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 negoti