- [Professor] Welcome
to our virtual class.
Today we want to be thinking about
the history of anthropology which you are
examining in close detail
in Anthropology 230
and how it has been reflected in
the evolution of applied anthropology.
You're reading several articles
which allow you to think
about the convergence
of different categories of anthropology
that have evolved in the
last couple of decades
public anthropology,
practicing anthropology,
and a whole host of things that
seem to have evolved along separate
tracks and then are now converging.
You're in the middle of that convergence.
And one of the things we
want to really get across
to you is that you can
take these various labels
and use them
almost like different hats that you
put on and take off depending on
the client and kind of
project that you have.
You can be agnostic.
You don't have to be wed to any one theory
or any one
version or label
of applied anthropology.
One of the things that you'll discover
is over the course of the career
you are a generalist, and
you will use whatever tool
is most useful in your endeavors.
Franz Boas, the father
of American anthropology
trained many of the students
through Columbia and Berkeley
and then as that replicated
to many other universities
in studies of the American empire,
largely Native American
Bronislaw Malinowski
was seminal in producing
a set of anthropologists that went
throughout the British Empire looking at
cultures in Africa
South Asia
and the Antipodes
in order to understand how to better
implement and create policies that would
affect the lives of those individuals.
Their intent and motivation
for this participation
was that it was better
to have informed policy
than uninformed policy and that
at least anthropologists
with their close contact
and humanistic connection with
the cultures in which they worked
would have a more
sympathetic and empathetic
understanding and a better
understanding of consequence
than if policies were created from afar.
And so, this
hidden legacy of colonial application
was part of the ancestral
spirit of anthropology.
One which is roundly
condemned in the 21st century.
However, it has left a legacy
which was in fact transformed.
It was very clear
in the second half of the 20th century,
that anthropologists were being
trained in the United States
and in Britain and other
English-speaking academic settings
that the old philosophy
of how we approached
culture and thought about culture and
portrayed culture would be inappropriate
to a more enlightened
engagement with communities.
And, I'm going to
um
consider this in a series of
transformations of thought
that went from one situation
to another situation
so
both Malinowski and Boas tended to treat
cultures as if they were isolated
as if they were a concrete 'other.'
If you look at Boas's student Kroeber
talking about Native American cultures
within California as
almost isolated 'others'
as if the Yokuts were highly
differentiated from the Monache
and treated each one
as a concrete 'other.'
That approach, that Boasian
approach was very fundamental
and the Malinowskian
approach of looking at the
Trobrianders as if they are a
concrete and isolated 'other'
editing out every instance of connection
with a broader public.
That was very typical of
the early 20th century.
And the people that the anthropologists
interacted with tended to be dominant
and powerful forces within that culture
Male,
older,
politically and economically active,
those were the people that
were thought to embody
what a culture really constituted.
and the other people that were in the
culture that were less dominant--
children,
women,
ethnic minorities--
they tended to be edited
out of that narrative.
When the narratives were being created
both by Boas and by Malinowski
they employed an expert voice that
reflected a kind of colonial hierarchy
with white men, largely white men
coming in, observing, and then
telling the story of that culture
to the rest of the world.
And that expert voice
was almost invisible.
The anthropologist was not really present
in that narrative in a major way.
People represented themselves
un-self-consciously
with a hidden voice of authority
not really presenting themselves
as folks who lived within that society
they treated their own
voices as almost omniscient.
And in the mid-20th
century after the 1950s
and particularly after the very important
critiques that were presented in the 1960s
there was a real shift in
the way anthropologists
wanted to approach the
people with whom they worked
and their own roles within communities.
And the focus was not to treat cultures
as if they were isolated holistic 'others'
but to place those communities
in a broader context.
And in fact
later
in this class
when you look at the video
produced by Genevieve Bell,
I encourage you to understand
that the anthropology of today
is the anthropology of context.
Of actually placing communities within
this larger political and
economic and environmental context
and that understanding that context
is our secret sauce.
We also recognize that no community
no matter how small, is homogenous.
There is diversity.
Diversity in age, gender,
sexuality, ethnicity.
All communities possess that diversity.
And it's just as important
if not more important
to represent that diversity
than it is to describe
the measure of central tendency
the average within a culture.
We also want to present a voice
that not only includes the voices of
anthropologists as they collect their data
and report on that data,
but also engage a dialogue
with the voices in the community.
And represent that
dialogue in their writing
so that you actually see the voices
and hear the voices of
people within that community.
And one of the things anthropologists
have really become attuned to,
especially since the
1980s, is understanding
kind of reflexively our
role as investigators
in the relationship to the community.
Often that relationship is a dominant one.
We're coming in as wealthier outsiders,
educated outsiders, but increasingly
as we do our field work
throughout the world
we're also studying up.
We're coming in in a
role of subordination,
asking more powerful elites
to share their lives with us.
And the way in which
we approach communities
in the 21st century is quite distinct
from the ways that Boas
and Malinowski did.
As more and more people
became anthropologists
we shifted from
a kind of dominant elite
that could afford to engage in
this relatively esoteric specialty,
to people who were on the
social margins of their culture.
And you see among the students
of Boas and Malinowski
people who were of more humble origins,
people who were middle
class or even working class,
particularly as the 20th century unfolded.
And those people
fared as you would expect
people who were marginal.
Women in particular were seen
as at the edge of academia
and Zora Neale Hurston,
who is one of the shining lights
of 20th century anthropology,
was in particular marginalized.
She wasn't able to earn her p.h.D.,
she wasn't able to get
an academic position,
she ultimately died in poverty.
And one of the things that we see
over the course of the 20th century
is that such people did increasingly well.
And Louise Lamphere, the author of two
of the articles that you are reading,
is an example of someone who actually has
moved from the margins toward
the center of anthropology,
and has been recognized
for her exemplary service
to anthropology with the Franz Boas Award.
And recognized by the Society
for Applied Anthropology
with the Bronislaw Malinowski Award.
But note in this photo, that even though
she has become more central to the field,
much of her career
she was
the token woman in her department,
and she had to struggle to
be recognized to get tenure
and to become a full professor
and to establish herself in the field.
And that the 20th century
is a story of people
moving from the margins toward
the center of the discipline.
0:10:29.066,0:10:29.033
And that the discipline itself became
a broader and bigger tent that became more
inclusive of people that would
once be considered marginal.
I don't want to overstate this
because I think that there are still
particularly in the elite institutions
the elite universities,
a very strong sense that you must
come from the elite to stay in the elite.
That you must be educated at an elite
undergraduate institution,
educated in an elite graduate institution,
and come from the kinds of means
that would allow you to thrive
in those kinds of universities.
But as anthropology has
grown and particularly
as applied anthropology has grown,
more and more non-elite institutions
such as San Jose State,
have been able to create
opportunities for people
who are on the margins
to reshape anthropology into something
that would make them more central.
And we see in this transformation
that there are still legacies of
Malinowski and Boaz that endure.
We still are fundamentally connected
to participant observations and an empathy
with our hosts, the fashion
that Malinowski established
in his long stay in the Trobriand islands.
We still focus on
identifying social structures
and the flow of goods and
power as did Malinowski.
We still focus, as did Boas, on collecting
texts, utterances, often through interview
and finding culturally
appropriate co-collaborators
within communities just as he worked
with George Hunt in the
Kwakiutl, the kwakwaka'wakw
and a fascination
ala Boas
with cognitive processes.
How does culture shape the way we think?
And when we
write,
or blog,
or create videos about anthropology,
we're still trying very
hard to convey a sense of
'we were there'
to establish our credibility
as people who were
informed directly in the field.
And I want to help you see, that you are
directly connected to these ancestors
of Franz Boas and Malinowski.
They are your
great great great grand-professors.
And so, I produced this
slide to help you see
that a genealogy of your connection
to these founding fathers
through me, your professor.
I had a professor, Sydney Story
whose professor Harry
Hoijer was the student
of the great linguist Edward Sapir
who was a student of Franz Boas.
My professor, Paul Bohannan
was a direct student
of E.E. Evans-Pritchard who
was a student of Malinowski.
So you are actively
connected to these ancestors.
And as you read in Anthropology 230
the voices of various theorists,
and as you understand your place
within the anthropological endeavor,
understand that the
ancestors are always with us.
The ancestors inform the
way we approach questions,
the way we think about data,
the way we work with communities
to become co-collaborators.
And that this story of transformation
is a story that took place
within our ancestral lineage.
And the other thing that I really
want you to pay attention
to is the contested labels.
Now, Lamphere in two of her articles
that kind of dismisses some of these
ah, arguments as nonproductive,
and they probably are nonproductive.
But I want you to understand that
these labels still have meaning.
And you're going to be
a part of that struggle.
And, as I mentioned in the beginning,
I'd like you to think about
these things agnostically.
Don't identify with any particular label
but think about how that label
reflects the kind of
work that you have to do
in the context in which you are doing it.
Academic anthropologists
are anthropologists
that work at universities.
While you are a graduate
student at San Jose State
you are an academic anthropologist.
Action anthropology was a philosophical
and political effort to bring anthropology
to bear on social issues and recognize
that the colonies are done,
and that we need to move on
and think about the implications
of life in those post-colonial realities.
Public anthropology is
a call to engagement.
Engagement with media and policy
and bringing anthropology
into the public in a way
that we haven't seen since
the days of Margaret Mead.
Applied anthropology is a reality
for almost all the World Anthropologies.
Only a very few places in the world,
such as the United States, separate
academic from applied anthropology.
In most of the world, if
you are an anthropologist
you are doing work in an applied setting.
But for you, as American anthropologists
be aware that the job market in the U.S.
is increasingly associated
with applied anthropology.
Practicing anthropology
refers to a non-academic track
of working in communities
and organizations.
One of the things that I
have seen in interviewing
practicing anthropologists that as they
are hiring, they don't
want to hire someone who is
taking a practicing position
because they couldn't make it in academia,
they couldn't get that tenured track job
and so 'Ah you might as
well do some practice.'
They want people who are dedicated
to be coming those kinds of
clinicians, those practitioners
who will bring anthropology
into the world.
And you bring anthropology
into the world often
in non-profit work, in
community work through advocacy,
which is work that is focused with
or on behalf of particular communities.
And you're not going to be
any one of those things.
But you will mix those labels,
those roles,
those flavors of anthropology depending
on the kind of work that
you're doing in the future.
0:17:30.033,0:17:30.000
And what you'll need to
do as you think about
building your toolkit throughout this year
in Applications Core A and B,
is think about the role of critique.
You want to bring a critical eye,
but if you only bring a critical eye
without having good
basic foundational data,
you will not be adding
value to the community.
You need to think about how to have
really clear communication
in order to make this
an effective form of applied anthropology.
