And the Magic Word is... FT article by Gillian Tett, US Editor and anthropologist

And the magic word is ...

By Gillian Tett

Published: October 29 2010 23:30 | Last updated: October 29 2010 23:30

What could “reboot” America these days? More stimulus spending? A dose of austerity? Increased quantitative easing (QE2)? Or is innovation the solution, coupled with passion and love?

That is a question I have been mulling since I flew down to New Orleans last weekend to attend a jazz-filled meeting called “Reboot America!”, organised by the glamorous Brit-turned-American journalist Tina Brown.

Fair, but now runs a hip American website, The Daily Beast. She also has an equally impressive list of friends. The participants in “Reboot America!” were like a fantasy dinner party: General Stanley McChrystal (former head of the US forces in Afghanistan) showed up; so did Diane von Furstenberg (the fashion designer), Sheila Bair (one of America’s top regulators), Vinod Khosla (the great venture capitalist), Joseph Stiglitz (the Nobel prize-winning economist) and Peter Orszag (until recently, Obama’s budget czar). Spike Lee and Richard Branson were also slated to appear but never made it.

While the attendees were eclectic, they shared at least two things. First, most agreed that America is in a mess, due to long-term structural problems as much as short-term banking woes. Indeed, as I listened to the debates in New Orleans I had a sense of déjà vu: the last time that I heard quite so much wailing about the future of a nation was in Japan, where I worked as a reporter in the late 1990s.

The second common thread was reverence for the idea of innovation. While Brown’s friends disagreed with each other over the merits of QE2 or nuclear power, almost everyone took it for granted that innovation was not just a Good Thing, but could help fix America’s troubles – particularly if combined with passionate energy. Or, as Beth Galante, an environmental activist from New Orleans declared, what was really needed was innovation and luurve.

On one level, this felt wildly exhilarating. I, for one, think innovation can be a wonderful thing if handled wisely. In other respects, it was also a trifle curious. These days, policymakers and politicians often like to sprinkle the “I” word around, mindful that innovation is not just a popular idea, but almost a quasi noble concept in America. It is baked into the American myth, like apple pie and motherhood; a near-sacred intellectual totem pole which almost everyone can rally around, be they fashion designer, bank regulator, army general or businessman.

But, as anthropologists have loved to point out, since the days of Claude Lévi-Strauss onwards, totems tend to be most potent when they are ambiguous enough to conceal contradictions. That innovation totem is no exception. If you were to ask the average person on the street to define innovation, they would probably talk about gadgets or cutting-edge science: Google, iPads, Viagra and so on. However, if you ask business people, they will often point to processes that are deceptively simple. David Neeleman, the founder of US airline JetBlue, for example, told the conference that his best innovations were putting televisions on planes and telling his staff to work at home, not in the office. In its most crude, dictionary sense, innovation is really just about embracing the new, or, for that matter, accepting change.

But while Americans might love their iPhones, many ordinary voters currently appear terrified of other forms of radical change. They don’t want their lives or communities to be turned upside down, or to lose their jobs to computers. They are wary of radical policy shifts such as Obama’s healthcare plans. And in practical terms, many innovations have had a dark side. Innovations in oil exploration have cut the price of oil; but they have also polluted the Gulf. Meanwhile financial creativity has fuelled the credit crisis – and left Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman, woefully suggesting that the “only truly useful innovation” in finance in recent decades has been the invention of the ATM.

These contradictions, for the most part, are largely glossed over. Everyone continues to rally around the innovation idea. And in a world where politicians are beset by seemingly intractable problems, it seems a magical cure for ills.

Don’t get me wrong: I am not against innovation. And down in New Orleans there were plenty of inspiring stories being bandied around among the jazz, involving clever new business ideas and social processes in places ranging from Finland to Colombia. But let nobody be fooled: innovation can be a powerful totem pole but it is not a magic wand. The spirit of Google alone cannot “Reboot America!” overnight. That will require a long, hard slog from politicians and voters alike; it won’t be glamorous.

getting anthropology out there in the workforce

A link to the interview with John Fox by Chronicle of Higher Education writer Susan Basalla May was just posted to the AAA web site. I like John's observations and suggestions, and I copy a few of them here to get the discussion going among us Breaching Boundaries folks.

http://chronicle.com/article/Zigzagging-Through-the-Real/124987/

"Don’t be afraid to break out and take your unique, humanistic perspective out into the big, wide world—out where “the other” lives. I’m biased, of course, but I think a world in which anthropologists are scattered throughout the workforce—in government, nonprofits, business—would be a really great place to live."

"I still unabashedly call myself an anthropologist, even though that has not been part of my job title for many years."

And then my question to contributors: What happens if we stop calling ourselves anthropologists, taking our humanistic perspective into the big wide world without crediting our training?

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.