[BRIEF NOTE] On the alleged decline of anthropology

[rfmcdonald]

Savage Minds' Rex has a despairing post about the future of anthropology. In the years of the baby boom, he argues, from the 1940s to the 1970s, an abundance of new anthropologists did an abundance of studies worldwide with an abundance of resources. Now? There's a serious risk of there being not enough anthropologists to read and index everything. There's still specialized research, but it's often private, commissioned for market research, say. The commons may be no more.

I'm guilty for this, I admit. I majored in anthropology in university, but I never became an anthropologist. The skills and knowledge I've acquired have served me well. I've an appreciation of different cultures and geographies, yes, I may have some interview skills, I know social theory, and I took a valuable lesson from my first day of Anthropology 101: "There's always a difference between a society's ideal behaviour and its actual behaviour." But I'll not be available to help keep the libraries of research functioning. Alas.

If you are an anthropologist of the Pacific you can find the senior Micronesianists, say, and they can give you the oral history of their discipline, including its origins literally from nothing to the present day. They know which anthologies and articles were ground-breaking, and which edited volumes were central to the academic networks that produced them. In the coming decades, though — and I don’t want to sound too grim here — the group of scholars to whom this oral history was transmitted is not going to be a couple dozen people, its going to be a couple of people.

Even as the oral learning is attenuated, we will still have the publications: the glorious, thick, un-DRM’d publications. Publications that do not wink out of existence if you don’t pay your monthly rental free to Ingenta, publications that don’t have special software designed to keep you from copying passages into your notebook. But in an era of scholarly decline, will there be enough personnel necessary for these works to be read in any serious way? As archival and unpublished work comes online, the amount is going increase exponentially. We will have a feast of digitized fieldnotes, diaries, and dissertations, and no one (or at least not enough) people to read them.

The situation is aggravated by anthropology’s penchant for particularism. We have fine regional syntheses (in PNG, for instance, edited volumes like Papuan Borderlands and Children of Afek) but most of our synthetic and generalizing papers derive from what Sahlins called “uncontrolled comparison”: reading tons until it comes together in your head, and then writing it up. This is a time-honored tradition, but requires large amounts of exactly what we lack: scholarly work cycles. Without any sort of rigorous metanalysis — or even standards for structuring our articles, wading through the literature is a rewarding but laborious project which is not fit for our upcoming shortage of labor.