On Anthropological Sciences and the AAA

I guess the time has rolled around again for my annual navel-gaze regarding my discipline, my place within it, and its future. Two strangely interwoven events have conspired to make me particularly philosophical as we enter into the winter holidays. First, I am in the middle of a visit by my friend, colleague, and former student, Charles Roseman, now an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. The second is that the American Anthropological Association meetings just went down in San Francisco and this always induces an odd sense of shock and subsequent introspection.

Charles graduated with a Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropological Sciences (once a highly ranked department according the the National Research Council) in 2005. He was awarded tenure at UIUC, a leading department for biological anthropology, this past year and has come back to The Farm to collaborate with me on our top-secret sleeper project of the past seven years. We've made some serious progress on this project since he arrived and maybe I'll be able to write about that soon too.

The annual AAA meeting is one  that I never attended until about four years ago, coinciding with what we sometimes refer to as "the blessed event," the remarrying of the two Stanford Anthropology departments. It's actually a bit of coincidence that I started attending AAAs the same year that we merged but it has largely been business of the new Department of Anthropology that has kept me going back – largely to serve on job search committees. This year, I had two responsibilities that drew me to the AAAs. The first was the editorial board meeting for American Anthropologist, the flagship publication of the association.  I joined the editorial board this year and it seemed a good idea to go and get a feel for what is happening with the journal and where it is likely to head over the next couple years.

My other primary responsibility was chairing a session that was organized by two of my Ph.D. students, Yeon Jung Yu and Shannon Randolph. In addition to Yeon and Shannon, my Ph.D. student Alejandro Feged also presented work from his dissertation research.  All three of these students were actually accepted into Anthsci and are part of the last cohort of students to leave Stanford still knowing the two-department system.

It was a great pleasure to sit in the audience and watch Yeon, Shannon, and Alejandro dazzle the audience with their sophisticated methods, beautiful images, and accounts of impressive, extended -- and often hardcore -- fieldwork. For her dissertation research, Yeon worked for two years with commercial sex workers in southern China, attempting to understand how women get recruited into sex work and how social relations facilitate their ability to survive and even thrive in a world that is quite hostile to them. Her talk was incredibly professional and theoretically sophisticated. For her dissertation research, Shannon worked in the markets of Yaoundé, Cameroon, trying to understand the motivations for consumption of wild bushmeat. Shannon was able to share with the audience her innovative approaches to collecting data (over 4,000 price points, among other things) on a grey-market activity that people are not especially eager to discuss, especially in the market itself. Alejandro did his dissertation research in the Colombian Amazon, where he investigated the human ecology of malaria in this highly endemic region. His talk demonstrated that the conventional wisdom about malaria ecology in this region -- namely, that the people most at risk for infection are adult men who spend the most time in the forest -- is simply incorrect for some indidenous popualtions and his time-budget analyses made a convincing case for the behavioral basis of this violation of expectations. This was a pretty heterogeneous collection of talks but they shared the commonality of a very strong methodological basis to the research.

At at time when many anthropologists express legitimate concerns over their professional prospects, I have enormous confidence in this crop of students, all three of whom are regularly asked to do consulting for government and/or non-govermental organizations because of their subject knowledge and methodological expertise. Anthsci graduates -- there weren't that many of them since the department existed for less than 10 years -- have done very well in the profession overall. I will list just a couple here whose work I knew well because I was on their committees or their work was generally in my area

In addition to these grad students, I think that it's important to note the success of the post-docs who worked either in Anthsci or with former Anthsci faculty on projects that started before the merger. Some of these outstanding people include:

In a discipline that is lukewarm at best on the even very notion of methodology, I suspect that students with strong methodological skills -- in addition to the expected theoretical sophistication and critical thinking (note that these skills do not actually trade-off) -- enjoy a distinct comparative advantage when entering a less-than-ideal job market. Of course, I don't mean to imply that Anthsci didn't have its share of graduates who leave the field out of frustration or lack of opportunity or who get stuck in the vicious cycle of adjunct teaching. But this accounting gives me hope. It gives me hope for my both my current and future students and it gives me hope for the field. Maybe I'll even go to AAAs again next year...

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *