DIAGNOSING AMERICA: Anthropology and Public Engagement.
 by Shepard Forman, ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994. xii, 314 p.

Reviewed by

Hervé Varenne, Teachers College, Columbia University

forthcoming in American Anthropologist.

This is a strong contribution to a particular genre in anthropological writing: essays demonstrating the relevance of the discipline to issues of public policy in the United States. Many have called for such books in recent years. Here is one that does this with no apologies and little self-doubt. Above all this is a book built on a strong moral center: an abiding belief in the "long standing and fundamental values of cultural pluralism and democratic participation" (p.2, and passim).

Indeed the book emanates from the very center of the discipline: it is the latest step in a process that started with a panel appointed by the Executive Committee of the Association. It was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, "met over a two-year period" and shaped the book. Several decisions were taken, including that of remaining "fundamentally value-driven' (p.3) and of understanding "disorder," the central word, in a "loose ... all-embracing" way. The book itself starts with a rapid overview of "American cultural values" by James Peacock who places himself in what he calls the "neocore- value school" (with a bow to Bellah). Follows a series of loosely integrated papers on "democratic participation" (Carol MacLennan), "productivity and hierarchy in American work places" (Frank Dubinskas), "downward mobility" (Katherine Newman), "psychophysiological stress" (Michael Blakey), "kin strategies in U.S.-Mexican households" (Carlos Vélez-Ibanez). The last paper is a discussion of the whole enterprise by Roy Rappaport. This paper (the longest in the volume) evolves into a discussion of "disorder" from a global ecological perspective. The book closes with a joint "Statement to the Profession," a plea for professional anthropologists to engage politically as the authors do, and then to implement this engagement in all aspects of professional activity.

The goals of such a book are so unimpeachable that criticism might appear mean-spirited. Rappaport does make several that anyone who want to follow in these authors' footsteps should take most seriously: it is evident that terms like "democratic participation," "cultural pluralism," "disorder," are fundamentally ambiguous. The authors construct an audience who questions neither the terms not the translations into political action the authors assume self-evident. What any audience who questioned either might do is left as a tantalizing issue that is eventually dismissed as if it threatened the whole enterprise. What might happen outside America, in Europe and further away, if anthropology became closely associated with the authors' particular interpretation of human values, is left for us, readers, to imagine.

Several things make me uncomfortable. There is a pervasive ahistoricism as the extensive work of earlier social scientists is barely mentioned: absent is the work of the Lynds, the Chicago sociologists, Warner. The work of Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck and their critics on American values appears fleetingly in Peacock's paper. The work done by anthropologists in the United States for the past 25 years is reduced to two or three popular books. There is a body of knowledge accumulating about the United States on which any kind of work, however value driven, should build.

More bothersome is the extent to which the papers seem driven by the author's that a moral/political orientation towards those who suffer in the United States must lead to particular modes of analysis. In so doing they subvert the independence of inquiry from immediate control by ideological forces. Eventually, we must trust that inquiry grounded on the methodological and theoretical weaknesses of earlier work is more likely to produce the knowledge we need to engineer political solutions to our moral imperatives. One paper demonstrates this. Vélez-Ibanez actually builds a policy case from ethnographic evidence. In the process he challenges any author (including several in the collection) who "categorize culturally different populations in a pluralistic setting ... within only poverty, underclass, or minority categories" (p.215). Anthropology's strength lies in such demonstrations of complexity and internal difference.

Other disciplines do very well what the authors do here (and they might have been mentioned). One may expect something more distinctive from anthropologists who take the contribution of their discipline as seriously as these obviously do--and particularly so when the discipline is challenged by skeptical outsiders for demonstrations of its utility and contribution.