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Lightness of Anthropology
William Roseberry
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 orga-
nized 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 hier-
archy 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.
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 com-
mercial 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 charac-
terized 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 multi-
year 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 flexi-
ble 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 contin-
ued 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, increas-
ing employment prospects for the late eighties/early nineties genera-
THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF ANTHROPOLOGY /19
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 differentiallywithin
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 grad-
uates 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 common-
er lineages find themselves in danger of dying out.
Intellectually, this results in a shrinking of diversity in the field,
20/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW
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 pre-
sent 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 individ-
ual anthropologists, of course, have strong positions on the matter. There have been
periods in which anthropological attempts to understand relations of power have
THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF ANTHROPOLOGY /23
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 dominat-
ed by scientific positivism that serves to rationalize structures of power, a hermeneu-
tic 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 individ-
ual's relative lack of success: she does not write well; he is too inflexible or mechani-
cal; 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" depart-
ments, 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-stu-
dents, 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 repre-
sented periods of profound intellectual ferment, connected with broader social and
political movements and shifts, and have produced structural changes in the disci-
pline-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 fil-
ter. 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-
24/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW
ments get the best and most jobs, and that graduates from more peripheral depart-
ments 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 situa-
tion, there is no problem: the "best" students go to the "best" schools; the "best" grad-
uates, 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 uni-
versally 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 connec-
tion between quality of program and position within the hierarchy.
Clearly, some programs are better than others: they have more human, biblio-
graphic, 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 ("excel-
lent") 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, espe-
cially when applied to programs, is that they ignore the emergence of innovative pro-
grams or constellations of perspectives, particularly but not solely in periods of intel-
lectual 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 depart-
ments, 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 stu-
dents 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 "air-
brushed 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
THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF ANTHROPOLOGY /25
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,
Writing 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 anthro-
pology 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.