[LINK] Michael Agar at Savage Minds on explaining what anthropology is

[rfmcdonald]

Michael Agar's guest post at Savage Minds is worth reading.

A couple of months ago I was having dinner with an old friend in Seattle. He stopped his fork in mid-flight and looked at me, astonished. “Microsoft hires anthropologists?” “Yes,” I answered, “They fire them too.” He’d just complained about the over-techification of his hometown, worried that the rumors of AliBaba adding to the existing digital mob were true. I had just said that “even anthropologists” were part of the new tech world. He still thought of us as collectors of quaint and curious customs of exotic people. Interesting and entertaining perhaps, but hardly relevant to the brave new digital world.

It made me wonder, again, how to explain what anthropology “is.” Why did my old friend still see it only in terms of the “savage slot,” Trouillot’s phrase that describes anthropology’s traditional academic assignment.

I do know that anthropology “is” something. It exists. It’s certainly the most self-conscious discipline that I know of, sometimes embarrassingly so at gatherings of diverse professions. It definitely tends to be more tied to the personal identity of its bearer than most professional labels that people use when you ask “what do you do?” Whatever it is, it has strong personal and social force. What is that force?

It’s been a half-century since I took the introductory cultural course at Stanford from Bernie Siegel. I signed up because a retired stockbroker and his wife, living in a restored house among the ruins of their abandoned former hometown in the California hills, asked me a lot of questions and then told me I should take it. I was there working for the State Department of Agriculture, looking for a moth whose eggs ate the leaves of grape vines. Cue Rod Serling for an episode of the old TV show Twilight Zone

A year later, I heard that Alan Beals was about to pack up his family and return for a second year of fieldwork in Gopalpur, a village in Mysore State, now Karnataka. He let me, a junior anthropology major, tag along because I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Much later I asked why he let me go and he said, “I don’t know. You kept showing up.” Just like Woody Allen wrote, that’s what 80% of life is, just showing up. The offer was, I’d work half the time as a research assistant and during the other half he would teach me what this mysterious “fieldwork” was all about.