Roseberry - The Unbearable Lightness of Anthropology

The Unbearable Lightness of Anthropology

William Roseberry

Anthropology is experiencing two crises, one loudly proclaimed and celebrated by a group of increasingly well known and well-paid crisis mongers and managers, the other recognized but unattended, the subject of worried conversations in offices, mailrooms, coffeeshops, and bars, but not a worthy subject for ”theorization.” The first is the crisis of representation that transformed anthropology, along with the other social and historical ”sciences,” from the early 1980s; the second is the more mundane and menacing crisis of employment, which has been particularly acute since the early 1990s. In neither case are we confronting unprecedented phenomena, but it is the contention of this essay that first, we need to think about these crises historically (that is, in relation to previous intellectual and material crises), second, we need to think about them structurally (that is, in relation to each other, and to other contemporary phenomena), and third, we need to ponder their likely implications for the sort of politically engaged historical anthropology envisioned in this special issue.l

A consideration of intellectual and material crises in anthropology can contribute to a discussion of the concerns of this special issue in two ways. First, by looking at a range of anthropologies and the means by which they become successful, I hope to support the editors’ contention that historians’ appropriation of anthropological ideas has been relatively narrow. Second, I am taking the history of American anthropology, as intellectual endeavor, discipline, and profession, as my central problem, and am applying to that history a political-economic per- spective that places the generation and communication of ideas within material, social, and political relations and processes. Thus I am pointing toward alternative intersections of history and anthropology, and I am using the framework of one such intersection to consider the recent history of American anthropology itself.

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By ”politically engaged” or ”radical” anthropology, I mean an intellectual commitment to the understanding, analysis, and explica- tion of the relations and structures of power in, through, and against which ordinary people live their lives. In this definition, there is no requirement that one follow a kind of class analysis, or that one take a particular position on Marxism. The routes toward an analysis of power can be various, from a political-economic analysis of the development of capitalism in a specific place, to the symbolic analysis of the exercise of power in a colonial state, to a life history of a person who experiences power from a particular position, in a particular way.2

Three Generations, Three Crises It is useful to think about the development of anthropological ideas and work since World War I1 in terms of a series of generations and the intellectual and/or political crises they perceived and proclaimed. Specifically, I suggest that we consider three such generations, at twenty-year intervals-a first, from about 1950, that attempted to transcend anthropological concentration on so-called ”primitive isolates,” and studied a range of wider connections with civilizations or “complex societies,” or with evolutionary processes; a second, from about 1970, that perceived and attempted to address a number of silences in anthropological discourse regarding power, colonialism, capitalism, class, and gender, and that raised a range of political and epistemological questions concerning prevailing modes of analysis; and a third, from about 1990, that is concerned with modes of representation and has turned its critique back upon the practice and, most importantly, ”poetics” of ethnography. The dates for each of these generations are approximate: they serve as markers for cohorts and processes of intellectual production that last a number of years, roughly a decade or more. Each of these generations defined its project in opposition to former and current anthropological practices and viewed those practices as approaching a kind of crisis. Their task was to place anthropology on a new footing.

An interesting feature of each of these periods is that politically engaged anthropology took an explicitly historical form, though the meanings of ”history” have changed over time. In the first period, a commitment to ”culture history” meant an attempt to place Native American peoples or peasant communities in, say, Puerto Rico within a history of Western expansion. In the second period, rather diffuse notions of history emerged. On the one hand, we find a contin- uation of the culture history tradition, now infused with a Marxian

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language of capitalism and class analysis. For the culture historians of the first and second generations, history was seen primarily as process. On the other, with the growing influence of Clifford Geertz and the historians’ embrace of Interpretation of Cultures (1973) during the second period, we find a move toward a more hermeneutic understanding of history as pattern.

Politically engaged anthropologists in both generations might pursue their historical and ethnographic studies through area studies programs, themselves the products of reconfigured funding programs for the social sciences after World War 11. Though the intellectual and political priorities behind the creation of such programs were hardly radical, they provided the venue, bibliographic resources, and funds for a range of important interdisciplinary projects. Thus, long before there was a self-proclaimed ”intersection” of anthropology and history, such intersections had been created by anthropologists or historians trying to understand the history and structure of power in, say, Mesoamerica.

The third period has unfolded in the midst of a proclaimed intersection of anthropology and history, but the intellectual work has gone in a rather different direction-not so much toward a consideration of historical process or pattern but toward a rereading and critique of historical and ethnographic texts themselves, a critique of their literary devices and tropes, and an examination of their embed- dedness within the very structures and relations of, say, colonial power they attempt to understand. This sort of analysis represents a potentially important advance for politically engaged anthropology and history, especially in combination with better substantive analyses of historical processes and pattern^.^

A number of objections can be raised to my delineation of generations and crises. At no single moment does my characterization of a generation begin to cover the full range of anthropological thought, movement, or practice; nor is it intended to. Indeed, the defining focus of the generations I have proposed would only capture and characterize the work of a minority of anthropologists working in an area. In marking the generations in this way, I have tried to identify innovative groups-scholars who confronted a body of anthropological concepts and practices, and advocated new approaches and problematics for anthropological work. Their writing was characterized by argument-with an anthropological past and with anthropological colleagues writing in their present. Fixing generations in this way therefore indicates a terrain of disputation and debate.

I mark these generations in terms of cohorts of graduate students,


who take from seminars and discussions a series of theoretical debates and perspectives, as well as a reading of literature on a particular area, and fashion dissertation topics designed to address perceived weaknesses, gaps, or unresolved problems in both the theoretical and real literatures. My argument privileges the dissertation, not as the sole source of intellectual innovation (this would be absurd), but as an indicator of certain intellectual conjunctures, a statement of what is perceived to be problematic or troublesome at a certain moment.

Marking generations in this way, we can consider specific processes of intellectual production in terms of theoretical and material relations. Concentrating on a graduate cohort, we can consider the texts read and debates that animated graduate seminars, the movement from seminar discussion to research proposal, the actual fieldwork- an encounter with field and archival materials, as well as local scholars and activists and their arguments and debates-the writing of dissertations and their revisions into books, and the review and reception of those books in another graduate cohort with perhaps radically distinct intellectual agendas and preoccupations. For any one cohort, then, we are considering an arc of at least ten years.

Concentration on generations of graduate students leaves open the question of the role and power of senior scholars. We might consider such scholars, first, as the authors of texts studied and criticized by a particular generation of students. But this is not, of course, the only way in which senior figures, leaders, or survivors of earlier generations and crises, figure in the production of a particular cohort of graduate students. I have thus far presented the movements as if they were wholly intellectual-the battle of ideas and the writing and reading of texts. We do not get very far in understanding past and present crises in anthropology without attending to the ideas and reading the texts, but the focus on cohorts of graduate students and the production and reproduction of generations of intellectuals reminds us that the processes are simultaneously material: Who is admitted? Who and what funded? Who and what published? Who hired, and where? Who tenured, and where?

Some senior figures reemerge here as active participants in the production of particular generations of anthropologists as teachers, members of review panels at research foundations, editors of journals, editors of book series, chairs of department, employers, patrons. One need not be crudely or mechanically materialist to recognize here a structure of power that figures in the very constitution of a generation of intellectuals, the definition and resolution of a cri-

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sis, and the selection of a tradition through which a particular generation or crisis is represented and remembered.

The relations between generations, between particular currents of thought across generations, or between contending positions and perspectives within a particular current of thought are therefore complex and power-laden in practice, even if simplified in rnem~ry .~ An intellectual history of any of the crises I have suggested, then, would need to deal with a range of questions and issues:

What was the intellectual field at a particular moment? That is, in both broad terms and in detail, what was the range of intellectual projects, perspectives, debates, and arguments that characterized the field?

How did the perception and declaration of a crisis affect the field? Against what perspectives and projects are arguments and critiques directed? What perspectives and projects remain relatively unaffected by the new debates?

How are both the intellectual field and the perception of crisis organized socially? For the former, I have in mind a mapping of the field onto a structure similar to the one alluded to above, including a hierarchy of departments, editorships of journals, memberships on research foundation review panels, and so on. For the latter, we need to know where, and through what channels and mechanisms, a crisis is declared and a debate joined-in what departments, through what new networks and organizations, and so on.

The emerging social organization of debate and argument then needs to be placed in relation to the organized intellectual field. If we are concentrating on a cohort of graduate students, who serves as their teachers, ancestors, and patrons? Where are they placed within the intellectual field and structural hierarchy? Does the challenge to the intellectual field also challenge the structural hierarchy, or does it reproduce it?

Finally, we need to examine the fate of a particular cohort of graduate students five or ten years into their careers, in relation both to the intellectual field and the structural hierarchy. Which scholars, perspectives, and projects have "made it," so to speak, and which have been filtered out? With what relation to the possibilities presented by the intellectual ferment of earlier years?

These questions need, in turn, to be placed within a broader social, economic, and political history of the academy-the expansion of higher education in the decades after World War 11, the stagnation and relative decline of enrollments and jobs in the social sciences in the 1970s and 1980s, and the "restructuring" of recent years; the


influence of political events, currents, and movements on particular generations, such as the McCarthyite purges, radicalization during the Vietnam War, and the Reagan "revolution."

Clearly, a detailed history of the sort I have suggested can not be attempted here. I do wish to indicate a few features and dimensions of such a history, however, to illuminate certain distinctive features of the present. In one sense, I am offering a sketch or outline for such a history; in another, I am pointing to some of the questions such a history would need to addre~s .~

Period 1: Culture History and Complex Society Prior to World War 11, the anthropological establishment in the United States was relatively small. A few Ph.D.-granting departments were responsible for the reproduction of the discipline, and the influence of dominant faculty in those departments was prepon- derant. In a sense, the structural hierarchy can be thought of as a kind of conical clan.6 For those unfamiliar with anthropological analyses of social and political organization, the conical clan is a particular social organization of power based on unilineal descent, in which, say, the firstborn son of the firstborn son of the firstborn son of a real or putative ancestor holds political power, and passes it on to his firstborn son. In any particular generation, other children of a power holder are considered to be part of the noble lineage, but as they have children, their descendants are more distant from the noble line. With time and kinship distance, they found commoner lines, providing a kinship basis for political hierarchy.

Transferred to academic hierarchies in a situation in which the structure of reproduction is relatively small (that is, there is a small number of Ph.D.-granting departments), the conical clan would take the following form: the noble line is located in the elite departments; the noninheriting sons and daughters are located in colleges, sociology departments, and non-Ph.D.-granting anthropology departments. Transferred specifically to the context of anthropology, the most important conical clan was that founded by Franz Boas at Columbia University, almost unique among his generation in his ability to reproduce himself. Because other early anthropologists were located in museums or departments associated with museums, Boas was able to supplement his intellectual power with the power to train students who, in turn, created other departments and trained other students. His first student, for example, was Alfred Kroeber, who went to Berkeley and founded a department of anthropology and, with Robert Lowie, another Boas student, extended his sphere of influence.

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Nonetheless, alternative centers were formed in the two decades prior to World War 11, as new departments were created, often with Rockefeller support, in close association with sociology programs. In important cases, this involved the creation of what can be seen as new or alternative conical clans. At Chicago, for example, Robert Redfield established a program in close association with the sociology department dominated by his father-in-law, Robert Park. The arrival of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown in the 1930s cemented an approach that was already more sociological than that practiced at Columbia or Berkeley and founded a new offshoot of a British conical clan. Malinowski’s brief stay at Yale had a similar effect, and Talcott Parsons’s conception of the study of ”social relations” at Harvard, encompassing both sociology and anthropology, and eventuating in an intellectual division of labor between the study of ”society” and the study of ”culture,” was to provide the basis for yet another clan.

Small size, clan structure, and differentiation provide the necessary basis for understanding postwar crisis and transformation. Two new developments after the war were inserted into this context: the first was the influx of a generation of largely, but not exclusively, male students on the G.I. Bill, and the second was the emergence of the US. as the dominant world power. The Pax Americana from the mid 1940s to the late 1960s, in turn, had further effects, such as the opening up of new areas of the world to U.S. interest and influence, and the related move of anthropological fieldwork beyond its Native American and Latin American loci to Africa, Oceania, and Southeast Asia; the remaking of the social sciences, and the inclusion of anthropology within the remade social sciences, around newly conceptualized ”area” studies, especially with the support of the Social Science Research Council; and the social and political conserv- ativism of the era, from the brief repression of the McCarthy years to the more generalized American ”celebration” (as C. Wright Mills called it) of the Cold War.

New and more people confronting a radically transformed social, political, and cultural context demanded a new anthropology not wedded to the study of small-scale communities treated as social and cultural ”isolates,” or to the ethnographic equivalent of pot- shard collection and classification. They were more interested in pattern and process, in sociological generalization and explanation, and in the structures and dynamics of power.

Though students at each of the centers can be seen to have moved toward new definitions and practices of anthropology, the group of ”culture historians’’ at Columbia University stands out, in its


rethinking of classic anthropological subjects (e.g., Native American cultural history), its move toward new subjects (e.g., peasants and “complex societies”), and its embrace of both materialism and histo- r ~ . ~ They had powerful and important teachers and patrons, such as Julian Steward and William Duncan Strong, who had good clan connections and ancestors and who had made earlier moves toward more materialist, evolutionary, and (in Strong’s case) historical approaches in their own work. Some of the students also embraced the more insistent and mechanical materialism and evolutionism of Leslie White, a relative outsider in clan terms who acted like one, rejecting Boas and the Boasians as he redrew his own intellectual genealogy to embrace the nineteenth-century evolutionists as ancestors. White was building what was to become a hegemonic department at Michigan, partly by employing some of the graduates of the Columbia generation, forming a kind of Columbia/Michigan axis in the 1960s for ecological, evolutionary, and materialist work. Another important figure, sometimes as teacher and sometimes as inspiration, was Karl Polanyi, who was directing the Columbia University project on ”economic aspects of institutional growth” in the late 1940s and 1950s, and who provided a language and conceptual repertoire through which the materialist and historical interests and political concerns of several cohorts of students, writing in a repres- sive decade, could be addressed without raising the specter of Marx.

Columbia anthropologists were not the only ones who moved toward new conceptualizations of anthropological practice in the postwar period. Partly because of the new availability of research funds for “area research,” and the as yet to be determined role of anthropology within such interdisciplinary projects, teachers and students at various centers made important moves toward comparative and interdisciplinary work on ”complex societies” and civilizations (e.g., Redfield and Marriott’s work on South Asia at Chicago, Parsons’s patronage of comparative political and sociological analysis at Harvard, Steward’s Puerto Rico project, and Wagley’s Brazil project at Columbia). I do want to suggest, however, that certain members of the Columbia generation constituted a focus of politically engaged, historical materialist work that distinguished that group from the rest. What, in brief and general terms, can we say about the reproduction of this generation, both broadly and in terms of the focal group from Columbia? First, if we take the vantage of the early 1960s rather than that of the mid 1950s, it is fair and reasonable to claim that reproduction was ”generalized.” True, individual histories and careers were varied and checkered. Sidney Mintz, for exam-


ple, went directly from graduate school at Columbia to Yale, where he was to stay for two decades, while Eric Wolf went from the same cohort to a series of research assistantships and visiting appointments before "landing," first at Virginia, then (after a brief visit to Chicago) at Michigan. Others, like Stanley Diamond, took even longer, moving from brief appointment to brief appointment, in and out of the academy, before landing in the mid-1960s at the New School, which, at that time and in anthropology, was completely off the institutional map. It is also true that the more radical language and concepts of the dissertation projects had to be submerged, mod- ified, or rejected as a condition of both publication and employment. Joan Vincent's careful analysis of the purging of Marxist language from Columbia dissertations as they were transformed into published books serves as a model for a wider study that needs to be done concerning the fate and work of other generations8

Second, the institutional map was itself changing, especially by the mid to late 1960s, with the establishment of new departments and new Ph.D. programs. This boom period in employment provided the first occasion in which a hundred flowers might bloom, mak- ing it possible to write of a "generalized" reproduction of a generation of anthropologists. This does not mean that hierarchy dissolved and that elite institutions did not continue to hire, almost exclusively, their own. But anthropologists who in earlier generations might not have found academic employment, or who might have held relatively marginal appointments in departments where they could not reproduce themselves, now found themselves working in, or crest- ing Ph.D. programs. In addition, some of these programs were in position to claim, and achieve, elite status themselves.

Third, as a consequence of the boom in programs and employment, the conical clan became more ramified and differentiated. If in earlier generations only the noble, senior line reproduced itself, as junior lines or junior descendants in each generation "died out" by not producing heirs, by the late 1960s even quite junior, or "commoner" lines were able to reproduce themselves. That is, they could train graduate students who in turn could expect to find jobs, perhaps, in some cases, in other new Ph.D.-granting departments.

Fourth, with important exceptions, the sharp intellectual focus of particular departments became more diffuse, partly as a function of increasing size, partly as a reflection of growing intellectual diversity, partly as a result of an additive, real approach to departmental curricula and hiring (at the stereotypical extreme, one Africanist, one Latin Americanist, one South Asianist, one Oceanist, etc.). Thus,


remnants of a variety of clans could be located in particular departments.

Period 2 ”Reinventing” Anthropology9 It is common to take the Vietnam War as a marker for the second period and the generation that came to college and graduate school in the late 1960s and early 1970s. To it needs to be added the civil rights movement and the broad mobilization for peace and freedom, the end of war abroad and social transformation at home. Two social phenomena serve as necessary context for the intellectual and academic movements of the period: continued expansion of departments, enrollments, and employment into the early 1970s, partly a reflection of draft laws and partly a result of the last of the baby boom generation’s coming of age; and the mobilization and radicalization of students and professors alike.

As a discipline, anthropology has never provided a congenial home for conservatives or those who serve power. Intellectually, its (often competing) relativistic and evolutionary emphases are potentially unsettling to western or ”American,” or ”British” chauvinisms. Practically, anthropology’s emphasis on fieldwork has taken its practitioners to the fringes of empire, placing them in a virtually unique position among social scientists to report substantively on empire’s effects and victims. Of course, it has also placed anthropologists in position to serve empire, as in British Africa, or among Native Americans, or the U.S.’s growing informal empire after World War 11. But the numbers of anthropologists who so served were never so great, nor was anthropology ever so central to the imperial project, as its critics (and this period produced a significant number of critics) proclaimed.

It should not be surprising, then, that anthropologists at a variety of campuses took active-and at times leading-roles in the political mobilization. At Michigan, for example, Eric Wolf and Marshall Sahlins were among the organizers of the teach-in movement against the war. Both were products of different cohorts of the 1950s generation at Columbia. Their activist example was to be repeated at other campuses, with other anthropologists. Student and faculty col- lectives at various departments created Anthropologists for Radical Political Action, engaging in actions on their own campuses, orga- nizing ”anti-imperialist” sessions at annual meetings of the American Anthropological Association, and publishing a regular newsletter.

Although much of this critical energy was directed ”outward,”


toward political mobilization on and beyond campuses, it was also directed ”inward” toward the discipline of anthropology itself-a critical reconsideration of a series of absences in anthropological discourse (of class, gender, colonialism, capitalism, the state, etc.), a reflection on the ethics and politics of fieldwork, and a rejection of intellectual models and paradigms (”structural functionalism,” for example) that had dominated the previous two decades.

Although some now see this as a period dominated by Marxist language and concepts, or by the resurgence of ”political economy,” we need to remember that the critiques were much broader and more diffuse. Marxism and class analysis there certainly were, but ”radical” analysis was hardly limited to such terms (consider, for example, the range of perspectives at issue in a then-emerging anthropology of gender), and ”critical” reflection on anthropological paradigms could avoid radical politics altogether. An emergent symbolic anthropology, for example, could reject the scientism and functionalism of reigning anthropological approaches, but in ways that displaced the political. Consider, for example, Clifford Geertz’s eloquent critique of positivism while he distanced himself from those who ”run on about the exploitation of the masses” (1973), or his rejection of mechanistic, top-down notions of power in favor of an interpretive understanding of the ”exemplary center” to understand politics in ... Indonesia. I do not mean to suggest that symbolic anthropology was necessarily non- or anti-political (indeed, important politically engaged work has taken the symbolic anthropology that emerged in this period as its starting point), or that one had to be Marxist or to ”run on” about class to be ”radical.” I simply want to stress the broad diversity of critiques and debates in anthropology in this period.

On the one hand, we find an extension of the “culture history” tradition from the 1950s toward a resolutely materialist and increasingly explicit Marxist analysis of capitalism, class, and state forma- tion. On the other, we find a move toward a hermeneutic or interpretive anthropology that rejected ”positivistic” and ”scientistic” anthropologies, and concentrated on processes of social and cultural construction-of cultural and political meanings and webs of signifi- cation, and of ethnographic facts and concepts. At the extremes, these two modes of analysis, each potentially critical, could speak past each other-the materialists dismissing the hermeneuticians as ”idealists,” ”mentalists,” and ”obscurantists,” ignoring their important critique of scientific rationalism; the hermeneuticians rejecting all material or sociological analysis as ”positivist,” ”empiricist,” or


"rationalist," ignoring the important political and sociological arguments embedded within much of this work. Not everyone worked at the extremes, of course, and some "marxists" were more comfort- able working toward the "materialist" end of the spectrum, while others veered toward the "interpretive" side. The main point and problem, however, is to recognize a wide range of critical or potentially critical, politically engaged anthropologies, and of a series of intellectual and political arguments among them.

This becomes important when we consider the differential reproduction of this generation. By the early 1970s, the last of the boom generation had entered college, and the growth period came to an abrupt halt. Some new Ph.D. departments were still created (at Johns Hopkins, for example), but for the most part academic growth was confined to community colleges (which had limited use or space for anthropologists), and enrollments in anthropology, along with other social sciences, shrunk. Ph.D. departments debated whether to continue admitting large numbers of students, and employment entered a long period of crisis.

Into this crisis entered many recent Ph.D.s, many of whom were the first graduates of new Ph.D. programs created at the close of the boom (Massachusetts or Connecticut or the New School, for example), and some of whom did reasonably well. Some of the new programs were among the most interesting and innovative on the scene. Small, unencumbered by the living and tenured dead, they were in a position to fashion programs that rethought anthropology, sought new connections and projects, and reconfigured intellectual genealogies. But they could not entirely escape genealogy, for many of the teachers in these new departments were themselves the younger, non-inheriting sons of the leaders of conical clans, or the products of commoner lineages that had been able to reproduce themselves during the boom period.

The graduates of the new departments were at a disadvantage as they sought academic appointment in a period of retrenchment. Although some found academic jobs (perhaps at departments like the ones from which they graduated, perhaps at state colleges and community colleges with undergraduate departments, or as part of sociology programs), many did not.

In a period of shrinking research funding and employment and growing numbers of employable graduates, one result was the rein- stitution of a kind of conical clan structure. Due to the changes of the previous forty years, one could no longer point to a single, apical ancestor. At an institutional level, several institutions could claim


elite status for themselves and their graduates. At a personal level, the intellectual upheavals of the early 1950s and late 1960s had involved much genealogical reconfiguration. So there were several lines of power, but there were many other lines, created over the previous fifteen years, that lacked institutional and personal power, and that were marked for genealogical erasure.

Although ”radicals,” graduates of both elite and non-elite institutions found jobs, published books, and received tenure, their pres- ence in the academy was never so pronounced as the neoconserva- tives feared; nor were they so well placed in elite institutions. Through myriad funding, publishing, and hiring decisions, many perspectives and some people were filtered out. By the mid 1980s, in retrospective essays written by graduates of this generation, ”political economy’’ was pronounced to be the least interesting or sophisticated intellectual innovation of the period, in comparison with, say, symbolic anthropology or structuralism.1° One of the authors of those essays has more recently gone even further, proclaiming in an interview in the New Yovk Times Sunday Magazine that nothing of any intellectual interest was happening in anthropology in the early seventies, with the exception of the work of Clifford Geertz, that the rest of the field was intellectually dead. In this period, one hundred flowers were planted; maybe forty bloomed; maybe twenty have survived.

Period 3: Rewriting Anthropologyll We can point to five trends in the most recent generation. First, there is a profoundly conservative reaction in politics and culture, marked politically by the Reagan victory in 1980, and organized attempts by Reaganites in power to ”defund the left” by actively intervening in government endowments and funding agencies-moves that were begun in the 1980s and are being pursued with renewed zeal and evident disgust by the new generation of Republican ”revolutionar- ies.” Culturally, it has been marked by a delegitimization of any sort of left or progressive discourse. As endowments, funding agencies, and universities are seen or identified as the producers of such discourse and sanctuaries for ”tenured radicals,’’ they become targets for what can best be described as a purge.

Second, we find a clearly related crisis of academic employment. To an extent, the economic crisis is invisible. In one sense, anthropologists have seldom had it so good: Though the rise of cultural studies has largely occurred outside of anthropology, it has nonetheless provided another and additional venue for some anthropologi-


cal work, and offers a growth pole for the employment of some anthropologists. Publishers are actively competing for certain kinds of anthropological texts, which in turn have unprecedented commercial potential. And an important circle of anthropologists find themselves in demand-for conferences, articles, books, and profes- sorships. But this is only one side of a broader and more troubling picture. While cultural studies disciplines and publishers have embraced certain anthropologies and anthropologists, most of what anthropologists do and write is rejected. Although the commercial- ization of academic (including university) publishing offers new and lucrative possibilities for some, it has closed off virtually any possi- bility of publishing what used to be the most basic product of our discipline: the ethnographic monograph. And the recent success of a few "stars" does not simply contrast with, but rests upon, the employment crisis faced by the majority, especially those who have graduated since 1990. The recent recession exacerbates a longer term trend and problem created by the adoption of flexible employment strategies by universities over the past two decades, resulting in growing numbers of faculty on short-term or part-time contracts.

Although the anthropological profession has always been characterized by differentiation between core or elite and "commoner" anthropologists, the most recent period can be seen as one in which the lines are more sharply drawn. In addition to a differentiation between core and peripheral departments, and distinctions between senior and junior faculty, new modes of differentiation are becoming more important. To the distinction between tenured and untenured, add one between tenure line and non-tenure line, or between multiyear and "visiting" or "guest" appointments, or between full-time and part-time. In each case, the distinction between a shrinking sta- ble and privileged core, and a growing unstable, flexibly employed periphery is more sharply drawn, and resembles the model of flexible labor market structures reproduced by David Harvey.12 Thus, the growing gap between the privileged few and the threatened many closely mirrors larger social and economic trends in class for- mation and employment.

The post-boom stagnation in enrollments and employment continued from the early 1970s until the 1980s, filtering out sigruficant seg- ments of the 1970s generation and its immediate successors, as we have seen. By the mid-eighties, a coming golden age was increasingly forecast, in which the retirement of a large generation of post-World War II scholars would produce a shortage in the professoriat, increasing employment prospects for the late eighties/early nineties genera-


tion of graduate students, and creating the basis for a bidding war for the next generation of senior scholars (the generation of the seventies, for example). Politics aside, this prospect struck fear in the tiny hearts of university presidents and vice-presidents for management and budget across the land. Luckily for them, the Bush recession of 1991, which hit especially hard in the Northeast and California, provided the opportunity not simply for cyclical retrenchment, but for an active "restructuring." With apparent glee, university presidents lined up to proclaim to the Chronicle for Higher Education that the present crisis would be different from earlier ones, that deeper and longer term cuts were required, and that the structure of higher education would be permanently changed. Subsequent cuts in budgets, and eliminations of entire programs, involved responses that went well beyond the financial exigencies of the moment. Yet even the most zealous budget cutters have been taken by surprise by Reagan's grandchildren-in- congress, anxious to defund not just the left, but higher education altogether. In uneasy combination, an economic recession, university budget cutters, and knife-wielding congressional reactionaries have produced a profound multiyear crisis in academic employment. When combined with increasing resort to flexible labor schemes in academia so that only 50 percent of the few jobs that are posted involve full-time, tenure-line appointments, we must conclude that the great majority of the present generation of graduates and graduate students will not find academic jobs.13

Third, as in the 1970s, this crisis is experienced differentially within a structured hierarchy of anthropology departments. It occurs within the context outlined in Period 2: a large number of Ph.D.-granting departments, with a clearly defined elite center and an equally clearly identified periphery, with a series of conical clans based in the elite departments. Through the 1970s and ' ~ O S , departments across the spectrum, in unequal numbers, were able to place some of their graduates and thus, in a sense, reproduce themselves. But the crisis of the '90s brings with it a profound structural consequence: a few elite departments, always more successful than the others in placing their graduates for reasons that are only tangentially related to "quality," are now in a position to virtually monopolize the placement of the present generation. It is not unheard of, for example, for a department to construct a short list composed entirely of the graduates of a single department. Structurally, a few conical clans are in position to domi- nate the field for the first time since before World War 11, as commoner lineages find themselves in danger of dying out.

Intellectually, this results in a shrinking of diversity in the field,


and this is the fourth trend we need to consider. A range of perspectives and arguments, and of large and small departments in which they can flourish, is especially important for the nourishment of a variety of politically engaged anthropologies. This diversity was an unanticipated consequence of the growth and ferment of Period 1, whch undercut the old conical clan structure; it was reproduced, if unevenly and not as broadly as one might have hoped, in Period 2. By filtering out much of the work (and a generation of scholars) coming out of the more "peripheral" departments, the present restructuring threatens to radically constrict the range of anthropological practices, thus closing the spaces in which politically engaged anthropology and history can be practiced.

These assertions may seem exceedingly strange when we consider the fifth trend of the period, which is the third intellectual crisis itself: the crisis of representation and the emergence of poststructuralist, postmodernist, and postcolonial perspectives. For many, this has been experienced as a period of increasing openness-to new, critical perspectives, to more diverse, "multicultural" authorships and texts, to a wider range of styles of work, texts, forms of representation, and so on. Much of this is true, and some of it is overstated.

There is much in the work that has emerged over the past decade that is new and represents a genuine break with the past, but it is also connected with, or rests upon, earlier work, especially that which emerged in Period 2. The critique of colonialism, for example, or of the politics and ethics of fieldwork, owes much to the unac- knowledged or partially acknowledged work and debates of the late 1960s and early 1970s. More importantly, the rejection of science, systems, social wholes, and even that now-thoroughly discredited account, the grand or master narrative, has roots in the hermeneutic movement that constituted one dimension of the work that came out of Period 2, especially as it developed out of the writing of Clifford Geertz. Many of the descendants have gone beyond and turned upon the master, but the lineal connection with various strains of symbolic and interpretive anthropology, especially as taught and practiced at certain core institutions, was of central importance in granting the crisis literature of Period 3 a kind of core or central, as opposed to marginal, status almost from the beginning.

I do not wish to enter here into a criticism of the work itself, on either intellectual or political grounds. Although I have reservations on both counts, I think much of it is good and necessary and that it belongs within an imaginable range of critical, politically engaged work.14


What I find disconcerting is its apparent success in shrinking the range of such work. This success should not be understood at the discursive level alone. The "posts" are not the first to make an exclusive claim on insight, intellectual sophistication, or political recti- tude. They owe their relative success, however, to their position within the conical clan and the consequences of the structural crisis. With regard to their clan status, one of the remarkable features of the present intellectual ferment is how thoroughly it has been spon- sored by core institutions in the field. As with earlier movements, this crisis eventuated in the creation of new journals and book projects. Where the earlier generation's Critique of Anthropology or Dialectical Anthropology were at first low budget, marginal opera- tions, however, many of the new journals associated with the "post" movement are centrally located, published by major university presses or, in the important case of Cultural Anthropology, a pioneer- ing journal in the creation of a postmodernist anthropology, by the American Anthropological Association itself. Despite the language of marginality, the present movement has been uniquely successful in gaining editorships, chairmanships, jobs, attractive book contracts, and the like.

The combination of their core status with an economic crisis means that the crisis managers and mongers may actually be in a position to put their exclusivist and exclusionary claims into effect. Not by means of conspiracy but as a structural effect of a range of individual decisions regarding funding, publishing, hiring, tenur- ing, and so on, it is possible that, as members of the present generation who do work that has fallen out of favor are not hired, whole lines of work will disappear.

What has fallen out of favor? In practice, it seems to be any work that is too ethnographic, too sociological, too structural, too political, too economic, or too processual. It certainly includes, but is not limited to, any of the work that develops the cultural history tradition of period 1, and most of the work that develops the Marxist, or more broadly materialist, tradition of period 2. Thus, in spite of its political claims, it rejects much of the politically engaged anthropology of the post-World War I1 decades, collapsing it into a vaguely defined "traditional," "conventional," "monumentalist," even "conservative" anthropology. To the extent that the present crisis managers are successful in ensuring the nonreproduction of these traditions, they will have succeeded in accomplishing what generations of university administrators and Republicans could not accomplish- purging a whole range of politically engaged anthropologies.

22IRADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

This is an extreme claim, and I hope I am wrong. But let us return to a less extreme way of posing the problem: that the conjunction of the two crises, given their respective structures, is resulting in the shrinking of the range of anthropological work in general, and of politically engaged anthropology more specifically. I regard either shrinkage as a loss, but let us concentrate here on politically engaged anthropologies. What, exactly, is in danger of being lost? Most broadly, it is the very attempt to analyze and understand the relations and structures of power in, through, and against which people live, which serves as a basis for such an anthropology. For such analysis and understanding, histories of colonialism or capitalism are never sufficient, but they remain necessary. Class analysis is never sufficient, but it remains necessary. Processual analysis, scientific and otherwise, is never sufficient, but it remains necessary. Ethnographic analysis of local fields of power is never sufficient, but it remains necessary. ”Grand narratives” (I am willing to let ”master narratives,” whatever they are, go) are never sufficient, but they remain necessary.

We still need, in short, the kind of social and cultural history and ethnography that has provided both our basic knowledge of relations and structures of power in, through, and against which ordinary people have lived, and the basis for important political debates and arguments. If this kind of work is ”airbrushed out” as a combined result of a theoretical shift in the discipline and a prolonged economic crisis, politically engaged anthropology will be impover- ished as a result. Lest there be misunderstanding, I am not calling for the mechanical reproduction of decades-old traditions, but for their active development, through internal and external argument, criticism, incorporation of new perspectives, arguments, and sources, and so on. For such development to be genuinely self-sus- taining, however, it requires an active sense of tradition, and a respect for a range of projects and perspectives, or of ways of being political. Otherwise, we end up with anthropology-lite, which might fit rather well in a restructured, defunded academy.

Notes. 1. I have written this essay while in rural Mexico, with limited access to books and

articles. I have therefore not discussed any particular works in detail but instead present an interpretive history of politically engaged anthropology that concentrates on broad intellectual and political themes and suggests, again in broad terms, a changing structure of academic production.

2. Nor, in my view, does this understanding of ”radical” anthropology require any particular position on ”scientific” versus ”interpretive” approaches, though individual anthropologists, of course, have strong positions on the matter. There have been periods in which anthropological attempts to understand relations of power have


been primarily "scientific," others in which they have been primarily "interpretive." My own attempt here is to understand the emergence of particular kinds of politically engaged anthropology in the context of specific arguments. In periods dominated by obscurantist approaches depending on the inspiration and vision of an individual author, a "scientific" examination of the relations and structures of power may be the most important step a politically engaged anthropology can take. In periods dominated by scientific positivism that serves to rationalize structures of power, a hermeneutic critique is necessary.

3. The danger is that many of the contributors to the new movement reject that combination, invoking power in the form of "capitalism," "colonialism," or "the state" without actually analyzing its forms, relations, structures, histories, or effects. History as process, as understood by both the culture history generation and the political economists of the second generation is actively rejected. The new authors are, for the most part, lineal descendants of the authors who called for hermeneutic anthropology of history as pattern during the second period, but they have set aside the substantive concerns (and the real discipline?) that could produce an Agricultural Involution or Negara. Thus a central dimension of a politically engaged anthropology-the attempt to understand and explicate the relations and structures of power in, through, and against which ordinary people live their lives-may be set aside.

4. The simplifications involve erasures-friends and comrades who did not get funded, or did not get published, or did not get hired, or got stuck at a marginal school, who got depressed, whose work does not appear in any bibliographies, or who cut his or her intellectual sails to catch the changing winds. These were, of course, their own troubles, and one can usually find particular reasons for an individual's relative lack of success: she does not write well; he is too inflexible or mechanical; her theoretical take is not quite sophisticated enough and has not incorporated the latest French twist. But to adopt C. Wright Mills' old and still useful language, those personal troubles must be fit within and understood in terms of public issues, in this case the structure of a discipline and the process of its reproduction.

The battle for ideas and the perception and resolution of crises takes on one appearance in the seminar room and in the publication of particularly important papers or books; it takes on a rather different appearance in the subsequent structure of departments or the retrospective representation of a debate. The students of Don X, Professor in a "top ten" department whose work has been convincingly criticized (or, often enough ignored) by other students in other departments, are quietly funded, do their research, publish monographs and articles, are hired by other "top ten" departments, and tenured. When they sit down to write their review essays, or a job description, or compose a departmental self-study in collaboration with other ex-students, the debates of an earlier generation are rewritten and . . . resolved.

The structure of reproduction therefore assures a kind of hierarchy of schools and departments, of lineages of scholars and traditions of work, of networks through which reputation and distinction are affirmed, of funding sources and, to a certain extent, priorities. This is not to say that there is no room for dynamism and/or change, or that structure determines all. The moments of crisis I identified have represented periods of profound intellectual ferment, connected with broader social and political movements and shifts, and have produced structural changes in the discipline-new traditions and styles of work, new departments, new scholarly lineages and networks, new journals, and so on.

I do mean to suggest, however, that even as the moments of crisis have produced structural change, the preexisting structures and networks have acted as a kind of filter. Certain intellectuals, ideas, perspectives, and projects do not make it through the filter and, therefore, do not make it into the review essays, histories, and intellectual genealogies. As they are "airbrushed out of history," so to speak, the movements and debates are simplified in retrospect.

5. In the analysis that follows, I consider the differential fate of generations of graduate students in terms of hierarchy of "elite" or central and more peripheral departments. A none-too-surprising conclusion is that the graduates of elite depart-


ments get the best and most jobs, and that graduates from more peripheral departments are comparatively disadvantaged in general, are shut out entirely-for the most part-from appointments in elite departments, and are especially disadvantaged in periods of academic retrenchment. What needs to be addressed more explicitly is the question and problem of quality. By one simplistic way of understanding the situation, there is no problem: the "best" students go to the "best" schools; the "best" graduates, the ones who wrote really "great" dissertations get the "best" jobs; and so on. For this to be true, the structural hierarchy of elite and peripheral schools would have to be perfectly mapped onto a universally agreed upon standard of quality, which in turn would have to mapped upon a distribution of students (again in terms of a universally agreed upon standard of quality). I do not wish to argue the opposite extreme, one that would claim a more or less equal distribution of "excellent" and "mediocre" students across the structural hierarchy, or that would claim no connection between quality of program and position within the hierarchy.

Clearly, some programs are better than others: they have more human, bibliographic, and financial resources; they have more integrated curricula; they teach intellectual history better or do a better job of engaging area literatures and studies. They attract more funds and students. Because of the availability of research and training funds and bibliographic facilities, some of their students (who may well start out "better" in terms of some universally agreed upon standard of quality) become "better" in the course of their graduate education, and as they research their ("excellent") dissertations. But anyone who has served on a search committee knows that the "best" programs also turn out dunces, and it is not uncommon for the dunces from the "best" programs to be hired while the "best" graduates of peripheral programs go jobless.

Moreover, one problem with universally agreed upon standards of quality, especially when applied to programs, is that they ignore the emergence of innovative programs or constellations of perspectives, particularly but not solely in periods of intellectual crisis or ferment-programs that are able to take as a collective project the recognition of a problem or movement in a new interdisciplinary direction. There is no reason why such movements and programs cannot be located in elite departments, and at times they have been. But there is also no reason why they should be so located, and they generally have not. Small, relatively peripheral departments may create programs and communities of graduate students who, despite relative lack of funding and resources, undertake projects and move in innovative directions that students in elite departments do not or cannot. Some of these students produce really "excellent" dissertations, "better" than or as "good" as the "best" dissertations from elite departments. But they have a harder time getting funded, published, and hired, and in retrospective review essays that consider their generation-essays written by graduates or professors at the "best" programs-they and their work may be "airbrushed out."

Of course, most of the anthropologists who are hired are "good," and some are "brilliant." I am not suggesting that there is no relation between the structure of the core and peripheral departments, or the emergence of central intellectual figures and the quality of work done in those departments or by those figures. I am claiming that the modes of differentiation are not perfectly mapped upon each other, and that to understand the lack of fit between the two we need to consider the operation of a range of social and political filters, only some of which are considered in this essay. The filters do not determine but neither are they insignificant.

6. Paul Kirchoff, "The Principles of Clanship in Human Society," in Readings in Anthropology, vol. 2, ed. Morton Fried. (New York: Crowell, 1959).

7. I am thinking here of such important scholars as Eric Wolf, Sidney Mintz, Stanley Diamond, Robert Manners, Eleanor Leacock, Helen Codere, just to limit our- selves to the Columbia circle. Moving beyond that circle, it is necessary to include such scholars as June Nash. Moving beyond the "culture historians," strictly speak- ing, at Columbia, we find the important early work of people like Elman Service, Marshall Sahlins, Marvin Harris, who were moving in a more evolutionary direction


theoretically, but who also produced important, politically engaged historical work. 8. Joan Vincent, Anthropology and Politics: Visions, Traditions, and Trends (Tucson:

University of Arizona Press, 1990), 23341. 9. The reference here is to Dell Hyme's edited collection, Reinventing Anthropology

(New York: Pantheon Press, 1972), which can be taken as one of the central texts of this period of ferment. Others include Tala1 Asad's Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca Press, 1973); the "Social Responsibilities Symposium" in Current Anthropology (1968/69), and a series of debates on ethics and politics in such surprising journals as Human Organization. A still-necessary text for this period is Joseph Jorgensen and Eric Wolf, "Anthropologists on the Warpath," in the New York Review of Books (1971). One can also get a good idea of the range of approaches within a reinventing anthropology by surveying edited collections devoted to questions that were being imagined and reimagined, most importantly in gender. See Rayna Rapp's Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), and Louise Lamphere and Michelle Rosaldo's, Woman, Culture, and Society (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974).

10. Sherry Ortner, "Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties," in Comparative Studies in Society and History (1984); George Marcus and Michael Fischer, Anthropology as Cultuval Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

11. I make reference here to the new emphasis on writing that marks much of postmodern anthropology, most famously in James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writ ing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), which along with the journal Culfural Anthropology is still the best place to capture the mood of the present in American anthropology. See as well Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).

12. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1989), 151, fig. 2.10.

13. It is helpful to see these trends in quantitative terms as well. According to sta- tistics provided by the American Anthropological Association, twenty anthropology Ph.D.s were awarded in the United States in 1950; the annual production of anthropology Ph.D.s since the early 1970s has been about four hundred. Although some sev- enty-four percent of graduates took academic jobs in anthropology departments in the early 1970s, by the 1990s this figure had dropped to around 40 percent. Of those that have taken academic jobs, some two-thirds are not in tenure-line positions, see Anthropology Newsletter (September 1995).

14. See Nicole Polier and William Roseberry, "Tristes Tropes: Postmodern Anthropologists Encounter the Other and Discover Themselves," Economy and Society, 18 (1989): 245-64; William Roseberry, "Multiculturalism and the Challenge of Anthropology," Social Research, 59(1992): 841-58.

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Roseberry - The Unbearable Lightness of Anthropology