Some of you may be interested in a related discussion of Matti Bunzl’s article on Kritik, the blog of the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, which initially sponsored the lecture that turned into the AA article.

http://unitcrit.blogspot.com/2008/03/against-west.html

http://unitcrit.blogspot.com/2008/03/all-about-west.html

I am not yet done with Bunzl’s article, but his departure point, the Gusterson-Besteman volume, is interesting. When Joana and I were writing our book, and this volume appeared, at first we thought we might as well stop. But when we saw the book we realised that, as Bunzl writes, it did not represent an earnest attempt to convince a broader readership that Kaplan, Friedman etc. were wrong; rather, the readership in mind was clearly anthropologists. More importantly, G & B were only deconstructing texts, not offering alternative explanations.

Bunzl is not the first to offer this kind of criticism. Ulf Hannerz in Foreign News lamented the inability of anthropologists to respond adequately to “one-big-thing” books such as Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations by presenting alternative visions that were clear and accessible. “Leaving an intellectual vacuum behind is not much of a public service,” he wrote. And he is right. Thomas Hylland Eriksen recently devoted a whole book, Engaging Anthropology: The Case for a Public Presence, to anthropology’s inability to affect public discourse. But of course the irony is that these two books, too, have been published by academic presses and are read mainly by anthropologists.

Joana and I wanted to target Huntington’s and Kaplan’s readership. We ended up with a compromise: the German version of our book has been published by a commercial press (aimed at roughly the Kaplan/Huntington readership, at least in theory), but the English version will be published by the University of Washington Press. Why? The main reason is that we do not know how to get through to commercial publishers. Stephen Greenblatt advised us against even trying, because, he said, even if they publish the book they will (1) interfere extensively with the text and (2) unless it is a commercial success will not keep it on their backlist. I am not sure if these are sufficient reasons not to have tried; after all, as Joana wrote, our German publisher meddled extensively with the text too, but this price might be worth paying.

On the other hand, some academic presses, including UW and Berg, are now doing “crossover” books like fiction, art, or Berg’s volume on the sari, which is in a coffee-table format but written by Daniel Miller and his colleague Mukulika Banerjee. This is a promising turn. So whether our book will get through to a broader readership is partly a matter of how the publisher will market it.

But I agree at least in part with Bunzl. I am not sure if this is a matter of epistemology, but it is somehow part of the disciplinary upbringing of anthropologists that they are extremely reluctant to take sides or offer judgements (except, curiously, about anthropologists themselves, e.g. those who are involved with the US Army in Iraq). I see this with my masters students who come from anthropological backgrounds. When they are confronted with court cases in which cultural arguments are used, they are very good at deconstructing them, but extremely bad in proposing alternative, better judgements, even though they know that the judgement that was made is bad. Students coming from other fields are less well-equipped to make judgements but more willing to do so. This may well be what Bunzl is pointing to.

http://www.infoplease.com/spot/topintellectuals.html

Even with the British bias, there are several historians you should know, and several not on the list, e.g. Arthur Schlesinger, Drew Gilpin Faust, or Doris Kearns Goodwin, who should be known to you. The only anthropologist is Geertz, now gone.

Stanley Fish is a good example of an English Lit prof whose “pundit” status is for something else – law and legal commentary.

Also look at Richard Posner’s 2001 book on public intellectuals for lots of other examples; he lists 546 public intellectuals, before selecting his own “top” 100. Even in his later expanded list of 607 people, I count only 7 anthropologists, including Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Ashley Montague – but also Jorge Castaneda, who seems to have made the list simply out of the number of popular citations rather than for being a household name, Lionel Tiger, Levi-Strauss, and Ernest Gellner – and not, interestingly enough, Geertz. BTW, he lists a LOT of other historians – see the whole list on line at

http://home.uchicago.edu/~rposner/TABLE%20II.pdf

But my point about Abu-Lughod was not that she’s a famous anthro pundit, just that she’s clearly not hampered from being able to speak meaningfully and coherently to a popular audience because of the epistemology of contemporary anthropology which, according to Bunzl, she encapsulated in “Writing Against Culture.” I think that there are plenty of other reasons why Abu-Lughod and others don’t often venture into pundit terrain.

You say that “Bunzl was looking for the difference between anthropology and other fields” and I would respond that my argument about MQ’s reward system indeed isn’t an argument about anthropology’s uniqueness, and that this is my point: there are lots of concrete structures beyond epistemology that keep anthropologists from being public figures, and they apply equally to other disciplines. Is Anthro really that unique when it comes to not having public figures? You say you know pundits from polisci, history, sociology, and art history, but I don’t. Mind you I am a pop culture retard, so by all means prove me wrong with a list of Influential Historians, but the only famous academics I can think of off the top of my head are Steven Levitt and Cornel West (someone who, incidentally, was clearly penalized at Harvard for his more popular work). And is West famous because of the epistemology of Religious Studies?

(And as for English Lit pundits, what about Stanley Fish?)

And Joanna, you know I have gotten a couple of e-mails in response to this posting from people sharing private experiences similar to the ones you describe, where they have been penalized or dismissed as populizers by their academic peers. But I think you pointed to a bigger issue in your comment when you said “The skills and contacts requiered for each sphere really are quite different.” It’s hard to know how to Make It Big outside of your discipline. (It’s hard to know how to Make It Big *inside* of your discipline, too!) It’s a struggle to publish an academic book, but it’s even more of a struggle to publish a popular book. Brava for successfully making the effort!

Lisa’s argument about the disincentives to serving as public figures also struck me as strange, for the simple reason that anthropology is not the only discipline that is subject to the constraints she mentioned, and presumably most of the disciplines from which public figures come also find that Macquarie rewards their refereed journal articles more than their NY Times op-ed pieces or that similar constraints and disincentives apply all over. Bunzl was looking for the difference between anthropology and other fields – Lisa’s comments seem irrelevant to that issue.

One approach to answering Bunzl’s question, which I believe is an excellent one that deserves discussion, is to ask what other disciplines may suffer similar irrelevance. English Lit comes to mind immediately, with an irony that parallels that of anthropology, since English Lit faculty take special pains to emphasize that Literature is Relevant. The most well-known English Lit pundits have made their marks in other ways (e.g. Michael Berube in disability work) or as commentators on knowledge in general (e.g. Alan Bloom). A few have written popular works on their specialties (e.g. Greenblatt on Shakespeare), but very few show up as ‘pundits’ contributing to serious public debate.

Is it any surprise that Bunzl focuses on ‘writing culture’ in asking why anthropology produces even fewer public figures than English Lit?

– Dave

I was also told that the only person who should be doing analysis is the anthropologist. Aka, my teacher hasn’t read anything in anthropology in the past 20 years…

This teacher is also a chair, and head of the department. What a joke…

I am in the lucky situation that as a non-academic but popularizing anthropologist, I work with Pál and we manage to produce academic as well as popular versions of our research. The skills and contacts requiered for each sphere really are quite different. I know, Pál often cringes when an editor for the popular work intervenes quite substantially to shorten and simplify an argument, but in the end we generally agree that it was worth it. I am suprised not to see more people collaborating in such as way, as we experience it as a real win-win situation.