In the link you highlighted from Civics Geeks, the post discusses “human being” and while I don’t share in their analysis, I think ways of human being is exactly what I like about “anthropologies.” In your comment there, and the post itself, there is this contrast between social structures and individuals. Hopefully an insistence on an inclusive anthropology – a way of being – will help resolve that dichotomy.

So in the way that I am trying to explore the concept, I would want to move “anthropologies” away from being either an “outlook” or a “study” and more a thing-in-itself. That is what startled me about the way it was used in the NY Times article, how that shift to “anthropologies displayed” really drove a re-orientation in my own thinking and resolved some key dynamics that often divide anthropology (say, the biology-culture fight) while capturing the sense of variation, comparison and holism to which we often profess.

I went looking around a bit myself for references to “anthropologies”. Here’s one I found from Deborah Durham on Anthropologies of Water. She writes, “There is no “anthropology of water,” as the title of the session suggests: there is only an anthropology of people and of the way that things like water (or taro, or space, or songs) figure in people’s lives and their understandings of their lives. And water (or money, or gossip, or aesthetics) features in people’s lives in a wide variety of ways – such that water itself (or myth, or relatives, or shelter) is as multi-colored, or multi-faceted, as the seawater Franz Boas tried so hard to understand.”

Let me contrast that with a call for proposals from Anthropology News that appeared in my in-box just today. “More than just ways of thinking and being, cultures are also fields of sensation, experience and sentiment. Indeed fieldwork remains the sine qua non of ethnographic understanding precisely in so far as both cultural transmission and cultural understanding depend on experiential engagement.”

There the regular concept of “culture” appears, trying to subsume everything that goes into “anthropologies.” It substitutes the (social/symbolic) structure for actual experiencing, sensing people. It doesn’t offer a theory of experiential engagement, but the blurb itself is saying this is the main way that we have to get at understanding a way of thinking and being in another place and time. In many ways, it over-extends and reduces the power of the culture concept, while also limiting the ways that we can think about and engage with people’s own lives.