I posted a note on Savage Minds about this book, which followed up on another post by Kerim about Tim Ingold’s Radcliffe-Brown Lecture, “Anthropology is not ethnography.” George suggested that the craft aesthetic addressed in that lecture is both central to anthropology and part of the problem today.

I read Ingold’s lecture and found it British. The text is very clear in the distinctions it tries to draw between different modes of anthropological claims on the description of social life. It is in fact a kind of bestiary of distinctions: nomothetic/idiographic, historical/scientific, descriptive/theoretical integration, explicate/implicate order and so on. All very clear and proper.

The crux of the argument is that opposing ethnography to anthropology as method to theory does a dis-service to both. Both practices are engagements with the world and its inhabitants through which we do philosophy. This is hardly a controversial claim, but it is made in the service of arguing that theory and method must come together in craft. There is a particular tricky part of the lecture, where he argues, if I get it, that ethnographic description does not integrate facts and observations the way a painting does (because it would be non-processual) but rather performs a kind of metonymic abstraction, from the field and the fieldwork via writing and the armchair into theory–and this is what he wants to call the craft of anthropology (and ethnography).

So what’s the problem with this? One thing that’s clearly an issue is nostalgia for a pre-industrial academic world in which small craft-oriented production is highly valued over the automated and big social science productions of economics or demographics and its data sets; Ingold even says something to this effect.

A second thing that might be wrong with it emerges at the end, when Ingold makes the very reasonable claim (and very apropos of our little book here) that it is students who have been excluded from their rightful place in the production of anthropological knowledge. Ingold’s invocation of the students “locked out of the power-house of anthropological knowledge construction” is a bit dramatic (not to mention a mixed metaphor in the context of craft), but I think part of the problem of anthropology-as-craft is precisely its necessary master-apprentice relationship. If anthropology is craft, and students should be part of the craft, then what kind of pedagogy does that call for if we want students to also be teachers and researchers in the real world? It’s all well and good for Oxford or Manchester to continually reproduce itself on the small scale, but such a model couldn’t be more out of step with the contemporary university. Everyone who has gone through the Rice program (or most anthro programs) and ended up teaching in a big university probably experiences the very shock that this situation produces. I don’t think that is the case in all disciplines. Certainly, the students I meet in the life sciences, who want to go on to a university career, know from day one how big, industrial and cut throat it is. If there is craft left in that vocation, it is very hard to come by. Anthropology by contrast, remains mostly a small scale craft production.

(Aside: One might compare this version of craft with Richard Sennett’s latest book, The Craftsman, though the anthropologist is not the subject: glassblowers, software programmers and chefs are though. It confronts a similar problem that it can’t deal with: how is it that there are master computer programmers and master glassblowers everywhere today… how is this knowledge still craft if it can be found anywhere, and seemingly transmitted outside of any guild-like structure? There are a couple of posts ([1][2]) at Savage Minds on the subject).

thoughts?