Anthropological Lives

An Introduction to the Profession of Anthropology

Virginia R Dominguez, Brigittine M. French

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780813597409
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Anthropological Lives introduces readers to what it is like to be a professional anthropologist. It focuses on the work anthropologists do, the passions they have, the way that being an anthropologist affects the kind of life they lead. The book draws heavily on the experiences of twenty anthropologists interviewed by Virginia R. Dominguez and Brigittine M. French, as well as on the experiences of the two coauthors. Many different kinds of anthropologists are represented, and the book makes a point of discussing their commonalities as well as their differences. Some of the anthropologists included work in the academy, some work outside the academy, and some work in institutions like museums. Included are cultural anthropologists, linguistic anthropologists, medical anthropologists, biological anthropologists, practicing anthropologists, and anthropological archaeologists. A fascinating look behind the curtain, the stories in Anthropological Lives will inform anyone who has ever wondered what you do with a degree in anthropology.Anthropologists profiled: Leslie Aiello, Lee Baker, João Biehl, Tom Boellstorff, Jacqueline Comito, Shannon Dawdy, Virginia R. Dominguez, T.J. Ferguson, Brigittine French, Agustín Fuentes, Amy Goldenberg, Mary Gray, Sarah Green, Monica Heller, Douglas Hertzler, Ed Liebow, Mariano Perelman, Jeremy Sabloff, Carolyn Sargent, Marilyn Strathern, Nandini Sundar, Alaka Wali.

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Introduction

The Profession of Anthropology and What It Means to Be an Anthropologist

We are anthropologists. We care about making sure that people understand what we do and why. We understand that people come to anthropology in different ways, that some are students who are intrigued by a course we offer or a museum exhibit we conceive or even a field school we run in some distant place, and that others might be parents or relatives of someone who has chosen to major in anthropology or even to enter a graduate program in anthropology. We understand that some readers are potential employers faced with an interesting applicant who has majored in anthropology but is not applying for a position as an anthropologist. We understand that there are many professionals who wonder whether they should encourage or discourage young people from studying anthropology as they are trying to decide what to do “when they grow up.” We understand that there are policy makers in government—at the municipal, state, or federal level—who think about and comment on the utility of anthropology (and other liberal arts degrees) for people seeking higher education. At the same time, quite often students and their families worry about their getting jobs after college, and they frequently think that the best majors are in professions they think they already understand—business, engineering, mass communications, computer science. Something like anthropology may sound fascinating but impractical, especially to people who imagine the discipline to be a small profession tied exclusively to college teaching or the excavation of ancient artifacts.

We aim to demystify the discipline, to talk about what we do as anthropologists, why we do it, and what longtime members of the profession do and why they do it, in order to render the work of anthropologists more visible and understandable. Underlying these objectives is a deeply felt commitment to the utility, importance, and satisfaction of a professional anthropological life. One of the big surprises to many people—both students and others with an interest in the profession—is that in the twenty-first century over half of professional anthropologists work outside the academy. They do so in private businesses, nongovernmental organizations, and governmental agencies (Bennett et al. 2006). In these jobs, they indeed make arguments based on research, analyze situations, collect and categorize information, advocate, recommend, present materials and analyses, challenge common views, witness, testify, instruct (though often not in a classroom), consult, test, provoke, and inspire.

At the same time, those of us who have academic jobs at community colleges, four-year colleges, and research universities have a host of responsibilities and commitments in addition to our dedicated time in the classroom with students. These entail things often just briefly described as “administration” or “service”; we find those terms elusive. Indeed, they say little about this multilayered aspect of our work itself or why we do it, and it is especially ironic because that kind of work is nearly always considered an important, expected, and necessary part of our jobs at colleges and universities around the world.

What Do Anthropologists Actually Do?

This question is perhaps the most common question people outside the field ask anthropologists. Prospective majors, parents, beginning graduate students, and colleagues in other disciplines often ask us for an “inside” perspective on the professional life of anthropologists. It makes sense. People often encounter anthropology through higher education—in colleges or universities and through folks who attend them—and frequently associate anthropology with college teaching and academic research. But that only captures part of what we do, and here we seek to make the range of what anthropologists do clearer and to invite others into the practices of the profession. As the voices in this book will well illustrate, there is actually great variability in what anthropologists do in their professional lives and work.

Of course, there are some common threads in the lived practice of anthropological careers, and those are just as important to us here as showing the variety and the twists and turns of the lives of anthropologists. Consequently, we deliberately structured this book as a kind of dance in which we go back and forth between showing our commonalities as professional anthropologists and showing the great variety of what we do on a day-to-day basis in order to illustrate the range and complexity in professional anthropological lives. In different institutional locations, areas of specialization, or subfields, there is impressive diversity in our professional perspectives and actions as anthropologists. We hope that some of this range will surprise readers and will show the broad reach of anthropology in the professional world well beyond stereotypical notions of the field.

We have already mentioned perhaps the biggest surprise to most people, including entering graduate students in anthropology—namely, that more professional anthropologists work outside the realm of higher education than inside it. Like psychologists, economists, lawyers, and journalists, anthropologists work in (and for) private businesses, nongovernmental organizations, and governmental agencies (Bennett et al. 2006). They are hired for the analytic and methodological skills they acquired as anthropologists, sometimes without even realizing they were acquiring those skills until they were called on to articulate them to folks who are not anthropologists. Anthropologists can and do research almost anything that pertains to the human condition. As we have already said, they make arguments based on empirical research. They observe, listen, ask, describe, recount, question, survey, organize, and interpret. They also advocate, recommend, challenge, witness, testify, instruct, consult, test, provoke, and inspire. We mention these things again because each of these actions is central to an anthropological career and each is a skill that trained anthropologists have and often use creatively, as we will hear in the narratives of our colleagues.

At the same time, and at the risk of repeating ourselves, those of us who have academic jobs at community colleges, four-year colleges, and research universities have many responsibilities and work beyond our dedicated time in the classroom and outside it with students. We might just refer to these in passing as “administration” or “service” duties, but that kind of work is nearly always considered an important and necessary part of our jobs at colleges and universities around the world and takes up a good deal of our time.

What, then, is that work? Let us break it down a bit here to foreground some points that will appear in more detail in the chapters to follow. It entails human resource management, meaning hiring, evaluating, mentoring, promoting, and firing people. It also means faculty governance outside our own units, programs, and departments, which has an impact on large sections of our colleges and universities; evaluation of peers’ research and pedagogy, including those outside our own institutions across state, national, and international borders; and assessment of academic programs, both at our own institutions and at other institutions across state, national, and international borders. It also involves leadership of professional organizations at regional, national, and international levels. Sometimes much of the work is done via committees and task forces made up of other anthropologists or other professionals from a variety of disciplines in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Sometimes the work is more individual, demanding a great deal of reading and assessment—of scholarly books and articles, unpublished manuscripts, and grant applications—for which there is no financial remuneration and little recognition. Sometimes the work is deliberately invisible to others, requiring the confidential assessment of other people’s work and others’ confidential assessments of our own work, points that we will examine in great detail in the pages to come. Sometimes the work is highly visible to others—such as leading national searches for deanships and presidencies or serving on the committees on which entire learning communities depend.

It is obvious that anthropologists do many things, much like people in certain other professions (like business and law) that are typically more visible to the general public. But this is true not just at the level of the profession as a whole but also on an individual basis in our anthropological lives. What may seem from the outside to be clear lines between responsibilities are actually blurred and traversed in the practice of our profession. For example, even the majority of anthropologists who work in business, nongovernmental, or governmental sectors report that “teaching is a primary work activity” (Brondo et al. 2009, 6). Thus, while many anthropological practitioners are not academically employed full time, they still contribute to the teaching and training of others, and they bring with them anthropological perspectives (Brondo et al. 2009). At the same time, those of us who hold teaching and research positions in academic institutions often find ourselves serving as anthropological experts for court cases in the United States (Haviland 2003; French 2015) and internationally (Briggs 2007; Blommaert 2009), testifying before Congress (Bourgois 2001), speaking on National Public Radio (Marks 2009), undertaking community assessments, and participating in commissioned scientific research panels, among myriad other roles as advocates and analysts in public life (Dominguez 2012).

This book, then, is an empirically situated firsthand examination of the profession of anthropology as understood through the heterogeneous perspectives offered by some leading and active practitioners. To explore the range of work anthropologists do and render it visible, we draw heavily on the sixteen written and oral interviews that Virginia R. Dominguez did while she was president of the American Anthropological Association (AAA; 2009–2011). The interviews were conducted over the phone or via Skype and were recorded at AAA headquarters, then archived and posted as an AAA series on iTunes. The whole series was called Inside the President’s Studio. To our knowledge, faculty and students in many parts of the world listened to these oral interviews attentively and enjoyed them. To bring additional perspectives to these narratives and illustrate additional breadth in the field, we interviewed four anthropologists who had nonacademic jobs or were based outside the United States. The interviews reflect anthropological lives lived in different ways by people in many areas of anthropology, both academic and nonacademic, and these include anthropologists who see themselves as sociocultural anthropologists, linguistic anthropologists, biological anthropologists, primatologists, medical anthropologists, archaeologists, applied or practicing anthropologists, and museum anthropologists. Included in this book are perspectives generously offered by past president of AAA Monica Heller; recent past president of the Society for Medical Anthropology Carolyn Sargent; leading psychological and medical anthropologist João Biehl; archaeologist and practicing anthropologist T. J. Ferguson; noted legal and social anthropologist and journal editor Nandini Sundar; distinguished archaeologist and recent president of the Santa Fe Institute Jeremy Arac Sabloff; longtime distinguished Field Museum curator and leader Alaka Wali; well-known primatologist and past president of the Biological Anthropology Section of the AAA Agustín Fuentes; much-respected historical and social anthropologist Lee D. Baker, who is also currently dean of Trinity College at Duke University; distinguished biological anthropologist and immediate past president of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Leslie C. Aiello; widely cited and respected British social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern; folklorist and longtime (now past) editor of Anthropology News Amy Goldenberg; longtime applied medical anthropologist, past president of the National Society of Practicing Anthropologists, and current executive director of the AAA Edward Liebow; field-straddling historical anthropologist and archaeologist Shannon Lee Dawdy; cultural anthropologist and linguist Tom Boellstorff, who is also a recent past editor in chief of the American Anthropologist; British Europeanist social anthropologist Sarah Francesca Green, who is now in Helsinki, Finland, after a long and distinguished career at the University of Manchester; Jacqueline Comito, linguistic anthropologist by training and director of Iowa Learning Farms and Water Rocks programs through the Department of Agriculture at Iowa State University; Douglas Hertzler, senior policy analyst at Action Aid; Mariano Perelman, economic anthropologist at the University of Buenos Aires and the national research institute in Argentina; and Mary L. Gray, on the faculty at Indiana University and also senior researcher at Microsoft Research. We include brief biographies and lists of their most significant contributions to the field in the About the Anthropologists section of this book.

The more we thought about these interviews in conversation with our students’ perennial questions and commonplace public understandings of anthropology, the more we realized that, taken as a whole, the interviews say a great deal about the range of work anthropologists do and the passions they have that are not often articulated outside the community of disciplinary practitioners to which we belong. While in the series Inside the President’s Studio Virginia sought to introduce the world to a number of people who were part of the profession and show them as people who chose anthropology as a profession, here we want to stress what they do, why they do it, and the range of activities entailed in leading lives as anthropologists for readers who are new to considering what is entailed in the professional life and work of an anthropologist. When we quote our distinguished colleagues in this book, it is with great respect and deep interest; we also use our colleagues’ voices to craft a broader analytic frame that shows how the profession looks from various positions on “the inside.” In other words, we seek to render “insider knowledge” of the profession intelligible to interested outsiders and novices with the hope of encouraging further exploration, consideration, and conversation in and about our field.

We invite readers to notice the multiplicity of domains in which anthropologists work, the ways in which those change over time, and the differential skills those domains and changes necessitate. Regardless of the sector—private businesses, nongovernmental organizations, the professoriate, university administration, or museum curating—these professional experiences weave in and out of each other as one practices anthropology over the course of a career. These shifting orientations, foci, and commitments underscore that a professional life in anthropology has no unitary direction. Rather, the professional trajectories of anthropologists are multiple, converge, and often lead in new and unexpected directions. This emergent quality of anthropological work is one that allows for, and perhaps even necessitates, intellectual, methodological, and professional innovation.

Moreover, we aim to show readers that most anthropologists undertake and highlight the importance of writing as a professional endeavor, however varied the product might be. The works they produce range from the expected books and articles in peer-reviewed venues to popular books, policy briefs, legal documents, curatorial texts, and blogs. While the professional emphasis on writing remains prevalent in the careers represented here, the objectives, pleasures, and consequences of writing are always challenging and never uniform for anthropologists.

Here, then, we highlight both variety and commonality. Interviewees speak about establishing, running, and managing private and public institutions, as well as editing scholarly journals, doing research, writing, and teaching in a variety of venues, including but not limited to universities and colleges. We group a few here in order to highlight certain aspects of that work, but we urge readers to look for how these anthropologists integrate their work into their understandings of the discipline, how they describe that mix, and how what they do changes over time.

Books like this are far less common than we hope or need. Despite a growing self-conscious concern with explicating anthropological careers (Brondo and Bennett 2012), ...