This field needs a kick in the pants.
How else can I explain what's going on in American anthropology? Just at
the time the public and our institutions are crying out for more open
publications, anthropology's largest professional association closed off
its journals. Not that it matters much, nobody reads them anyway. The New York Times, on the other hand, many of my dear
colleagues (and all our administrators) do read.
There, they find articles about anthropology once every six months or
so, which lately have featured a nightmare tale of foot-shooting and
backpedaling. Not good.
President Obama's mother was an anthropologist. Never has the field had
such name recognition and exposure at the top level of government. So
naturally, our expertise is highly sought by government agencies,
scientific funding sources, lobbyists and opinion leaders, right?
Uhhh...no.
Isn't it strange? Anthropology, supposedly engaged deeply in diverse
communities around the world, is almost totally disengaged with the
American public. Long ago, anthropologists spoke out on our origins,
history, and diversity. Now, the public is much more likely to hear
about human relationships and diversity from popular books and
television programs hosted by amateurs. The most celebrated (and most
watched) television program today touching on anthropology is Ancient Aliens. Not good.
Our final refuges within ivy-covered walls are now threatened by changes
in the political climate. Years of a sliding economy have left their
mark: Young people see a university education as an expensive luxury
that will saddle them with debt. More students pursue two or more years
of training on secondary or correspondence campuses where anthropology
simply does not exist.
Universities are shutting down or shrinking anthropology departments.
Hardly anyone thinks of expanding them. That's because hardly anyone
thinks of anthropology at all.
We can fix this. We can build on our traditions to create a
new foundation for American anthropology in the twenty-first century.
But we cannot do it within academia alone.
Our universities are shedding their ivory tower exoskeletons, working to
gain the support and engagement of a broader public. Anthropology can
step forward to lead this academic revolution. To do so, we must
strengthen our historic connections to communities outside academia. We
must reinvigorate the core of anthropology, showing how our approaches
work in applied contexts. We must inspire people by helping them
discover their heritage. And while doing these things, we must step up
the quality of our academic research.
Here's how:
1. Embrace new forms
Anthropology's hashtag ends in FAIL. If you don't know what that means, you're one of the reasons.
In anthropology, the average time to the first
publication resulting from fieldwork stretches to years. Other fields
communicate their results rapidly. For anthropology, it can be like
waiting for messages from Alpha Centauri.
Our catastrophic situation has been carefully but imperfectly hidden
from administrators and junior scholars. A substantial
fraction of the funded fieldwork undertaken by tenured anthropologists
will never lead to a publication. Many mid-career anthropologists go years without publishing anything.
Senior archaeologists and biological anthropologists retire or die
sometimes with years of work left undescribed.
Critics see this as simple laziness. I see it as a symptom of the total
failure of scholarly communication in anthropology. Instead of
encouraging our colleagues to quickly disseminate their ideas and
results, we straitjacket them into nineteenth-century forms that take
years to produce results. The only communication going on is the smell
of academic machismo as we make young scholars hurdle the arbitrary
barriers to publication.
We can bring back the inventiveness of our predecessors, but to succeed we must abandon their forms.
The ethnographic monograph was a masterpiece of compromise. Look at the
problems faced by a salvage ethnographer: Many observations could never
be replicated, but the rapid development of a base of comparative data
might enable other scholars to more effectively record and systematize
observations on other cultural groups. The essential comparative body of
knowledge existed mainly in the minds of a few hundred people. In 1930,
a book could capture attention long enough to transmit the essentials,
while archiving observations for future scholars. Few today appreciate
the cleverness of this solution, rooted in 19th-century printing
technology. A monograph could justify the expense and labor involved in
typesetting and printing only by fitting the needs of libraries and a
few hundred buyers. "Peer review" emerged as a marketing tool, assuring
the academic press of a minimum standard of quality to ensure library
sales.
The archaeological site report involves skilled labor at every stage,
from drafting maps and original drawings of artifacts to the preparation
of data tables and text. In the past, it was necessary for the final
report to follow excavation by a long interval of time, because all
these parts had to come together. But today, every one of these parts is
prepared digitally, many of them as excavation is proceeding. Why do we
tolerate a publication strategy in which the total description of a
site can be held up by the slow work of a single collaborator? In
biological anthropology, key articles often appear in edited volumes as
an outcome of conferences. These typically appear in print two years or
more after the conference occurs, at an average cost of more than a
hundred dollars per volume. The quality of these contributions are
highly variable, because many of the authors fully realize that so few
people will read them.
Anthropologists already use tools that can radically improve
communication of our scholarship. Who among us still has the luxury of
preparing manuscripts in longhand for typesetting? How many of us fail
to transfer our field notebooks and observations to digital form? Most
young anthropologists work entirely digital, from data collection to
publication. They work in film and video, in photography and digital
recordings.
Imagine an alternative, in which fieldwork is reported as
it happens. Site reports can be updated daily and
followed in real time. Each interview as a part of ethnographic
fieldwork can be published, each story told on its own before it is
assimilated into the larger picture. Conference volumes can be e-books,
published before the meeting so that they enhance the value of the
face-to-face event. Meetings can be archived, linking presentations,
discussions, and text.
The technology to enable such new communication patterns is already
available to us. Today, anthropologists are far behind the pack but the
tools are in place for us to take the lead. We can invent new forms for
the 21st century, if we simply abandon our 19th-century expectations.
Universities and libraries stand ready to help us adopt new forms,
because these forms serve their needs and constraints today.
We must change not only for practical reasons but for moral reasons as
well. Anthropological research depends on the cooperation, interest and
goodwill of many communities, both today and in the past. People do not
donate their cooperation lightly. Wherever anthropologists do their
work, they are lucky to have the help of these communities of people.
Whether biological, archaeological, or cultural, our research relies on
unique resources that in many cases cannot be duplicated. We bring these
things to light, for the broader appreciation and education of the rest
of humanity.
Having our work read by twenty people is an not acceptable communication
strategy. Failure to share results broadly betrays the
cooperation of the communities who enable our research. Changes in form are necessary to improve our scholarship. These changes
don't require more work, they require different work. Greater engagement is one of many
benefits, which requires us only to recognize the value of the changes
already underway.
2. Defend good science.
Anti-science reactionaries are spreading nonsense among
the public. Why are so many anthropologists on their
side?
Yes, I know that many anthropologists today in the U.S. engage in work
that is not empirical, and that they do not consider themselves to be
scientists. Many of them are skeptical of science, others believe that
scientific and humanistic approaches within anthropology complement each
other.
This is nothing new. Alfred Kroeber criticized Frans Boas for his
unwillingness to build theories that go beyond the data. Boas called
Kroeber "Epicurean", insisting that when we go beyond the evidence, we
have nothing to guide us besides our own preferences. Since those days,
many anthropologists have chosen the Epicurean route. For the most part,
they've coexisted with empiricists under Kroeber's big umbrella.
Through most of the 20th century, this tension made anthropology
stronger. Our field became a refuge for scientific questions that could
not be asked elsewhere.
Consider the path followed by postwar behavioral and biological
sciences. Behaviorism, started by John Watson and B. F. Skinner in
psychology, gave rise to a productive research program but utterly
failed on questions of mind, language and culture. Mainstream biology
forged a synthesis with genetics but left unexamined on the table its
old understanding of race and variation. It was within anthropology that
progress continued on our understanding of cultural ecology, social
learning, and race. Anthropologists demonstrated the pattern of human
genetic variation, first using blood groups and later other characters.
They challenged the traditional concept of race from within
anthropology, and extended those challenges to biological variation
outside humanity. Anthropologists were among the first to extend the
evolutionary synthesis to behavioral ecology, studying the flexibility
of the human organism to cultural variation and the social learning of
cultural traits in non-human primates. And while many anthropologists
continued to go in for grand theoretical schemes, a lively tradition of
critique of these grand schemes led to real methodological progress in
cultural anthropology and archaeology. In a scientific establishment
tied to reductionism and biological determinism, anthropologists were
radicals.
Like any radicals, they weren't always right. Any working scientist will
be wrong about most of the details, if we revisit his work after fifty
years. What makes anthropology weak today is that so many
anthropologists learn nothing about scientific anthropology after
Boas. They're reactionaries against science, without
knowing what today's scientists do.
Consider our scientific history. With sheer empirical observation,
anthropologists unshuttered the folds of humanity, raising people who
had been derided as "primitives" up to their rightful place beside the
pampered dons of Western culture. In so doing, their science transformed
"civilized" culture itself.
We fought the revolution. We won.
Science is still transforming society, in ways that may alter people's
conceptions of identity, genealogy, social bonds, and human dignity.
Technology has given new opportunities to connect and follow social
networks, while enabling new forms of coercion and surveillance.
Genetics is opening new windows on human health and human origins, while
showing that some traditional ideas about human diversity are obsolete.
We are still lifting the once-primitive into our recognition of
humanity, while questioning the boundary between ourselves and nature.
Our work inspires people, and they are engaging with science in a
broader way than ever before. Anthropologists are forming
public-oriented projects to provide samples, answer questions, and
donate resources. The ideal of participant observation has been inverted
-- now it's not only the researcher who observes by participation, it
is the observed who participate in research.
I witness its power of this approach every day in my own research. The
engagement of ordinary people in our work is greater than ever, while
the core anthropological training provides a background lacking in other
fields. Many of my friends in human genetics have been surprised by the
power that this anthropological perspective can yield.
I don't claim that every anthropologist must be a scientist, or that we
cannot develop anthropological knowledge using non-empirical approaches.
But our field makes a fundamental mistake when it divorces itself from
science. Science reactionaries enable anti-science forces of all kinds,
from creationists and homeopaths to vaccination opponents and white
supremacists. Science reactionaries are the reason many people see
"anthropologist" as a fancy way of saying "kook".
We can be part of the future by reinvigorating anthropological science
and by developing a deeper conversation with other scientists outside
anthropology. Tomorrow's anthropologists must know the field's successes
as well as its failures. The way to combat bad science is to do better
science.
3. Empower students.
Where are your students getting a job? If you think it's
not your problem, then why do you have students?
The highest-ranking anthropology Ph.D. programs today allow roughly half
their students to finish by the end of their sixth year, and place half
their students in jobs at graduation. Those jobs include academic and
applied contexts, both temporary and permanent. Those are the best
programs for student outcomes, the average outcome is much worse. Only 20 anthropology programs in the United States finish
more than a fourth of their Ph.D. students in six years.
When those figures were published by the NRC last year, most
anthropologists met them with a shrug. What can we do? We all know that
fieldwork can drive anthropology Ph.D. programs to seven years or
longer. If you don't do your time in the field, you're not an
anthropologist.
As a result, students who could be bright anthropologists find much
brighter options in other social sciences. The best sociology programs
finish around two thirds of their students in six years and place
90-100% of them in jobs at graduation. Geography programs also place
nearly 90% in jobs at graduation. The reason is not hard to see: These social sciences have forged much stronger ties in
corporate, government, and industry settings than have
anthropologists. While we're busy talking to ourselves,
other social scientists are talking to people who matter.
As an teacher and advisor, I make sure my graduate and undergraduate
students get skills that will transfer into the broadest chance of
success. Graduate students teach, they engage with the public, and they
cross disciplines in their work. They present their work repeatedly, at
professional meetings, for our faculty, for other students, and outside
of anthropology. Most important, they develop skills that translate
outside academia. For some students, this means anatomy, for others
genetics. All of them learn to program a computer, most learn to browse
genomes and operate on genetic data. My assignments are collaborative,
students blog and participate in conversations; they produce and edit
videos; they participate in real research.
For my students, anthropology is a preparation for a
networked future. Engagement is not an option, it is a requirement.
Making our students more competitive for non-academic careers does not
mean turning our back on what we already do well. Our students learn how
to think in ways that other students don't. Fieldwork gives our students
tremendous advantages that most industry professionals can only look on
with envy.
We should reinforce those essential experiences and make them greater
opportunities for engagement. Why are anthropology students going into
the field without contracts to write weekly or monthly about their work?
Why do our professional associations do not support themselves by
becoming clearinghouses for ongoing field reports? Where are the
workshops and press kits that will enable our young researchers to build
ties to media and communities outside their institutions?
We may not be able to finish most students in six years. Fieldwork will
always be an essential part of anthropological training. But we can do
more to make the world recognize the quality that our students attain as
a result of this long training. We must give our students more
opportunities to demonstrate their mastery of engagement skills. We must
ease the path to publishing their observations, not saddle them with
additional years of waiting for a monograph after they return from the
field. We must increase the proportion of our students supported by
research grants, and provide support for a second grant while students
write the results of their first. Most important, we must create a
culture where progress reports, written engagement, and presentations to
non-academic audiences and institutions are a routine part of students'
training. That means working more closely with applied and
industry-based anthropologists and allied scientists, and bringing those
people back into academic anthropology to share their knowledge.
The way forward
Academic fields follow the irregular meniscus of human knowledge as it
flows outward. Genetics is not what it once was, nor are physics,
psychology or economics. Some once-bright ideas were shot down, others
fell off the fashion train. But each keeps certain essential traditions,
its core.
American anthropology has a Boasian core. This is a contingency of
history, which enabled many successes of the past, but is not the only
model for the study of humanity. Economists, historians, political
scientists, psychologists, biologists, human geneticists, and others all
want a piece of our turf. Even within anthropology, many colleagues see
the field on life support and pray that administrators will pull the
plug. They see academia as a zero-sum game and are whetting their teeth
for the spoils. The work will go on, the question is whether
anthropologists will do it.
I know my young friends, working hard to build their own personal brands
in a world where anthropology has lost its self-respect. I'm not the
last of the four-field dreamers. It is time for us to create a new
anthropology that steps forward from the past and once again engages
people in discovery.
Public interest in anthropological topics has never been higher. As
anthropologists, we are stewards of unique cultural and biological
resources. If cultural resources lie unused, unwitnessed, and
unappreciated, then human heritage dies. With technology, we can protect
and promote those resources, enabling people to discover their cultural
and genealogical heritage.
We can engage communities in real academic and scientific research. Some
anthropologists have already taken the lead by listening and absorbing
the contributions of their participant communities. As public funding
for universities comes increasingly under threat, our institutions face a
desperate need to demonstrate their value by bringing constituents into
our research and academic communities. Anthropology is perfectly placed
to enable such engagement, and universities are ready to support us in
those efforts. Smart departments will use their limited positions to
bring young anthropologists who advance engagement. Scholars who engage
with the public will engage with their departments and campuses,
changing the academic climate.
Engagement is the antithesis of condescension. Embracing a model of
engagement means changing our mode of communication. Write every article
for real people. Some say that means "dumbing down" our research. Don't
dumb it down. Sharpen it. Your scholarship will improve as a result.
I'm not interested in driving old friends to retirement parties. Let's
rebuild anthropology as the radical science it once was. We must not
miss this chance, because it may be the last. Consider your pants
kicked.
John Hawks is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His blog is
here.
