Why I Chose Anthropology, but Anthropology Didn’t Choose Me

by Paul McDowell

“Anthropology is the holistic and cross-cultural study of humankind.” That’s how I define anthropology in front of my students every semester. That is the reason I chose anthropology in the first place. I knew, when I made that choice, that economics, political science, and sociology were (1) excessively culture bound in Western notions of social reality and (2) hyperspecialized to the point of uselessness.

Now anthropology is also ethnocentric and hyperspecialized. Its uselessness is obvious for anyone who cares to look. The discipline no longer takes seriously the hope to explain humankind’s diversity or its commonalities. Furthermore, in the name of applied anthropology, the discipline does nothing either to improve the lot of non-Western peoples or to improve the well-being of us all. Rather it serves only to force quiescence among the subject peoples to the demands of corporate powers, extend their reach, and in the end allow them to destroy us all.

Extraordinary claims, you say? Yes, I know the drill. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Nevertheless, a moment’s honest reflection will demonstrate that you don’t need extraordinary evidence because these claims aren’t particularly extraordinary. Here’s why.

To begin with, there are fewer and fewer introductory textbooks emphasize holism. A few books might tip the hat for this idea, but it is not given serious treatment. It might be that, back in the days of Boas and Tylor, and even of Kroeber and Radcliffe-Brown, an anthropologist had to be a factotum general to study a culture and its people. She or he had to learn the local language. She or he had to learn about how food was gathered or grown, then cooked; how shelters were constructed; what tools were made and used for what purpose; how work was organized and exchanges made; and how people controlled themselves and others. In other words, anthropology was the more or less science of this-and-that, which had to fit together somehow.

Now, the natives have anthropologists in every hut and field of their community. Zinacantan, Chiapas, Mexico has become a classical case of specialization gone amok. In 1969, Evon Z. Vogt could claim in Zinacantan that the village and municipio enjoyed the presence of some 90 ethnographers, each specializing in myth, world view, gender roles, and God knows what else. The tired joke about household composition—man, woman, children, anthropologist—took on a new life.

Now specialization is the holy grail, the sacred cow, of anthropology. Hasn’t anyone done a paper on the nutritional value of yak milk? Well, let’s get on it. Is there something feminists overlooked about abducted Yanomamo women? Let’s spend another $10,000 to find out. In their scramble to make some original contribution, the anthropologists, like their brothers and sisters in sociology, have become irrelevant hyperspecialists. Holism no longer exists as a methodological tool.

Irrelevant you say? Look at what we’ve done right, says a defender of Margaret Mead in Margaret Mead and Samoa. If so, then let’s see what there is to show for all this effort. Why is Africa undergoing the greatest die-off from AIDS in its known history? Why is Latin America undergoing ever-increasing poverty, so much so that with every U.S. military intervention, revolutionary movements keep popping up? What about the fact that peasants endure the greatest privation since Deng Xaoping effectively ended the economic Communist model? Yuppies in Shanghai and Hong Kong make money handover fist while the rest of China starves. What good have anthropologists done for the people they studied and were supposed to help?

In other words, what has anthropology done lately to benefit the humankind it purports to understand?

But don’t anthropologists hold cultural relativism to be self-evident? I daresay that ethnologists today are no less ethnocentric and culture bound that their counterparts in the other social sciences. The reductionism accompanying sociobiology, cognitive anthropology, structuralism, and all the other so-called postmodernist ideologies that have grown like weeds inside some dilapidated mansion is nothing but Western claptrap. Science has taken flight from the discipline, replaced by a conceptual sophistry that bears no resemblance to the scientific study of humankind over which anthropologists once prided themselves.

Anthropology, like the other social sciences, has grown in the way that, as Edward Abbey would put it, cancer cells grow. The universities are bloated with hyperspecialized hobby horses, funded either by taxpayers too poor to benefit from the Bushian tax breaks or by foundations whose largess come from corporations overcharging the consumers and wringing the last ounce of energy from their employees before spitting them out. Every meeting generates anew arcane papers that invite self-congratulation or critique over methodological triviata, chit-chat that hides the latest intrigues in the academic sandbox, and meat markets with ever-increasing numbers of frustrated job seekers who have to face yet another year of taxicab driving or adjunct instructorships—and who just blew another couple grand for this annual rite of futility.

The future of anthropology? Like cancer, it’s a growing discipline. Like cancer, it absorbs money, intelligence, and facilities for no other purpose than its growth. Its claim to distinction as a holistic, cross-cultural science has long since gone by the board. Until it ceases to be the child of imperialism that Kathleen Gough long ago declared, and gets on with the twin task of finding commonalities and diversity of all humankind and of learning how these findings can prove beneficial to us all—not just the power elite—the cancer metaphor will never break down.

Again, the future of anthropology? What future?

Paul McDowell
Santa Barbara City College