…because they are such hard drinkers, and their politically incorrect jokes, amplified by laughter that is way too loud inside a small bistro, is welcome relief from polite sobriety?

Just kidding, come on.

Maybe it’s, specifically, a manufactured fetish for American theory, and for acceptance within American anthropology circles, with all the publishing and funding opportunities that go along with that? At least that’s what this quote from above seems to suggest:

“passeurs . . . in the country itself or in target countries, propound and propagate, often in good faith, American cultural products, and all the American cultural authorities which, without being explicitly concerted, accompany, orchestrate and sometimes even organize the process of collective conversion to the new symbolic Mecca.”

I just came across, on Netflix, a film on 18th century American history like those shown in middle and high school classrooms in the U.S. Here’s one section that sounds like a walking advertisement for higher education:

“By the middle of the 18th Century, colonists endorsed the idea that education should not be kept from ordinary citizens as it had been in Europe, but should be available to all. Many of America’s revolutionary leaders could claim attendance in the higher institutions such as Yale, Harvard, and William and Mary, which were created in the early colonial period. Today, America’s universities and colleges are the cornerstone of the nation’s independent free mind and a source of innovation and a prepared workforce.” (source: 18th Century Turning Points in U.S. History)

It declares everyone’s right to formal, institutionalized education, as if you’re being slighted if you don’t get it – a lesser citizen – and then suggests that to be free, a leader, independent, and job-ready, you have to attend one of the U.S. colleges or universities. For future employers, it starts putting in place the idea that you’d do best to hire one of these people over any other. Even crazier, the videos are allowed to throw out the “facts” at kids without any supporting evidence, as if anything else would confuse their young minds. I think that’s one way American intellectualism is fetishized, one way the market is being created, at least within the U.S.

i am not sure if this argumentation works – i am just trying to argue Kacper’s point as i understand it.

Ethnography, especially overseas, requires some real financial backing though. It can’t be done by everyone, everywhere.

this combination of marketization/commoditization and theoretisation of anthropology (that go hand in hand of course) somehow led to american dominance (or rather peripheralisation of other ways of ‘doing anthropology’). how, i am not quite sure. but that is point taken by Kacper Poblocki in Whither Anthropology Without Nation-State (CoA 2009, 29/2) – a view from central and eastern europe…

Anthropologists in Arms: The Ethics of Military Anthropology (Critical Issues in Anthropology) (Hardcover) ~ George R. Lucas Jr. (Author)…

Focuses on HTS and ethics. Lucas in US Naval Academy professor of philosophy.

Perhaps will help in debate.

http://www.usna.edu/OfficerDevelopment/LEL/facultyProfile/lucas.htm

Also, while America might be at the center of academic knowledge production, other countries are engaged in other forms of production even more fundamental to the American way of life.

Consider the impressive quantity and diversity of consumer items produced in China each year. Clothing, food, oil, etc., and so much of it comes from other places….

Does it need to be balanced? Trade and exchange doesn’t seem wholly wrong. However, one side is primarily working in factories, etc., while the other is working in classrooms focusing on knowledge production. And the latter, in many cases, often don’t produce much of worth at all, or intentionally or unintentionally do work that helps sustain their own position in the world, or produce valuable knowledge (for example medicine) that’s only shared with those who can afford it, or, through scholarships and international programs with select individuals. And as you seemed to suggest, some of these programs also appear to be constructed to with the intent of furthering U.S. strategic ties with specific places.

Business and marketing efforts on the U.S. strike me as an odd mix, selling others’ products but of obviously spending a lot of time negotiating production and prices to their advantage.

Absolutely, it could solve nothing apart from fixing the numbers. Very good point that you raise here, especially since the question is what kind of “non-hegemonic anthropology” is promised in return/in response/instead of the American-dominated one? The discussion as presented by Bourdieu and Wacquant tends not to raise those questions, but instead implies (perhaps) that other nations produce other anthropologies — to use anthropology as an example, which they don’t. One question then is: do other nations really produce other anthropologies? If not, if instead we see multiple local variations on a global theme, then “American dominance” might well continue without dominant Americans.

The other problematic issue concerns the dividing up of anthropology in parcels that correspond with the identities of nation-states. To some extent, yes, anthropology is a “national” effort, given state support for universities, centralized research funding, academic publishing, etc. On the other hand, I am not sure there is a “Canadian anthropology” as much as “anthropology in Canada.”

Some of that “anthropology in Canada” is in fact American anthropology — with four-field departments at McGill and the University of Toronto, for example, a four-field approach that emerged in the U.S. — and others follow the British model, where anthropology really just means social anthropology. Perhaps the most “Canadian” feature are the many anthropology programs that coexist in dual sociology-anthropology departments, such as mine (in fact the only two universities in which I have worked in Canada had combined departments) — and the compromises that produces might spur the development of something distinctive. But not yet.

Thanks very much, the comments become a vital counterpart/counterweight to the main post, much appreciated.