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C h a p t e r 1 2 Going Public: Responsibilities and Strategies in the Aftermath of Ethnography Engaging the public sphere is central to contemporary anthropology’s agenda.1 Exhortations to do so are plentiful. Individual examples are readily identifiable. Yet analyses of how public engagement actually works are few. How may we disaggregate ‘‘the public sphere’’ into the actual pathways of audiences, sites, media, and roles that anthropologists encounter and navigate ? And how do contemporary forays into action, advocacy, applied, popular , or public interest anthropology articulate with a disciplinary history of concern about ethical and professional responsibilities to the people we study and to ‘‘society at large?’’ To unravel these questions, let us begin with an insight from Sandra Wallman: ‘‘It may be helpful to think of an anthropological enterprise as composed of stages in the movement of information. Collecting information [is] the first stage; then there’s the writing-up of the information; and a third stage is ‘applying’ the information when asked to do so—these three stages are all within the purview of the most cautious and traditional academic anthropology. [In] crossing over [into advocacy] one may [also] push the inference of the information when not asked: ‘Listen, I’ve found this out and you people should know about it!’’’2 Using Wallman’s framework, an ethnographer confronts one cluster of responsibilities while doing fieldwork, a second during the writing process, and a third in the aftermath of fieldwork and publication. This ensemble of responsibilities is addressed in the Society for Applied Anthropology’s Statement of Ethical and Professional Responsibilities (available on the society’s sfaa.net website).3 The statement defines our responsibilities to the Going Public 189 peoples we study, the communities affected by our work, our professional colleagues, our students and fieldwork team members, and our research sponsors. All of these may pertain in each of Wallman’s three stages of an anthropological enterprise. The final set of defined responsibilities, however , applies solely during the third, postfieldwork and postwriting, stage: ‘‘To society as a whole we owe the benefit of our special knowledge and skills in interpreting sociocultural systems. We should communicate our understandings of human life to the society at large.’’4 Lionizing Boas? Communicating anthropological findings and perspectives to ‘‘society at large’’ is not a new development, and Franz Boas, whose career spanned the 1880s to the 1940s, has been lauded as the discipline’s foundational practitioner of such public engagement.5 Boas was a fascinating figure, and understanding his work, career, and ideas remains an enduring task for contemporary anthropology.6 Yet although Native American peoples were the subjects of Boas’s and most of his Columbia students’ fieldwork, his scholarly and popular writings dealt scarcely at all with the contemporary conditions or experiential realities Native Americans faced. The life of the Indians of the Northwest Coast during his 1886–1900 fieldwork years included logging camps, migrant labor, salmon cannery employment, depopulation, colonial rule, and the impact of the fur trade and gold rush. Yet aside from a reference in 1894 to European-introduced diseases and a brief defense of the legally banned potlatch in 1899,7 these contemporary realities found mention only in his private letters, not his voluminous publications on the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) and other Northwest Coast peoples. Instead, readers learned about a vaguely past-time Indian culture, one without any individual Indians or any sense of how the actual world Northwest Coast people inhabited during Boas’s day ‘‘appears to the Indian himself.’’8 This anthropological salvage mission—reconstructing an ethnographic present—was what he taught his first generation of students, and they remained resistant to scholarly or public engagement with issues of contemporary Native American life.9 Only with Paul Radin’s Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian (1920) did Boasian anthropology at last produce a ‘‘native’s point of view’’ that included contemporary realities the book’s 190 Chapter 12 subject himself experienced: craft sales to whites, farm and railroad wage labor, ‘‘Wild West’’ show employment, federal annuity payments, alcoholism , attacks from whites, imprisonment, and conversion to the Christianin fluenced, pan–Native American peyote religion. Boas’s commitment to the scientific goal of salvaging culture as he understood it was more important than the life circumstances of his informants . This may also be gauged by his treatment of father and son Qisuk and Minik, two of six Polar Inuit transported to New York City in 1897 by...

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