Identity Statement

Fashioning a Departmental Identity at Northwestern

Timothy Earle
Anthropology News
March 1999
Pg. 14-15, 20

The dismemberment of the Department of Anthropology at Stanford (AN, September 1998) has shaken our sense of self. Stanford, a top-ranked, mid-sized department, had seemed an ideal program, and its inability to resolve disciplinary difference raises stark fears. Is Anthropology fragmenting and fading? Can anthropology survive only in large universities, the Michigans and the Berkeleys and the UCLAs where the four fields can survive through size that allows each field to operate independently? Some feel that anthropology as a discipline has been dissolving for a generation. Specialization and rich training have increasingly isolated many practitioners at the same time that allied disciplines of sociology, history, human biology, and linguistics, and the women's-ethnic-area-cultural studies programs have gobbled up our messages. Are we now redundant?

We think not. The Department at Northwestern is committed to an integrated four-field program powered by the intellectual differences and complementary of a holistic Anthropology. We are building sociocultural anthropology, archaeology, biological anthropology, and linguistic anthropology as strong intellectual fields while emphasizing bridges between them. Our program crosses the cultural borders that have divided the humanities and sciences, and strikes a union recognizing manifold approaches and accepting the tensions and challenges that they bring. Within anthropology, our common academic history and interests give a unity that may be difficult to discern from the outside. Yet, by acknowledging the diverse theoretical perspectives that inform research, we can fashion an evolving multidimensional understanding of the human experience, allowing individual perspectives to contribute without fears that one will silence the others.

FASHIONING A DEPARTMENTAL IDENTITY

Three general paths exist for departments of anthropology. One is to grow to such a size that each subfield of anthropology can exist as a quasi-independent discipline. Favored by many large universities, this solution is intellectually easy: the subfields become minimally involved with the others' faculty. This path is towards separate but equal programs that allow, but do not encourage, cross-overs. A second path, chosen by Chicago, Santa Cruz, San Diego, and now Stanford, is to limit a department's intellectual range so as to lessen the tensions within their faculties. As large and specialized programs have come to dominate training of doctoral students, a new generation is emerging with little commitment to the encompassing discipline of anthropology.

A third path, however, exists. Northwestern's department repudiates any dismemberment of anthropology and has committed itself to build an integrated program. By exercising sufficient patience with the rifts that have grown up within modern anthropology, we can seize the advantage of our historical breadth for a new era of multidisciplinary thinking. Northwestern has designed its program to offer one such model for interdisciplinarity. I provide details on our program to illustrate how such bridging can work. These details may show processes of departmental integration that, with totally different contents, could be implemented by many departments across the country. First off we recognize that we cannot "do it all": to try to build a program that fills all anthropological specialties is simply impossible, and I believe that Departments need to build to strength rather than mending a tattered whole cloth. Establish strengths in each field, build to those strengths, and seek bridges that reinforce strengths in other fields.

At Northwestern, our goal is to have each field with one or more strengths-- areas, methodologies, and/or theoretical approaches in which we can be recognized as among the very best. For cultural anthropology, the foci are African ethnography, economic anthropology, urban studies, and gender studies; for archaeology, the comparative study of the evolution of complex societies; for linguistic anthropology, Latin America and
Caribbean ethnography, practice theory and formal analysis; for biological anthropology, human biology. Then the strategy is to make specific hires that bridge to other fields, as for example ongoing hiring objectives in cultural anthropology, archaeology, biological anthropology for specialties in Africa, Latin America, economic anthropology, and complex societies.

To embrace the dynamic tensions inherent within anthropology we must try to maintain a balance in personnel so that groups do not feel threatened or marginalized……

Several lines of creative tension within our Department include:
1. between spatial and temporal scales of analysis, as in micro analysis of linguistics and practice theory, and macro-scale analysis of political economies and archaeology;

2. between methods, as in the quantitative approaches of network analysis and human demography, and the qualitative methods of ethnography and life histories; and

3. between causes, as in natural processes of human biology and reproduction, of environmental systems, of technological mechanics, and in cultural processes of identity, sexuality, and meaning.

Intellectual tensions probably characterize most social science department, but for anthropology they lie at the heart of our discipline and recognize long-standing antinomies that cannot simply be transcended. Our goal is to make hires that create affiliations across fields and thus minimize inherent tendencies to fission. Reproduction,
for example, is neither purely "natural" nor purely "cultural," but involves elements of both in intricate ways that anthropology's breadth can be used to lead the social sciences on important integrative paths.

All intellectual projects benefit from a self-conscious sense of their place in the history of thought, and our faculty richly represents work in critical theory and anthropological history. At the same time that we study the workings of complex society, we investigate the placement of the scholar within that world. Our faculty is thus directly involved in the archaeology of anthropological thought, discovering how the discipline of anthropology and related social sciences affect and are affected by broader political agendas.

Within the Department at Northwestern two point of convergence make connection and collaboration feasible across the fields:

1. Dedicated to original field research. A research focus on world issues and cases gives an immediate common ground for discussion. The inherent complexity of human worlds demands an eclectic understanding of such issues as reproduction, economy, political strategies, and cultural production that we study. The Department's geographical area and theoretical foci encourage bridging themes to emerge.

2. Focus on the Anthropology of Complex Societies. The study of complex societies offers not only a broad range of topics for study by members of all fields, but above all, a linkage with one another organized around the study and explanation of the longue duree of societies and cultures whose consideration illuminates our condition in the present. Expansive common grounds for intellectual interchange and debate include colonialism/world systems, human health and reproduction, agricultural change, and cultural production.

At different temporal and spatial scales, with different methodologies, and with contrasting theories, the anthropology of complex society studies how such human groups organize, operate, and change. These investigations immediately draw our attention to economic relations, social power, identity, and culture as a highly dynamic phenomenon. To illustrate how substantive themes emerge to use the different field strengths, we list three integrative, research problems that our faculty is now pursuing:

Intergenerational processes of biological and cultural change. Research focuses on the internal dynamics of the household and how they articulate with economic and political forces. We study how household members solve basic problems of survival and replacement. Solutions involve cultural and social factors wrapped around the biological requirements of hunger, health, sexuality, and reproduction. Within households individuals meet daily contingencies, and these actions then have long-term intended and unintended consequences.

The human landscape: processes of intensification, building, degrading, and signification. At scales that vary from the space of a family's home to broad 'natural' environments, humans build their physical world to provide needed resources, to structure social relations, and to imbue action with meaning. The landscape contains aspects of 'nature' operating outside of human control, but the specific nature of those processes is transformed and directed by human labor. The different uses and meaning of the landscape fit together in creative and lasting ways that channel (restrict and promote) forms of social change. Interactions among different scales of space and time provide for the interface of the different fields of anthropology.

Cultural practice, material production, and the use of ideology in the institutionalization of power. This theme links ideology (strategically created cultural forms) to an external world of performance and objects. United are actions, spaces, and artifacts in the construction of history and meaning. We focus on how ideological change takes place both in the long-term and in the short-term. What is being represented and the form of its
representation affect its social significance. This leads us to unite concerns for performance, production, information, and institution in the operation and continuity of human social action.

Themes can be quite flexible so that hiring can cross borders in surprising and creative ways to keep our discipline's cutting edge integrative and holistic, a vision unlike any other discipline in academe.

The operational objective is evident: to construct means by which a broad anthropological identity can be conceptualized and presented locally in the world of the departments. At Northwestern five strategies are being used:

Hiring. Search committees are composed of representatives from several fields and charged with searching creatively for bridging relationships based on the established goals of the fields.

The first-year seminars. Incoming graduate students take a year-long seminar sequence that socializes them as an anthropological cohort. The seminars draw out the primary contributions that each field makes to the broader discipline and identify likely grounds for collaboration.

Bridging seminars. Graduate students take a bridging seminar that discusses how collaboration across fields of anthropology enriches our understanding of specific anthropological issues. Topics focus on specific integrative themes. This year’s topic will be “Economic Anthropology from Ethnographic and Archaeological Perspectives” led by Timothy Earle (archaeologist) and Karen Tranberg Hansen (a cultural anthropologist). Previous years seminars have included “ The Anthropology of Food and Nutrition, led by William Leonard (a biological anthropologist) and Mary Weismantel (a cultural anthropologist), which surveyed various anthropological approaches to the study of food, looking at the ways in which biology and culture interact to influence variations in food consumption patterns and nutritional well-being, “Everyday Life”, led by Cynthia Robin (archaeologist) and Jack Sidnell (linguistic anthropology), “The Media of Culture” led by Timothy Earle (archaeologist) and William Hanks (linguistic anthropologist), and “World Systems in Anthropological Perspectives”, led by Robert Launay (cultural anthropologist) and Gil Stein ( archaeologist).

Colloquia series. Departmental colloquia can focus on a variety of field specific and integrative themes. The idea is to invite top anthropologists working on issues relevant to a series' theme to give both a formal presentation and to hold open discussions on the topics under consideration. We have been conducting lecture and workshop series tied to biological anthropology and linguistic anthropology. By discussing some of the most exciting field specific research directions, these series are helping to rebuild these fields within our department.

Collaborative research. Both faculty and graduate students are encouraged to design field-research collaborations that cross established subfield lines. We desire an ethic of integrated research, in which the specialized skills of individual scholars can complement each other for a full and rich understanding of the issues under study. Graduate student committees are expected to include members from multiple fields.

By building intellectual interchange into the daily practice of our department, we anticipate that the frontier of a new four-field anthropology can be explored and developed as a model for our discipline and for the social sciences more broadly. Such is our goal.