Developments in US Anthropology since the 1980's

For our reading this week, we read George E. Marcus’ Developments in US Anthropology since the 1980’s. In this piece Marcus tracks the development in American anthropology from as early as the 1960’s to the postmodernism era into the early twenty-first century. In doing so he compares the “centers” (the U.S., Britain and France) to the “margins” or countries often referred to as the “other” or non-western places. He also talks about the globalization of anthropology with new ethics and accountabilities then later sums up his views on public anthropology.

Marcus starts out by mentioning the uniqueness of anthropology to the palace in which it’s studied. He says that anthropology is linked to its own national drama and uses the example of Russia (or at the time the Soviet Union), stating that Russian anthropology was linked directly to Russia’s struggle with authority. Along with this, in his effort to distinguish a “center” from a “margin”, Marcus illustrates the differences that come with studying anthropology within these “centers”. Using the example of the U.S. Marcus says that factors such as the amount of money put into anthropology here in the U.S. versus other places, along with the number of people working within anthropology, shape the anthropological relations between the “center and  the “margin” countries.

After making the distinction between the center and margin, Marcus gives us insight into the many changes within anthropology from the 1960’s to the 1980’s (1990’s). First, we see a shift in interest from solely non-western peoples to other categories of people such as women, lesbians and gays. Along with this change in interest is the idea, proposed by James Clifford, of ethnographies being seen as a genre of literature. Marcus goes on to say that the availability of anthropology history effects how anthropology is practiced and lays out notable controversies that come from the knowledge of anthropology history. One of the controversies Marcus used was Derek Freeman’s attack on Margaret Mead’s Coming of Age in Samoa, calling Mead naïve and accusing her of creating mischief within anthropology. Although these controversies fail to provide the changes they’ve created within anthropology (if any), they are important because they illustrate the progression of U.S. anthropology as a whole over the past two decades. We can then use these progressions to fill in the missing spots of anthropology, studying people and things that we’ve never looked to study before. One of the missing spots in anthropology, as pointed out by Marcus, was the emerging “public anthropology”. Marcus says that public anthropology takes into account the gained knowledge from anthropology and applies its contributions to events and issues in the world. This new public anthropology reveals a discipline more concerned with anthropology’s accountability as it pertains to mankind, along with its ethics and obligations to those being studied. He states that public anthropology includes its subjects, further clarifying this point by posing the question of; what would those being studied, such as the Trobiand Islanders, the Nuer or the Samoans, think of the anthropological work being done on them? This is important to consider in our analysis of changes because this was not a concern of early anthropologists such as Malinowski and Mead.

Conclusively, Marcus’ work picks up where Ortner left off, looking deeply at the trends of early anthropology and how it’s made progression from modernism, to postmodernism and then to the early twenty-first century. Marcus does a great job at distinguishing the “center’s” anthropology from the “margin’s” and laying out the new features that came with early twenty-first century anthropology. He uses various examples to bring clarity to the points he’s made with the use of theorists before him and during his time (such as Clifford and Fischer). Although our progression in anthropology cannot make up for the focus and flaws of previous anthropologist/theorists, it does however allow us to build on the information we already have to push the progression of anthropology even further.