The State of the Anthropology Department

by Hugh M. Lewis

to

our

great

mother cow

killed and quartered

a limb carried off in each direction

its carcass left to fester and rot

from which flowers

eventually spring

cleansing

fertile

earth

with

a

bunch of lemon yellow carnations

adorning the shadowy corridors

outside closed doors

yellow sun-bursts

shedding color

wall flowers

sunny faces

silently

sitting

a

lost

spirit

beckons

tear drops

week-old petals

fallen from wilted flowers

onto the brown tile floor

swept away at night

by the custodian

forgotten echo

fleeting

by

the

natives

are restless

shadows dancing

around the firelight

shaking their shields and spears

drumming in the darkness

another human sacrifice

for the Gods

To the memory and embodiment of young Dan--a too-familiar stranger.

I offer an account of an auto-reflexive perspective of anthropology based upon an ethnographic study conducted within an anthropology department, as well as informal participant-observation and membership-role involvement within four departments. Reflexive Anthropology has been concerned with the relative ontological status in our professional knowledge of the cross-cultural "Other" in relation to the primary anthropological "Self." Like William Conrad, we must eventually confront the unasked question of to what extent "Otherness" is a symbolic representation of our sense of "Self"--how much do self and other interpenetrate one another? How much is the self found in the other, and the other in the self?

It is unknown if other studies exist that carry the possibilities of reflexology to its logical conclusion--the ethnographic investigation of the Anthropology department as the primary forum of the articulation of Anthropology. Such a study represents a critique of anthropological praxis as a scientific paradigm. Ethnographic study of an Anthropology department opened a Pandora's box and has released into the world certain basic issues of anthropological power and ethics that cannot now be recalled.

It represents a taboo topic in the professional field. These things are not supposed to happen in the field, though its occurrence may be more commonplace than realized or admitted, and though most professionals probably have many stories to tell about it. But to broach the topic is like a betrayal of profession solidarity, except that the honesty of facing it and coming to terms with it would enable us to overcome and move beyond the limitations which its continued ignorance entail for the field.

The central model is derived from the ethnographic study of the department. This model has been consistently corroborated within the settings of three other university departments, both observationally, impressionistically and existentially. It is suggested that this model may indeed be of critical importance in the articulation of anthropological praxis across America, and this model is entirely congruent with Thomas Kuhn's perspective of the formation and change of science as the product of social paradigms. The history of this model is now as much a matter of biographical reflection and social fact as it is of ethnographic construction.

The model was based upon the lack of fit of the overall impression of more than thirty interviews with graduate students at different phases of their student-career in an Anthropology program in the Northeastern United States, and more than sixteen professors from the same program, and a growing base of behavioral observations which were concurrently made in the same program. A sense of discrepancy between the said and the done prompted the study in the first place, framed within the aegis of a field-methods course, and this sense of discrepancy became only more salient during the course of the study. Within the interviews, there was a vague, often implicit, sense that some kind of "problem" existed within the program, which it became the "purpose" of the study to solve. This sense of "problem" was more implicit for the faculty than for the students, who were often quite clear and unambiguous about their opinions of it.

Everyone, almost without exception, had their own opinions on the matter, even that there was no problem. Everyone also had a sense of an "informed" perspective on the matter that they were "sharing" with me or "informing" me about their perspective. There was in most of the interviews an emerging sense of asymmetry between interviewer and interviewee. The subjects interviewed played the part of expert and I played the part of the objective inquirer who often asked leading questions anyway. We played our parts, and assumed different roles. For the most part I left the interviews open and only minimally structured, allowing them to take whichever direction they may.

Three-quarters of the students were found to come from middle to upper middle class backgrounds, as were most but not all of the faculty. Three-quarters of the students were also found to come regionally from the same area in which the school was situated, as were many of the faculty.

My main conclusion from the study, and from a series of events that immediately followed the study, including the suicide of a young student, a growing resentment by a number of graduate students, the concerted attempt of the faculty to suppress the resentment, and then singling me out and systematically ostracizing me from the program, first informally and socially, by students and faculty closing their ranks on me, and then officially by using my writing as an excuse for cutting off my assistantship and changing my official status within the program.

In hindsight, the conclusions of my study and the resulting events were the elaboration of certain psycho-social dynamics which appeared to be shared by most members of the situation. At the core of these dynamics there is the need to cultivate a strong interpersonal and professional student-mentor relationship, from which status and funding within the program would follow. There was a need for the students to always put their best foot forward, as what was apparent in the interviews themselves, but also in the context of the classroom and in the corridor politics. At the same time, there was a need for the same people to "hide" what they might be feeling or honestly thinking, as if this might be their weaknesses, their fears and insecurities within the program--some aspects of human reality which the fact of the study brought out clearly in a number of ways.

My conclusion was that the professionalization of the anthropological ego, as the principle sense of "Self" in relation to the "Other" is accomplished by means of a compartmentalization of feeling, knowledge, attachment and involvement between professional and personal domains of life. This compartmentalization of ego was accomplished differently by different Anthropologists--such that for some the professional self was basically a nine-to-five routine that ended at the end of the workday. For others there seemed to be greater integration and less apparent separation between professional and personal domains, such that behavior in the office or at home was little different or discrepant, and can be connoted by rather casual and friendly relations in the department setting and possibly stiff and formal relations at home.

What emerged was a range of different professional styles of being and doing Anthropology in relation to the department. For some, this professional compartmentalization involving the internalization of certain implicit values and ways of seeing and behaving professionally, was more easily or successfully achieved than by others. For a few anthropologists, such compartmentalization appears to have been achieved incompletely and at considerable cost and difficulty.

To a great extent status is tied in a rather capitalistic spirit and ethos to one's funding. Funding, always limited, from one source or another, constitutes the primary basis of legitimacy and prestige within the programs. There is a sense that one needs to make oneself appear worthy of such support, and that there was conscientious and deliberate manipulation of both one's own identity and of others in order to cultivate and maintain this appearance. This need takes objective expression in periodic evaluations of student's performance.

A principle means of manipulating status identity within the department forum is in corridor talk and discourse--knowing and using effectively the jargon, constructing and modifying stories or myths both personal and social, by which identity and status could be determined and manipulated. Being included or excluded from such dialogue within rather exclusive networks or cliques, which controlled information about, availability and access to resources, techniques, information, can be a critical factor in determining one's fate in the program. Status hierarchy within the insider group is thus preserved.

This process of presentation of the professionalized ego in the forum of the department took a number of forms--in the politics of writing, in discourse, in social and informational networks and cliques, and in the manipulation of status-identity and politics of information and resource availability and opportunity.

Fore- grounding of an ideal and idealized sense of self as an expert whose legitimacy was always under scrutiny meant as a concomitant backgrounding and repressive denial of traits and weaknesses which were threatening to the process of identification--not knowing things, not reading things, not doing things one "ought" to be doing or doing things one should not really be doing.

This all occurred within a department setting whose atmosphere was repressive and largely directed by a small clique whom I nicknamed the "Boys of Biology." The head of the department emphatically told me during the course of our interview that he had no need for "culture" and that it was his express intention to set up the program so that the study of nature became its primary agenda. This led to an atmosphere and closed door politics in which information was being unevenly manipulated and disseminated.

The social atmosphere of the department, which I would characterize as repressive and even paranoid, came to express itself in a form of marginalizing and targeting certain scape-goat within the program who came to symbolically embody the sense of failure and weakness which everyone had been denying in themselves. I eventually became such a scape-goat as well.

Leaving this program in search of a better one, I found myself in a private school in which cultural materialism (and not sociobiologism) was the predominant and often hidden agenda of the program. Having initially criticized the perspective of a rather strong minded cultural materialist within the program for "not turning his pyramid on its side" I found him the next day ranting loudly in the corridor well within earshot of my desk "about the gall of certain new students" and the need to put a handle upon them. I found it impossible to work at my desk, and so choose to do all my work in the anthropology library that proved more efficient. I found that people who I had never meant were talking behind my back and forming social opinions about my identity without even knowing or making an effort to get to know me. I came to the realization that it was important for these people not to know me so that that they could therefore manipulate my identity in any manner they desired to--which they did. Not being there to defend or manipulate my own identity, I deliberately allowed myself to become a convenient target of such manipulative social practices. There became a need not to know me and to avoid me at all costs on the part of most of the students and many of the faculty.

Needless to say, this led to a basic inability to function effectively within the program, despite superlative "A" quality grades and performance in the different classes, and this became a decisive factor in my voluntary withdrawal from the program.

My social predicament became epitomized by the expression of a peer relationship I had with a middle aged female graduate student who was a co-teaching assistant in an introductory cultural anthropology course. One day she had told the professor that I hadn't been doing my work, and then both came at me accusatively under false pretences. Afterward this lady insulted me and scolded me for the way I was doing things, in a manner that was totally "off the wall" and seemed to me uncalled for. I had never been treated so terribly or so caustically by any other person in my life, even in Boot Camp.

This lady drove to school every morning in a Mercedes-Benz, and was the girl friend of a senior social anthropologist in the program who was an ardent and highly political cultural materialist. During the rest of the semester this woman clung to our professor under whom we were working to the point of following her around wherever she went. At the end of the semester when this woman learned that I had withdrawn from the program, she apologized for herself in the hallway--not for her own behavior, but to excuse and exonerate her guilty conscious. It came off as totally ingenuine to me.

The parent-child form which the mentor-student relationship often seems to involve certain psycho-dynamic processes of transference, suggestion and identification, process which can be and are manipulated by both the student and the professor, especially in the fostering of attitudes and opinions about Anthropology and of other people within the program. The neurotic "codependent" nature of this relationship should be considered as critical in influencing the professionalization of the anthropological ego. It is to be legitimately asked whether or not these students or their professors could really function effectively or independently in a fieldwork setting, and indeed a great many of these people depend upon "plugging" into the fieldwork context provided by their professors, a process which their professors may have done in relation to yet other mentors.

I was appalled to consider the implications of what these people were doing for fieldwork, in which we might construct the identity of the "other" reference "Other" without really bothering or getting to know the person at the center of our constructions.

I came to the conclusion also that the attempt to remain or foster a guarded sense of objectivity we often implicitly deny our own subjectivity, and the subjectiveness of our responses to one another, and that this denial of subjectivity which was integral to the repression of our professional faults, led to the projection of such subjectiveness as an inherent sign of weakness onto "others" both within the department and also in the field. Such a denial of subjectivity also then resulted in the closure of a circle of deceit within which we could ideologically construct, or reconstruct, anyone's identity anyway we wanted to.

I came into a third Anthropology program with a seasoned aim not to allow myself to be victimized again. The program was factionalized, largely by a politically motivated bio-cultural/sociobiological group who were attempting a take over of the department, but who had been effectively resisted and frustrated by a small core group of senior Anthropologists. But this factionalized situation left a cloud over the social atmosphere of the department which largely constrained social relations and the freedom of what one could say or do, or who one could associate with, within the program.

It was upon my return from fieldwork after more than a year and a half's absence that the unfriendly side of the program became more apparent and insidious, to the point of near total social exclusion from virtually every aspect of its life. I was not only not welcomed back by all but a handful of people within the program, but I felt deliberately unwelcome in an insulting way by many people whom I had never even met or talked with before, or who knew be before but were able to show me their dislike.

Again, my social identity and status within the program was undergoing a process of manipulation and construction on the part of both students and faculty which was essentially beyond my control to do anything about. I elected to socially isolate myself from these processes as much as possible and to allow it to take its course for ethnographic purposes.

Again, I was appalled and disillusioned by the almost boundless capacity of anthropologists to socially construct the identity of significant counter-reference "others" in almost any manner they choose to, without reference to or getting to really know these individuals in any genuine sense. The factors that have played themselves out beyond my own control in relation to myself which would, if not decisively dealt with, would have resulted in my eventual ostracism and failure within the program for social reasons entirely unrelated to formal educational performance or achievements, are representative of a deeper and more despairing malaise within Anthropology, that would have eventually resulted in the ostracism and loss of a vital, well-developed cross-cultural perspective in anthropology.

The long range capacity for an effective and genuine cross-cultural anthropology is being undermined at the research level due to a number of interrelated factors. To the extent that a biological (or alternatively a strongly and mostly pase' cultural materialist) paradigm becomes politically and economically predominant within anthropology, a paradigm which focally searches for shared biological foundations of human nature and its cultural manifestations, then the critical capacity to account and control for the reality of culture, its influences in shaping our lives, and of cross-cultural differences in our anthropological world-view, will be eroded and underdeveloped, and the paradigmatic foundation for an authentic cross-cultural anthropology will become increasingly ignored and eventually lost.

This rise in preeminence of the biological paradigm within Anthropology at the research level of the PhD granting Universities, has been a general trend signaling a major shift of focus in the field of anthropology away from culture and towards nature. It is a shift that is tied indirectly to a number of larger political economic processes working in the background context of the anthropology department, such as the ascendance and entrenchment of a conservative, right-wing, capitalist motivated political hegemony of the American government during the decade of the 80's and early 90's. There is also the preeminent "biological evolution" success in other fields of biology which were centrally tied to methodological breakthroughs in genetic research. There is a polarization of the class system which has meant the erosion of a solid middle class orientation, a loss of mobility and cutting of of mobility of the lower working classes. Also I find a transformation of the academic forum of the University from an academic forum for the exchange of ideas into increasingly an academic marketplace for the competition for resources, the realizing and playing out of class moment, and transformation into the University as a money-making institution. There is a general shift of scientific research funding from pure which promises long term theoretical progress to applied programs that promise more practical short term technological gains but at the potential cost of long-range or basic research. I find as well a general loss of economic growth and development in the country, which has meant the loss of funding for scientific research programs. There has occurred scaling back of academic departments, the loss of job-opportunities, and the increasing "turning inward" of American cultural values and away from a realistic world-view, as evidenced by the rise of congressional support for anti-gun-control, anti-abortionism, of the promotion of prayer in the classroom, and the rise of teaching of creationist doctrines in the classroom.

What is lost has been the capacity to understand, recognize, critically evaluate, appreciate or tolerate personal and cultural differences--the subjective foundation of cross-cultural differences and ultimately, an objective cross-cultural anthropology.

It is suggested in keeping with Thomas Kuhn's theory of scientific paradigms underlying scientific revolutions, that "conversion" is at the heart of the dynamics of this process. "The conversion experience that I likened to a gestalt switch remains, therefore, at the heart of the revolutionary process. Good reasons for choice provide motives for conversion and a climate in which it is more likely to occur....But neither good reasons nor translation constitute conversion, and it is that process we must explicate in order to understand an essential sort of scientific change." (Kuhn, 1963:205)

It entails that the social dynamics occurring within department settings play a critical role in the academic professionalization and secondary socialization of the student, that affiliation and promotion to one or another paradigm is biased and influenced by these processes, as are the more general paradigmatic movements within the field.

It suggests that the most significant primary reference "Other" in relation to the "Self" (anthropological "ego") is increasingly not to be found with cross-cultural identification in field-work settings, but within the forum of Academic departments, as the academic mentor, and that in counter-reference to this relationship, the place of the traditional "Other" in anthropology serves the function of the significant "counter-reference" which has important implications as far as the identification and internalization of core values of the professional anthropologist is concerned

The function of the counter-reference other involves on a sub-conscious level processes of psychic projection of identity which is inherently biased and distortive of the reality of the other, and which is tied to basic repressions of personality which is integral to the process of "compartmentalization" of personality during professionalization of identity. The "objectified" relationship with the other is marked by the "intentional alienation" of the other and by a form of knowledge summarized by Martin Buber as an "I-it" relation as opposed to the alternative "I-thou" relation.

It is suggested that this orientation and proclivity of constructing other's identities independently of any real subjective relationship with them is fundamentally counter-intuitive and antithetical to the promotion of genuine cross-cultural research.

The social psychological and small group dynamics which occur within anthropology departments are as much of the character of neurotic compulsion and ego-defensive rationalization as they are based on actual formal academic performance. In every relation across the graduate student-faculty boundary, there is an amount of symbolic "leakage" which occur that critically influences the formation of attitudes, impressions, social identity and status within departments.

It suggests that long term success of the student's career may have little to do with actual ability or knowledge of anthropology, especially from a cross-cultural perspective, nor with the individual's capacity or ability to perform research effectively and independently in the field setting. Primary direct factors of success include the ability of the graduate student to form effective mentor relationships, to internalize on a subconscious level the values and implicit understandings embodied and encompassed within this relationship, to read and manipulate self-identity within peer and faculty social relations within the department.

Indirectly, it is suggested that these factors of success are linked to 1. early primary socialization experiences and subsequent secondary socialization experiences of the graduate student, especially during adolescence, high school, the period following departure of high school and subsequently the first four years of undergraduate education, 2. class background of the student and the student's parents; 3. class background of the mentor in relation to the student; 4. the dynamics of professionalization of the mentor.

What has been lost within the Anthropology department has been the diversity of ideas, and the availability of a diversity of alternative mentor-student relationships, a loss and devaluation of subjectivity in the process of professional internalization, a pronounced effect of the rise of a solitary mentor-student relationship reinforced by exclusive cliques that come to take on paternalistic overtones and undercurrents of a parent-child ethos.

My original ethnography of the now distant department was met initially with strong enthusiasm on the part of otherwise reticent students, and much skepticism, caution and even stern warnings or avoidance on the part of many professors. Later this became translated into an interest and involvement in the study, especially with the intentionality and hope of offering constructive improvements in the department that would lead to improved social relations. Finally, it was met with disappointment as the study was descriptive and critical and not prescriptive in nature.

Some points are offered as suggestions for improvement of social relations within the Anthropology department and to hopefully counter some of the negative spurious effects of irrelation.

In this spirit the following academic paradigm is offered:

1. It is an unprofessional and unethical abnegation of the responsibility of any member of a program to cultivate views or expression of subjective opinions which are biased against any other members of the program, which leads to the open criticism or exclusion of any member of the program.

2. It is the responsibility of every member of a program to maintain an attitude of openness, fairness and tolerance of difference and divergent views within a program.

3. It is the responsibility of all members of a program to maintain and protect the professional privacy of student's records.

The inherent asymmetry and inequality of the student-mentor relationship, and the special sensitivities involved in this relationship, should be taken into greater awareness, especially on the part of the faculty member. In this regard:

4. It is the responsibility of the professor as a mentor and leader to foster a social atmosphere of tolerance and appreciation of divergent points of view.

5. It is the responsibility of the professor to deliberately counter any expression of intolerance or exclusion on the part of students in relation to any other student or member of a program.

6. It is the responsibility of the faculty member to assure that this asymmetry is not taken advantage of or exploited, that the student is not victim of prejudice or discrimination or rejection.

Students should be allowed and encouraged to enter into a broader range of mentor-student relationships with a number of different faculty members, and this relationship should be therefore depoliticized and nonexclusive in quality.

It is recommended that Anthropology departments can provide a forum within the department that can cut across disciplinary boundaries and cliques. It is recommended that department-wide meetings might be regularly conducted--once a semester, once a month, once a week if necessary--with encouragement of attendance by all members of the program, including undergraduates. The aim of these meetings would be sensitivity training--cultivation of awareness and critical appreciation of professional interests, involvement, and values of different members of the program. The spirit of these meetings should be democratic and open to all. A part of these meetings can be the presentation of projects by all members as part of the requirements of PhD dissertation and master's thesis work.

Finally, I wish to conclude with a message to all young anthropologists who would aspire to be better writers. Writer's block should never be made into a political issue or be allowed to become a terminal condition whatever the department or program or whomever the mentor.