"Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory"

A new online journal has just started publishing. "Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory."

 According to its mission statement, the journal:

"aims to situate ethnography as the prime heuristic of anthropology, and return it to the forefront of conceptual developments in the discipline.

The journal is motivated by the need to reinstate ethnographic theorization in contemporary anthropology as a potent alternative to its 'explanation' or 'contextualization' by philosophical arguments, moves which have resulted in a loss of the discipline's distinctive theoretical nerve. By drawing out its potential to critically engage and challenge Western cosmological assumptions and conceptual determinations, HAU aims to provide an exciting new arena for evaluating ethnography as a daring enterprise for 'worlding' alien terms and forms of life, by exploiting their potential for rethinking humanity and alterity."


In looking around the journal website and its first issue, I became confused about the meaning of the term "ethnography." I always thought it meant fieldwork, the first-hand gathering of social or cultural data through participant observation. The initial article, by David Graeber, is a reworking of ethnographic data from others about Shilluk divine kingship. The second, by Marshal Sahlins, is about kingship in ancient Sparta, which doesn't seem very ethnographic. I guess if you can get a paper by someone as prominent as Sahlins, you don't worry too much about sticking to your specifications. Or maybe I am mistaken in my conception of "ethnography." I have to admit that I pay less attention to anthropology than I used to, particularly since resigning from the American Anthropological Association. And then there are some papers on kinship, a few theoretical papers, English translations of three papers by Maurice Godelier, and some reprints of classic anthropology articles by Evans-Pritchard and others.

I guess this is what they mean by ethnography (also from the mission statement):

"Topics addressed by the journal include indigenous ontologies and systems of knowledge, forms of human engagement and relationality, cosmology and myth, magic, witchcraft and sorcery, truth and falsehood, indigenous theories of kinship and relatedness with humans and non-humans, hierarchy, materiality, perception, environment and space, time and temporality, personhood and subjectivity, alternative metaphysics of morality."

Hmmm, what about economics and politics? Personally, I'm more interested in how Shilluk or Spartan kings collected taxes than in the symbolism and meaning of divine kingship. The topics covered in this new journal reside in one corner of the universe of cultural anthropology, leaving out big portions of scientific anthropology (or scientific ethnography), from medical to economic to cognitive to political anthropology. But still, this new journal looks much better than many offerings in cultural anthropology today, particularly in its focus on theory that is more empirically grounded and less philosophical (see my urban theory paper for my views on philosophical theory). Take a look at Hau.

Will transdisciplinary work destroy anthropology?

When the Department of Anthropology at Arizona State University was planning its transition into the School of Human Evolution and Social Change in 2005, a member of the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association said in an interview, "This kind of program isn't going to strengthen anthropology, its going to destroy it." A bunch of non-anthropologist faculty positions were added to the program, mostly new hires, and bunch of new anthropologists were hired (including yours truly in 2005). Now that the new school is five years old, has anthropology been destroyed?

Not according to an article in the current issue of Anthropology News ("Transdisciplinary Anthropology at Arizona State" by Alexandra Brewis, Christopher Roberts, Rhian Stotts, and Amber Wutich, Anthropology News, May 2011, page 21). This group of faculty and students conducted a network analysis of faculty collaboration within the school, gathering data on research collaboration and communication among faculty within the school.

Figure 1 reports research collaboration on formal projects, and Figure 2 shows communication (email, phone calls, etc.). It is interesting that the non-anthropologists, group 5, are in the middle of the anthropological subdisciplines. Archaeologists (group 1) collaborate most often with bioarchaeologists and non-anthropologists. I collaborate on research projects with a few archaeologists and a few of the non-anthropologists (e.g., see our transdisciplinary urban project, a funded research project within the school. This is one of a group of transdiscplinary research project in the school, called "Late Lessons from Early History"). As for communication patterns, it looks like physical anthropologists and bioarchaeologists are always yakking (while the rest of us are too busy doing research...... ha ha, only kidding!).

The results of the network study confirm my own subjective impression of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change. Anthropology is alive and well here, but many or most of us anthropologists are also engaged in transdisciplinary work and collaboration that both extends and strengthens anthropology. The fact that all of our faculty are empirical scholars with a scientific epistemology certainly helps processes of interaction and collaboration.

I can't link to the Anthropology News article because its not posted online yet. I find it very frustrating that they don't get around to posting their issues until after the paper copy has been distributed (I got my copy today). I'll try to add a link after the AAA gets around to posting the issue. On the other hand, since AN is not open access, many readers will not be able to access it. So maybe I'll download the article and post it on my website. The things one has to do to get around AAA publication policies!

Pascal Boyer asks, "Why is most cultural anthropology largely irrelevant?"

So begins a new paper by anthropologist Pascal Boyer (Washington University in St. Louis). Boyer analyzes three "modes of thought" that characterize modern anthropology:

• Science mode
• Erudition
• Salient connections

I won't give away the argument; read it yourself, posted on Boyer's website. I find Boyer's observations helpful in sorting out the epistemological and theoretical territory of anthropology and archaeology today. It would not be hard to translate Boyer's argument into archaeology, and one could ask "why is most archaeology largely irrelevant?"

This paper is the written version of a talk Boyer gave a year or two ago at a session on integrating the sciences and the humanities at the University of British Columbia. The title of the lecture was "Three Styles of Inquiry in the Study of Culture. Explaining the Current Dismal State of Cultural Anthropology." It is highly entertaining (especially if you work in the science or erudition modes). The video is posted here.


The paper is:
Boyer, Pascal     n.d.    From Studious Irrelevancy to Consilient Knowledge: Modes Of Scholarship and Cultural Anthropology. In Creating Consilience: Reconciling Science and the Humanities, edited by E. Slingerland and Mark Collard, pp. in press. Oxford University Press, New York. .

"Anthropologists Urged to Unite Behind Archaic Policies and Technology"

In Nature (Feb 10), Adam Kuper and Jonathan Marks published "Anthropologists Unite!" The tagline is: “Anthropology isn’t in the crisis that parts of the media would hav you believe, but it must do better, argue Adam Kuper and Jonathan Marks."


They talk about the AAA science flap and its fallout. Daniel Lende at Neuroanthropology has a very nice analysis of the piece. My only observation here is to point out two regressive aspects of Kuper and Marks's paper.

(1) They really have no clue about anthropological blogs and their actual and potential value to the discipline. They seem to think that bloggers mostly wait for the seeds of a controversy to appear, and then fan the fires and make a lot of noise to obscure the issues (this is what the AAA president also claimed). Many of us think that there is some real intellectual and professional work going on in the anthropological blogosphere. But when "mainstream" anthropologists take a look, they often seem dazed and confused. For another example, take a look at David Price's paper on anthropological blogs in American Anthropologist -- it is really clueless about what blogs are and what they do (Price, David H. 2010  Blogging Anthropology: Savage Minds, Zero Anthropology, and AAA Blogs. American Anthropologist 112:140-142_). Well, maybe you can access AA and maybe not. And this brings me to my second point.

(2) The Nature paper will cost readers $32.00 to purchase, unless one has an individual or institutional subscription. So not only do Kuper and Marks have some regressive ideas about anthropology, but their choice of outlet was regressive in terms of open access; they chose, instead, to publish in a closed, commercial venue.

 It might be a good thing if anthropologists were to unite intellectually (I'm not going to hold my breath, though), but it would NOT be a good thing if they were to unite in support of commercial, limited publication and in support of clueless ideas about anthropology blogs.

Anthropological bloggers write to the AAA board

A group of anthropological bloggers (including your truly) has just submitted a letter to the President and Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association. The gist of the letter is that the discussion of the AAA-science episode in blogs and other social media has been beneficial to the discipline. This interaction (here, on Neuroanthropology, Savage Minds, and elsewhere) has been more dynamic, relevant, and productive than: (1) the rather limited and wooden pronouncements from the AAA Executive Board; and (2) the articles by Nicholas Wade in the New York Times. Therefore the AAA should think about how to promote the use of social media professionally and how to take advantage of this growing network of on-line anthropologists to promote the interests of the discipline and the association.

You can read the letter here.

So just what are the intellectual and professional implications of all this blogging? Come check our our symposium at the SAA meetings on blogging in archaeology, organized by Colleen Morgan of Middle Savagery.

American Anthropologist implies that archaeology is not part of anthropology

Just got the Dec. 2010 issue of American Anthropologist. There is a special section titled "In Focus: (Not) The End of Anthropology,  Again? Some Thoughts on Disciplinary Futures" edited by John Comaraff and Karl-Heniz Kohl (wow, what a nice postmodern-sounding title). There are three articles, each by a sociocultural anthropologist, about the future of the discipline of anthropology. Oops, I mean the future of "cultural anthropology," although only one of the articles (by Andre Gingrich) has the sense to use "cultural anthropology" in its title. The article by Ulf Hannerz ignores archaeology, and the one by John Comaroff uses "archaeology" only to mean the "past" or "history" (deliberately echoing Foucault's usage, I'm sure). Gingrich does mention archaeology when he says, "Other neighboring disciplines among the “four fields”—for instance, archaeology or physical anthropology..."

These three authors, like many sociocultural anthropologists, apparently view their own subdiscipline as the "real" anthropology, with fields like archaeology or biological anthropology as dimly-related hangers-on. These fields aren't really part of anthropology, unless one is forced into 4-field discourse for some reason. These authors certainly seem to think they can write about the "discipline of anthropology," but only talk about cultural anthropology. And by implication one can infer that the (sociocultural anthropologist) Editor of American Anthropologist feels the same way (otherwise one might expect a note from the Editor, or perhaps more precise titles of the articles).

So where does this leave archaeology? The flagship journal of the main anthropological association, in a featured series of papers, implicitly dismisses archaeology as an important part of anthropology. When this is added to the insults from the AAA science fiasco, it helps push people like me further from anthropology. In the past few years I have come to view archaeology as a comparative historical social science discipline of its own, rather than as a lesser subdiscipline of anthropology. I discuss this briefly in "Archaeology is Archaeology" (Anthropology News, Jan 2010, page 35 - I'll try to post this on my website soon).

If I were a sociocultural anthropologist who wanted to drive archaeologists out of the AAA, I'd probably do things like fiddle with the wording of planning documents to alienate archaeologists, plant hegemonic articles in AA, and cut archaeology sessions from the AAA annual meeting (this initially occurred in 2002, and was the impetus for the founding of the Society for Anthropological Sciences). Hmmm, all these things have happened.

WEIRD people are not representative of all humans

The title above is actually a technical, scientific statement, describing the main finding of a new paper:

Henrich, Joseph, Stephen J. Heine, and Ara Norenzayan 2010    The Weirdest People in the World? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33:61-135.

Here is part of the abstract:

Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans.  (See the article for the complete abstract, the full text, and a series of peer comments. Some of the latter also have clever and insightful titles).


This is almost a yawner for anthropologists, but evidently its big news to psychologists and other behavioral scientists. Although Henrich is in the Psych dept at Univ British Columbia, his PhD is in Anthropology (UCLA). His work is quite interesting; if you are not familiar with it, check it out.

Does American Anthropologist respect blogging?

I just posted an entry on Ancient World Bloggers Group called "Blogs Don't Get No Respect." It makes three points:

1. A new paper on blogging in American Anthropologist, while purportedly giving respect to blogs, in fact suggests a lack of respect for blogging on the part of the journal and the article author. (Price, David H. (2010) Blogging Anthropology: Savage Minds, Zero Anthropology, and AAA Blogs. American Anthropologist 112:140-142).
2. Savage Minds is a fantastic blog, with a lot of vibrant and exciting intellectual exchange.
3. Archaeology, unfortunately, lacks anything like this.
   

Oh well.