudinous intellectual sins of cultural anthropology over the past thirty years or so. Cultural anthropologists filled the pot, turned on the heat, brought things to a boil, jumped in, and now complain that they’re in hot water. It is telling that the scientific disciplines that anthropology used to comprehend, principally physical anthropology and archaeology, have been snubbed by culturalists bedazzled by the same kind of theory that swamped literary studies, from which cultural anthropology often seems indistinguishable these days. Nor did it help when one of the tribal idols, Margaret Mead, was shown to have trimmed her sails to accommodate politically congenial theories, evidence be damned.

    Cultural anthropology has been fertile soil for relativism, subjectivity, and outright solipsism. At the same time it has been airily dissdainful of science and scientific objectivity, which, problematic as they may be, are vital to any serious inquiry. It has been the home territory of some of the most bizarre exercises in “science studies”, as exemplified by such characters as Latour and Traweek.

    Is it any wonder that it is now viewed as a musty relic, now that “postmodernism” has lost its magical power to impress and intimidate?

    Economics, at least, is answerable to empirical evidence and, for all its sins, deals with a reality all to familiar to people. That, and not the mathematical machinery, is what gets people to take it seriously.

    — Fossil · Jul 29, 05:50 PM · #

  11. I’m surprised no one has pointed out the elephant in the room:

    There are lots of people who have no idea what anthropology is.

    “Isn’t that the study of monkeys?”

    Lots of you made thoughtful, insightful comments about the problems within the field of anthropology itself, and even noted some interesting questions as to how it relates to other fields.

    But, if we’re talking about media presence, it’s the field of communications we need to move to. I was a grad student/instructor in comm for quite a few years and, believe me, a lot of the people who wanted to be media professionals [including journalists, PR specialists and advertisers] openly resented their liberal arts education and the requirement to take outside electives [heck, even internal electives annoyed some!]. When I introduced basic cultural anthro and sociology concepts to them [that I had learned as an undergrad and for my MA], not a few of them resisted the experience. Some openly exclaimed, “That’s just wrong!”

    Economics has a higher TVQ because it’s all about the money, ya know?

    Percolating beneath this idea is a lot of what’s discussed above too though.

    — anon · Jul 29, 09:12 PM · #

  12. “Isn’t that the study of monkeys?”(anon, comment #11)

    Yes, sad, isn’t it, that some people are unaware that “anthropos” refers to people. Of course, it is worth noting that some anthropologists do study monkeys and other nonhuman primates.

    As a primatologist, I have many valued colleagues who are anthropologists (along with others whose backgrounds are in mammalogy, zoology, psychology, or other fields—even economics).

    I have been astonished to find that anthropology is so poorly represented on many campuses. A couple of years ago I taught some courses in psychology at a small liberal arts college in Maryland that had no anthropology course at all! And a few years earlier I held an appointment as a research professor in psychology at a fairly major private university that ostensibly has great strength in international studies, but had only a tiny representation in anthro, and that was in the sociology department.

    Anthropology is such a fundamentally important subject that it should be represented (well) in every respectable undergraduate curriculum in the country. That is so obvious to me that I have difficulty understanding why it is not universally recognized.

    How is it that my field, psychology, is one of the most popular undergraduate majors on most campuses (although biological psychology is not always as well represented as it should be), and anthropology is too often entirely absent?

    — Joe Erwin · Jul 30, 04:16 AM · #

  13. Good article and discussion. One question, though: what the hell does it matter what’s on CNN? Or any television program? TV by its very nature leeches the complexity out of any subject, strains the hard bits out of what’s left, then homogenizes the whey before serving it to the audience. Of course they went with the flash. So what?

    — Dan · Jul 30, 07:37 AM · #

  14. There may be other issues, too, depending on institutional and community contexts. I taught for a while in a sectarian college that was growing increasingly orthodox. A number of my colleagues in the “faith development” departments (Philosophy and Theology) heartily disapproved of the content of my courses. Particularly egregious topics included human evolution, kinship and marriage, and comparative religion. My experience, I suspect, may be extreme.

    When I was a postdoc earning an MPH, one of my mentors recommended the following monograph:

    Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life,
    Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1995.

    In this book, Porter places the development of quantification in historical and political context. Mathematics is supposedly a language separate from the people who use it, and therefore an objective way of arriving at public and political decisions.

    — Maria · Jul 30, 08:09 AM · #

  15. So far this has been the best discussion on the CHE that I have ever read. Thanks go to Dr. Jackson and everyone else.

    Surely another facet, a little unspoken here, of cultural anthropology’s “problem” is that it, among the human sciences, is too close to the humanities. The humanities themselves are “guilty” in the eyes of many of much of the excesses that some of the posters here have forwarded: too much theorizing/not enough problem solving, too much ideology (always this is a problem of the ideology being too liberal, do note).

    Please note that I say all this as a practitioner of a field that operates just on the other side of the human science / humanities gap: folklore studies. Sharing the same grandfather, Boas, cultural anthropology and folklore studies are kissing cousins, in a fashion.

    The humanities are, in general, left out of public discourse. To some degree, we surely brought this on ourselves by getting too caught up in our own theorizing and an ever-proliferating terminology. But it’s also the case that the humanities, embodying the liberal arts, have always been the favorite targets of pogroms. And with the rise of the culture wars in the U.S.A. in the 80s , humanists were bound to be among the first to be sighted/cited.

    While I make no excuses for my colleagues and peers who seem to engage in endless “problematizing,” I also think that the kind of complex view of reality the humanities offer is something sorely needed in the present, but because that complexity often takes within its sweep issues of power, it’s always going to be difficult for whom power works to deal with. And the communications industry is by and large a place where power works.

    — John Laudun · Jul 30, 08:28 AM · #

  16. We get this in sociolinguistics (motto: the really, really tiny social science!), as well—we’ve got people working in qualitative and quantitative sociolinguistics (more in the former), and the wider public seems happy to ignore all of us, even though there’s a lot of work with direct applications to public policy.

    We talk about the problem at our conferences and all, but just like in this discussion, though, we start getting hung up on internal differences—the qualitativists see their work as more tightly tied to the actual experience of language, while the quantitativists (disclosure: including me) see their work as having a more rigorously scientific backing, and all sociolinguists see themselves as being ignored by the theoretical branches of linguistics. Along the way, though, we lose sight of the fact that if we weren’t spending so much effort trying to convince linguists that what we’re doing is important, we might be better positioned to influence society more widely.

    — Will perform ANOVAs for food · Jul 30, 08:47 AM · #

  17. One of the problems with discourse in which a little evidence becomes the subject of vast theoretical constructions and speculations is that those who practice this approach tend to get involved in major “pissing contests” over whose speculation is more correct, sounds better, is more appealing, or generates more testable hypotheses. I have had access, as a multidisciplinary journal editor and grants reviewer, to some major disputes between authors or investigators and reviewers. Paleoanthropologists are notorious for sabotaging each others work through excessively brutal criticism. Some other fields are remarkably enthusiastic over, and supportive of, each others’ work. I do not know whether other aspects of anthropology suffer from the same syndrome. There is just much less room for controversy when people stay pretty close to objective reality.

    But how can it be that so many schools do not have anthro programs? One of the answers may have been identified above in Maria’s post (#14). Discussions of human evolution, cultures, and kinship systems are certainly unwelcome on some conservative faith-based campuses. I recall a case at an adventist college where a biology instructor was canned for teaching what main-stream biologists regard as accurate evidence regarding natural selection. The inescapable conclusion seems to be that such institutions are committed to enforcing ignorance rather than providing people with the intellectual tools to evaluate evidence.

    — Joe Erwin · Jul 30, 09:52 AM · #

  18. Herb (#*) and others are certainly correct in their pleas for more accessible writing that retains the virtues of academic rigor. I recall a recent article in either The Atlantic or Harpers about the failure of of our current administration to draw on anthropological or cultural knowledge of the middle east before it entered into what has proved to be its utterly disastrous war-crime ridden and lethal policies. The neocons — especially the likes of Rumsfeld, Perl and Wolfowitz, simply shrugged their shoulders at the loss of so many cultural treasures in Iraq. The article mentioned that having some anthropologists in the White House or state dept. would be advantageous as it was during the Cold War. Instead, we have narrowly educated bureaucrats and our nation’s first MBA president to thank for the continuing bloodshed and a steadily failing economy. (And, of course, what’s really appalling, is the fact that this guy was a “history” major; Yale should be sued for malpractice.)

    One further observation: it seems to me that anthropology, like so many fields in the “human sciences” and/or humanities, continues to suffer the Dangerfield effect: each laments the lack of respect given them, and it’s certainly true that the new Theology (Economics), because it is cloaked in mathematical garb, has probably dethroned Philosophy as queen of the sciences. Certainly it’s also true that internal feuds have, as #16 notes, kept discussion merely academic: as the neocons say: you chatter and interpret while we run the world.

    — George K. · Jul 30, 12:57 PM · #

  19. It is because Social Sciences in general are a farse. You have economics which is really just mathmatics, Political Science which is just history for dummies, Sociology which is just Anthropology for dummies, phychology which is just another sub discipline of Anthropology, and then finally Anthropology which is a mix of hard science and history. There is no such thing as “Social Sciences” and the closest thing to a “social science” would actually be Anthropology. The rest are pretenders.

    — McDuffy · Jul 30, 01:29 PM · #

  20. “it’s certainly true that the new Theology (Economics), because it is cloaked in mathematical garb, has probably dethroned Philosophy as queen of the sciences”

    LOL

    I guess others must be taking the field of economics more seriously than economists do. Let me state clearly, and I’m sure I speak for at least a few other economists, that we’re in trouble if economics is anything more than just another social science.

    Then again, look at how much attention is paid to college rankings, student evaluations, and grade point averages. I suppose that numbers will always attract attention even if they are devoid of meaning.

    This has been a very interesting discussion about the social sciences. There really should be more such discussions.

    — me · Jul 30, 02:03 PM · #

  21. There are two issues I’d like to add:

    (1) As for anthropologists and political/government engagement: The AAA has opposed the US Military’s Human Terrain Program on ethical grounds. I am ambivalent about this decision. As a social anthropologist, I would much rather go to work forthe Human Terrain Program than do qualitative market research for RJ Reynolds.

    2) Has anthropology as a discipline and a community dealt clearly with its own problems and issues, in particular, labor? Like many of the liberal arts, most of its PhDs are not employed in academia, and I wonder how many are actually using their degrees to make a living. My feeling, and it could be misplaced, is that tenured, established anthropologists live in a much different world than the likes of me. Perhaps from such positions of priviledge (to use critical anthropology’s own term) it is easier to draw unambiguous ethical guidelines. The discipline needs to make its work relevant to the rest of the world in ways that make sense, and it has to find a way to include its “former graduate students” (its PhDs) into the community.

    — Maria · Jul 30, 05:28 PM · #

  22. I’m trying to make sense of comment #19 without being too strident in an initial reaction. I’m wondering what is meant here by “phychology” and in what sense whatever it is can be considered a subdiscipline of anthropology.

    — Joe Erwin · Jul 30, 06:01 PM · #

  23. I imagine, hopefully without being too paranoid, that “phychology” was just a typo, and that “psychology” was meant. I imagine “phycology” was not meant, as that is the scientific study of blue-green algae, which does not seem very intimately connected with anthro.

    There is also a sense in which biological anthropology is a subdiscipline of primatology. ; )

    To be entirely fair, there is a sense in which psychology is a subdiscipline of anthropology. That sense is that some anthropologists call themselves psychologists (e.g., social psychologists or evolutionary psychologists). One can actually get an anthropology Ph.D. in “social psychology,” and one can also get a psychology Ph.D. in “social psychology.” Back in the 70s I briefly called myself an “evolutionary psychologist” while I was getting a PhD in psychology, subfield “psychobiology.” I was concerned with the comparative, integrative, and evolutionary study of behavior and learning. Someone pointed out to me that I was insufficiently grounded in paleoanthropology to call myself an “evolutionary psychologist.” I am tempted to suggest that anthropologists who call themselves “evolutionary psychologists” should be sure they are sufficiently grounded in psychology, but maybe they already are.

    Anyway, the development and traditions of psychology and anthropology are fairly distinct, so I would not go around calling psychology a subdiscipline of anthropology. This would likely offend both psychologists and anthropologists.

    An interesting exception occurred at Penn State, where C. Ray Carpenter, a psychologist by training (PhD in psychology from Stanford and postdoctoral work in psychology at Yale), and a field primatologist who called himself a “social psychologist,” was instrumental in establishing the Department of Anthropology (as well as, the PSU medical school). I was fortunate to know the man some 35 years ago, and I very much appreciate his successful efforts to promote the development and well-being of anthropology. Anthro at PSU is located in Carpenter Hall.

    There is also a sense in which anthropology is a sub-discipline of primatology…. ; )

    — Joe Erwin · Jul 30, 06:35 PM · #

  24. Sorry for duplication above….

    — Joe Erwin · Jul 30, 06:37 PM · #

  25. #21 “Has anthropology as a discipline and a community dealt clearly with its own problems and issues, in particular, labor?”

    Are you kidding? One of anthropology’s biggest problems is the excessive disciplinary navel-gazing they’ve been wasting time on for going on four decades now. Just get out there and do some good work, and stop worrying about what other people are going to think about it.

    — Ethel · Jul 30, 07:01 PM · #

  26. Many of the successful biological anthropologists I know who are not in academic anthro departments work in med schools (anatomy or forensics), museums, or zoos. Of course, some are even in marketing. Anthropology is a very strong and useful major in the places where it is taught across the spectrum from biological and linguistics to social and cultural.

    I’ve said too much. I’ll let others have their say.

    — Joe Erwin · Jul 30, 07:26 PM · #

  27. Ever notice how, historically, human beings started studying scientifically the things that are most remote from us, namely the heavens? All those early sites that were aligned with the sun at noon on the summer equinox, etc.? Then,
    through time, humans moved inwards in their studies, from
    God and the stars to physics, biology, politics, literature, and finally, to the source of all that thinking—us, in anthropology.
    Anthro doesn’t get any respect because it hits too close to
    home. Standing outside one’s own culture, and viewing it as just one more culture among many, is one of the hardest things to do. Americans, who, for the most part, have had little contact with other cultures, have a particularly hard time with this challenge.

    Standing outside one’s own culture, and viewing it as just one more culture among many, is one of the hardest things to do. Americans, who, for the most part, have had little contact with other cultures, have a particularly hard time with this challenge.

    — mjbinfo · Jul 31, 01:18 AM · #

  28. Sorry about the repeat in the post above. I find the preview function to be really squirrelly. Or is it that I use a Mac?

    — mjbinfo · Jul 31, 01:23 AM · #

  29. Is the preview function malfunctioning?

    — Joe Erwin · Jul 31, 03:48 AM · #

  30. If standing outside one’s own culture is what makes anthro a hard row to hoe, try standing outside one’s own mind—the task of philosophy. Harder still, and gets even less respect. But I’ll use this discussion as an assignment in my next seminar in phil of the social sciences, thanks to all…

    Scriven

    — michael scriven · Aug 4, 11:00 AM · #

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