Slowly I have seen the emergence of Caribbean musical tributes to Barack Obama, something one ordinarily does not see happening with US presidential candidates, most of whom I would argue inspire indifference, resignation, or plain hostility in the English-speaking Caribbean which, without a language barrier, and with significant family connections, and blanketed by US media, is directly exposed to US politics.

Posted below are a number of music videos from some well known Caribbean music celebrities, including The Mighty Sparrow (Trinidad), repeatedly crowned the Calypso King of the World (and a favourite of US General Colin Powell, who raucously cheered and sang along in a visit to Trinidad in 1998); Cocoa Tea (Jamaica); and, Tyrical (Jamaica).

The reasons voiced for their support of Obama are varied, but it seems likely that the fact that for the first time there is a good chance that a man with African ancestry, classed as African-American in the US, could win the presidency is something that is starting to attract enthusiasm in the Caribbean. That the image of the US could be significantly reshaped in the Caribbean is possible, were Obama to be elected president, and it could blur political lines of antagonism between what was called the “third world” and the US. In this same vein, to the extent that it can be justified, the US would for the first time be projecting an ambiguous image, one that would possibly introduce some pause in the anti-American hostility that has grown worldwide over the past several years — all of this remains to be seen. Anyway, let’s turn to the videos below:

The Mighty Sparrow: “Barack the Magnificent”

The respect of the world that we now lack,
If you want it back, then vote Barack!
Because this time we come out to vote!

Stop the war!
Stop genocide in Darfur!
No matter what,
Get health care for who have not!
The Foreign Relations Committee,
Can attest to his tenacity,
For homeland and job security.

He stood his ground
When the war was a conception,
Said it was wrong,
So he didn’t go along,
Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton
They said of Barack’s opinion,
“He’s a man of resplendent vision!”

I know the warmongers are anxious, ready and set,
Saddam is who posing to us our really main threat,
They magnified Saddam’s offences,
Now we’re paying the consequences,
Everyday our soldiers joining the trenches!

Barack! Barack!
He’s fighting for openness and honest government!
Barack!
He’s doggedly defiant,
Phenomenal strength and wisdom beyond comment!

After you put we in a quagmire!
Not this time!
We come out to vote!

What’s at stake?
Clean up Washington overall!
In the wake
Of the Jack Abramoff scandal.
The middle class done elect a man,
It’s without representation,
This régime has too much corruption!
He wants to see,
A whole energy policy,
Inclusively,
Extent? Comprehensively:
Renewable fuels to clean coal,
There’ll be no price gouging at all,
These things are Barack Obama’s goal.

Entrenched in the crooked régime, we must all, take note,
They’ll be kicking and screaming at me, so we all must vote!
By not exercising these rights,
It’s refusing to see the light,
Democrats! Rise up! Stand up and fight!

Barack! Barack!
On the Senate Affair Committee he’s a giant!
Barack!
Dignifiedly resilient,
And with rock star status he’s Barack The Magnificent!

You talk about how you won’t cut and run,
Rumsfeld and Rove, that’s what they done!
But not this time!
We come out to vote!
Not so government work!

As a grad,
From both Columbia and Harvard,
This GI lad,
Want all others to study hard,
We’re the wealthiest in less respects,
Without proper health insurance,
Walter Reed Hospital, for instance.
Quality check!
Every wounded soldier should get,
Not abject neglect,
All providers must give a heck!
Health care must be affordable
And easily accessible,
Make existentialism enjoyable!
Without that we could be living in pure misery,
Psychological, mental, even insanity.
Loving husband, father of two,
That is Obama’s point of view,
Religiously-urged family value.

Barack! Barack!
Civil rights lawyer who taught constitutional law.
Barack!
Super terrific, I quote,
“Candidate of note!”
So, make sure he gets your vote!

Subpoenaing them gets you no answer!
The Attorney-General can’t remember!
Not this time!
We come out to vote!

We know he’s young,
But, with the Wisdom of Solomon,
Not like that one!
He has experience, look what he’s done!
Insurgents have just one focus:
That’s to put a hurting on us.
Worldwide security must be enforced!

Immigration
Could even get further outta hand,
The border plan,
He’ll protect in legal fashion,
Undocumenteds would get time,
They’ll have to atone for their crime,
Criminals would be kicked out, behind!
Employers who hire illegals and who outsource,
Know it’s unconstitutional and time to change course,
Special interests ain’t facing facts,
Illiteracy and slavery could last,
Disenfranchisement gone, the time has passed!

Barack! Barack!
The first black President to lead this mighty nation!
Barack!
We’ll regain worldwide respect
with Obama’s vision and excellent comprehension!

The respect of the world we now lack,
If you want it back, then vote Barack!
Not this time!
We come out to vote!

Cocoa Tea: “Barack Obama”

Tyrical: “The Obama Song (We President)”

Another treasure accidentally found on YouTube — “Anthem of Freelance Anthropology” shown on MTV.

Freedom sounds mix of Ehtnographic Public Domain Footage:

[FOOTAGE]
EDWARD S. CURTIS
“IN THE LAND OF WAR CANOES:
KWAKIUTL INDIAN LIFE ON THE NORTHWEST COAST”(1914)

ZORA NEALE HURSTON
“FIELDWORK”(1928 )

MAYA DEREN
“DIVINE HORSEMEN
THE LIVING GODS OF HAITI”(1947)

[MUSIC]
THE SKATALITES
“FREEDOM SOUNDS”

In addition to the YouTube channel, there is the anthropologix blog (in Japanese). As far as I could understand, the maker of the video is a Tokyo-based band called Illcommonz (”ill+commons” see: http://www.myspace.com/illcommonz), who have produced a number of interesting dub/alternative pieces such as “Junk and Progress of the Man,” and “Taro the Voodoo Man.” The band’s Japanese website can be found at: http://illcomm.exblog.jp/. Among the band’s influences are Jacques Derrida (incidentally, see my collection of videos in the vodpod to the right, there is one of Derrida “On Love and Being” where he seems to be tortured by the question, “what about love,” painful and yet funny to watch). The artists in the band are identified as: “Contemporary Artist, Independent Ethnographer, Art & Literature Critic, Graphic Designer, Movie Maker, Track Maker, Part-time Lecturer, Gift-Economist, Expressive Activist, Precariate, and some others.” One of the artists is Masanori Oda (photo) who identifies himself as an ethnologist and installation artist. I will return to the ideas and questions this phenomenon evokes and provokes, in subsequent posts.

I am very grateful to Dr. Anthony McCann for inviting me to join a group of eight other contributors at the Rethinking Academic Conferences blog. This is an interesting site for reflecting on the nature, impact, and assumptions of our regular academic practices, placing them in both a social and environmental context, while considering new and expanded notions of open access. I am very enthused by what I have read so far on that blog and I hope to contribute soon.

Among Anthony McCann’s numerous papers online and other sites is Beyond the Commons, which deals primarily with with issues of music, intellectual property, copyright, and performing rights. Also, and this is very interesting (offering me personally a great deal to learn) is Anthony’s Crafting Gentleness blog, which is part of a much larger site, also called Crafting Gentleness dealing with the political possibilities of gentleness in our everyday lives. Very intriguing I must say! I look forward to learning more.

In the meantime, many thanks again Anthony for offering me the pleasure of joining your collaborative efforts.

CultureTube has produced a video shown on YouTube (added in December of 2007) that deals with the subject of research ethics and anthropologists in the Human Terrain System. The video as a whole makes several important, critical points, which have met with harsh reactions by some viewers (less than 2000 at present) . It does not seem to have gained wide notice yet, and the discussion is currently limited to less than a dozen comments. The video is shown below and runs for circa 10 minutes.

A variety of thoughts on the “uses” and “usefulness” of anthropology were provoked by Lorenz Khazaleh’s synopsis on African anthropology, which also contains links to online papers of the World Anthropologies Network, a source of especial importance to some of the issues I wish to cover in this blog.

Within the North American context it is not difficult to encounter opinions that academics in general, especially in the social sciences and humanities, should “get out there” and “do something useful.” In fact it is this very same type of overt anti-intellectualism that is used by so many online commentators in justifying the work of anthropologists in counterinsurgency intelligence gathering in Iraq and Afghanistan. At least two assumptions are at work in this “get out there and make yourself useful” notion.

To quote the words of a Ghanaian scholar, the late Herb Addo at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad (a former supervisor and one of my first and most important inspirations in getting me to think about Eurocentrism, developmentalist ideology, and world-systems analysis), one implicit idea is that, “all the thinking that needs to be done has already been done.” He disagreed, and faulted Marx as well for arguing along similar lines that we need to go beyond understanding the world to actually changing it, as if the thinking was the lesser practice, and as if thinking were not a practice.

The second assumption is much more basic, and involves a simple question that critics of the Ivory Tower do not ask themselves — if I were not a professor, I would probably be a convenience store clerk, at least for a while, maybe permanently, now how would that be socially more useful and a more valuable contribution than my “getting out there” and teaching? Perhaps the idea is that I teach in my natural state, even while I sleep, and that doing it is not a form of doing, and involves no getting out. I don’t doubt for a moment that some would prefer the convenience store clerk or waiter — for some, being served by someone struggling to survive gives them a perverse sense of self-fulfillment, and they do not get that fulfillment from me. For others, real work is tangible, material, physical, concrete.

Some of these biases return in the context of debates between Caribbean scholars in the early 1990s in the University of the West Indies, and reappear as well in the chapter by Paul Nchoji Nkwi that Lorenz writes about. In the Caribbean, at the onset of structural adjustment programs and austerity measures implanted by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, suddenly the region was cast as one where “scarcity” was the dominant state of existence. Never mind that a few years before scarcity in petroleum rich and agriculturally fertile places was not an issue, and a few years later, that scarcity would suddenly vanish. Like African states, Caribbean states can have a great wealth of resources, and it is scarcity that is manufactured by world capitalism and fabricated by particular ideologies. Once the word “scarcity” is mentioned, it is a green light for economists to rush in and reshape the terms of discourse (after all, theirs is a science of “the management of scarce resources” as was the classical definition of economics) — humans become “human resources,” knowledge becomes “human capital,” and so forth. It is in that context that some scholars — the upholders of laws of scarcity, foreign investment, and divestment of even profitable state enterprises — attempted to mute critical thinkers such as Herb Addo. The idea at work here is that “critique” is like navel gazing, it’s now time to produce research that is relevant to policy and to specific development programs. Norman Girvan based at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, and once one of the radical thinkers of the New World Group, had become one of the trumpeters of the free market, a kind of business ethnographer with interests in rural entrepreneurship in Jamaica, and a direct counterweight to Addo.

In the African context Nkwi notes that anthropology had to be either useful or be gone. Usefulness is defined here as making a contribution to health and development programs. In fact, the “making a contribution” idea, so prevalent in anthropology and academic discourse more generally, presumes that there is already some larger project in place, to which we fit in and adjust ourselves, to which we contribute. Critique is not useful, especially not in situations of scarcity — this, presumably, is what Nkwi is referring to. That is also state-led anthropology. In conditions of scarcity manufactured by oppressive regimes, fabricated by the workings of the capitalist world market, where already existing natural wealth is exported to the upper class and away to foreign capitalists, people’s health and wellbeing are challenged much more than by micro-bacteria alone. An anthropology that is critical of the state, of the workings of power and political practice, can become very useful precisely for challenging one of the biggest threats to the welfare of so many Africans: the state itself. Will the state pay for its own deconstruction? Most likely not — indeed, universities in different parts of Africa have not been spared by repressive violence.

Let’s hear from one Ugandan anthropologist, presently dividing his time between Columbia University and Kampala:

Mahmood Mamdani, former professor at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda:

I remember seeing him (Idi Amin) when he came to the University. It was the 50th anniversary of Makerere and he came with an entire battalion of troops, armed. He stood there and said, “I came with a full battalion so that when you raise your heads from your books, you know who has power.”

We just froze completely.

Then he went on to say: “On my way, I stopped at Mulago (the university teaching hospital), and I looked at your medical records and I saw that most of you are suffering from gonorrhoea.” Then he paused and said, “I will not tolerate you spreading political gonorrhoea in Uganda.”

That was as explicit a warning as you can get. Students knew there would be no second chance. This man was ruthless and he would strike ruthlessly.

There may have been no unanimity among African anthropologists about how to be “useful” to their societies, but perhaps there is more unanimity now? Unanimity is one of those things that like scarcity can also be manufactured and then managed.

I just love being in Anthropology. I think it is a great privilege to be in institutional Anthropology in this time…it’s like being among old colonials, secluded in a beautiful jungle estate house,

as we ponder the demise of our empire, the disrespect and sometimes fury of the restless natives who sense that independence is coming soon, and the occasional loss of one of our own at the savage hands of a native roadside bomber.

••••••

Some of us fan ourselves on the veranda, and then suddenly Professor Joyce Fitzgibbons on permanent sabbatical from Cambridge begins to sing a charming old number:

♫♫♫
School days, school days
Dear old golden rule days
Readin’ and ‘ritin’ and ‘rithmetic
Taught to the tune of the hickory stick
You were my queen in calico
I was your bashful barefoot beau…
♫♫♫

Joyce and Pippa stare me down
as I accidentally walk in on their
dress preparations for this evening’s
“Indian Dance” as they call it.
I was made to feel like a worm
in that moment.

Those golden rule days, those days of golden ruling, of ruling over gold. Professor Fitzgibbons’ elder sister (photo above, to the right of Joyce) — “Oh just call me Pippa” as she always said — spoke with a sad smile, “We’ll miss seeing the sunsets over the savannas, the song of the kiskidee in the mornings, and looking out over Point Cumana, rum and coke in hand.” She asked me to go in the next room and turn on our antique gramophone and play her favourite record, and I oblige. ▼

Sipping my rum and coke, I reflect on how this was the perfect discipline for me. This discipline speaks to whole genealogies of conquest and occupation. In my case, old colonialism runs through my family roots: the father raised in an Italian colony in East Africa; the grandfather in the Italian airforce; the American grandmother from California who rushed her little boy past the pile of severed European hands and bowels; the other grandfather, a Viscount, who sired children in Jordan during one of his foreign adventures; the vacations we took as children in French colonies in the Pacific, and British colonies in the Caribbean; living in a country where colonialism springs internal; and, the wife, born at a time when her home was still a British colony. This is the discipline for me.

I love this time, spent in this old house, with old tales, old books, old stories, and old eccentrics. We are joined, finally, on the veranda by Dr. Sigismund Goodfellow (left), who has just been completing an exhaustive oral historical record among practitioners of Yoruba rites, with a generous grant, as he always reminds us, from the Livingstone-Chrysler Trust. He got up from his afternoon nap a bit bleary eyed but nevertheless ready to begin some late afternoon verbal play, with lashings of his wit, “To wit, to woo,” as he always said. “Will you be joining our little, shall we say, fiesta candida tonight?” he asks me with an ominous little wink as he passes his hand around my shoulders.

For madness had set in, as it always does, among old colonials as they ponder and gaze and grieve and despair and imagine about after, after their empire comes rushing to a close. The colonial madness that seems to afflict Caucasian conquerors of tropical “wildernesses” is well known and well documented virtually everywhere, and the fact that we hush it up so much is due to the fact that, well, it would be impolite and inappropriate to Brasso one’s wares in public.

Sigismund tells Arthur, down from a university in Baltimore, “In spite of what that reckless old fool Maurice says, we would indeed miss this grandfather discipline we call Anthropology…”

“Grandmother!” Joyce interjects from four rooms over.

“I swear she has the ears of a bat,” Sigi mumbles. “The point is,” he resumes, “and you tell me frankly Arthur, for only the candid ones may be admitted to la fête de ce soir, while we would miss Anthropology, would they miss us?” He asks this sweeping his right hand out from his pocket and over the railing of the veranda, motioning across a Scarlet Ibis horizon. Arthur from Baltimore replies with a shrug, “Well, you know what I said, and you know what I do, and you ignore it at your own peril.”

Arthur (left, in his “field wear”) is a firm believer in status and respect, displayed through the acquisition of power in the form of capital and corporate connections. Arthur is the one who once dismissed me saying, “Max, you can go ahead and be the pathetic little Willie Loman of anthropology, but some of us prefer to screw on our fists, put on our conference faces, and go out there and get it.” Arthur’s father was in what we now call “direct sales,” and so was his mother, in a manner of speaking, as she had retired from “exotic dancing” shortly after spawning Arthur in 1955.

“Go where the opportunities take you,” continues Arthur. Sigi almost snarls, a corner of his lip quiveringly pulled upwards, “You are quite the madame, Arthur, a candid little madame I confess…but I never want to leave the Congo.” He did not mean Congo literally of course, it just happened that the television was on and the appropriate words flowed out of it in time ▼

Civilization (Bongo, Bongo, Bongo) - 1947
The Andrews Sisters with Danny Kaye
- written by Bob Hilliard and Carl Sigman

♫♫♫
Each morning, a missionary advertises neon sign
He tells the native population that civilization is fine
And three educated savages holler from a bamboo tree
That civilization is a thing for me to see

So bongo, bongo, bongo, I don’t wanna leave the Congo,
oh no no no no no
Bingo, bangle, bungle, I’m so happy in the jungle, I refuse to go
Don’t want no bright lights, false teeth, doorbells, landlords,
I make it clear
That no matter how they coax him, I’ll stay right here
♫♫♫

I was glad to hear Dr. Herbert Gloss’ car come to a skidding stop in the gravel driveway. Herbert (left) is an economist from somewhere in Middlesex, here to advise the transition regime. In private, he is an acidic, self-deprecating, hyper critical, glib man who never lets anything escape his notice. He parks his keys down on the side table, smoothly swoops up a glass, fills it six fingers worth with puncheon rum, and drops a little token ice cube into it as if that will somehow dull the fire. “So what are you old cronies banging on about today? Oh no, don’t tell me, have you hit a speed bump on the way to your funeral arrangements?” Gulp. Sigi at that point actually makes a move as if to leave the room, stopped only by Arthur who has now reappeared naked and smeared with green paint. Sigi gets a warm smile on his face, forgets Herbert, and congratulates Arthur, “It is only 5:17pm, and yet you are already properly attired for la fiesta de esta noche” which he pronounces, as always, with a thick English accent, so thick that it sounds like he is deliberately making fun of the language, whichever language, perhaps his own.

“Oh yes, well I can’t miss this now can I,” says Herbert, as if speaking to himself.

Joyce and Pippa appear, like two mad parrots, their saggy white bodies festooned in feathers and cloth strips, and they shout imperiously, “Silence, silence, everyone! The dance begins.” These anthropologists, always so eager to reenact the dances and songs and myths of “the natives,” announce a departure from the norm. “This is a play on exoticism, our personal tribute to the old classic, Big Chief Ugh Amugh Ugh.” I am about to let something obscene splatter from my lips, but Herbert motions “shh” to me with a finger to his mouth and whispers, “This should be good. Bask in it.”

The dance proceeds. In the pause after the dance, Sigi breaks into the applause.

“Big Chief indeed!” exclaims Sigi, as if the dance reminded him in some oblique way about current events that have been dogging him. Look, the reader has to understand that Sigi has only two things on his mind tonight, his demented feast ritual, where they gather naked in a circle, preferably drunk, and dance around a bonfire, and his complaints about native hostility and crime. He continues, “I say, Big Chief indeed! Much like this new ‘First Minister’ fellow, Mr. Chief Walla Walla who got the Tomahawk Blues whilst pursuing a first in social anthropology and museumology at Oxford. He is treachery itself, treachery with a hearing aid and sun glasses.”

I really cannot contain myself at this point. “Listen man, you can’t just stomp around in people’s yards as if you owned them, as if you have some right over others, please, be serious.”

“Too right! Too bloody right I say!” Herbert is merely stoking the fire for a good fight, as he peers with one eye down to the bottom of his empty glass.

That must have been the only time I saw Sigi actually will me to death with his cold, hardening, narrowing little eyes, it really was intimidating.

Herbert intervenes, “No, Sigi, really let’s hear this Trojan Horse out, this should be amusing. I love to hear the bark of an underdog admitted to the Pig House, sorry, I meant Big House, and still barking his underdog language.” Sigi adds, “Fine with me, for as the local saying goes: let the jackass bray.” He lights a pipe with his back turned to me.

Colonialism runs in my family roots, and could have well privileged my family were it not for the inevitable stripping wrought by a World War. I grew up with an inheritance of champagne tastes on a mauby wallet, with many glimpses of privilege, but ultimately as a déclassé son of a white collar worker — an airline employee, coincidentally, because wanderlust seems to have a genetic strain to it. We lived for almost twenty years next to a 16-lane highway, and all emerged partially deaf as a result, and as very loud talkers, and with a desire to get the hell out.

Back to my comments to Sigi. I say, “You know how wanted you are, you see where the ‘informed consent’ is, in action, when the locals welcome you with roadside bombs. You have no rights here.” It was harsh, but the stench of despair and the madness it nurtured was too much.

This despair that leaves us — them — flailing about for alternatives, for anything to get a kind smile again, a warm reception, respectful tributes, and not the thousand inane taxi-driver questions about pyramids and bone collecting; to speak the name of our own and be met by a public that says, “oh yes I read her latest book,” rather than “who? sorry, never heard of her”…and that from fellow scholars! Despair as they ask why they are irrelevant, why they are not wanted, why nobody listens to them, and what about the contribution they have to make, how about their applied efforts, we invented the green button on photocopiers, we are mapping humanity to terrains that enable kill chains across Iraq and Afghanistan, we own ‘culture’, we forsake ‘culture,’ we are theorists, no wait we are ethnographers, we are ethnography itself, we are above it all, we are beneath it all, we are nuanced, we are complex, maybe we should go public, another pipe dream straight out of The Iceman Cometh. These people are quite blazingly mad.

As I leave, I see that somebody spray painted the words “SOON COME” and the outline of a machete on the front door.

“The choice to rely … on cultural anthropologists in the rebuilding of a defeated enemy has particular resonance now as the United States struggles to rebuild a stable and viable Iraq. … As the occupation of Iraq appears more complex by the day, where are the new Ruth Benedicts, authoritative voices who will carry weight with both Iraqis and Americans?”
—–Alexander Stille, “Experts can help rebuild a country,” The New York Times, 19 July, 2003.

(Notes and comments on:
Bunzl, Matti. (2008). The quest for anthropological relevance: Borgesian Maps and epistemological pitfalls. American Anthropologist 110 (1): 53-60.)

Reasons for Irrelevance: It’s an Inside Job

The discussion between Bunzl and Besteman-Gusterson has some rewarding points to it. Bunzl begins by observing what most of us already know to be the case that,

Put simply, many of us chafe under a perceived public irrelevance, especially when compared to the glory days when anthropological titans like Margaret Mead and Ashley Montagu regularly addressed millions and had a real impact on debates in education, public policy, and beyond (2008: 53).

Specifically, Bunzl chooses to use one single text as the focus, or as the vehicle, for his critical analysis of why this is so. He thus speaks of Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong: Anthropologists Talk Back, edited by Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson, and published in 2005. He says that the authors in that volume (which I have yet to read myself) took on top public “pundits” in the U.S., from Thomas Friedman to Samuel Huntington. George Marcus, in a quote on the front cover, called it “a bold attempt … to remake the terms of public debate.”

Bunzl sees the book as failing to achieve its aims of recouping the legacy of Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, of anthropologists becoming engaged as public intellectuals, noting that the book was largely ignored, for all its heroism (2008: 53).

The book failed in its aims, Bunzl argues, for a number of reasons:

“the book was issued by the University of California Press, an outfit not particularly known for its ability to reach broad audiences. As a result, Pundits was essentially an inside job. It was written by anthropologists, of course. But it also appeared in an anthropology series, although one explicitly devoted to public engagement. And yes, the blurbs cited earlier were by other anthropologists as well. Pundits may have staked a claim to the public sphere, but, as far as I can tell, few outside the world of anthropology knew, let alone cared, about that” (2008: 54).

Bunzl criticizes them for narrowing “punditry” to the workings of reactionary myth-makers who work to support the privileged, while ignoring the presence of successful left-wing pundits (eg, Michael Moore, Naomi Klein), and distancing themselves from public punditry. Bunzl asks: “if progressive punditry is in fact possible, then how do we explain the persistent failure of contemporary anthropologists, including those in Pundits, to play a more prominent role in the public sphere?” (2008: 54). He sees this gap in the book’s foundation as one that undermines the whole premise of the book.

Bunzl’s question has to do with why anthropology has largely disappeared from the public sphere. Is it due to powerful exclusionary forces, working on top of and against the discipline, from outside the discipline, or are there reasons internal to the discipline that can help to explain anthropology’s public irrelevance? (2008: 54).

Some might object that anthropology does not need to be publicly engaged, does not need mass audiences, and thus eschew the common goals of both Bunzl and Besteman-Gusterson. I disagree. Anthropology will not reside safely in peace, ensconced in the Ivory Tower, because there too it is suffering from increased marginalization, and that’s in the cases of universities that actually have an anthropology program of some sort. Moreover, any discipline whose purchase covers a wide range of publicly relevant, directly relevant, issues should say something in public. There is no point being a mute bystander as public debates rage about race, the family, violence, religion, and thus act like some dog in the manger. Even those disciplines that some might think engage in “navel gazing” — philosophy, English literature — have had, and have, scholars with a higher public profile than we do, and here I am speaking only of the North American context. If we were speaking of scholars in places such as France, even Trinidad & Tobago, then this discussion would not be as relevant, or relevant in the same ways.

Bunzl’s main argument is, “there is something about the contemporary variant of sociocultural anthropology, for which Pundits is paradigmatic, that has precipitated its increasing marginalization” (2008: 54).

Bunzl says, admitting to producing a pithy sound-bite:

“the glory days of U.S. anthropology seem to be over because today’s anthropologists are not radical enough” (2008: 54)

Generalizing, as the Bongo-Bongoists Rear their Ugly Heads in the Cayman Islands

On pages 55 and 56 Bunzl takes us through a familiar, but effectively condensed, review of the demise of positivist science in anthropology, the questioning of searches for universal laws, the emergence of ideas of anthropology as a science of meaning, based on interpreting specific discourses, and greater attention paid to how knowledge is not neutral, but is a function of power, privilege, and hierarchy. The problem, as Bunzl argues, is that in the course of these developments, anthropologists began to reject generalization. Generalizations were seen as part of a discourse of objectivity and expertise, a language of power in Lila Abu-Lughod’s view.

(We should also recognize that the critique of power in anthropology typically extends only as far as our analytical and rhetorical practices, and not our very institutionalization, i.e., that which enables to speak Abu-Lughod as a professional authority, as a professor, and the exclusions that had to occur in order for her to occupy that position.)

Generalizing assumes that the analyst can stand outside of what is being analyzed, and tends to take small cases, and diverse differences, and flatten them out, homogenizing them, producing pictures of coherence and timelessness (2008: 56).

So far so good, except that I now worry that perhaps “generalization” has been confused with “totalization” and “universalization”, which it resembles. Generalizing about what appears to be the case, for the most part, that is, by and large, does not remove the analyst (a figure in the crowd itself, who notes where most of the crowd is heading), and does not pretend that there are no differences (most of the crowd surged forward, but some of us remained behind). The opposite of generalizing is the incessant natter of what Ted Llewellyn called the Bongo-Bongoists — these are obnoxious and sometimes agitated hecklers who interrupt to say, “but in my tribe, among the people I study, among the Bongo-Bongo, no such practices exist.” I recall being taken to task for, of all things, generalizing about how deeply slavery marked the Caribbean experience and how “blackness” was still stigmatized as the most negative, socially undervalued identity. The objections? That in the Cayman Islands (a wealthy colony packed with white expatriates) … that in Montserrat … in places where pearls and turtles were the backbone of the economy, and so forth. In other words, in the tiny micro-exceptions the generalization did not work…except that it does, because it is generally accurate for most places, most people, and most times.

The other extreme, of course, is to see the Bongo-Bongo as representatives of all of humanity — the logical shortcoming here is generalizing from the single case. But that does not mean that one cannot and should not generalize from multiple, or most cases. The Cayman Islands don’t prove generalizations about the Caribbean wrong; instead, it’s that we cannot let the Cayman Islands stand in the way of such generalizations, nor, worse yet, serve as a template for understanding the rest of the Caribbean.

As Bunzl explains, the rejection of generalization leads to the rejection of the concept of culture. Culture “militates against the specificity of partial truths” and yet those renouncing culture still had an idea of culture, as “contested, temporal, and emergent” (which is surely also a generalization in its own right) (2008: 56). In Abu-Lughod’s view, “culture” also became a conceptual tool for othering.

Don’t YOU Dare to Other ME

Again, this is a problem in anthropology — when we speak of “others” we are making the mistake of bundling a whole set of very different ideas into one, as if all “othering” was “bad” and somehow evitable. Whether we choose to “other” or not, there will always be persons who are different, who stand aside, and outside. You cannot “invent” or “construct” an “other” — you might be able to invent or construct an image of an other, but not the person who is other, that person who is not me. It is ironic then, that in battling against culture, Abu-Lughod ends up right back in the trap of universalizing — without culture, there are no others, and we are all the same — or, we are all bundles of particular specifics, that defeat generalizing language…except, of course, for the term “specificity” itself which can then become a substitute for culture, difference, and otherness. (I will say a lot more about these issues in coming months, especially once I summon the energy to finally do an in-depth review of Vassos Argyrou’s Anthropology and the Will to Meaning.)

This is not deny the seduction of plunging oneself into deep specificity, into fragments of knowledge, of diverse tales and documents and persons and voices. Whether this means that exoticism has thus been defeated is still very much open to question in my view, and the fact that these wonderfully dynamic, localizing, particularistic feats of writing are almost always done in some thatched hut village in Indonesia or wherever else, except at home, leads me to think there may be no good answer. A second question has to do with the assembling of fragments and specifics: who does the assembling, the editing, the rewriting, and according to what framework? Is it purely random, escaping all of one’s prior socialization? I very much doubt it — it’s just that the framework has been silenced.

Let’s Hear from the Book Club

This leads me to pity what we do to students, pitching one approach after another, one trend after another, one ethnography after another, one theory after another, one big-name author after another, leaving so many to become confused, always running on a bibliographic treadmill, becoming professors and always on an angry and/or anxious lookout for the next big book, which we must all read, and all of us must quote. I hate that feeling, that I have been involuntarily recruited into some small town book club, where it is to be assumed that we have all read the latest Ong-and-Tsing, as if these were the only ones to read, as if they ought to be read.

Bunzl argues that ethnographies of the particular, like (guess who?) Anna Tsing’s In the Realm of the Diamond Queen, are still caught up in positivist epistemology (2008: 57):

Sociocultural anthropology may have rejected a scientistic variant of positivism, but it retains, even augments, a more immediate form, one that purports that all empirical phenomena are amenable to observation and description. What else, after all, is the demand to eschew false generalizations in the interest of more accurate representations of complexity?

Bunzl also observes how old abstractions and generalizations are often replaced by new abstractions and generalizations, except that these are less amenable to criticism; that “culture” might be rejected as an essentializing abstraction, but not so much “gender” and “class” as other essentializing abstractions (57).

[See my posts on anti-anti-essentialism: here, and there.]

The Devil is the Details

Bunzl, referring to Borges’ famously funny story of the quest for the ever more perfect map of the empire, which then grew to the size of the empire itself, argues:

Driven by an unselfconscious demand for “exactitude in science,” it is on a quest to find the perfect representation of human reality, one that is free of all essentialisms and generalizations. What it does not realize is that such a representation—if it could be had at all (and, of course, it could not)—would be entirely unwieldy. Even worse, it would be altogether useless, not because it would be false but because it would be true (57).

Where Pundits fails, in Bunzl’s view, is its repeated, persistent charge that America’s top pundits are “simplistic.” Indeed, how many of us who are anthropologists have heard that a book is great because it is “sophisticated” and treats “complexity” complexly, or something along these lines? Sophisticated? A sophisticated text that “explodes” that which it “interrogates”, with a fine sense of complexity — talk about a bad mixing of metaphors, almost all of which stink of elitism and domination.

Bunzl ends by calling for renewed respect for an epistemological program that existed and still exists in anthropology, in the figures of Boas, Geertz, Sahlins, and Ortner, a program that,

recognizes the limitations of anthropological generalization but is not terrified by this possibility. It knows the impossibility of finding laws in a natural scientific sense but is prepared to uncover meaningful connections through interpretive speculation. It is aware that in a philosophical sense, all empirical knowledge is provisional, partial, and subjective, but it seeks to transcend that limitation to find the truth about the world. It understands that objectivity is not fully possible but strives for it nonetheless (59).

This statement can be taken further, as it opens out onto similar goals and tendencies across the social sciences, humanities, and yes even the natural sciences. I will talk more about this when I finally review and produce some notes from Immanuel Wallerstein’s Open the Social Sciences, which I read over a decade ago.

I should note the discussion that followed the article within the pages of the American Anthropologist:

Besteman, Catherine and Hugh Gusterson. (2008). A response to Matti Bunzl: Public anthropology, pragmatism, and pundits. American Anthropologist 110 (1): 61-63.

and

Bunzl, Matti. (2008b). A reply to Besteman and Gusterson: Swinging the pendulum. American Anthropologist 110 (1): 64-65.

Responses from the Anti-Pundits

Besteman and Gusterson seem to be particularly offended with the criticisms of their book, even stating that Gusterson was “heavily criticized” — I don’t know, it seemed to me that Gusterson was criticized more in passing, and was hardly the focus of Bunzl’s piece. The more important point is that the editors of Pundits insist that their target was not punditry as such, but right-wing punditry, and not generalizations as such, but crassly inaccurate ones that justify imperialist programs. These two sets of authors, who would seem to be sympathetic to one another, seem to have passed each other in a foggy night.

Besteman and Gusterson, offer an unnecessary listing of names of people they think are examples of something different to what Bunzl claims, which also serves to define the “in group,” and to exclude Bunzl of course. Lists are always problematic in these cases, and best to avoid, not only because they are objectionable devices used to privilege certain speakers, and thus create a hierarchy, but also because in this case the list offered by the editors is so very short when compared to the thousands who constitute American Anthoroplogy alone. In other words, they make Bunzl’s points twice for him.

The editors get on to something interesting, finally, which has to do with their reasoning as to why anthropology is not publicly relevant as it once was:

It is true that today’s anthropologists are not household names in the way Margaret Mead was. But the reward structure of the contemporary neoliberal academy grants tenure, promotions, and pay raises for academic books and refereed articles and disdains those who write for a popular audience. Mead herself was forced to build a career in the interstices of academia and public life. Also, since Mead’s time, anthropology has moved away from sustained attention to some of the issues that deeply interest so many U.S. citizens: family, marriage, divorce, children, adolescence, love, romance, and parenting. Finally, anthropologists cannot afford to lose sight of the texture and nuances of the communities and issues we study. A deep knowledge born out of long-term relationships with interlocutors based on trust is our distinctive contribution to public discourse. Appreciating and translating nuance is an ethnographic project at odds with roughshod punditry. In saying this, we are not agreeing with Bunzl about a supposed anthropological aversion to generalization but are, rather, pointing to a friction between ethnography’s interest in nuance and the glibness of some punditry. We believe that a public anthropology combining the phrase-making skill of a Friedman with the nuance of a Geertz and the passion for social justice of a Paul Farmer is possible.

Oh No, Here Comes “Nuance” Again

Nuance, like sophistication, is a pretentious little term that will hopefully fall out of fashion with the fashion-minded, and hopefully sooner rather than later. Nuance is for the wincing cocktail guest who can be counted on to say, “…well, I don’t know really, I’m not so sure, it may be more complicated…because on the one hand…and then on the other hand,” as they put their erudition on display like a peacock. Mind you, I am the one who has a post on this blog that is focused on “fuck,” so perhaps a little erudition would not be amiss. I distract myself yet again.

Was this Rewarding? Well, on the one hand…and on the other hand…

I am very happy to see Besteman and Gusterson raise the issue of the “reward structure” of the “neoliberal academy” that emphasizes certain kinds of publications in certain venues (for the non-tenured mind you…the tenured have a choice, one that is usually exercised in doing everything possible to achieve greater rewards, such as full professorship, a standing in multiple editorial boards, sitting on various committees of high-powered funding bodies, and so forth). They are right to raise this issue, except that structure precedes neoliberalism, and they are part of the academy, and the academy has very conservative biases in terms of its everyday working assumptions and practices. Otherwise Besteman and Gusterson are to be applauded for going on the record.

We need to keep in mind that academics themselves serve as the guardians and police of this reward structure. They themselves frown on certain publications, even on the very teaching texts that they use for teaching, an attitude that I will never understand. They sneer at websites, and arch an eyebrow at a newspaper column. Hopefully we can start hearing academics making a lot more noise about what gets rewarded and how, and I think this is slowly starting to happen.

It is also interesting to see the editors of Pundits confess to the fact that much of what anthropologists study is simply not interesting to a wider public, a terrible self-indictment. Bunzl’s response to the response seemed to me to be a little circumspect and tranquilized, missing some golden opportunities to turn the “dialogue” into a moment opening out onto transformation. Too bad.

••••••

Of course, the big question that keeps getting ignored is: are people wearing enough hats?

Monday Morning Madness

A music video from Trinidad’s 3 Canal (named after a cutlass [machete] with three grooves), titled “Talk You Talk” — my favourite Rapso piece.

Thanks to Guanaguanare for transcribing these great lyrics (see below the video).

Yeah! Revelation!

He promised the fire next time
He promised the fire next time
He promised, He promised, He promised, He promised,
He promised the fire next time, next time
And who ain’t dead they badly wounded
Who ain’t dead, badly wounded
Who ain’t dead, they badly wounded
Who ain’t dead, badly wounded!

Talk yuh talk, you mocking pretender
I check your lyrics and a come fuh test you
Far too long yuh foolin’ the children
Fillin’ their head with brainwash education

Doomsday reach, boy plan your retreat
Cause the children coming to take back the street
The power of the word in the conscious stylin’
Paving the way for a brand new morning
I say, the power of the word in the rapso stylin’
Rocking the roots of the vampire system.

Talk yuh talk, you mocking pretender
talk yuh talk, you bloody deceiver
talk yuh talk, you serpent master
Talk yuh talk, you friggin’ oppressor

Right down to the heart of the matter
Where reality bites and illusions shatter
Right down to the heart of the matter
The tide go bust and reality scatter

He promised the fire next time
He promised the fire next time
He promised,He promised, He promised, He promised,
He promised the fire next time, next time
And who ain’t dead they badly wounded
Who ain’t dead badly wounded
Who ain’t dead they badly wounded
Who ain’t dead badly wounded!

Talk yuh talk, you mocking pretender!
I check your lyrics and I come fuh test you
Far too long you foolin’ the children
Fillin’ their head with brainwash education.

Doomsday reach, plan your retreat
Cause the children comin’ to take back the street
The power of the word in the conscious stylin’
I say, paving the way for a brand new morning
The power of the word in the rapso stylin’
Rocking the roots of the vampire system

Talk yuh talk, you mocking pretender!
talk yuh talk, you bloody deceiver!
talk yuh talk, you serpent master!
Talk yuh talk, you friggin’ oppressor!

Chatter, chatter, chatter, only cealesss chatter
We going right down to the heart of the matter
Chatter, chatter, chatter, what is the matter
I can’t seem to stop this ceaseless chatter
Chatter, chatter, chatter, going round in my head
Oh lord, oh lord like they want me to dead
Everybody talking, nobody listening
Oh my god, what, what really happening?…….

Revelation vibes!!!

Despite my repeated criticisms of the Human Terrain Systems work that involves social scientists, anthropologists included, in counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, I am linking to this news merely for the record. Some of my criticisms were also posted in the AAA news blog. I neither wish to cheer this death, nor to indulge in the kind of pious sanctimony I have encountered in readers’ comments on some of the sites below, with their unscrupulous and quick little promotional plugs for the “good” of HTS. As far as I am aware, this is the first HTS researcher to have been killed as a result of combat, and for as long as the program continues one can expect that there will be additional fatalities, both for HTS members and even more so for the subject populations they are monitoring.

•••••••

FROM:
HUMAN TERRAIN SYSTEM
It is with deep sorrow that we must inform you of the tragic death of Michael Bhatia, our social scientist team member assigned to the Afghanistan Human Terrain Team #1, in support of Task Force Currahee based at FOB SALERNO, Khowst Province.

Michael was killed on May 7 when the Humvee he was riding in was struck by an IED. Michael was traveling in a convoy of four vehicles, which were en route to a remote sector of Khowst province. For many years, this part of Khowst had been plagued by a violent inter-tribal conflict concerning land rights. Michael had identified this tribal dispute as a research priority, and was excited to finally be able to visit this area. This trip was the brigade’s initial mission into the area, and it was their intention to initiate a negotiation process between the tribes.

Michael was in the lead vehicle with four other soldiers. Initial forensics indicate that the IED was triggered by a command detonated wire. Michael died immediately in the explosion. Two Army soldiers from Task Force Currahee were also killed in the attack, and two were critically injured. …

FROM:
BAE SYSTEMS
ROCKVILLE, Maryland - BAE Systems has announced the identity of an employee who died Wednesday in Afghanistan. Michael V. Bhatia, 31, a social scientist working for the company in Afghanistan, died in an IED attack in Khowst on May 7.

Doug Belair, president of the company’s Technology Solutions & Services line of business said: “We are deeply saddened by the loss of Michael Bhatia. He was a well-respected and important member of our team who served his nation in the face of great danger. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family, friends and colleagues.”

Mr. Bhatia had been working in Afghanistan as part of the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain Systems program team since November after joining the company in September. He was from Medway, Massachusetts.

About BAE Systems

BAE Systems is the premier global defence and aerospace company delivering a full range of products and services for air, land and naval forces, as well as advanced electronics, information technology solutions and customer support services. With 97,500 employees worldwide, BAE Systems’ sales exceeded £15.7 billion (US $31.4 billion) in 2007.

FROM:
THE WATSON INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
May 08, 2008

Michael Vinay Bhatia ‘99 died yesterday in Afghanistan, where he was working as a social scientist in consultation with the US Defense Department.

In addition to graduating magna cum laude in international relations from Brown University, Michael was a visiting fellow at the Watson Institute from July 2006 to June 2007. At the Institute, he was involved in a research project on Cultural Awareness in the Military, writing his PhD dissertation, and teaching a senior seminar on “The US Military: Global Supremacy, Democracy and Citizenship.”

•••••••

Additional coverage:

‘Human Terrain’ Social Scientist Killed in Afghanistan
WIRED Blog Network, May 9, 2008

Human Terrain Team Member Killed in Afghanistan
Small Wars Journal, May 9, 2008

Social Scientist in Army’s ‘Human Terrain’ Program Dies in Afghanistan
Chronicle of Higher Education, May 9, 2008

In an article by Andy Guess in Inside Higher Ed titled, “Blogs and Wikis and 3D, Oh My!” (09 May, 2008), there is an interesting section featuring discussions of the nature, purposes and benefits of academic blogging, and some of the lingering suspicions that surround them. I will post a few extracts that I think are worth considering, though one may need to read the complete piece to get a greater sense of the context and a sense of who are the speakers quoted in the article.

Volokh has the characteristics of most successful academic blogs: Its contributors are scholars and experts in a given field, and they use that expertise to provide on-the-spot analysis and running commentary on issues that matter. They interact with readers who comment on posts and build on (or push against) each other’s insights. Not unlike peer review … except on a potentially wider scale, and in public.

…

Of course, academic bloggers can broaden the scope beyond their field of expertise - or even venture beyond their means. In academe, scholars “tend to be very narrowly focused,” noted Mano Singham, director of Case’s University Center for Innovation in Teaching and Education (UCITE) and an adjunct professor of physics. But talk to a professor, and it’s clear that most of them possess a “wide range of opinion,” he added, and why confine it to the cocktail party circuit?

Besides providing breadth, and an outlet, for scholars’ extracurricular interests, blogs can also quicken the pace at which serious questions get considered.

…

Yet some (or even most) in academe view blogging commitments as a distraction from scholarly work. “There is some tension between blogging and academia in certain disciplines. Many academics view blogging with suspicion,” Adler said. “It is often assumed … that it is time that one could and should have been spending on one’s scholarship.” He disagrees, arguing that it all comes down to “free time.” Still, before he earned tenure, he blogged under a pseudonym.

Singham, who also has a blog, added that the popular conception of bloggers as “no-life, underemployed losers” explains “why academics would shy away from that kind of association.” He argued that a frequent regimen of writing for a blog could actually improve efficiency and scholarly output in the long run.

…

Scharf - keeping in mind the varying quality of blogs - said that he made sure to clarify his blog’s intent and high standards by displaying awards that it had won and a prominent list of expert contributors “so that people were getting the sense that this was a very serious [effort], that these experts were well-qualified to be saying these things.”

Personally, I am a bit dismayed by the last paragraph. It relies on an appeal to authority as the basis for evaluating the credibility and validity of statements posted on blogs, which is a poor way to make a logical argument in any context simply because authorities can also be wrong. My larger concern has to do with the importation of standards from the offline realm, and from past academic traditions, in shaping and evaluating a new wave of scholarly practice that, ideally, should be seeking a break with those standards and traditions while questioning them severely. Being cautious is one thing, and the need to be self-critical is never redundant — but choosing to do something new, only to do it defensively and with a chip on one’s shoulder seems to defeat the point of going online. The prejudice against producing websites is not new — indeed, some think it is the activity of graduate students who seek immediate attention and gratification, and will let the sites fade once they get their doctorates and their first teaching positions. How pleasant it is to see such prejudices defeated by actual practice.

Newly published articles:

American Anthropologist
March 2008, Vol. 110, No. 1, pp. 53-60
Posted online on May 8, 2008.
(doi:10.1111/j.1548-1433.2008.00008.x)

The Quest for Anthropological Relevance: Borgesian Maps and Epistemological Pitfalls

MATTI BUNZL

Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, IL 61801

Concepts: sociocultural anthropology, positivism, Boas, Geertz, Writing Culture

In this essay, I critique the currently dominant mode of American sociocultural anthropology. Through a historical reading of canonical texts from the 1970s to the 1990s, I trace some of contemporary anthropology’s limitations and probe their implications for the possibility of a publicly engaged discipline. I focus my critique on the demand for ever-increasing complexity, identifying it as an implicit form of positivism that renders the results of anthropological inquiries increasingly irrelevant to the big questions of the day. Epistemologically speaking, contemporary anthropology is thus not radical enough. In conclusion, I mobilize the Weberian-Boasian tradition as the most viable alternative to sociocultural anthropology’s status quo.

American Anthropologist
March 2008, Vol. 110, No. 1, pp. 61-63
Posted online on May 8, 2008.
(doi:10.1111/j.1548-1433.2008.00009.x)

A Response to Matti Bunzl: Public Anthropology, Pragmatism, and Pundits

CATHERINE BESTEMAN

HUGH GUSTERSON­

Department of Anthropology, Colby College
Waterville, ME 04901-8840

Department of Anthropology, George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

Concepts: globalization, neoliberalism, public anthropology, media, inequality

Discussing only two out of 11 chapters, Matti Bunzl argues that Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong (2005) embodies an excessively deconstructive approach that undermines public anthropology by opposing all generalization. In fact, the contributors to the Pundits volume come from a variety of intellectual positions, some unfriendly to deconstructionism. In a book that is deliberately jargon free, the contributors are unified not by postmodernism but by pragmatism. They oppose generalizations that are manifestly ideological and untrue, not all generalizations. The point of the book is not to nitpick generalizations but to unmask media apologetics for neoliberalism and neoconservatism that misuse core terms (e.g., culture, ethnicity, human nature, gender) from the anthropological lexicon. We advocate a revitalized public anthropology based on grounded research, translation of sophisticated anthropological knowledge into accessible English, and a passionate concern for the well-being of those at the sharp end of neoliberal globalization.

American Anthropologist
March 2008, Vol. 110, No. 1, pp. 64-65
Posted online on May 8, 2008.
(doi:10.1111/j.1548-1433.2008.00010.x)

A Reply to Besteman and Gusterson: Swinging the Pendulum

MATTI BUNZL

Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, IL 61801

Concepts: epistemology, politics, the public sphere

In this rejoinder to Catherine Besteman and Hugh Gusterson, I clarify that my essay “The Quest for Anthropological Relevance: Borgesian Maps and Epistemological Pitfalls” is not primarily a critique of their volume Why America’s Top Pundits Are Wrong (2005). Instead, I maintain that it takes issue with the current state of sociocultural anthropology and its inability to communicate with a larger public sphere. In conclusion, I reflect on the historical location of my argument, likening my position to advocacy for a swing in the discipline’s epistemological pendulum and finding additional cause for such action in the realities of the current political moment.

Conference announcement:

International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA)

Disappearing disciplinary borders in the social science library - global studies or sea change?

University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

6-7 August 2008

http://ilabs.inquiry.uiuc.edu/ilab/ssls/

Over the past decade, the nature of social science research and scholarship has undergone shifts that have blurred the traditional disciplinary boundaries as research attempts to grapple with phenomena and issues that require interdisciplinary knowledge and collaboration. For example, a growing number of institutions and scholars are vent