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AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY IN AMERICAN CULTURE: THE PROBLEM OF INFLUENCE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2012

RICHARD HANDLER
RICHARD HANDLER*
Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology and Program in Global Development Studies, University of Virginia E-mail: [email protected]
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Extract

American anthropologists have a PR problem. We know it, and it bothers us. A left-of-center discipline finds it difficult to get across its cultural criticism in a country with center-right mass media. To make matters worse, the discipline is cursed by the fact of having ancestors who hang around, whose contemporary public presence seems greater than anything the anthropologists of this world can muster. The greatest of these anthropological ghosts is Margaret Mead, whom some anthropologists have never forgiven for her celebrity. Even for those of us who admire her, her presence and that of a few other ancestral figures, like Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict, throw a glaring light on our own lack of a public voice.

Type
Review Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 9 , Issue 3 , November 2012 , pp. 721 - 732
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 Freeman, Derek, Margaret Mead and Samoa (Cambridge, MA, 1983)Google Scholar.

2 Linton's, Ralph chapter on “status and role” in The Study of Man (New York, 1936)Google Scholar was taken by many anthropologists and sociologists of this era as the paradigmatic statement on the topic.

3 Dobrin, Lise and Bashkow, Ira, “‘The Truth in Anthropology Does Not Travel First Class’: Reo Fortune's Fateful Encounter with Margaret Mead,” Histories of Anthropology Annual 6 (2010), 66–128CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Mead, Margaret, Social Organization in Manu'a (Honolulu, 1930)Google Scholar; idem, Kinship in the Admiralty Islands (New York, 1934); idem, The Mountain Arapesh (New York, 1938).

5 Stocking, George, “The Ethnographic Sensibility of the 1920s and the Dualism of the Anthropological Tradition,” in idem, ed., Romantic Motives (Madison, WI, 1989), 208–76Google Scholar.

6 Freeman, , The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research (Boulder, CO, 1999)Google Scholar.

7 David Schneider, “The Coming of a Sage to Samoa”, Natural History, June 1983, 4–10.

8 The term is taken from Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, “Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness,” in Fox, R., ed., Recapturing Anthropology: working in the Present (Sante Fe, NM, 1991), 17–44Google Scholar.