Rena Lederman

February 29, 2024

My ASA Chat excerpts and summarizes my contribution to the November 2023 American Ethnologist Forum, “What’s the good of anthropology?”.  For the paper in full, see: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/amet.13229.

That paper concerns a dilemma faced in practicum courses and in helping students represent anthropology’s distinctive research style to research ethics committees mostly comprising mainstream social-behavioral scientists. In my experience, the quality of anthropological research that attracts students is its realism—its rooting in anthropologists’ sustained relationships with persons and circumstances wherever they actually are. Students are captivated by the possibility of engaging in meaningful ways with people whose experience moves them. However, from a conventional social-behavioral science perspective, being with and learning from people on the latter’s terms and in conditions not controlled by the researchers, is incoherent as science (and, in that sense, unprofessional and unethical). Dominant social-behavioral research styles sacrifice realism for replicability by creating special-purpose settings to enable systematic hypothesis-testing and reproducible findings. Realism is also devalued in research ethics reviews, which treat replicability (not realism) as the social-behavioral research standard. 

            My references to “mainstream” and “conventional” social and behavioral science rest on field research of a different kind from the work I carried out in Papua New Guinea in the late 1970s–early 1990s.  While the first couple of decades of my research career were devoted to Melanesianist field research and teaching, I have spent a larger fraction of the past three decades reflecting comparatively on anthropological research values and practices in relation to those of our disciplinary neighbors in the humanities and social/behavioral sciences. Much of that reflection was accomplished as a university and disciplinary citizen serving on committees and other bodies as the only anthropologist among experts in those neighboring disciplines. In addition to reading published and unpublished sources of various kinds, my comparative disciplinary understanding derives from practical, engaged experience serving on those bodies—including post-doctoral fellowship committees, an IRB, various funding agency subcommittees, national-level commissions evaluating research ethics oversight practices themselves, and more.  

Rena Lederman (PhD Columbia; Professor, Princeton): At Princeton, Dr. Lederman administered the department’s undergraduate program (especially 1980s); she was on the board and executive committee of the Program in Women’s (then Gender and Sexuality) Studies (1980s-2000s), served as Anthropology’s Director of Graduate Studies and was her department’s representative on the university’s Institutional Review Board for a total of 16 years, among other service responsibilities.  Dr. Lederman began her scholarly career as a student of Melanesian exchange meanings and practices, gender relations and politics, and historical dynamics and discourses—drawn to Highland Papua New Guinea for its decentralized, participatory political culture; and to anthropological scholarship on PNG and the Pacific as resources for rethinking EuroAmerican assumptions about sociality and about “cultures” as bounded, ahistorical, and shared. Pacific perspectives on cultural boundaries, differences, and transformations continued to inform her thinking as her work shifted during the 1990s and into the 2000s to engage controversy within and beyond anthropology over the public reception of disciplinary expertises. Around 2000 her emergent comparative understanding of disciplinary knowledges became a means for intervening in national and international policy discourse on human research regulation. Much of her time over the past 25 years has been spent intervening in practical and scholarly ways to respond to the panic prompted by international regulatory “hypervigilance” that appeared to threaten ethnographic research disproportionately. Once fully retired in 2024, she plans to return to delayed projects central to her scholarship.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkRdpMfyx5s&authuser=0

Robert Rubenstein

January 18, 2024

In this talk I reflect on the role of relationships in the field. I mean this in two senses, (1) the professional and personal relationships that we form with colleagues; and (2) the roles played by relationships we form with people among whom we do fieldwork, and how these intersect. Both forms of relationship influence the shape of the discipline and contribute to defining the topics of our research. Regarding the first, in this talk I reflect on how a chance introduction to Sol Tax contributed to my own anthropological practice. I met Sol half a dozen years after completing my doctorate. Completed at the end of 1976, my doctoral studies focused on Mesoamerica, language and education, and on the philosophy of science.  Before meeting Sol, I had read Robert Redfield’s papers in the University of Chicago Special Collections. Among those papers I found fascinating the relationship between Robert Redfield and Tax. I discuss what led me to the 1991 publication of Fieldwork: The Correspondence of Robert Redfield and Sol Tax, which compiles and annotates some of the letters they exchanged during their Guatemalan fieldwork. I describe the archival work that led to the publication and the ways in which referees reacted to the book proposal. Working further with Sol, I found Action Anthropology to be a good case to work with as I sought to replicate research done by Don Campbell on the role of relationships and personality in the founding of schools in psychology, which I discuss. As well, Sol’s leadership in the IUAES led to an introduction to Mary LeCron Foster, from which developed a 20 year-long collaboration on the anthropology of peace and human rights. I describe the way this led to the founding of the IUAES Commission on Peace and Human Rights, and to my subsequent work on the anthropology of multilateral peacekeeping.  Regarding the ways in which relationships with people among whom we do our fieldwork, in this talk I discuss how the reciprocal obligations of field work with multilateral peacekeeping forces led to my working with the United States Army Peacekeeping Institute and the United Nations. The former somewhat paradoxical given my own biography in relation to the US war in Vietnam. Subsequently, this led back to the discipline because, despite peacekeeping being exempted from the list of ‘anthropological sins’ articulated by the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, I was among those described as war criminals at the business meeting of the 2007 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association.

Robert A. Rubinstein is currently Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Professor of International Relations at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. His research focuses on political and medical anthropology and on social science history and research methods. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1977. He received a master’s degree in public health from the University of Illinois in Chicago in 1983.From 1994 to 2005 Rubinstein directed the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts at the Maxwell School.Rubinstein has conducted overseas research in urban and rural Egypt, where he lived from 1988-1992, and in Belize and Mexico. In the United States, he has conducted research in Atlanta, Chicago, and Syracuse. In political anthropology, Rubinstein’s work focuses on cross-cultural aspects of conflict and dispute resolution, including negotiation, mediation and consensus building. He is an originator of the subfield now referred to as the  anthropology of peacekeeping. In 1983, Rubinstein was a founding member of the Commission on Peace and Human Rights of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences.  Rubinstein has collaborated on policy applications of his work with the International Peace Academy, the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations, The United Nation Office of Internal Oversight Services, and the United States Army Peacekeeping Institute. As a medical anthropologist, Rubinstein has focused on conflict and health, disparities in access to health care and the implications of those disparities for the health of populations, and on the integration of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. He has developed community-based health interventions in Egypt and Atlanta. And additionally, he has collaborated on health policy issues with the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Carter Center, the Georgia Department of Physical Health, and the Onondaga County Health Department. Robert Rubinstein has published more than 100 articles in journals and books. He is author or editor of ten books and research monographs.  Among the many honors he has received are the 2016 Victor Sidel and Barry Levy Award for Peace from the American Public Health Association, the 2010 Robert B. Textor and Family Prize for Excellence in Anticipatory Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association, and the Chancellor’s Citation for Faculty Excellence and Scholarly Distinction from Syracuse University.

https://youtu.be/WMkfsOwedV0

December 7, 2023

Magdalena Zegarra Chiappori

October 9, 2023

Leslie Sponsel

The Yanomami of the Amazon in Brazil and Venezuela are one of the most famous, fascinating, studied, misrepresented, exploited, and endangered Indigenous people in the world. The Yanomami are reflected in various ways and degrees in many of the theoretical approaches and issues in the history of anthropology since the 1960s. They are a microcosm of anthropology. Moreover, they have suffered horrifically from devastating alien invasions of their traditional territory, most of all waves of illegal gold miners in the 1980s, and again in recent years. Every aspect of their population, culture, and ecology has been impacted, and for many communities in devastating ways. Building on his recent book, The Yanomami in the Amazon: Toward an Ethical Anthropology beyond Othering, Les Sponsel will discuss in historical perspective the research and controversies and scandals surrounding the Yanomami and as well as a few of the more than one hundred anthropologists who have had the unique privilege of living and studying with them. Sponsel will home in on professional ethics and human rights, as well as the changing political ecology of the Yanomami and of anthropology. The talk will also inform the Yanomami case as a component of the “human nature industry” which erroneously and dangerously celebrates the ubiquity of warfare through ideologically driven Hobbesian pseudoscience.

Dr. Leslie E. Sponsel is Professor Emeritus at the University of Hawai’I. He earned his B.A. in Geology from Indiana University (1965), and the M.A. (1973) and Ph.D. (1981) in Biological Anthropology from Cornell University. Over the last four decades he taught at seven universities in four countries, including two as a Fulbright Fellow (Venezuela and Thailand). In 1981, he was hired to develop and direct the Ecological Anthropology Program at the University of Hawai`i. His courses include Ecological Anthropology, Environmental Anthropology, Primate Behavioral Ecology, Spiritual Ecology, Sacred Places, Anthropology of Buddhism, Ethics in Anthropology, and Anthropology of War and Peace. Although retired since August 2010, usually he teaches one course each semester and devotes the remainder of his time to research and publications. From 1974 to 1981, Sponsel conducted several trips to the Venezuelan Amazon to research biological and cultural aspects of human ecology with the Yanomami and other Indigenous societies. Almost yearly since 1986 Sponsel visits Thailand to research aspects of Buddhist ecology and environmentalism together with his wife, Dr. Poranee Natadecha-Sponsel. In recent years, their research has focused on sacred caves in northern Thailand. Sponsel’s extensive publications include numerous journal articles, book chapters, encyclopedia articles, four monographs, three edited books, and two co-edited books. He also publishes in other fields to better integrate his work with different subjects and broaden his audiences. He is one of the pioneers in developing the interdisciplinary subjects of spiritual ecology, nonkilling anthropology, and ethnoprimatology.

September 14, 2023

Riall W. Nolan

A casual question from my advisor in the Spring of my senior year set me off on a trajectory I would never have imagined. I’d like to chat about how and why I “came to” anthropology, and what I’ve tried to do with it over the years. During my career, I learned a bit about the institutions we’ve created (as Mary Douglas pointed out to us) to do our thinking for us, and how they act to both enable and impede our efforts to address global challenges. I’ll finish the talk by discussing some of our efforts to create a professional arm for our discipline, why that’s increasingly important, and how senior anthropologists should support these efforts.

Riall W. Nolan is Professor Emeritus at Purdue University. He has a doctorate in social anthropology from the University of Sussex. About his career, he writes: “In 1965, the Peace Corps sent me to Senegal, and my life changed forever. I spent the next twenty years living and working overseas, teaching, researching and managing international development projects. I lived for years in widely diverse places – Papua New Guinea, Senegal, Tunisia, and Sri Lanka. When I decided to come back to the US in the mid-80s, I managed international programs at several large US universities, where my goal was to get as many young Americans out of town as possible. This took up another twenty years of my life. In 2010, I finally rejoined the faculty full-time. A few years later, I began to split my time between my US university and the University of Cambridge in the UK. At Cambridge, I taught people how to incorporate anthropology into development work. In the US, I worked with students to help prepare them for non-academic careers. Anthropology has enormous potential to help us change how we relate to the world and the people in it. I have always worked, inside and outside the university, to help younger anthropologists realize this potential. It is a slow and sometimes frustrating process, but very worthwhile. I’m still at it.”

Preview attachment Sid Greenfield ASA Thursday Chat May 2023.mp4

May 4, 2023

Sid Greenfield

This chat summarizes the series of fortunate accidents that led the son of two High School dropouts, who almost became one himself, to get a PhD in anthropology. This, and a tenured position at a young age, led to a research career that took him from studying the family in Barbados to Brazil, where his research into patronage overlapped with Political Science. He did history when he went to Portugal to unravel the origins of plantations and plantation slavery. Returning to Brazil, he delved into medicine when he entered the enchanted world of healing in Northeast Brazil where beings we place in another plane of reality return to our world through mediums to perform milagres (“miracles”) such as surgeries in which they cut into patients with anything from a surgical scalpel to a rusty knife to an electric saw without anesthesia or antisepsis. The patients feel no pain, do not develop infections, and recover. Finally, as age and infirmity took hold, in collaboration with colleagues, he is helping improve the mental health of women in a favela (slum) in Fortaleza and working with local people to raise their own food.

Moshe Shokeid ASA Thursday Chat March 2023.mp4 – Google Drive

March 16, 2023

Moshe Shokeid

Only a minority among our colleagues enjoy the opportunity to revisit their earlier fieldwork sites, reviewing their initial observations and research conclusions. This paper presents my experience witnessing the dramatic social transformations that have taken place owing to internal and external processes, in three fieldwork sites over twenty to thirty years. The subjects of these ethnographic monographs : Moroccan Jewish immigrants in an Israeli farming community; Israeli emigrants in the Borough of Queens; the gay and lesbian synagogue in New York City. These evolutionary changes, unconceivable during the studied period but inevitable aftereffects of most ethnographic projects, present a reality that anthropologists rarely consider in their work and teaching.

Carole McGranahan Theory as Ethics ASA Thursday Chat 02_16_23.mp4 – Google Drive

February 16, 2023

Carole McGranahan

To theorize is to make an argument, to make sense of the world, to name and create. It is to stake a claim in and about the world. This can be an ethical act. However, it has not always been one. Thinking of theory as ethics, rather than solely as intellectual practice, requires a rethinking of the purpose and not just the content of theory. This is not a prescription for theory, but an acknowledgment of a shift underway across the disciplines. In anthropology, one key move is our recognition of ethnography as theory as well as method. As we reassess theory as a form of ethnographic knowledge, how and when do ethics enter the conversation? What are our responsibilities to speak not only truth to power, but also ethics to theory? In this talk, I explore these questions through (1) my own three decades of research with the Tibetan exile diaspora, and (2) current theoretical trends in anthropology.

Carole McGranahan is Professor in and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Colorado. She holds a PhD in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan (2001). Dr. McGranahan is a scholar of contemporary Tibet and the USA and conducts research with the Tibetan exile community in both South Asia and North America. She is author of Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War (Duke University Press, 2010), co-editor of Imperial Formations (with Ann Stoler and Peter Perdue, SAR Press, 2007) and Ethnographies of U.S. Empire (with John Collins, Duke University Press, 2018), and editor of Writing Anthropology: Essays on Craft and Commitment (Duke University Press, 2020). She is currently finishing a book on Theoretical Storytelling.

Harvard Chiapas Project Thursday Chat by Matt Watson.mp4 – Google Drive

January 26, 2023

Matthew C. Watson

Between 1957 and 1980, 142 students conducted ethnography in Mexico through the Harvard Chiapas Project. One-third of them became professional anthropologists. Project alumni include scholars of Mesoamerica as well as experts on regions around the world, where they extended methods developed to study Zinacantán, a Chiapas municipality of 8,000 residents, to cultural study writ large. They have built high-impact research centers and trained generations of anthropologists in methods learned in the Chiapas highlands. The Chiapas Project’s impact on the humanities and social sciences is immeasurable. Yet this major project and field school has figured only peripherally in histories of anthropology. This talk develops current efforts to rewrite anthropology’s history by tracing the pedagogical, technological, and experiential conditions of ethnographic training and fieldwork. I center two technological conditions of fieldwork in Chiapas from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s: the use of a Land-Rover as a vehicle enabling and framing ethnographic interviews; and the novel incorporation of aerial photography as a workaround for generating ethnographic data under conditions of compromised rapport.

Matthew C. Watson is an associate professor of anthropology at Mount Holyoke College. His work on the history of anthropology has focused centrally on twentieth-century Maya studies as a site of popular science with deep political and economic consequences in Mexico and Central America. His book, Afterlives of Affect: Science, Religion, and an Edgewalker’s Spirit (Duke University Press, 2020) evokes how surrealist artist and art historian Linda Schele imbued a space of banal historical research, Maya hieroglyphic decipherment, with an aura of joyous revelation. His recent work turns to the history of midcentury ethnography in highland Chiapas, centering techniques and technologies of ethnographic fieldwork and pedagogy developed through the Harvard Chiapas Project (1957-1980).

ASA Thursday Chat 12_8_22 ASA at the AAAs of the Future.mp4 – Google Drive

December 8, 2022

Welcome from Maria Cattell.

There were both good things and difficulties with the 2022 meeting.  In the Thursday chat we want to hear your ideas about how we on the ASA Board can make improvements for future years. Several board members will help to guide the discussion and keep us on track. Among them are: Jim Weil, Rick Feinberg, Jay Schensul, Tim Wallace, Devva Kasnitz and myself.  Again, this Thursday we hope to explore ideas to make the meetings more interesting, fun and rich for ASA members. The discussion also will help President-Elect Jay Schensul as she prepares the ASA programming for Toronto’s 2023 AAA meetings.