I will keep my eyes open for differential rates of hiring adjuncts, to see if it varies from discipline to discipline, and why it might. My own university does not have a law school, so I really can’t make any judgments, but also there are no private universities in Canada, so it is impossible for me to judge just how high up the class hierarchy students are, just on the basis of what they choose to study. All we do know now is that making tuition cheaper has not been an incentive that brings in increased numbers of working class students, and that most of the students we do have in Canada are — not necessarily from very privileged backgrounds alone, however we may define that — generally members of the middle class. What I do not know is what the definition is that is used to identify “middle class” by StatsCan — it is available for certain, but I have not checked.

At my university, at least, all the elite white men and women, the people with the most access and freedom, apply to law school.

In Canada, I detect no “do good” element at all in the research grant application or review process — and indeed, one could argue, if nasty, that most of the social sciences and humanities research that is funded is very much niche-oriented, self-indulgent stuff. There was no politically correct agenda in the NSF grant applications I reviewed, nor in recent Dutch granting agency applications that I had to review.

I have no problem with learning about other societies, we do that as individuals by many different means. However, I do not believe that “the traditionals” are simply waiting for “us” to tell their stories, in our own ways, according to theories they would find incomprehensible and largely irrelevant, assuming they even had access to our publications.

I do not follow the point that “rape, enslavement, warfare and general exploitation and mayhem” is simply the tradition of anthropologists. Most of the people we have worked with are the ones who have suffered “our tradition,” and have plenty to say about it. So why not listen to them? And why not listen to us reflecting on what we have learned from them? If the alternative to navel gazing (which seems to be the American way of dispelling self-criticism, with very obvious consequences in American politics), were to be more National Geographic…I will go with the navel gazing.

Otherwise, as I said, I have no real problem with your points, and this was never an ethnography blog that was determined to just get on with the business of telling other people’s stories. The ethnographic essays that have appeared here functioned to put into practice some of the objectives of the project — so there is no need for any kind of opposition between self-criticism and doing ethnography. One really cannot do the latter well without the former.

That’s what they say, yes, but the sort of applications they actually fund are almost exclusively those with a politically correct agenda. Here’s a sampling, from just one page of Wenner-Gren grants (http://www.wennergren.org/grantees/grantees_list.htm) awarded between 2001-2008. I didn’t pick through a long list to get these, they fell out on a single page on my very first search:

‘Children’s Subjectivities, AIDS, and Social Responses in Brazil’; ‘A Guinea Pig’s Wage: Risk, Body Commodification, and the Ethics of Pharmaceutical Research in America’; ‘When Value Disappears: The Economic Dimensions of Citizenship and the Argentine Debt Default,’;
‘The Anxious South Korean Student: Globalization, Human Capital, and Class’; ‘Genomic Evidence, Historical Quests, and the Politics of Identity at the Turn of the Millennium’; ‘Gendered Politics in a Changing Space: Colonialism and the Invention of a Female Igbo King.’

This is what Anthropology has come to in our time. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a conservative, in fact I’d characterize myself as an Orwellian socialist. And it’s not my intention to put you down, because, as I said, I am in complete sympathy with just about everything you’ve written. However, I do think it time for anthropologists to wake up out of their dogmatic slumber, get their head out of their navels, stop agonizing over ethical spilt milk, and realize that there is still a fascinating world out there waiting for us to figure out. If you talk with traditional people you discover that their principal interest is — still — their traditions. Yet all the anthropologists want to talk about is their own tradition — of rape, enslavement, warfare and general exploitation and mayhem. And of course we are all experts on that, so there’s no need to study anything or anyone, just vent on about what bad boys we’ve been.

On my economics blog I don’t dwell too much on who the guilty parties are or what sort of evil maneuvers led us down the path to imminent perdition. Everyone else is doing that so why should I bother? I focus on the fundamental aporia that grounds capitalism and makes total and complete meltdown inevitable regardless of what we do or fail to do. I call it Mumonkan, “The Gateless Gate.” Our whole world has turned into a Zen koan. I dwell on the bright future that awaits us on the other side of that gate, if we can only find the courage to pass through it.

And on my music blog, really an anthropology blog, I focus on what all that wonderful music sung and played by all these remarkable indigenous people all over the world can tell us about who we are and where we came from and where we are going. I put together a proposal for Wenner Gren to get some funding to systematically explore just one especially interesting and important aspect of that and didn’t even get past the initial screening. Not really surprising since there was nothing remotely “correct” or “do-good” about my proposal, it was just basic, old fashioned comparative musicology/anthropology.

In terms of learning from the people you study, some of them may be presenting their own works and other materials online. The ones I collaborated with to produce the ethnographic pieces on this blog certainly do. However, in this phase, I am definitely focusing exclusively on the reflexive concerns as you put them, especially as I am winding down.

Not to worry though, I am not being defensive, and I take all of your great points.

As much as I like what I read here, I must protest because even though what you say you say very well, nevertheless, these sentiments have themselves been co-opted into the athropological mainstream, to the point that just about every grant opportunity (and yes, I apply for anthro. grants because I refuse to deny myself anything) is targeted toward some sort of feel-good “research” by people who have to pretend they want to save the world in order to get a grant. I on the other hand still want to actually learn something from the people I study rather than pretend to be able to save them, as much as I’d love to actually be in a position to do that.

I’ve been political all my life but in my own subversive way, a habit that is not compatible with the usual career path, so I’ve never had much in the way of security, but I have had lots of fun making people uncomfortable. Ever since reading The Theater and Its Double, I’ve had no problem leading a double life as both artist and intellectual and also serious theoretician and rabble rousing blogger (I actually have two totally different blogs, one on a revolutionary approach to anthropology, http://music000001.blogspot.com/, the other on economics and poetry: http://amoleintheground.blogspot.com/). What I miss on this blog is: anthropology, i.e., writings focused on actual people in the real world and the amazing things they do and the amazing ideas they have, rather than the ingrown, self-reflexive concerns of well meaning anthropologists. And please don’t take this a criticism because as I said I am in total sympathy with the sentiments being expressed here — and I sense behind all the guilt the strivings of a kindred spirit longing to break free. :-)

“None of this might be very practical to our immediate situation”

If “our immediate situation,” broadly defined, includes human suffering, then it sounds like the ideas would have practical significance, at least based on this second part:

“The Self is a singularity, an infinitely small point of consciousness. The self is constructed of various identity forming materials (personality, religion, race, and so on), built around and attached to the Self. Human suffering is a result of mistaking such constructions for one’s inherent being, and identifying with them instead of with the point that connects them.”

What I wonder about is seeing “human suffering” as only a form of mistaken thought/seeing… Where do aspects of identity such as “I am hungry” or “my head hurts” fit into the notions of S/self? If someone beats me over the head with a baseball bat as I’m walking down an alley, is my resultant suffering (my head throbbing with pain, rather bloody, ouch, somebody get me to a doctor) somehow connected to seeing S/self in the wrong way? Or, what if a person suffers hunger and dies because his/her crops died in drought? Also a problem of identifying with the self rather than Self? Maybe this also makes sense in nondualism and I’m still too much of a dualist to see it. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

I will be thinking about this much more, many thanks for sharing your thoughts here, and I will get out of the way of any others who might wish to comment.

Most Indian philosophy I’ve read, both in Hinduism and Buddhism, make a distinction between the innate Self and the constructed self/The Ego (not related to the Freudian concept). As convention, a lot of people use the capital/lower case S/s to distinguish between the two. The Self is a singularity, an infinitely small point of consciousness. The self is constructed of various identity forming materials (personality, religion, race, and so on), built around and attached to the Self. Human suffering is a result of mistaking such constructions for one’s inherent being, and identifying with them instead of with the point that connects them (I think of the Self as the origin (0,0) of a Cartesian coordinate plane). I might be wrong, but I get the impression that identity is viewed by many anthropologists/culture studies/feminist folks as an amorphous nebula of swirling meaning. Indian philosophy says there is some general form to the shape, that hidden behind the walls of constructed identity lies something of greater ontological status. The picture is more akin to a solar system, with constructions orbiting a central locus that ties together experience over time.

None of that is really all that far out. But in addressing your point, the classic mystic insight is that my Self and your Self are one and the same. I art thou. We just build different constructions around it. Sure it sounds like hokey-pokey Aquarian rhetoric, but so does a lot of theoretical physics these days. In super-string theory, that very same physics is beginning to sound remarkably consilient with Buddhist cosmology. If we’re moving out of the realm of anthropology, or academia in general, than I say all the better.

I think social science’s part to play is in leading human consciousness from a naive essentialism, to the existential diversity of post-modernism, to an englightened essentialism of non-dualism. True unity only achieved through diversity.

None of this might be very practical to our immediate situation, but isn’t it pretty to think so?

But you do have a conception of “self” there, so it seems a bit contradictory to write later that, “the perception that entities can be distinct from one another, that I am Not You,” is an “illusion” at the root of “most human suffering.” I am not sure that it is, inherently so. It can be deployed that way, but so can “love” for that matter. I would say that “I am Not You”, is basic to a sense of self, that it expresses the root of individuality, which not need be ideologized, reified, and institutionalized as individualism. I think the more problematic version of this is: “I am not you, and I am better than you” and more than that, “there is only enough space for I, and not you.”

What do you think?

There’s an awful lot of talk of deploying anthropology against the “evil empire.” Of aiming it like a bazooka towards the oppressive structures that imprison us, control us, but exist outside of us. Well, if I’ve learned anything from anthropology it’s that the power structures are projected outward from us, the meaning-makers, and if I’ve learned anything from life it’s that change starts and ends within the Self. Tearing down the tangible manifestations of capitalist structure isn’t going to result in the good kind of anarchy — we’ll just rebuild it or die trying, kick over the anthill and it’ll be back the next day, because the internal directives are still intact. The kind of anarchy we want, where not only the structures of power have burned but the blueprints as well, will only be achieved through cultivating categorical non-dualism.

And that gets me to my vision of anthropology’s exalted seat. I see it as a wisdom tradition, alongside Daoism, Sufism and Kabbalah. Except more scientific! Through a strange mix of coincidence and deliberation, my own spiritual progress has been powered by the practice of anthropology. Theories of identity construction in the anthropological discourse, in this context, paint a road map for deconstructing our arbitrary identities and discovering the constant to which they attach. The fluxes and flows of Appadurai, once liberated from the purposes of academia, are synonymous with the Dependent Co-Arising of Buddhism, or the interdependency of all things. If there is work to be done it is on ourselves. These two theoretical perspectives alone cover the root causes of most human suffering, (1) the identification and attachment to constructed notions of identity, and (2) the perception that entities can be distinct from one another, that I am Not You. Anthropology provides both the theory and the method (ethnography) to remedy such illusions. After all the concern over the legitimacy, or even the possibility, of anthropological knowledge, how ironic that it may attain something greater as a producer of wisdom.

As it’s been said, we’ll have to detach from the university system. Good riddance, I say. It’ll take a meditative approach to anthropology, a gonzo ethnography approach to life, but I still think that anthropology can save the world

“Reform yourself and you will have reformed thousands around you.” – Paramahansa Yogananda

When you write, “I don’t think I’m alone when I say that I was/am an anthropology student that doesn’t know what anthropology is,” you are right, and it is not just something experienced by students. You will find that even on supposedly narrower subjects, such as “what is ethnography?”, there is still considerable disagreement among anthropologists. The discipline has always had these fragmentary, incoherent, embryonic qualities, both in its ascent and its decline. That is also an excellent point you make when you write that it is a “very big challenge for creating an ‘anthropological’ knowledge that is deinstitutionalized and accessible to an audience outside of academia,” and it is in fact one of the very big limitations that I learned from this experiment. Non-anthropologists might think that the peculiar intervention of a single anthropologist in a public debate somehow reflects the person’s credentials as an anthropologist…and we may even exploit that fact, but pinning down what is so “anthropological” about the knowledge presented can be a huge challenge, unless you are constantly referring to the micro particulars of your own ethnographic work. Even in that case, what makes the ethnographically gained knowledge “anthropological” aside from a discipline laying claims to it as its own?

The centripetal and centrifugal tendencies in this discipline make defining what one does as “anthropological” that much harder, and now I realize: it simply is not worth the effort. Develop your own perspective, raise your own questions, and seek to answer them by any and all means possible.

In the meantime what we both gained from the experience is personal insight into how knowledge is structured by the university, and how the structuring itself seems to possess no defensible logic.

Many thanks again Joel, please feel free to comment again, and I am very happy for your visits.