A recent post by Rex on Savage Minds connects the American Civil War with the American Anthropological Association (AAA). He reflects that…
In the years leading up to the civil war, sectionalism meant the divisive need to commit to either the South or the North hence Robert E. Lee’s reluctant decision to serve the South, despite his own dislike of slavery and secession: “I must side,” he wrote, “either with or against my section.” In the context of the economics of AAA journals, on the other hand, I’m rapidly learning that understanding sectionalism is also very important.
His article is about how important AAA section journals are, but his Civil War analogy may be more appropriate to the newest AAA Newsletter which takes up the question whether the “union” of anthropological subfields should be “torn asunder.”
For those of you who aren’t “in the know” about our angst, some practitioners believe that anthropology has grown so diverse that little holds us together–specifically there is little in common between the interests and approaches of cultural anthropology and biological anthropology.
This diverse and interesting set of brief articles come at the issue from a variety of angles. Mary Shek examines departments that have split (e.g., Duke, Stanford, Harvard) and those that work toward a holistic anthropology (e.g., Emory, University of Florida and Arizona State University’s new School of Human Evolution and Social Change), Eric Alden Smith pleds for reconciliation, while Sylvia Yanagisko and Dan Segal state that:
To date, we have seen little evidence that the so-called “biological synthesis” offers cultural-social anthropology a useful tool. To the contrary, rather than contributing to interesting work in cultural-social anthropology, the various forms “synthesis” seem most often to have been designed to control and limit cultural-social anthropology, making it less rather than more interesting….
Other articles include Fran Mascia-Lees “Can Biological and Cultural Anthropology Coexist?” and Andrea Wiley’s look at how some anthropologists (in her case nutritional anthropologists) feel that they need both approaches and their work is being hindered by the binary opposition of cultural and biological approaches.
Speaking of which……Some archaeologists, like myself, who are both grounded in some form of “science” and want to engage culturally-oriented topics (my fav-o-rites inlcude cultural memory, modernity, race construction, power relations, identity, etc.) feel a little like the state of Missouri in this anthropological civil war (although I admit I have problems sustaining a conversation with primate morphologists). Note: archaeologists ended up in both departments at Stanford depending on their theoretical approach.
Whatever your current stance on the topic, however, this issue of the Anthropology News is a good open debate.
After news of John’s successful prospectus defense, I was feeling all nostalgic for Austin, Texas…So I was browsing The Austinist (a website about Austin) and came across a blurb on MachinesMimesis (TM), a walk-thru musical installation event at the Cathedral of Junk held late in January (click on the image for a larger view of the poster). It was presented by the curators of the Museum of Ephemerata–Scott Webel and Jen Hirt. These folks are old friends from UT (via the the Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies) and I had no idea that 1) they were still in Austin and 2) they were continuing their great work with the Museum of Natural and Artificial Ephermerata. If you have never come across their work, check it out….I noticed the following advert under current projects …
