7. Reflections on Departmental Traditions and Social Cohesion in American Anthropology

This study was loosely sponsored by the Centennial Executive Commission of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), although it articulated questions I have thought about and hoped to explore formally for many years. Like most things worth doing, the project has taken longer and proved more complicated than I expected at its onset. I envisioned being able to speak systematically about the demographics of career mobility from department of training to present employment and wondered how, or even if, ties from professional socialization were maintained within present practice. In many ways the study raised more questions than it answered. But I believe that these questions are integral to the reflexivity of the contemporary discipline and that it is time to share the reflections that emerged as I attempted to assimilate the insights and queries shared with me by colleagues, both through a formal questionnaire and through recurring discussions over the intervening several years. I hope that this report will encourage ongoing reflexivity about our collective interactional, institutional, and paradigmatic networks.

Centennials are times for taking stock—of where we have been and of where we are going. Let me trace the process that led to my survey and the tack it took as it acquired a life of its own. I am not a survey researcher at heart. The most intriguing patterns emerged for me in reading each questionnaire as a whole, as a statement about the professional life world of a single responding colleague. Many individuals did not respond formally to the questionnaire but chose to talk to me about particular issues that captured their attention. Relative to the possible number of respondents, very few questionnaires were returned.¹ Although there is nothing statistically significant in the questionnaire results, answers to most questions reached a saturation point where new answers were already familiar in outline. Not everyone agreed, even in assessing the same departmental tradition at the same time, but the range of responses was far from random as colleagues accepted the challenge to reflect on their own career trajectories. Each response added a dimension to the interpretive context of departmental organization of professional socialization in American anthropology.²

The problem of social cohesion among an amorphous agglomeration of individuals sharing a profession cannot be tied to any single unifying characteristic. We anthropologists imagine ourselves to constitute a community, but most of us do not know one another or ever expect to do so (Anderson 1983). Despite the apparent contextuality and fuzziness of our sense of solidarity, however, a few institutional infrastructures suggest how social networks might function sufficiently broadly that their collegiality can be attributed in principle to others who are not in fact part of a given individual's personal network. Two of the major ones are the umbrella mandate of the American Anthropological Association (of which more below) and the academic departmental structure of professional socialization (although no longer exclusively of employment).

Professional socialization, usually resulting in a doctorate in anthropology or a closely related discipline, takes place in (at least one) academic department that imposes a personal face on the larger discipline and provides an entrée to its social networks, theoretical potentials, and methodological predilections. Each such department develops over time a particular slant on the wider possibilities in the discipline and, whether consciously or unconsciously, orients its students thereto. Some of these identities persist across professional generations, while others are more ephemeral.

I have been musing for many years about what makes the identity of anthropologists unique among social scientists. I remain convinced that we are different from our nearest academic bedfellows in the social sciences and humanities. Against all odds and despite high levels of internal bickering both within and across subdisciplines, we seem to maintain an overriding sense of intimacy and social cohesion.

A few variables come immediately to mind. Perhaps the most salient feature that distinguishes us is scale. Despite quite remarkable post– World War II expansion, anthropology remains the smallest of the social sciences. Although the AAA certainly no longer meets in a single room where all colleagues know one another personally, this...