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Anthropology News • April 2007
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me with poignancy is the difference in relation-ship-building “in the field” between commercial and academic research. What does it really take to become trusted, even while intruding, so that we know better what the real story is?
In commercial ethnography, entrée is measured in minutes and phone calls not in months and years. Commercial ethnography uses these short-order relationships to access patterns and routines, quirks and rituals of individuals who exemplify an aspect of culture valued by a client. With every new project comes an opportunity to observe then analyze. We are “handed” that relationship. We don’t build it as one does in extended fieldwork, of which my recent trip to Antigua reminded me—after 20 years, I was still part of the commu-nity, and old friends hungrily shared news.
In client work we deliver the analysis but the anthropologist’s mind keeps spinning to find a different angle—and there’s the privilege! In a sense it’s like closing that loop in the ethnographic process. For the client we question, then observe, though rarely are we part of a community. For our anthropologist’s mind, we observe then question. We accumulate dozens of mental files with stories and encounters, in some ways like a fiction writer.
In my mental files I have a 40-year-old extreme fitness buff who pushes himself harder every year to do another iron man race, triathlon or marathon, his freezer stocked with steaks, and a mannequin head propped in his window to scare away intruders from his suburban Atlanta home. And there’s the 18-year-old homeless man who builds a community out of friends and relatives across the city of Chicago, taking a shower here, a hot meal there, staying con-nected by driving all day like a cop on a beat, sneaking in to his girlfriend’s dorm at night. And the Indiana farmer’s wife who learned to quit naming animals after one of them turned up on her dinner table; from then on they were called t-bone, pork chop, drumstick.
If those stories are left out of client reports they are not lost to anthropology as long as we keep retelling them from our own shifting vantage points until the connections emerge. It is the stories that keep us from slipping into the “ethnographic present.”
Any news, issues, or photos of interest to NAPA mem-bers can be sent to Inga E Treitler ([email protected]). If you would like to propose yourself or someone else for a Practitioner Brief, please contact me.
National Association of Student Anthropologists
MELINDA BERNARDO, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
On the Socialization of Graduate Students in Anthropology
By Eli Thorkelson (U Chicago)
“Does contemporary anthropology have any real value?” That’s what I was asked yesterday, in an
earnest email from a friend, an undergrad. It’s a good question, simultaneously intellectual, per-sonal and ethical: one part existential dilemma, one part research project. It asks: is anthropol-ogy legitimate, justifi able or more simply, just?
In graduate school, on the borders of the discipline, these questions are acute. Although we will never escape ethical questions, ethics begins at home, in our own academic institu-tions. We can’t separate ethics from practice in our professional lives, where we’re surrounded by academic norms, and the smallest gesture, like the shake of a professor’s head, can be an eloquent judgment. Nonetheless, the academic world often falls short of our ideals. And in try-ing to understand this world, ethics and value judgments are our tools of critique.
Having said this much, I want to make a simple argument. Graduate education is imper-fect—and some of its problems are structural, institutional and tenacious. But being anthro-pologists, we know how to analyze and under-stand social situations, including our own. And without such an analysis, informed change will not be possible. So we need to make our profes-sional expertise practically useful, putting it at the service of rethinking our own institutions.
What are these problems, you might ask? For one thing, our theory and practice are inconsis-tent. We critique hierarchy while reproducing a rigid system of academic ranks; we denaturalize market ideology while putting ourselves on the job market; and we decry the theoretical inadequacy of Western individualism even as we artfully distinguish ourselves from others in our writing. For another, within graduate school there are still real inequities of wealth, opportu-nity and prestige, often coupled to gender, class, race/ethnicity, educational background and all the other typical markers of social distinction. My department’s chair, John Kelly, observes that we suffer from unresolvable tensions between equality and merit. Finally, our emotional lives are tangled up in our work: anxiety, fatigue, dis-enchantment, worry, guilt, haste and occasion-ally even despair are part of daily life for many.
These are not accidents. The socialization of graduate students into the discipline is a struc-tured process, and our personal experiences reflect that structure. Anxiety, for instance, is not just an individual, psychological problem; it is a symptom of the social world we inhabit. Yet our personal experience is inevitably partial and parochial, and debates about institutional reform are limited by a lack of collective, comparative knowledge about graduate socialization. Without knowing what varies across institutions, it is dif-ficult to know what can and cannot be changed. Of course, we all reflect on the discipline, but most of our reflections happen in bars and coffee-shops, or behind closed doors with friends. And at least since the 1980s, most “reflexive” critiques have focused on theory or fieldwork, neglecting to examine academic institutions in much detail. A new public debate is needed.
Towards that end, graduate students from across the country, including me, are working on a collaborative set of analyses. We plan to
publish an essay collection and to present some of our work at this year’s AAA meeting. The more intriguing topics include the linguistic politics of collaborative research in Arizona, rela-tions with faculty mentors in Indiana, and the causes of curriculum change in California, not to mention the biography of a funding proposal, tracking the biographies of funding proposals, teaching theory, writing ethnography as fic-tion, and examining anthropology as a form of meditation. We’re still actively looking for par-ticipants, so please get in touch if you’re curious, or even if you’re just interested in reading our results. You can reach me at [email protected].
Finally, I should emphasize that our critiques are hopeful: I answered yes to my friend’s ques-tion, saying to myself that if anthropology had no value, there would be no point in criticizing it. Graduate education is full of contradictions, but through informed debate they may eventu-ally be addressed.
Something to say? Please send your comments, questions, suggestions and contributions to Melinda Bernardo ([email protected]).
Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges
LLOYD MILLER, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
Teaching About Evolution and ReligionAt this writing, SACC-L listserv viewers are again engaged in a lively discussion about problems with teaching evolution to students whose re-ligious backgrounds condition them to fear or reject it. The column excerpts and references this ongoing discussion.
The discussion began with the suggestion to have a workshop at our spring conference in Monterey, CA, on how people deal with fundamentalism, reli-gion and evolution in the classroom. Frank Lagana (Queensborough CC, NY) expressed frustration at hearing a student (for the umpteenth time) insist, “(very belligerently) that fossils are fakes. As she put it, ‘I’m a Christian so I have to believe they’re fakes.’” He listened politely for a few moments and then, “trying my best to remain reasonably calm in my answers to her, I finally abruptly ended the discussion with the suggestion that it was obvious that nothing I could possibly say would ever have any effect on her.” He asked if there isn’t a better way to deal with this.
Katrina Worley (CA) said, “My way of handling situations like this is to ... remind the students that they signed up for the class after having read the course description. They did so knowing that the course dealt with human evolution. I then inform [them] that I don’t care what they believe. ... In order to pass my course, however, they do have to understand what ‘science’ has to say about evolution. ... In the same way ... I don’t want to know what their minister, pastor or priest says about evolution. ... I’m telling them up front that I don’t care if they retain their beliefs, while
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letting them know in advance that they may not use those beliefs to disrupt my classroom.” Several others spoke to the same point.
Mark Lewine offered, “I think that we have a unique opportunity to engage clergy as well as students in ‘science education’ with the RACE Project moving around the country for the next several years. For example, most of my students with ‘creationist’ issues mystifying their ability to think in my courses are African-American and Latino with trust in ignorant clergy. When the RACE Project comes to Cleveland, I am plan-ning to invite groups of these clergy to view and discuss the exhibit information on the human genome and its significance as an ‘anti-racist’ educational source. This should begin to change their perspective on science and evolution. ...”
Dorothy Davis (UNC-Greensboro) stated, “I introduce the concept of three kinds of knowl-edge: Common sense knowledge, religious knowl-edge—based on faith—and scientific knowledge. ... When we get to evolution and someone begins to challenge it for religious reasons, I just point out that they are using religious knowledge and not scientific knowledge, and then I explain why.”
Phil Stein (Pierce C, CA) claims that they have less of a problem, due mainly to having changed the title of their physical course to “Human Biological Evolution.” He does teach critically both the con-cept and the controversy of Intelligent Design, and makes every attempt to show students respect for their belief systems, while clarifying for them that the course is about science.
Brian Lynch (Quinebaug Valley CC, CT) offers an ethnographic perspective: “... as a cultural anthropologist ... my task ... is to invite people into what for many might be a foreign ‘culture’ (scientific anthropology). They are going to be invited and asked to explore, observe and learn to understand this foreign culture, not to necessarily give up their own culture, but to be able, at least, to return to that culture with a better understand-ing of this one (the discipline of anthropology).”
Some resources offered: Dianne Chidester (Greenville Tech C, SC) recommended the July-August 1999 issue of Skeptical Inquirer devoted to science and religion as useful for students. Brian Lynch mentioned the Clergy Letter Project in which 612 congregations from all 50 States and more participated in Evolution Sunday on Feb 11, 2007, to discuss with their congregations the compatibility of science and religion.
It might comfort students to know that many mainstream Christian denominations find sci-ence and religion compatible.
Send communications and contributions to Lloyd Miller ([email protected]).
Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness
LAWRENCE B MCBRIDE, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
I am pleased to announce that the SAC Executive
Board has named Bonnie Glass-Coffi n editor for Anthropology of Consciousness, (AoC) beginning in the fall of 2007. Also, I would like to thank Charles Flowerday for his great work as interim editor.
With a PhD in anthropology from UCLA, Glass-Coffin has been on the faculty at Utah State University since 1993, where she was recently promoted to full professor. Glass-Coffin has con-ducted field and archival research in Peru, Ecuador and Spain as well as in domestic settings.
Her books include The Gift of Life: Female Spirituality and Healing in Northern Peru, (1998) and Anónimo Mexicano (with Richley Crapo, 2005). During this, her sabbatical year, she is conducting field research for another book, tentatively titled “Ethnography in the Time of the Taripaypacha: Spiritual Transformation and Shamanism from the Heart of the Andes to the American Heartland.”
Visions of AoC
By Bonnie Glass-Coffin (Utah State U)
As a cultural anthropologist with interests in medical anthropology, the anthropology of re-ligion, Latin America, gender and shamanism,
ethno-history, communi-ty development and ap-plied/action anthropolo-gy, my research strengths are very much in line with the AoC mission and goals. For the last 18 years I have researched and written about shaman-ism in northern Peru, focusing on historical transformations occur-ring as a result of Spanish conquest, paradigmatic transformations that re-
sult when Peruvian shamanism is considered through a gendered lens and the changes that occur when shamanic healers are catapulted into the limelight of exotic “Otherness” as a result of the researcher’s gaze. Much of my writing has also considered the very personal transforma-tions that have occurred in my life as a result of my prolonged contact with Peruvian shamanic worlds. Most recently, I have begun to ask how these transformations in consciousness can and should be experienced and explained.
The insights gained during the course of this work led me to an interest in the editorship of AoC because, just as awareness of consciousness bridges gaps between Self and Other, Participant and Observer, Subjectivity and Objectivity, stud-ies of consciousness can provide a lens through which we begin to bridge the rifts between understandings of anthropology as “social sci-ence” or as “humanistic endeavor” that have fractured our discipline. Whether considering the role of consciousness in asset-based community development, in human evolution, in new reli-gious movements or in artistic expression, I see consciousness studies as a way to return to the holism that attracted so many of us to anthropol-ogy in the first place, even while expanding the
dialogue beyond our peers to engage with and better serve our academ-ic audiences, our communities, and maybe even our planet.
In an era that has been called nothing less than a “consciousness revolution” by 21st-century philosophers, economists, physicists and historians, one of my goals for the journal is to provide a platform for interdisciplinary discussion about this phenomenon. My vision for the journal includes inviting contributions from authors across many disciplines on top-ics including (but not limited to) 1) Post-posi-tivism and the “Consciousness Revolution”: Why Here, Why Now?; 2) Considerations of Consciousness in the 21st Century: Building New Bridges Between Science and Humanism in Anthropology; 3) The Impacts of Consciousness and Spiritual Transformation on Healing; 4) Anthropologists and Spirituality: How (or Should) We Integrate Our Beliefs into Our Work?, 5) Consciousness and its Impacts on Environmental Movements: Examples from Eco-Feminism, Deep-Ecology and Local/Globalization; 6) Consciousness, Adaptation and Human Evolution: Bridging Divides Between Materialist and Cognitive Explanations of Change; 7) Consciousness in the Marketplace: Spirituality and Its Impacts on Economic Theory; 8) Consciousness and Cultural Studies: Connecting with American Values in the 21st Century; 9) Ethnic Consciousness and Identity Politics: Radical Fundamentalism and the New World Order, 10) Consciousness and Religion: Mainstream and New Religious Movements in a Post-Global World; 10) Consciousness and Transformations in Development Anthropology: Participatory Research, Asset-Based Models and Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed; 11) The Re-Enchantment of the World: Consciousness and Physics in a Post-Newtonian Universe; 12) When Anthropologists become Practitioners: the Impact of Consciousness Studies on Anthropological Method and Theory.
Although “in the field” until later this spring, I welcome correspondence, which should be directed to me at [email protected].
Send SAC news to Lawrence B McBride, UNC Cha-pel Hill, [email protected].
Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition
JANET CHRZAN, CONTRIBUTING EDITOR
GMO: Benefit or Boondoggle? Two perspectives provide provocative ideas about GMO crops. Tina Huey argues that GMO crops could provide solutions to food-related production problems; Barrett Brenton main-tains that the problems of GMO production overwhelm the potential for equitable solu-tions. Part two of two.
AoC Editor Bonnie Glass-Coffin
