The Radical Transformation of Anthropology: History Seen through the Annual Meetings of the American Anthropological Association, 1955–2005

There are those who celebrate the radical transformation of anthropology, those who mourn it, and those for whom it is unknown ancient history. The world of cultural and social anthropology was turned upside down long ago, but this great transformation has not begun to be documented.¹ In this chapter I want to offer a brief account of when and under what circumstances the momentous changes that produced a radically different discipline began.

The Association of Senior Anthropologists sponsored a session for the 2004 annual meetings of the AAA with the title "The 1960s Radical Restructuring of Anthropology: The Making of Anthropology as We Know It." In the abstract, Paul Doughty asked, "To what degree did the 60s counter-culture zeitgeist contribute" to the "restructuring of anthropology[?]." I contend that it had everything to do with the transformation of American anthropology. Without the '60s as we knew and lived them, ours would be a very different intellectual and professional world. I shall attempt to document this claim through a chronological investigation of the programs of the annual meetings of the AAA, especially through the crucial years from 1965 to the early 1970s, drawing upon the programs and abstracts of those years as well as on my own memory of the events and the zeitgeist. But first I must briefly characterize the nature of the major transformations that I will discuss.

There have been many aspects to the restructurings and transformations of American anthropology over the past four decades; of course, not the least of which is the remarkable growth in the size of the field and the degree of diversification this has entailed. But the ones that I want to focus on involve both the practice of cultural anthropology (social anthropology, ethnology, ethnography) and an ethos, a mentalité, a mindset, a general disposition. Anthropology and anthropologists have been profoundly affected by the same forces that have influenced so much of American, European, and world intellectual life, of course— those we sometimes abbreviate as "the posts." But these developments have taken a special form in our case.

This practice and this mindset are not universal but they do pervade the work of many contemporary anthropologists and have come to characterize the field at its commanding heights. Whereas until the mid 1960s American anthropology—the four-field variety—was conceived of as an "objective" ("positivistic") science, since anthropology's newest revolution the very notions of positivism, objectivity, and science itself are not only questioned but are—in some quarters—considered impossibilities at best, lies and tools of hegemonic domination at worst.² Consequently, the nature of research, the character of publication, and the tone of much public discourse in anthropology, has to a considerable extent shifted, from one of putatively, perhaps mistakenly, disinterested and nonjudgmental scholarship to one of open engagement, judgment, and, sometimes, unabashed partisanship.³

Pre-1960s anthropologists have been criticized for their failure to deal with issues of conflict and inequality; current anthropology is obsessed with these. The prevalence of domination, oppression, resistance, victim-hood, violence, and suffering is inescapable today in anthropology. This is evident everywhere from introductory courses (see, e.g., Columbia and the University of California–Berkeley [Lewis 2008b]) to the pages of the leading journals and books. The interrogation of hegemonic discourses, and discussions of "race," gender, sexuality, the body, and identity, resulting in the unmasking of unpleasantness and unhappiness, has been raised to a dominant position.⁴ The ubiquity of domination and oppression has become foundational for a good portion of social and cultural anthropology, and our field serves as one more site for the "hermeneutics of suspicion," along with literary theory, critical theory, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, certain forms of feminist theory, and other cognate trends.⁵

Nor is this merely a matter of the choice of topic and the framework for analysis; from the very beginning, critical anthropologists trained their sights on the moral failings of the field itself, and they were joined enthusiastically by many writers from outside the discipline. As a result we have long...