I’m just an anthropologist, which means that, like sociologists, historians, a minority of journalists and others, I’m in the business of trying to make sense of what’s going on in the world. In my case, the bit of the world I try hardest to make sense of is Indonesia, especially Bali (and occasionally south India), focusing on topics ranging from local politics, religion and history to development/environmental issues and architecture.
Its a priveleged position to be in but with the privelege comes responsibility to try to make it useful. I work in a university, where (at least on a good day) teaching feels reasonably useful, but there is also considerable pressure to produce writing in academic form/style and publish in academic journals. This usually takes a long time, but when it eventually gets published, not a lot of people read it and when they do they sometimes wonder why they tried anyway.
If my work has any value, I’d like it to be available to as wide an audience as possible, preferably in a style anyone can read and understand. This is not as easy as it may sound – the mainstream media are generally not interested and other options are limited. I’m not a blogger by nature, but I’ve resorted to it to get the fruits of my research, in academic and not-so-academic form, out there to you and anyone else who might be interested. Lets see how it goes.
Thanks for opening your office door, Dr MacRae.
hello! great blog!!!!
Thanks Graeme! I am beginning to understand!
Many thanks, Graeme. Your website (as much as a blog) is very useful. It would be helpful to know when you post new articles or blogs.
Thanks for your comments. Mark, you are quite right – it is essentially a site for my existing writing, using the easiest software available. But comments/discussion are welcome.
Great work Graeme!
A very useful site, especially for those members of the public who do not usually browse through specialist journals in anthropology.
Making what we know accessible is making it count.
Best,
Thomas
wow! i am not sure about the statement about “style that anyone can read or understand”. i flicked to two and thought i need a long weekend to digest this! i am gob smacked. you always seemed so relaxed. you must have been working your butt off. i will definitely read the one about Ubud ( yes, i know there are several, i forget which one it was i dipped into) when i have more leisure. maybe you could earmark them – lighterweight or abstruse? (They take a long time to download on dial up )
Thank you for sharing your work. i shall look at you with eyes of awe henceforth. As we sip our green tea or home brew.
This is a fine blog, Graeme. Thanks! I’m glad to learn something about your work, and I admire it. We anthropologists sometimes don’t know enough about what each other do, and sometimes when we do know, we often get into fights about it. I don’t know whether we’re worse than other academics in this respect. But I guess it is part of the peer review process, or something.
To be able to convey what we’ve learned to normal people, our students, and general readers in the world beyond academia is harder than it seems. I hope I am getting better at it than I was when I first started thirty years ago, but it’s hard to say. Things were so much simpler then! Or seemed so.
Anyway, thanks again. Please keep blogging. And keep in touch.
Thanks Peggy, I think these are problems with academia in general – anthropologists are not exempt but we are not worse than the others. Bridging that gap between academia and the rest of the world is more urgent than ever and I guess blogs (& e-publishing generally) are part of the solution.
Part of the problem, I think, is that we professional anthropologists are snobs, like most other academics. As snobs, we can’t stand the riff-raff. For many of us, the riff-raff are people with neither wealth nor fame nor title nor university degrees, aka most people. Because we can’t stand the riff-raff, we would not consider hanging out with them. But hanging out (aka participant observation) with riff-raff is largely what the practice of anthropology is all about. Or used to be.
And if we don’t hang out with them, how can we communicate with them in something resembling their own language? Even if we could, would we?
Sorry for going on so. It is late at night for me.
Well Peggy – I’m not so sure about this one … I can see where you are coming from and I think there is maybe some truth in it (some of the time, for some people).
Most (but not all) academics come from middle-class backgrounds and end up working in a comfortable middle-class sort of job, dealing largely (but not always) with people more or less like themselves. And as the university system becomes more about the intergenerational transmission of earning power and less about education as we used to know it, I guess this effect increases. But, all that said, many (but not all) anthropologists do the research part of their work with pretty ordinary folk and as we both know this can be a pretty transformative experience, which is reflected in the sort of things we write and teach and argue about and occasionally (as you have done) put significant bits of our lives into, so I don’t think it is that simple (and I suspect you don’t really think so either). But I do think the present condition of the university system and the competetive conditions of academic employment conspire to make it harder for us to be the real anthropologists most of us wanted to become in our headiest fieldwork days and perhaps still do on a good day. What I think we have to do now is find ways, as a professional group, of salvaging real anthropology from the things that threaten it and turning it back into the humane and useful practice is should be (and sometimes is).
I agree with all you say, Graeme, and apologize for getting grumpy and pessimistic sometimes. We should work to turn anthropology back into the humane and useful practice it can be and should be. But “back” is maybe not the right word here. In the past, there have been good anthropologists and bad ones, just as there are now, only now there are many more anthropologists doing all kinds of things, some of them (in my view) pointless, a few of them destructive, and some of them highly admirable, even if not much noticed by the world. I wonder if we could get Obama’s mother’s dissertation somewhere. Maybe you have already mentioned it in your blog. It was about a group of people in Indonesia, I think. She worked many years there and, from descriptions of her thesis I have read, she was doing exactly what you and I and others hope to do, to really learn from (not just about) the people we work with, ordinary people, poor people, who are often seen by better fed people as inferior to those who are better fed. Spend a large amount of time with those people, and find out what we can really do for them. What they really need, that we might be able to somehow provide. Meanwhile, there is little reward for such work – little if any material benefit, little if any recognition. And that is probably why, as you have noted, that kind of anthropology is not much practiced these days. Nor, I would add, was it ever. If one is lucky, one can get a university job that will enable this kind of work.