A Journalist Reflects, David Glenn

There is an obvious kinship between anthropology and journalism. At their best, both fields tie microbehaviors to explanations about much larger patterns and structures, without sacrificing complexity and nuance. Professionals in both fields need to reflect every day on ethical questions of consent, power, and voice. But of course there are also profound differences between the two projects: Anthropologists are likely to spend much more time with a given set of informants, and they usually have the luxury (or curse) of having much more time to write about their findings. In my contributions, I will talk about what I've learned about journalism from reading anthropology. I will also offer some reflections about how anthropology (and its major scholarly associations) compares to other social-science disciplines in its interactions with journalists. And I'll comment on news-media coverage of the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System, which journalists often describe as an "anthropology" program even though few of its social scientists are actually anthropologists by training.

The American Anthropological Association RACE project: Social inequality and Social Change, Arlene Torres

The public education project of the AAA, RACE: Are We So Different? produced in conjunction with the Science Museum of Minnesota, is a museum exhibit, a website, and educational programming designed to enhance understanding of human diversity and the concept of race, past and present. The exhibit has been on tour throughout the nation. Its objective is to allow for critical dialogue about race and social inequality. The project also hopes to develop an environment where a host of individuals will commit themselves to addressing social inequities in the various locales, including but not limited to, the school, the workplace, and the public policy arena. My contributions will address accomplishments and challenges from the perspective of an anthropologist who contributed to the making of this project and in the distribution of ideas related to it in her interaction with viewers, teachers, community organizers, and public officials. Of particular interest is the ways by which the project can illuminate our understanding about issues of critical concern in Capitol Hill. Education, immigration, health and the prison complex are but a few arenas where knowledge about the processes that inform concepts of race, racializing stereotypes and racial profiling is essential.

Para-site Experiments as a Bridge Between the Desire for Usefulness and the Micro-Macro Politics in Ethnographic Research, George Marcus

I want to explore how political stakes arise in the course of ethnographic research projects today. While these politics originate within the purely "academic" purposes of inquiry and are 'micro' or granular in the circumstances of every fieldwork project, they also scale up, gradiently, to the most macro and pressing political issues at stake in larger public spheres. As an anthropologist with an ethnographic interest in anthropology itself, I am interested in how the micropolitics of research defines processually anthropology as a public discipline, through the tropes of collaboration, reflexivity, ethical concern, or activist desire that ideologically define ethnographic research today. To understand this processual emergence of public anthropology from its research practices requires experiments with forms in relation to the wonderfully open (for the individual anthropologist) yet mostly private (to the anthropological community) research process that anthropology licenses as its emblematic method. One such experiment with innovation in form in the ethnographic research process is the staging of 'para-sites' within or alongside fieldwork, encouraged at the Center for Ethnography (University of California, Irvine; www.socsci.uci.edu/~ethnog). These stagings are proposed as a mode to understand and develop the political dimensions of the reflexive function of fieldwork research as it unfolds under the increasing imperative of collaborative norms. This is a form for both understanding and realizing the way that particular projects of ethnographic research take on public import in their doing-- and thus how granularly anthropology overall is becoming a public discipline.

Students’ Use Of Anthropology Education In Architecting Their Futures, Antonella Fabri

The theme of my comments come from my recent experience of teaching a course in applied anthropology at John Jay College. Contrary to previous experiences in other colleges, where the course had always sparked attention and lively discussions among students, here it was usually met with apathy if not hostility. It was only when I introduced new methods and contents that students became ethnographers in their communities and offered me the insight that the critical thinking process of our discipline was the most valuable element to them. I realized that they were already doing anthropological thinking but that they needed different orientations and less traditional methods. The result was that they crafted their own anthropological perspective and applied it to their daily lives, and that they were able to analyze and communicate to others their everyday experiences. My goal in this discussion is to reflect on the still uncharted potentials within the discipline of anthropology and reflect on our role as educators to enable students to speak their own voices and to become, in turn, educators in their own communities.

Ethnographic Pedagogies: Circulating Anthropology’s Strengths as a Public Discipline, Mitra Emad

These comments offer the story of how Cultural Studies began, programmatically and pedagogically, at a mid-sized, land-grant state university in northern Minnesota. Revising an existing humanities program and drawing from collaborators’ experiences as union and community organizers, this small Cultural Studies program ultimately developed and sustained its efforts through core engagements with ethnography. Ethnography has long been an important research method for Cultural Studies. Since the late 1980s, the critical rethinking of ethnographic method by cultural anthropologists has led to new pedagogical styles especially effective for undergraduate programs oriented towards civic engagement and public lives. The development of this particular Cultural Studies program in its ethnographic and pedagogical specificities draws from and reflects an epistemological moment currently at play in the human sciences that challenges the humanities to engage directly with contemporary culture – a challenge that has at times in the public culture of academia, been dismissed as “vocational.” Fostering reflexivity, socio-political action, and interdisciplinarity, ethnographic pedagogies drawn from contemporary anthropology create a playing field for undergraduate students’ civic engagement and public lives.

Design Ethics: Implications for Anthropology, Jen van der Meer

Designers make things. So do product developers, engineers, and supply chain managers. In terms of outcome, there is no separation between our thought process and our practice. We are evaluated by what comes off of the assembly line and what is adopted into the marketplace. We may borrow from the field of anthropology, or partner with talented anthropologists, but the big difference is that we know exactly when we stop observing, and we start making. When people in the design community started to become aware of the environmental and social impact of consumer culture, there was a debate. What should we do? Some of us felt tremendously guilty that we’d been involved in the making of fashionable televisions, disposable one-use toothbrushes, and smart phones designed to last for only two years. Changing the way we make things is not an easy task, especially since designers are not responsible for determining the business drivers, or regulatory requirements, of how things are made. The early founders of the Designers Accord acknowledged that designers do not have all of the power, but that we do have influence. The launch of the Designers Accord commitment was widely adopted as an oath, taken by over 300,000 members of the design community, a promise to learn, share, and a commitment to raise environmental and social impact questions and conversations each and every time we design. We will share the early foundations of the Designers Accord, and the mainstream media acceptance of a conscious design movement.

Practicing Anthropology on the Periphery: A Caribbean Instance, Michael O'Neal

After beginning my professional career as a manager in a family business in the Virgin Islands, I eventually “detoured” to pursue graduate studies in anthropology, ultimately earning the Ph.D. in 1983 with a dissertation on the political economy of development of the BVI, and returning to the business immediately thereafter. Over the course of my career in the BVI, I have variously and often simultaneously worn the hats of business executive, conservation consultant, NGO chair, community college president, and scholar, attempting, whenever appropriate, to apply an anthropological perspective to these undertakings in an informed and judicious manner, in settings far removed from the academic and professional centers of gravity of anthropology. The concept of Caribbean “occupational multiplicity”, involving an individual’s “simultaneous or sequential engagement in a number of economic activities” is well known, following the work of Lambros Comitas (1973) and others. Thus, by way of illustration, “politicians who are also historians or writers, the fisherman who keeps a rum-shop storefront that also rents video tapes, successful Cambridge-educated medical doctors who also keep kitchen gardens and raise pigs, are all well known and prized examples of occupational multiplicity in the Caribbean” (Freeman 2005: 5). It is within the context of this trope of occupational multiplicity and the wearing of many hats, then, that I seek to locate my reflections on practicing anthropology on the “periphery”, itself a multivalent term, referring, as it does in this instance, to both geographic and professional location, as well as political economy.

Organizer Introductory Remarks

Executive Panel Discussion AAA New Orleans 2010

Breaching the Boundaries of Anthropology, Circulating Ideas, Creating a Public Discipline: Anthropology at Work in Overlapping Spheres of Design, Education, Public Sector, and Policy

Chairs and Discussion Moderators : Inga Treitler and Dena Plemmons

Introductory Remarks

In its 100 year history anthropology has done a lot to address grand public challenges, from war to race, to poverty, to environmental change. But we need to do more. We need to work within many industries and sectors and with people practicing in other disciplines. We need to work with people with whom we have resonance, and also, perhaps especially, with people we don’t agree with. Why? Because when we do, we see questions and directions and repercussions and benefits refracted in unanticipated ways. That is what connects the particularly disparate group you see before you — anthropologists and non anthropologists, working in all sectors of society. Anthropologists are good at observing, and not so bad at describing. But many of us get nervous about the possibility of our work being used by people whose ideologies diverge from ours. And yet while we observe, our need to be morally engaged often causes us to try to affect change even while we try to maintain the objectivity of an observer. How are these tensions — lying at the very heart of this current epistemological moment in our discipline — to be reconciled? To circulate, indeed to innovate, if that is what is called for, requires us to step up to our power to bring about change.

We’ve been hampered by at least two concerns in our efforts to circulate beyond our work in familiar and expected ideological terrains. Let’s call these concerns the communication problem and the ethics problem. First, to the communication problem--we have trouble getting heard by people who can make positive change. Some of that is because we speak of simple things in life in a particular manner that makes them unrecognizable to others—dare I say we are exclusive? insular? But we’re making headway. The Race Project sponsored by AAA and funded by the NSF and the Ford Foundation is an exemplary case of anthropology being heard, loudly and often. The purpose of the race project is to communicate the core notion that race is not biological but cultural. It came from our association and has resonated in small towns and big cities all across the country, and the Internet, and through the halls of the government. Though the evaluation is not yet complete, to an observer the Race Project appears to be a success in many ways including impact on federal policy. Anthropology has been heard on Capitol Hill.

And now to the ethics problem--people hear us, and then they misuse our work to bring about damaging change. Fears of our services and our work being misused have been most recently exemplified by the very public debate about embedding anthropology in the ranks of the military in a context of armed conflict. The debate has been heard the world over. But in the urgent need to reduce armed conflict, that cry in all of us to do something is lost to the fear that our principles will be misrepresented by ineffective, even dangerous spokespeople. What to do? Some have tended to turn inward begging for less engagement rather than better understanding. Others have taken on tasks within the AAA – like the Race Project -- to create a public dialogue that might stand to inform policy at highest levels. More recently though, the military engagement dialogue yielded a project currently underway to collect material for an Ethics Casebook. Two contributors at this table are involved in reviewing material for the casebook with the aim to add transparency to the ethical problematic in certain anthropological engagements. Still others are taking on jobs in industry, in colleges, in consulting, in marketing, where they put anthropological models, theory, methods, and ethnographic case material to work, with subtle transformation in the human condition the goal. That transformation is through education, through consulting, through reporting and writing, through advising those in greater positions of power, and eventually through taking those positions of power and leadership on ourselves.

In drawing together the particular individuals you see here we looked at the idea that anthropological research follows an arc that can ultimately impact policy -- though it rarely does. Some of us have an awareness of that arc, some have been directly influential in that point of influence, and others are at the fuzzy ethnographic front end on grand issues that will ultimately benefit from their input. We keep anthropology’s epistemological moment in the forefront of our thoughts to remind ourselves that ideas and knowledge do not emerge fully formed but follow an arc and often a cycle. What is the place of ethnographic study in that process of knowledge creation? What is that tension of innovation and tradition in the process of understanding and honoring the dignity of the human condition? We know that the process of knowledge creation often begins with provocations and perturbations in what we take as given—what counts as popular wisdom, public knowledge or just plain unquestioned facts. The perturbations are often born of crisis, as happened in the anthropological engagements in armed combat. These critical moments have been understood by one of our contributors through the metaphor of the acupuncture needle, a letting go of presumed tensions in a release of energy.

We are here to seek the help of one another and of the audience to get better at using our ethnographic knowledge and new interpretations to bring our influence to grand public challenges. And also simply to get better at understanding the arc of knowledge creation, so as to know how to move from specific cases to broad and general human principles. How do we use the authority of our science in bringing change to the human condition where and when it is needed?

Moving into that next stage in this discussion we begin by taking a stance-that anthropology, the study of the human condition, has a responsibility to address grand public challenges – to reduce armed conflict, to relieve conditions of poverty, to contribute to a sustainable practice of commerce that supports human dignity, and to make civic engagement a natural feature of societies.

We suggest that anthropology has promise as a public discipline. By that we mean that we bear a responsibility to engage in public debates through our work and our actions as we work with others who are bringing about a reduction of human suffering in many arenas. Those you see here have a demonstrated history of crossing disciplinary boundaries to have broader influence in the arena of grand public problem solving. The work we do is at the intersection of science, culture, policy, and politics. And in these arenas we listen hard and walk away from ideological rigidity.