Day: January 30, 2008

Engaging Anthropology and Social Theory

I was recently reading Kay Warren’s chapter, “Perils and Promises of Engaged Anthropology: Historical Transitions and Ethnographic Dilemmas,” where she discusses different strands of engaged cultural anthropology.  Certain approaches—like critical takes on ladino/Maya relations and inequality in Guatemala—struck me as being at quite some remove from neuroanthropology.  But one strand she describes did seem closer to me: 

Another perspective is that we need to move beyond the antagonisms of the past to grapple with new issues: gang violence, alienation, and the mass marketing to the urban underclasses of commodities from foreign clothing styles to mood-altering drugs; the globalization of popular culture that undercuts local authority and parental status in the eyes of many youths and their parents; and consumer expectations and forms of employment that, as they respond to transnational media and forms of production, are independent of local space (Garcia Canclini 2000).

 This chapter raised the question: What are the on-going theoretical and ethnographic discussions in cultural anthropology that are closest to the work we are doing on this blog? 

Or, to take it further afield and include Todd and sociology, what strands of social science research offer the most immediacy to our work?  Where are the fruitful collaborations and theoretical synergies likely to be found? 

I present this as a question to people who read this blog.  I would love to see plenty of comments, and look forward to a fun conversation.

Blogging and Public Intellectuals?

Todd, who commented on the Wending post, has an interesting discussion of “On Being A Public Intellectual” over at his blog Todd’s Hammer.  He engages Russel Jacoby’s argument that public intellectuals have basically perished given the post-modern turn, the professionalization of the academy, and the rise of modern media.  

I might counter that we have a new breed of public intellectual—people like Steven Pinker.  The star professors who write popular books and who appear on television, and who command super-sized salaries from universities.  They sell ideas and, in many cases, reassurances to the American public.  To take a comment by Robert Steele, a top 50 reviewer on Amazon, about Joseph Nye’s book, Soft Power:  

This book, perhaps deliberately so, but I suspect not, is out of touch with mainstream scholarship such as the last 50 books I have reviewed for Amazon. It is one massive “Op-Ed”, and its sources are virtually all “Op-Eds” (a number of them not written by the purported authors), with the result that this book gets an A for a good idea and a C-, at best, for scholarship. One simple example: the sum total of the author’s references on “virtual communities”, one of the most important ideas of this century, is one Op-Ed from the Baltimore Sun.

But in looking at the posts on this blog, the ones that have attracted the most attention are ones in the public domain—the critique of Steven Pinker or the Time Magazine article on love—as well as ones that address issues of everyday discussion—our mood affecting our health, IQ and race, our sense of balance. 
Continue reading “Blogging and Public Intellectuals?”