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On Entry into Anthropological Publics
by
Teachers College, Columbia University
[these notes were presented at the Council on Anthropology and Education Graduate Student Forum at the November 2003 meetings of the American Anthropological Association)]
The graduate student’s question to elders in the field is as deceptively simple as its answer: “When should I start publishing?” “Early–and often!”
“Doxically”(with all due respect to Bourdieu) this is a question about academic publishing and, not so implicitly, the pragmatics of career building. More precisely it is about transforming always inchoate thoughts and fragments of fieldnotes and other documents into a textual form particular to anthropology (since this is the discipline we are talking about here). It is about “publicizing” oneself, or, more precisely, entering an anthropological public. And it is about doing this using a form that is uniquely useful for initial appointment to an academic position and eventual tenure. There is clearly much that is arbitrary about this form:
• 30 pages of solid prose (ostensibly to be read rather than looked at or heard) that are
• formatted as per the back matter of the association’s journal and that are
• finally acquired after a process of double-bind peer reviewing through which faceless authority figures bestow the right to publish, legitimately.
This form is arbitrary and its imposition, if one follows Bourdieu on scholastic authority, altogether violent. To compose this paper is an inevitable step in the process that, once one has been admitted, taken courses and exams, makes it more and more likely that one will remain caught within the orbit of disciplinary anthropology through first jobs, reappointment and tenure (not to mention further promotion, visibility in the field, and grateful students–until the closing festschrift and obituary in the Newsletter).
Those who know my work also know that I do not agree with Bourdieu on much–even though I must respect the power of his voice. There may be something of a rarely discussed doxa that lead us to produce 30-page papers. But there is little evidence that this is carefully hidden. The arbitrariness of the form is, also, artful. It has its value and, anyway, there are other means at our disposal to make ourselves available to the various publics we may wish to address. Still, we must address the arbitrariness of the form and of its imposition.
It is to insult all of us, professional anthropologists in more or less peripheral positions within the field, to suggest that we are blind to the arbitrariness of the ways through which we enter the anthropological public and control this entry. Even if we, as cultural anthropologists were not in the business of ferreting just this kind of arbitrariness, we should suspect that something peculiar is going on here. We need not have carefully observed the rhetorical forms of other disciplines to know that the 30-page-paper with no tables or illustrations is not universally used. Not only do we “know” this, but we, and particularly “us,” the elders in the field, enforce it. We do so altogether violently through unfavorable blind reviews, denial of tenure and other processes which, together, can produce the full degradation ceremonies that project some out of the orbit of disciplinary anthropology. An event such as this Graduate Student Forum on publishing is such a moment when apprenticed are instructed on how to keep alive the peculiarities of our forms, perhaps because for the apprentices as for the elders, the alternatives are too horrible to contemplate.
I have used the language of “arbitrariness” and “violence” to index a particular form of critical awareness that does also hide something I want to bring out: the orthodox form is, also, a deliberately cultivated artful production in a collective play performed by many actors for many audiences. It is a play that opens on other plays to other publics, Above all, it is a play that is always open to further play on its form–however much these may need to be sanctioned.The power of the form for particular forms of expression and silence is what concerns me here. For professional players this means not only perfecting one form but also entering new contexts and perfecting other forms with different power for expression (and silence). To set the stage for this discussion, I will restate what I take to be first principles. We do not get into anthropology to write 30-page papers (or 250-page books). Publishing such papers on the way to a job can only be a peripheral reason for subjecting oneself to the ritual violence elders must inflict on the apprentices through application, grades, exams, etc. I am precisely not being ironic when I say that anthropology is, and indeed we must struggle for it to remain, the total activity (total social fact?) through which an altogether small sub-set of the population of the world (“us, anthropologists”) teach ourselves something that was not available for instruction until we trained ourselves to listen ever more carefully to people we then re-present to our peers and, through them, we hope, to a broader public that might not otherwise listen carefully to what others have had to say. Or, in Geertz’s more poetic language:the vocation of anthropology is not to answer our deepest questions, but to make available to us answers that others, guarding other sheep in other valleys, have give, and thus to include them in the consultable record of what man has said. (Geertz 1973:30)
Some of us would go further to remain within the particular public controlled by the strictures of “science” if only because it is only by accepting this control that we will achieve something different from what the strictures of “humanism” have produced since the two started to diverge. There is a particular power to arbitrary forms.Before I address this power, I want to explore briefly the notion of the “public” that is directly implied in the concept of “publication.” In the philosophical political sciences, this public is not a controlled and structured field (“community”? “polity”?) for individual practice but rather the ideal-type of a boundless space, an an-archy infinitely available for new voices and new ways of speaking. In that sense, the public is the whole of humanity before (and after) it organizes itself into the various villages, cities or countries we do, mostly, inhabit. As intellectuals, as human beings really, this is the ultimate public to which we are responsible–even though we will never, in this world at least, reach it fully–both because of our limitations and those of our audiences.This understanding of “public” is ideal-typical. It should not be transformed into a utopia. In any of our possible worlds the actual publics we address are both limited and diverse in the sense that there are various boundaries and criteria for participation that are actualized through various forms that, in our societies for sure, are not only the product of arbitrary history, but also the product of deliberate processes of differentiation. The public that makes “academia” is not the public of “policy makers” or “popular culture.” If we want or need to address those we have little choice but to live with the differentiating and discriminating processes that I am trying to index here–after all we do not control the forms of these publics. Even within academia that there are further subdivisions that are all our potential public (to the extent that we can legitimately attempt to make ourselves heard there) but that have also different properties that can be enabling if we take ourselves to be the bricoleurs we know all human beings to be.
In brief, academic-publishing-for-tenure is not the only possible form of entering the public. To a certain extent, while it is the form that we must use at various points in our careers indeed to get tenure and remain legitimate participants, it is also the form that is least likely to do full justice to our research work, not to mention the people who helped us with this work by displaying themselves to us–the people to whom the discipline as a whole is responsible.I will not talk here about the detail of the processes that lead to peer-reviewed academic and scholarly publications. There are many sources where a student can find details and a student would do well to take them to heart. I would even say that, besides the career rationale for the form, there are good reasons to put oneself to the discipline of writing one of these texts. In thirty pages that must stand on their own, one must work at balancing general introductory theoretical statements with a carefully chosen representation of one’s observation and analysis with a focused conclusion. This form, unavoidably, does not allow one to say or represent “everything.” Neither does a 250 page book. But it does allow for certain things to be said that would be obscured in other forms of publication.More importantly for me here, neither the paper nor the book exhaust the forms that we should consider using to address any of the publics that authorize our voices. It may not make sense to address “the general public” early in one’s career for purposes of tenure or promotion. Elders must warn that review committees may not only ignore such writing by even look askance at it. And then again, not helpfully I know, they may applaud! And yet this general public is one that we should also seek to address whether through the press, through “trade books,” through text books, television documentaries, etc. It may not either make early career sense to address policy makers in the language that they can receive: some reviewing committees may not notice in such a language the scholarly work that they sanction. But addressing policy makers in such a language is very much another of the responsibilities of our discipline. And this cannot be done in a language that will prevents the text from being read. Before we blame potential audiences for not reading our work, we must wonder how such audiences will learn to read this work if we do not instruct them on how to do so.
There are also narrower publics, or more hidden ones, that may be interested in our work. More importantly these may precisely be the publics that, as personal authors, we may be most interested in reaching. This is one or several publics made up of the small sub-set of our colleagues who share a particular enthusiasm even though they may not all belong “in” anthropology. We may hope that they will locate us through their diligent searches through our career-oriented publications in more or less obscure journals. But we must also seek them actively and it is with the various techniques for publicizing ourselves in limited fields that I want to end.
The first of these publics to identify is made of those other anthropologists whose fields of interest intersect with one’s own in the narrowest of ways, whether in terms of area, preferred research techniques, or theoretical orientation. In some cases, such a public has already institutionalized itself as a sub-discipline, and area association, etc.. Some of these already have their own journals and professional meetings. In other cases, a public has not institutionalized itself but it may be close to doing so. Over my own career, I participated in the early meetings of what is now the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, and what is now the Society for the Anthropology of North America. Such societies started with small numbers of people meeting together outside the usual organizations. There is every reason for students across institutions and associations to hold such “alternate” meetings anytime they can. In many ways, these are the meetings when one will meet those peers who count for intellectual and scholarly purposes–if not necessarily for purposes of initial appointment. For a while now, emphasis has been put on the mentoring of junior scholars by senior scholars. Developing peers is equally essential.
How does one identify these future peers? The obvious way is to attend meetings of already established associations and do the networking we are all already familiar with. I also want to make a pitch for using the new technologies, and particularly the Internet. I encourage students to develop a professional site as early as possible in their graduate careers and to update it at every significant stage in their disciplinary development, particularly as their research takes shape (proposal) and as it matures (early papers, dissertation, etc.). Some may worry that someone will “steal” an idea: I would answer “You Wish!” Obscurity is a much greater risk. Nothing is more heartening, I believe, than being “discovered” by someone who shares some of our interests and who can actually directly address these interests from a related point of view. Some of those who discover us will be potential peers in the discipline, others will hail from other disciplines and probably also from outside its boundaries. One can be skeptical about the claims of some about the universality of the Internet as medium but it hard to argue that it is a much broader public sphere than any of those we have been accustomed to so far.
One feature of the Internet is particularly important for scholars: the ability it provides for extensive publication (in all senses) of parts of one’s corpus that, until now, had no chance of ever been made public in any form (except perhaps by a very well-endowed library, and then again to only a select few). Most of what we collect, even after it has been indexed, analyzed, and otherwise represented, has remained unaccessible. To a large extent we “trust” each other about the existence of a corpus out of which, even in most book-length texts, very little is actually made available for perusal. This is what the Internet is changing. It certainly is extra work to format one’s background material for Internet publication (though perhaps not so much if one has thought about it from the earliest stages). At this point it is work that will not “count” for career purposes since such publication is not peer-reviewed. I can envision a moment however when it will be expected by at least some on reviewing committees that the printed publication be accompanied by a well-formed site where much of the supporting material is made available. I am sure this will be the case for analysis based on visual material. But one can also imagine calls to re-present the kind of background ethnographic material based on participant-observation that it has been so hard until now to make available except through textual summaries that, as we have been reminded for several decades now, may owe more to the strictures of the travelogue than to those of the sciences. Who knows that such a requirement might lead to shorter “papers” (perhaps 10-page articles that would be the textual version of oral presentation at meetings) indexing a large web site. This could have the side effect of allowing a greater percentage of scholarly work to be made available and peer-reviewed.There is every evidence that these new forms for publication are beginning to be institutionalized and will soon be protected by style-sheets and other means of control and sanction. But my plea here is for a continuing exploration of the forms even beyond what has been institutionalized so far. I would go so far as to say that evidence of such exploration should somehow count for career purposes–though I would not want this to be taken as a radical critique of the forms that count at this point. There will always be such forms. They have served us well so far. To refuse to use them at this point is to walk out of the discipline. Even new forms will have to be extensively discussed in the various forums that, together, constitute our anthropological public before the can move to the background of our considerations and what will then appear as an unexamined doxa.It many be too harsh to say, as I was told by the speaker at my Ph.D. commencement: “If you do not publish you should perish!” But with entry into anthropology comes the responsibility of speaking out in the ways that will make ourselves heard. And, with Merleau-Ponty, I accept that we will never escape the deliberate artfulness of instructed forms not because they enslave us but because they are the very conditions that allow us to say something new.