Expected publication date: 2012, in concert with my long awaited text “Y2k the Maya Way.” You heard it here first.

In fact, this could be a useful chapter for your new book, Rewriting Culture ;-) (I am still laughing remembering the list of titles you came up with a few weeks back).

You wrote (in response to Stacie):

“We study “other people,” then turn around and declare that what they told us is a “folk model” (something inferior), and so then from where do we derive our superior interpretations and explanations?”

I also think that the process of ethnography shapes the very way that knowledge is labeled and understood. Ethnographers go talk to people, record them in interviews, and then characterize that kind of knowledge as “local knowledge,” which is often not based on historical fact, is somehow different from science, etc. But how else are people supposed to respond in a 45 minute or hour long interview? What other possibilities do ethnographers expect? Are the interviewees supposed to have supporting scientific documents on hand? These people are then represented through a series of “narratives,” which are then compared with the more formal (and sometimes western) knowledges of reports, articles, and publications (which of course benefit from extensive editing, research, and so on).

I think it’s ironic, as you say, that ethnographers basically get their information from the very people who they are then supposed to explain the situation to! This comes from the idea that ethnographers are experts who can somehow translate difficult cultural situations for various people…or something like that.

I’m suggesting a metamorphosis of the beast, bringing forth something sublime and pragmatic from among the current body parts and fluids of something mundane and next-to-useless. But, I don’t think we can do it simply by having conversations among ourselves. Somehow, we have to speak in tongues that the powers-that-be understand.

I mentioned before some great global challenges to the survival of humanity in this bottleneck era between the Holocene and the Anthropocene. I am not merely speaking of climate change. Geopolitical realities follow geo-environmental realities. For instance, here’s a hot tip for those concerned with global security: as the needs of human groups go unaddressed on an Earth becoming evermore extreme and in the face of population increase, more numbers of people stressed, one might expect a sharp rise in insurgencies. It’s a math problem.

These are the sort of challenges that can level the pipefitter as well as the philosopher, the rich as well as the poor. Thinking as a sociologist in at least some part of my day, I wonder, “How important are these challenges laid alongside the challenges of the ‘culture of sociology’ that Wallerstein talks about in the essay I referenced before? Those challenges were six in number: Freud’s take on rationality/irrationality, Eurocentrism, the Braudelian challenge of multiple visions of time, complexity studies (a la Prigogine), feminism, and the realization that modernity is a myth (pp. 229-243).

Will our own preferred languages of discourse float on the rising tide? Wallerstein’s enumerated challenges rock our world in that they are challenges to the life of the social scientific mind, specifically the sociological imagination as handed down to us from our forbears. But, there are things in motion right under our feet that have the capacity to put an axial tilt on all our worldviews. How goes detecting those tectonics?

Here’s an example. To some degree, here in the States, some top-level leaders have begun to sense that American innovation isn’t making it in terms of such salient issues as the decline side of oil, our crumbling civilly engineered infrastructure, and the United States’ ability to remain competitive in the world economy. There is a push on across all agencies and programs in our government to address the problem of innovation. This is observable over at the National Science Foundation where social scientists are being funded to study innovation. Before I went to Fort Leavenworth to hook up with the Human Terrain System program, I had been following their progress. At this past American Sociological Association meeting in August in San Francisco, we got a sneak preview of what the grantee teams were doing in one of the sessions held. I didn’t see much innovation in the methods of studying innovation. Evident was the public policy scholar’s worthy method of counting American-authored scientific papers vs. those written by authors of other nationalities. The best one that verged on being innovative concerned the grantees who examined CVs. They found that those academic scientists who were the most creative/innovative were those who got a lot of support in graduate school (i.e., assistantships) and who got on the tenure-track quickly. But, I detected a big whiff of “individual responsibility” in the grantee team’s interpretation of their results and wondered where the social structure was in that picture. For instance, might the over 70% of contingent faculty members in the American professoriate account for a major drag on American innovation? After all, Academe is the primary feeder industry to other enterprises. Contingent faculty members are typically without job security and enough salary to make ends meet and who have few or no benefits. They are usually dead last in getting resources to teach the subsequent generations of American scientists, engineers, and scholars: time, office space, in-house funds for projects, and so forth. When I brought up this structural interpretative possibility, it was as if I broke wind in the room. Absolutely no one commented except for the session chair who politely moved on.

Somehow, we need to develop institutions to shield against the gathering storm. That means training up for industries that either don’t yet exist or that are in their infancy. It certainly requires forethought outside of the box to wrap our minds around the job(s) ahead of us as a species.

None of this explains why anthropologists, within their discipline, can’t make more of an effort to cross over with other disciplines. Which is why I would also add:

(d) Obsession with making theoretical arguments within disciplinary bounds. Sure, professors include readings from politics, economics, history, etc., as well as what they call “data” or “folk models” from the “field.” Students take courses in a variety of disciplines. But, ultimately, when you’re writing a paper or thesis for anthropology, you have to argue your main point within “anthropology.” You have to stay in “discourse” with whatever grand model of human life/behavior that anthropologists are supposedly building. You have to study the theory of the “great” anthropologists and a few other revered “Western thinkers” so you can FIT your conclusions into theirs, and if the conclusions don’t fit, you have to rack your brain to come up with a grand and nuanced argument to explain why, working within their own established terminology. It’s as though Hegel’s conclusions about progress and the history of philosophy, about new ideas evolving through contradictions, reveal nothing timeless about human thought but are simply the result of how the system of knowledge production is organized. Note how the use of Hegel lends scholarly “credibility.”So, in order to come to legitimate conclusions, we have to internalize these people and what they’ve said, to spew it back out in scholarly papers. Does the same go for “folk models”? Not in the least.

What keeps disciplines within their bounds? That is interesting, because the reality today is that they often do not, and lots of “studies” programs have now become institutionalized (sometimes sneered at by academics who don’t necessarily recognize their old school disciplinary snobbishness) — area studies, indigenous studies, women’s studies, cultural studies, strategic studies. In anthropology some of “our” key theorists are themselves not anthropologists.

What tends to maintain the disciplines, in my view, and these are some very rough hypotheses of my own, is a combination of factors:

(a) Defensive, obsessive self-awareness, possibly more acute in anthropology than in other disciplines (hence, anthropology courses, in anthropology departments, whose titles contain the words “Anthropology of”, such as “Anthropology of Media,” “Anthropology of Travel,” or standard ones such as “Political Anthropology” — I mean, we get it! You’re an anthropologist, teaching an anthropology course in an anthropology department…what other kind of media course would you be teaching?). This is possibly a sign of a discipline whose practitioners sense their own increasing marginalization and lack of relevance.

(b) Established university structures. Lots of us have many ideas of how to reorganize the structures of knowledge. Now try to get the deans, other heads of departments, the board of governors, and the university president on board. Try to get accreditation. There is a lot of institutional inertia, and often very poor communication — I am not naming names here.

What would you add to, or take away from, this list?

In terms of our being pressed…well, we are: graduate “training” is designed to do just that. You cannot get a degree in (social-cultural) anthropology without doing ethnographic fieldwork. Then we tell ourselves, yes, this is the best way to understand humanity, and in that case this works as a convenient, largely baseless rationalization. We cannot even achieve a consensus about what ethnography “is” or how it is to be “done” — imagine that we then proclaim it the best “way.”

We study “other people,” then turn around and declare that what they told us is a “folk model” (something inferior), and so then from where do we derive our superior interpretations and explanations? What’s even more amazing are those other cases — and I use these for teaching purposes — where an anthropologist disputes some ideas as a folk model, and then to challenge the model he/she turns to the very same folk to dispute the folk model. In the first situation, we pretend as if we somehow stand outside of the very system in which we live when we analyze it. How does the anthropologist know that his/her model is not just another folk model? In the second situation, we have anthropologists who do not pretend that their work stands outside of that which they analyze, but who instead use that which they dispute to dispute that which they dispute. I did not just accidentally garble my writing.

I think that with opened social sciences, will come opened methodologies, that do not canonize one single approach, nor one single way of expressing the results of one’s study.

Anyway, fire away!

“Anchored within the structures of the university, anthropologists were constrained to maintain the practice of ethnographic fieldwork “within the normative premises of science” (Gulbenkian, 1996, p. 21). Some were of course attracted to ideas of a universal natural history of humanity, with assumed stages of development, but their discipline was one pressed into studying particular peoples, requiring a very specific methodology, that of fieldwork.”

Max, in your opinion, what KEEPS disciplines within their bounds?

I’m guessing a lot of anthropologists would argue that they’re not “pressed into” studying what they study, and through fieldwork, but rather that this is the BEST way to understand humanity. They’re constrained to an extent by structures, and might acknowledge that if they see the history, but there are also many immediate changes they could make in how they do their work and structure their classes but don’t necessarily do so.

Do they simply not see the history? What other important factors are at play? I could make a few hypotheses of my own but am only coming from a student perspective.

There is one thing we need to change, I think, and that is the idea that decolonization is a process to be engaged in by the colonized alone, and not the colonizer. I think the colonizer is sometimes in more desperate need of decolonization. In addition, “decolonization” seems to fail best when it is one-sided: jubilant new nationalists celebrating the formal withdrawal of a British governor, boasting of a new local pride, but then the governor is replaced by teams sent from the IMF, World Bank, DEA, FBI, and CIA.