Cross-field Anthropology: Opportunities & Obstacles

As evidence that there are at least pockets of cross-disciplinary collaboration and apprecation within AAA, the Society for Cultural Anthropology sponsored a Multispecies Salon at the recent meeting. Five essays published in the November 2010 issue of Cultural Anthropology formed the platform of the "innovent", and several additional papers were discussed. There were also exhibits of art informed by the concept of Multispecies Ethnography held in New Orleans galleries.

I think this is a great example of what IS happening NOW within anthropology and evidence that there is mutual respect amongst various practitioners, some of whom consider themselves scientists and some of whom do not. I heard it was all fascinating. Unfortunately, I didn't attend any of it because I couldn't find it. The innovent wasn't advertised by the Biological Anthropology Section. The online AAA program allows you to search by interest group (the program is a behemoth); my searches for "biology" and other related terms did not return any information on the Multispecies Salon. You'd have to know it was happening in advance to find it in the program. I learned that a couple of colleagues of mine were presenting in this forum but I couldn't remember the name of the session; searching the index of the printed program for their names yielded nothing. When I finally figured out what session it was, I rushed to the room to find it empty, the session over. In addition, Karen Strier, a highly respected primatologist, gave a distinguished lecture to the General Anthropology Division at AAA. However, Karen's name wasn't even in the program and the talk was very poorly attended. Ironically, the title of her talk was "Why Anthropology Needs Primatology."

Is this merely a rant? I don't think so. I think it's necessary to engage in the discussion, to engage both in critique AND in self-reflection. As I just remarked to a friend, my training in cultural anthropology at both the undergraduate and graduate levels is inadequate. That lack of training fostered a lack of interest, and a sense of distance and illiteracy (reading the titles of papers and symposia in the AAA program only heighten my sense of speaking a different language). I don't know what's going on in cultural anthropology today; I mostly just feel like it's water I'd rather not tread. I'm not taking pride in that assertion, I'm just sayin'. And I doubt I'm alone. I honestly don't know what it means to be an integrated anthropologist, but I'm trying to learn. That said, I've published one paper in American Anthropologist, with another in final revisions. The first was the year in review for biological anthropology (2009) and the other is an explicitly evolutionary paper, co-authored with a fellow biological anthropologist and written intentionally for Am Anth. We were delighted by the warm reception our paper received by the editors & reviewers and are enthusiastic about sharing it with a broadly sociocultural readership.

To wrap these musings up, I don't think the answer is to abandon AAA. To those biological anthropologists who are currently engaging in research and dialogue across the subdisciplines, hats off. Keep doing it. I'd recommend (beg?) going forward that you avail yourself of whatever status you have within AAA, as well as whatever modes of social media you can access, to spread the word about what you're doing and why. Let the rest of the biological anthropology community know when and where your sessions are so we can show up and learn from your approach. One of the reasons I started this blog is because I felt that we tend to get locked into the cramped rabbit warrens of our own work and suffer from a distaste for promoting ourselves and asking questions. I think this debate has opened up wonderful opportunities for our discipline as a whole to engage in some much-needed self-promotion.