Writing A Dissertation

Your proposal raises the further question: will the journalists then find a way to integrate the glut of literature, art history, history, political science, economics, and other PHDs who face this economic crunch–one that predates the current fiscal crisis by some years, by the way? I'd love to read more incisive journalism on all these subjects, too!

And although I take your point about the realities of academics' needs to publish (and for whom they do so), I think you missed my point re audience, which maybe is the wrong word. Again, lots of anthropological work is not written in any form. That does not make it not-work. And it doesn't mean that some don't abuse their insider status. Journalists have lost lots of credit for the same flaw, but that's tagging the whole with the flaws of what I'm convinced is a small minority.

I don't quite agree that anthropologists audiences are also their research subjects. Many anthropologists have been banned from their field sites. No anthropologists heads out to do work that will only be read by a single women's group in Nairobi (for example). They write for their audiences at home. For academic advancement, and for their colleagues. Sometimes the anthropologists never even show their work to the communities that they research in. But maybe those are just the "bad" ones.

"Good" anthropologists, however give back to the communities they work in in other ways. By working with NGOs, womens' groups, harvesting grain, whatever. As participants, and becoming part of the lives of their research subjects. And that is a real strength of the discipline.

But I don't want to discout writing. Written nthropological work is indeed very often theory-laden and full of footnotes and citations. These are symbolic of academic status, but they also serve a purpose. They stake out analytical territory and they allow us to see how new ideas build on old ones. They are tedious and annoying but somewhat necessary. To a degree. Some people are just bad writers.

Jargon and thick academic syntax make us hard to read sometimes, but that difficulty is not unique to anthropology. Think of all the misunderstanding between climate scientists, journalists, politicians, and "the public" today. Sure, climate science is relevant, but how should it become so? By being more lay-accessible or more "scientfically rigorous"? Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Methodologically, anthropology is as diverse a discipline as you're likely to find, since chromatography, genetic sequencing, quantitative surveys, semistructured interviews, and directed observation can all be part of the toolkit. It would be awfully hard to "program" a student to master all of these, and one of the things that makes the discipline appealing to me (and perhaps to journalists) is the diversity and creativity with which anthropologists approach their interests. Our training, if frustrating at the outset for its open-endedness, is purposely practice-based. In no other discipline are students so self-guiding in the execution of their research and the selection of their topics. Again, this is a huge strength, as it promotes curiosity rather than rote repetition. Deweyan learning alive and well, to the extent that it can be in a tower made of elephant tusks. The training that we do get in theory is what allows us to report back to one another with some coherence.

But as for relevance, the most important audiences we have are usually not those in the USA or Europe (our colleagues, mostly) who read journals. Indeed, many of our most important audience members cannot read or, if they can, afford a daily newspaper. We have another "audience" whose interest precedes the written product. They are those with whom we work. From laboratories to women's groups in impoverished cities, it is very difficult to find an anthropological "site" these days that wasn't negotiated in terms of relevance to the "natives" before the tape recorder rolled or pen touched paper. Anthropologists I know spend as much time building fences, clearing lots, going to weddings and funerals, and facilitating communication between groups as they do collecting "relevant" data.

Anthropologists–good ones anyway–can be at their best when they act, as one of my professors put it, as "professional interferers." Relevance, in this sense, is a prerequisite for publication.