Date: Mon, 10 Apr 1995 04:37:57 -0600 (MDT)
From: Robert Johnson <johnsorl-AT-Colorado.EDU>
Subject: Re: musing with Gewertz



On Sun, 9 Apr 1995, Mike Lieber wrote:

> Yeah, academic jobs are very hard to come by.  Most anthropologists getting
> their degrees will be employed outside academia, and from where I'm sitting
> right now, there are not nearly enough anthropologists to go around.  While
> AAA doesn't know what the hell is happening, it seems that everyone else has
> suddenly discovered that they need ethnographers, specifically cultural
> anthropologists, to tell them about all kinds of issues that concern variable
> populations.  Eve Pinsker and I are currently working in a Mexican-American and
> a Black community where our university has partnerships with community
> organizations trying to find out what the relationships of these groups with
> the university are and have been.  They all want interns to help them do their
> own research--can we provide them or do the training for them?  Next year,
> we move to the Med School to find out why their minority students have
> difficulties dealing with different parts of the curriculum.  To do the job
> right requires the kind of awareness of difference that only a good grounding
> in area studies brings.  Hispanic students, for example, are a major enigma
> to the Medical folks, since there seems to be no clear pattern of difficulty
> emerging from their data.  They know that Hispanic covers Mexicans, Puerto
> Ricans, Cubans, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, etc..  They just don't know what those
> differences mean.  What the Medical folks would love from us--and corporate
> types want he same thing (see _Managing Cultural Differences_ for an example)--
> is a menu, a trait list that they can use for each identified category.  What
> we have to do is to wean them away from a trait list that will sabotage every
> programmatic response based on it.  Areal studies are where one learns the
> nature of cultural variability.  ASAO does a good job of this.  Eve can give
> even more examples of this kind of thing in evaluating community-based health
> care programs--and evaluations of this sort constitute a natural domain for
> anthropologists.  We ought to own this stuff.

>.............................Or am I missing the point?

>						Mike Lieber

	Yes, Mike your missing the point. As I've told you before, as
	anthropology whores itself to big business, and that includes
	the medical "industry," its going to be placed in more quandries
	than anthro ever was parasiting itself off indigenous peoples.	
	The inherent racism of traditional anthropology, which many of 
	were able to deny, which characterized the "objective" denial
	brought to traditional ethnography, is now being put to use by
	those big business elements that see in it an analytical tool
	to further economic imperialism against racial minorities.
	Big business, whether the medical "industry," World Bank, National
	Science Foundation, or corporate enterprise which employs
	anthropology on a need-to-know basis, is going to play anthropology
	for chumps, an intention on its part which it will no doubt
	succeed in with those of even less observational myopia and
	moral acuity than yourself.
	I am hopeful though, even you seem to detect that somethings amiss.

	Its only going to get worse for anthropology. I would suggest that
	for those older denizens of traditional anthropology, that they have
	today at least one last shot to make something significant for their
	lives. Anthropology must become a force for the liberation of peoples
	and not only harden more as it transitions itself from the colonial
	to the neo-colonial. Maybe as you and others like you come to 
        consciousness and conscience after all these years you can warn 
	those who are just beginning careers in anthropology that anthro isn't
	just another job, but rather a moral calling, that if sold out once,
	only opens up the individual to even greater demands for moral
	compromise.

	You still have some time left. I wish you the best of luck.

							Robert Johnson






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