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.