The Unbearable

Lightness of Anthropology

William Roseberry

Anthropology is experiencing two crises, one loudly proclaimed and

celebrated by a group of increasingly well known and well-paid cri-
sis mongers and managers, the other recognized but unattended, the
subject of worried conversations in offices, mailrooms, coffeeshops,
and bars, but not a worthy subject for ”theorization.” The first is the
crisis of representation that transformed anthropology, along with
the other social and historical ”sciences,” from the early 1980s; the
second is the more mundane and menacing crisis of employment,
which has been particularly acute since the early 1990s. In neither
case are we confronting unprecedented phenomena, but it is the
contention of this essay that first, we need to think about these crises
historically (that is, in relation to previous intellectual and material
crises), second, we need to think about them structurally (that is, in
relation to each other, and to other contemporary phenomena), and
third, we need to ponder their likely implications for the sort of
politically engaged historical anthropology envisioned in this spe-
cial issue.l
A consideration of intellectual and material crises in anthropology
can contribute to a discussion of the concerns of this special issue in
two ways. First, by looking at a range of anthropologiesand the means
by which they become successful, I hope to support the editors’ con-
tention that historians’ appropriation of anthropological ideas has been
relatively narrow. Second, I am taking the history of American anthro-
pology, as intellectual endeavor, discipline, and profession, as my cen-
tral problem, and am applying to that history a political-economic per-
spective that places the generation and communication of ideas within
material, social, and political relations and processes. Thus I am point-
ing toward alternative intersections of history and anthropology, and I
am using the framework of one such intersection to consider the recent
history of American anthropology itself.

RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW 65:5-25 1996

6/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

By ”politically engaged” or ”radical” anthropology, I mean an

intellectual commitment to the understanding, analysis, and explica-
tion of the relations and structures of power in, through, and against
which ordinary people live their lives. In this definition, there is no
requirement that one follow a kind of class analysis, or that one take
a particular position on Marxism. The routes toward an analysis of
power can be various, from a political-economic analysis of the
development of capitalism in a specific place, to the symbolic analy-
sis of the exercise of power in a colonial state, to a life history of a
person who experiences power from a particular position, in a par-
ticular way.2

Three Generations, Three Crises

It is useful to think about the development of anthropological ideas
and work since World War I1 in terms of a series of generations and
the intellectual and/or political crises they perceived and pro-
claimed. Specifically, I suggest that we consider three such genera-
tions, at twenty-year intervals-a first, from about 1950, that
attempted to transcend anthropological concentration on so-called
”primitive isolates,” and studied a range of wider connections with
civilizations or “complex societies,” or with evolutionary processes;
a second, from about 1970, that perceived and attempted to address
a number of silences in anthropological discourse regarding power,
colonialism, capitalism, class, and gender, and that raised a range of
political and epistemological questions concerning prevailing modes
of analysis; and a third, from about 1990, that is concerned with
modes of representation and has turned its critique back upon the
practice and, most importantly, ”poetics” of ethnography. The dates
for each of these generations are approximate: they serve as markers
for cohorts and processes of intellectual production that last a num-
ber of years, roughly a decade or more. Each of these generations
defined its project in opposition to former and current anthropologi-
cal practices and viewed those practices as approaching a kind of
crisis. Their task was to place anthropology on a new footing.
An interesting feature of each of these periods is that politically
engaged anthropology took an explicitly historical form, though the
meanings of ”history” have changed over time. In the first period, a
commitment to ”culture history” meant an attempt to place Native
American peoples or peasant communities in, say, Puerto Rico with-
in a history of Western expansion. In the second period, rather dif-
fuse notions of history emerged. On the one hand, we find a contin-
uation of the culture history tradition, now infused with a Marxian
 THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF ANTHROPOLOGY/7

language of capitalism and class analysis. For the culture historians

of the first and second generations, history was seen primarily as
process. On the other, with the growing influence of Clifford Geertz
and the historians’ embrace of Interpretation of Cultures (1973) during
the second period, we find a move toward a more hermeneutic
understanding of history as pattern.
Politically engaged anthropologists in both generations might
pursue their historical and ethnographic studies through area stud-
ies programs, themselves the products of reconfigured funding pro-
grams for the social sciences after World War 11. Though the intellec-
tual and political priorities behind the creation of such programs
were hardly radical, they provided the venue, bibliographic
resources, and funds for a range of important interdisciplinary pro-
jects. Thus, long before there was a self-proclaimed ”intersection” of
anthropology and history, such intersections had been created by
anthropologists or historians trying to understand the history and
structure of power in, say, Mesoamerica.
The third period has unfolded in the midst of a proclaimed inter-
section of anthropology and history, but the intellectual work has
gone in a rather different direction-not so much toward a consider-
ation of historical process or pattern but toward a rereading and cri-
tique of historical and ethnographic texts themselves, a critique of
their literary devices and tropes, and an examination of their embed-
dedness within the very structures and relations of, say, colonial
power they attempt to understand. This sort of analysis represents a
potentially important advance for politically engaged anthropology
and history, especially in combination with better substantive analy-
ses of historical processes and pattern^.^
A number of objections can be raised to my delineation of genera-
tions and crises. At no single moment does my characterization of a
generation begin to cover the full range of anthropological thought,
movement, or practice; nor is it intended to. Indeed, the defining
focus of the generations I have proposed would only capture and
characterize the work of a minority of anthropologists working in an
area. In marking the generations in this way, I have tried to identify
innovative groups-scholars who confronted a body of anthropo-
logical concepts and practices, and advocated new approaches and
problematics for anthropological work. Their writing was character-
ized by argument-with an anthropological past and with anthro-
pological colleagues writing in their present. Fixing generations in
this way therefore indicates a terrain of disputation and debate.
I mark these generations in terms of cohorts of graduate students,
8/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

who take from seminars and discussions a series of theoretical

debates and perspectives, as well as a reading of literature on a par-
ticular area, and fashion dissertation topics designed to address per-
ceived weaknesses, gaps, or unresolved problems in both the theo-
retical and real literatures. My argument privileges the dissertation,
not as the sole source of intellectual innovation (this would be
absurd), but as an indicator of certain intellectual conjunctures, a
statement of what is perceived to be problematic or troublesome at a
certain moment.
Marking generations in this way, we can consider specific process-
es of intellectual production in terms of theoretical and material rela-
tions. Concentrating on a graduate cohort, we can consider the texts
read and debates that animated graduate seminars, the movement
from seminar discussion to research proposal, the actual fieldwork-
an encounter with field and archival materials, as well as local schol-
ars and activists and their arguments and debates-the writing of
dissertations and their revisions into books, and the review and
reception of those books in another graduate cohort with perhaps
radically distinct intellectual agendas and preoccupations. For any
one cohort, then, we are considering an arc of at least ten years.
Concentration on generations of graduate students leaves open
the question of the role and power of senior scholars. We might con-
sider such scholars, first, as the authors of texts studied and criti-
cized by a particular generation of students. But this is not, of
course, the only way in which senior figures, leaders, or survivors of
earlier generations and crises, figure in the production of a particu-
lar cohort of graduate students. I have thus far presented the move-
ments as if they were wholly intellectual-the battle of ideas and the
writing and reading of texts. We do not get very far in understand-
ing past and present crises in anthropology without attending to the
ideas and reading the texts, but the focus on cohorts of graduate stu-
dents and the production and reproduction of generations of intel-
lectuals reminds us that the processes are simultaneously material:
Who is admitted? Who and what funded? Who and what pub-
lished? Who hired, and where? Who tenured, and where?
Some senior figures reemerge here as active participants in the
production of particular generations of anthropologists as teachers,
members of review panels at research foundations, editors of jour-
nals, editors of book series, chairs of department, employers,
patrons. One need not be crudely or mechanically materialist to rec-
ognize here a structure of power that figures in the very constitution
of a generation of intellectuals, the definition and resolution of a cri-
 THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF ANTHROPOLOGY/9

sis, and the selection of a tradition through which a particular gener-

ation or crisis is represented and remembered.
The relations between generations, between particular currents of
thought across generations, or between contending positions and
perspectives within a particular current of thought are therefore
complex and power-laden in practice, even if simplified in r n e m ~ r y . ~
An intellectual history of any of the crises I have suggested, then,
would need to deal with a range of questions and issues:
What was the intellectual field at a particular moment? That is, in
both broad terms and in detail, what was the range of intellectual pro-
jects, perspectives, debates, and arguments that characterized the
field?

How did the perception and declaration of a crisis affect the field?
Against what perspectives and projects are arguments and critiques
directed? What perspectives and projects remain relatively unaffected
by the new debates?

How are both the intellectual field and the perception of crisis orga-
nized socially? For the former, I have in mind a mapping of the field
onto a structure similar to the one alluded to above, including a hier-
archy of departments, editorships of journals, memberships on
research foundation review panels, and so on. For the latter, we need
to know where, and through what channels and mechanisms, a crisis
is declared and a debate joined-in what departments, through what
new networks and organizations, and so on.

The emerging social organization of debate and argument then

needs to be placed in relation to the organized intellectual field. If we
are concentrating on a cohort of graduate students, who serves as
their teachers, ancestors, and patrons? Where are they placed within
the intellectual field and structural hierarchy? Does the challenge to
the intellectual field also challenge the structural hierarchy, or does it
reproduce it?

Finally, we need to examine the fate of a particular cohort of gradu-

ate students five or ten years into their careers, in relation both to the
intellectual field and the structural hierarchy. Which scholars, per-
spectives, and projects have "made it," so to speak, and which have
been filtered out? With what relation to the possibilities presented by
the intellectual ferment of earlier years?

These questions need, in turn, to be placed within a broader social,

economic, and political history of the academy-the expansion of
higher education in the decades after World War 11, the stagnation
and relative decline of enrollments and jobs in the social sciences in
the 1970s and 1980s, and the "restructuring" of recent years; the
10/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

influence of political events, currents, and movements on particular

generations, such as the McCarthyite purges, radicalization during
the Vietnam War, and the Reagan "revolution."
Clearly, a detailed history of the sort I have suggested can not be
attempted here. I do wish to indicate a few features and dimensions
of such a history, however, to illuminate certain distinctive features
of the present. In one sense, I am offering a sketch or outline for such
a history; in another, I am pointing to some of the questions such a
history would need to a d d r e ~ s . ~

Period 1: Culture History and Complex Society

Prior to World War 11, the anthropological establishment in the
United States was relatively small. A few Ph.D.-granting depart-
ments were responsible for the reproduction of the discipline, and
the influence of dominant faculty in those departments was prepon-
derant. In a sense, the structural hierarchy can be thought of as a
kind of conical clan.6 For those unfamiliar with anthropological
analyses of social and political organization, the conical clan is a par-
ticular social organization of power based on unilineal descent, in
which, say, the firstborn son of the firstborn son of the firstborn son
of a real or putative ancestor holds political power, and passes it on
to his firstborn son. In any particular generation, other children of a
power holder are considered to be part of the noble lineage, but as
they have children, their descendants are more distant from the
noble line. With time and kinship distance, they found commoner
lines, providing a kinship basis for political hierarchy.
Transferred to academic hierarchies in a situation in which the
structure of reproduction is relatively small (that is, there is a small
number of Ph.D.-granting departments), the conical clan would take
the following form: the noble line is located in the elite departments;
the noninheriting sons and daughters are located in colleges, sociolo-
gy departments, and non-Ph.D.-granting anthropology departments.
Transferred specifically to the context of anthropology, the most
important conical clan was that founded by Franz Boas at Columbia
University, almost unique among his generation in his ability to
reproduce himself. Because other early anthropologists were located
in museums or departments associated with museums, Boas was able
to supplement his intellectual power with the power to train students
who, in turn, created other departments and trained other students.
His first student, for example, was Alfred Kroeber, who went to
Berkeley and founded a department of anthropology and, with
Robert Lowie, another Boas student, extended his sphere of influence.
 THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF ANTHROPOLOGY/ll

Nonetheless, alternative centers were formed in the two decades

prior to World War 11, as new departments were created, often with
Rockefeller support, in close association with sociology programs. In
important cases, this involved the creation of what can be seen as
new or alternative conical clans. At Chicago, for example, Robert
Redfield established a program in close association with the sociolo-
gy department dominated by his father-in-law, Robert Park. The
arrival of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown in the 1930s cemented an approach
that was already more sociological than that practiced at Columbia
or Berkeley and founded a new offshoot of a British conical clan.
Malinowski’s brief stay at Yale had a similar effect, and Talcott
Parsons’s conception of the study of ”social relations” at Harvard,
encompassing both sociology and anthropology, and eventuating in
an intellectual division of labor between the study of ”society” and
the study of ”culture,” was to provide the basis for yet another clan.
Small size, clan structure, and differentiation provide the neces-
sary basis for understanding postwar crisis and transformation. Two
new developments after the war were inserted into this context: the
first was the influx of a generation of largely, but not exclusively,
male students on the G.I. Bill, and the second was the emergence of
the US. as the dominant world power. The Pax Americana from the
mid 1940s to the late 1960s, in turn, had further effects, such as the
opening up of new areas of the world to U.S. interest and influence,
and the related move of anthropological fieldwork beyond its
Native American and Latin American loci to Africa, Oceania, and
Southeast Asia; the remaking of the social sciences, and the inclusion
of anthropology within the remade social sciences, around newly
conceptualized ”area” studies, especially with the support of the
Social Science Research Council; and the social and political conserv-
ativism of the era, from the brief repression of the McCarthy years to
the more generalized American ”celebration” (as C. Wright Mills
called it) of the Cold War.
New and more people confronting a radically transformed social,
political, and cultural context demanded a new anthropology not
wedded to the study of small-scale communities treated as social
and cultural ”isolates,” or to the ethnographic equivalent of pot-
shard collection and classification. They were more interested in pat-
tern and process, in sociological generalization and explanation, and
in the structures and dynamics of power.
Though students at each of the centers can be seen to have moved
toward new definitions and practices of anthropology, the group of
”culture historians’’ at Columbia University stands out, in its
12/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

rethinking of classic anthropological subjects (e.g., Native American

cultural history), its move toward new subjects (e.g., peasants and
“complex societies”), and its embrace of both materialism and histo-
r ~They. ~had powerful and important teachers and patrons, such as
Julian Steward and William Duncan Strong, who had good clan con-
nections and ancestors and who had made earlier moves toward
more materialist, evolutionary, and (in Strong’s case) historical
approaches in their own work. Some of the students also embraced
the more insistent and mechanical materialism and evolutionism of
Leslie White, a relative outsider in clan terms who acted like one,
rejecting Boas and the Boasians as he redrew his own intellectual
genealogy to embrace the nineteenth-century evolutionists as ances-
tors. White was building what was to become a hegemonic depart-
ment at Michigan, partly by employing some of the graduates of the
Columbia generation, forming a kind of Columbia/Michigan axis in
the 1960s for ecological, evolutionary, and materialist work. Another
important figure, sometimes as teacher and sometimes as inspira-
tion, was Karl Polanyi, who was directing the Columbia University
project on ”economic aspects of institutional growth” in the late
1940s and 1950s, and who provided a language and conceptual
repertoire through which the materialist and historical interests and
political concerns of several cohorts of students, writing in a repres-
sive decade, could be addressed without raising the specter of Marx.
Columbia anthropologists were not the only ones who moved
toward new conceptualizations of anthropological practice in the
postwar period. Partly because of the new availability of research
funds for “area research,” and the as yet to be determined role of
anthropology within such interdisciplinary projects, teachers and
students at various centers made important moves toward compara-
tive and interdisciplinary work on ”complex societies” and civiliza-
tions (e.g., Redfield and Marriott’s work on South Asia at Chicago,
Parsons’s patronage of comparative political and sociological analy-
sis at Harvard, Steward’s Puerto Rico project, and Wagley’s Brazil
project at Columbia). I do want to suggest, however, that certain
members of the Columbia generation constituted a focus of political-
ly engaged, historical materialist work that distinguished that group
from the rest. What, in brief and general terms, can we say about the
reproduction of this generation, both broadly and in terms of the
focal group from Columbia? First, if we take the vantage of the early
1960s rather than that of the mid 1950s, it is fair and reasonable to
claim that reproduction was ”generalized.” True, individual histo-
ries and careers were varied and checkered. Sidney Mintz, for exam-
 THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF ANTHROPOLOGY /13

ple, went directly from graduate school at Columbia to Yale, where

he was to stay for two decades, while Eric Wolf went from the same
cohort to a series of research assistantships and visiting appoint-
ments before "landing," first at Virginia, then (after a brief visit to
Chicago) at Michigan. Others, like Stanley Diamond, took even
longer, moving from brief appointment to brief appointment, in and
out of the academy, before landing in the mid-1960s at the New
School, which, at that time and in anthropology, was completely off
the institutional map. It is also true that the more radical language
and concepts of the dissertation projects had to be submerged, mod-
ified, or rejected as a condition of both publication and employment.
Joan Vincent's careful analysis of the purging of Marxist language
from Columbia dissertations as they were transformed into pub-
lished books serves as a model for a wider study that needs to be
done concerning the fate and work of other generations8
Second, the institutional map was itself changing, especially by
the mid to late 1960s, with the establishment of new departments
and new Ph.D. programs. This boom period in employment provid-
ed the first occasion in which a hundred flowers might bloom, mak-
ing it possible to write of a "generalized" reproduction of a genera-
tion of anthropologists. This does not mean that hierarchy dissolved
and that elite institutions did not continue to hire, almost exclusive-
ly, their own. But anthropologists who in earlier generations might
not have found academic employment, or who might have held rel-
atively marginal appointments in departments where they could not
reproduce themselves, now found themselves working in, or crest-
ing Ph.D. programs. In addition, some of these programs were in
position to claim, and achieve, elite status themselves.
Third, as a consequence of the boom in programs and employ-
ment, the conical clan became more ramified and differentiated. If in
earlier generations only the noble, senior line reproduced itself, as
junior lines or junior descendants in each generation "died out" by
not producing heirs, by the late 1960s even quite junior, or "com-
moner" lines were able to reproduce themselves. That is, they could
train graduate students who in turn could expect to find jobs, per-
haps, in some cases, in other new Ph.D.-granting departments.
Fourth, with important exceptions, the sharp intellectual focus of
particular departments became more diffuse, partly as a function of
increasing size, partly as a reflection of growing intellectual diversi-
ty, partly as a result of an additive, real approach to departmental
curricula and hiring (at the stereotypical extreme, one Africanist,
one Latin Americanist, one South Asianist, one Oceanist, etc.). Thus,
14/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

remnants of a variety of clans could be located in particular depart-

ments.

Period 2 ”Reinventing” Anthropology9

It is common to take the Vietnam War as a marker for the second
period and the generation that came to college and graduate school
in the late 1960s and early 1970s. To it needs to be added the civil
rights movement and the broad mobilization for peace and freedom,
the end of war abroad and social transformation at home. Two social
phenomena serve as necessary context for the intellectual and acade-
mic movements of the period: continued expansion of departments,
enrollments, and employment into the early 1970s, partly a reflec-
tion of draft laws and partly a result of the last of the baby boom
generation’s coming of age; and the mobilization and radicalization
of students and professors alike.
As a discipline, anthropology has never provided a congenial
home for conservatives or those who serve power. Intellectually, its
(often competing) relativistic and evolutionary emphases are poten-
tially unsettling to western or ”American,” or ”British” chauvinisms.
Practically, anthropology’s emphasis on fieldwork has taken its
practitioners to the fringes of empire, placing them in a virtually
unique position among social scientists to report substantively on
empire’s effects and victims. Of course, it has also placed anthropol-
ogists in position to serve empire, as in British Africa, or among
Native Americans, or the U.S.’s growing informal empire after
World War 11. But the numbers of anthropologists who so served
were never so great, nor was anthropology ever so central to the
imperial project, as its critics (and this period produced a significant
number of critics) proclaimed.
It should not be surprising, then, that anthropologists at a variety
of campuses took active-and at times leading-roles in the political
mobilization. At Michigan, for example, Eric Wolf and Marshall
Sahlins were among the organizers of the teach-in movement
against the war. Both were products of different cohorts of the 1950s
generation at Columbia. Their activist example was to be repeated at
other campuses, with other anthropologists. Student and faculty col-
lectives at various departments created Anthropologists for Radical
Political Action, engaging in actions on their own campuses, orga-
nizing ”anti-imperialist” sessions at annual meetings of the
American Anthropological Association, and publishing a regular
newsletter.
Although much of this critical energy was directed ”outward,”
 THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF ANTHROPOLOGY/15

toward political mobilization on and beyond campuses, it was also

directed ”inward” toward the discipline of anthropology itself-a
critical reconsideration of a series of absences in anthropological dis-
course (of class, gender, colonialism, capitalism, the state, etc.), a
reflection on the ethics and politics of fieldwork, and a rejection of
intellectual models and paradigms (”structural functionalism,” for
example) that had dominated the previous two decades.
Although some now see this as a period dominated by Marxist
language and concepts, or by the resurgence of ”political economy,”
we need to remember that the critiques were much broader and
more diffuse. Marxism and class analysis there certainly were, but
”radical” analysis was hardly limited to such terms (consider, for
example, the range of perspectives at issue in a then-emerging
anthropology of gender), and ”critical” reflection on anthropological
paradigms could avoid radical politics altogether. An emergent
symbolic anthropology, for example, could reject the scientism and
functionalism of reigning anthropological approaches, but in ways
that displaced the political. Consider, for example, Clifford Geertz’s
eloquent critique of positivism while he distanced himself from
those who ”run on about the exploitation of the masses” (1973), or
his rejection of mechanistic, top-down notions of power in favor of
an interpretive understanding of the ”exemplary center” to under-
stand politics in ... Indonesia. I do not mean to suggest that symbolic
anthropology was necessarily non- or anti-political (indeed, impor-
tant politically engaged work has taken the symbolic anthropology
that emerged in this period as its starting point), or that one had to
be Marxist or to ”run on” about class to be ”radical.” I simply want
to stress the broad diversity of critiques and debates in anthropolo-
gy in this period.
On the one hand, we find an extension of the “culture history”
tradition from the 1950s toward a resolutely materialist and increas-
ingly explicit Marxist analysis of capitalism, class, and state forma-
tion. On the other, we find a move toward a hermeneutic or inter-
pretive anthropology that rejected ”positivistic” and ”scientistic”
anthropologies, and concentrated on processes of social and cultural
construction-of cultural and political meanings and webs of signifi-
cation, and of ethnographic facts and concepts. At the extremes,
these two modes of analysis, each potentially critical, could speak
past each other-the materialists dismissing the hermeneuticians as
”idealists,” ”mentalists,” and ”obscurantists,” ignoring their impor-
tant critique of scientific rationalism; the hermeneuticians rejecting
all material or sociological analysis as ”positivist,” ”empiricist,” or
16/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

"rationalist," ignoring the important political and sociological argu-

ments embedded within much of this work. Not everyone worked
at the extremes, of course, and some "marxists" were more comfort-
able working toward the "materialist" end of the spectrum, while
others veered toward the "interpretive" side. The main point and
problem, however, is to recognize a wide range of critical or poten-
tially critical, politically engaged anthropologies, and of a series of
intellectual and political arguments among them.
This becomes important when we consider the differential repro-
duction of this generation. By the early 1970s, the last of the boom
generation had entered college, and the growth period came to an
abrupt halt. Some new Ph.D. departments were still created (at
Johns Hopkins, for example), but for the most part academic growth
was confined to community colleges (which had limited use or
space for anthropologists), and enrollments in anthropology, along
with other social sciences, shrunk. Ph.D. departments debated
whether to continue admitting large numbers of students, and
employment entered a long period of crisis.
Into this crisis entered many recent Ph.D.s, many of whom were
the first graduates of new Ph.D. programs created at the close of the
boom (Massachusetts or Connecticut or the New School, for exam-
ple), and some of whom did reasonably well. Some of the new pro-
grams were among the most interesting and innovative on the scene.
Small, unencumbered by the living and tenured dead, they were in a
position to fashion programs that rethought anthropology, sought
new connections and projects, and reconfigured intellectual genealo-
gies. But they could not entirely escape genealogy, for many of the
teachers in these new departments were themselves the younger,
non-inheriting sons of the leaders of conical clans, or the products of
commoner lineages that had been able to reproduce themselves dur-
ing the boom period.
The graduates of the new departments were at a disadvantage as
they sought academic appointment in a period of retrenchment.
Although some found academic jobs (perhaps at departments like
the ones from which they graduated, perhaps at state colleges and
community colleges with undergraduate departments, or as part of
sociology programs), many did not.
In a period of shrinking research funding and employment and
growing numbers of employable graduates, one result was the rein-
stitution of a kind of conical clan structure. Due to the changes of the
previous forty years, one could no longer point to a single, apical
ancestor. At an institutional level, several institutions could claim
 THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF ANTHROPOLOGY/17

elite status for themselves and their graduates. At a personal level,

the intellectual upheavals of the early 1950s and late 1960s had
involved much genealogical reconfiguration. So there were several
lines of power, but there were many other lines, created over the
previous fifteen years, that lacked institutional and personal power,
and that were marked for genealogical erasure.
Although ”radicals,” graduates of both elite and non-elite institu-
tions found jobs, published books, and received tenure, their pres-
ence in the academy was never so pronounced as the neoconserva-
tives feared; nor were they so well placed in elite institutions.
Through myriad funding, publishing, and hiring decisions, many
perspectives and some people were filtered out. By the mid 1980s, in
retrospective essays written by graduates of this generation, ”politi-
cal economy’’ was pronounced to be the least interesting or sophisti-
cated intellectual innovation of the period, in comparison with, say,
symbolic anthropology or structuralism.1° One of the authors of
those essays has more recently gone even further, proclaiming in an
interview in the New Yovk Times Sunday Magazine that nothing of any
intellectual interest was happening in anthropology in the early sev-
enties, with the exception of the work of Clifford Geertz, that the
rest of the field was intellectually dead. In this period, one hundred
flowers were planted; maybe forty bloomed; maybe twenty have
survived.

Period 3: Rewriting Anthropologyll

We can point to five trends in the most recent generation. First, there
is a profoundly conservative reaction in politics and culture, marked
politically by the Reagan victory in 1980, and organized attempts by
Reaganites in power to ”defund the left” by actively intervening in
government endowments and funding agencies-moves that were
begun in the 1980s and are being pursued with renewed zeal and
evident disgust by the new generation of Republican ”revolutionar-
ies.” Culturally, it has been marked by a delegitimization of any sort
of left or progressive discourse. As endowments, funding agencies,
and universities are seen or identified as the producers of such dis-
course and sanctuaries for ”tenured radicals,’’ they become targets
for what can best be described as a purge.
Second, we find a clearly related crisis of academic employment.
To an extent, the economic crisis is invisible. In one sense, anthro-
pologists have seldom had it so good: Though the rise of cultural
studies has largely occurred outside of anthropology, it has nonethe-
less provided another and additional venue for some anthropologi-
18/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

cal work, and offers a growth pole for the employment of some
anthropologists. Publishers are actively competing for certain kinds
of anthropological texts, which in turn have unprecedented com-
mercial potential. And an important circle of anthropologists find
themselves in demand-for conferences, articles, books, and profes-
sorships. But this is only one side of a broader and more troubling
picture. While cultural studies disciplines and publishers have
embraced certain anthropologies and anthropologists, most of what
anthropologists do and write is rejected. Although the commercial-
ization of academic (including university) publishing offers new and
lucrative possibilities for some, it has closed off virtually any possi-
bility of publishing what used to be the most basic product of our
discipline: the ethnographic monograph. And the recent success of a
few "stars" does not simply contrast with, but rests upon, the
employment crisis faced by the majority, especially those who have
graduated since 1990. The recent recession exacerbates a longer term
trend and problem created by the adoption of flexible employment
strategies by universities over the past two decades, resulting in
growing numbers of faculty on short-term or part-time contracts.
Although the anthropological profession has always been charac-
terized by differentiation between core or elite and "commoner"
anthropologists, the most recent period can be seen as one in which
the lines are more sharply drawn. In addition to a differentiation
between core and peripheral departments, and distinctions between
senior and junior faculty, new modes of differentiation are becoming
more important. To the distinction between tenured and untenured,
add one between tenure line and non-tenure line, or between multi-
year and "visiting" or "guest" appointments, or between full-time
and part-time. In each case, the distinction between a shrinking sta-
ble and privileged core, and a growing unstable, flexibly employed
periphery is more sharply drawn, and resembles the model of flexi-
ble labor market structures reproduced by David Harvey.12 Thus,
the growing gap between the privileged few and the threatened
many closely mirrors larger social and economic trends in class for-
mation and employment.
The post-boom stagnation in enrollments and employment contin-
ued from the early 1970s until the 1980s, filtering out sigruficant seg-
ments of the 1970s generation and its immediate successors, as we
have seen. By the mid-eighties, a coming golden age was increasingly
forecast, in which the retirement of a large generation of post-World
War II scholars would produce a shortage in the professoriat, increas-
ing employment prospects for the late eighties/early nineties genera-
 THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF ANTHROPOLOGY /19

tion of graduate students, and creating the basis for a bidding war for
the next generation of senior scholars (the generation of the seventies,
for example). Politics aside, this prospect struck fear in the tiny hearts
of university presidents and vice-presidents for management and
budget across the land. Luckily for them, the Bush recession of 1991,
which hit especially hard in the Northeast and California, provided
the opportunity not simply for cyclical retrenchment, but for an active
"restructuring." With apparent glee, university presidents lined up to
proclaim to the Chronicle for Higher Education that the present crisis
would be different from earlier ones, that deeper and longer term cuts
were required, and that the structure of higher education would be
permanently changed. Subsequent cuts in budgets, and eliminations
of entire programs, involved responses that went well beyond the
financial exigencies of the moment. Yet even the most zealous budget
cutters have been taken by surprise by Reagan's grandchildren-in-
congress, anxious to defund not just the left, but higher education
altogether. In uneasy combination, an economic recession, university
budget cutters, and knife-wielding congressional reactionaries have
produced a profound multiyear crisis in academic employment.
When combined with increasing resort to flexible labor schemes in
academia so that only 50 percent of the few jobs that are posted
involve full-time, tenure-line appointments, we must conclude that
the great majority of the present generation of graduates and graduate
students will not find academic jobs.13
Third, as in the 1970s, this crisis is experienced differentiallywithin
a structured hierarchy of anthropology departments. It occurs within
the context outlined in Period 2: a large number of Ph.D.-granting
departments, with a clearly defined elite center and an equally clearly
identified periphery, with a series of conical clans based in the elite
departments. Through the 1970s and ' ~ O S , departments across the
spectrum, in unequal numbers, were able to place some of their grad-
uates and thus, in a sense, reproduce themselves. But the crisis of the
'90s brings with it a profound structural consequence: a few elite
departments, always more successful than the others in placing their
graduates for reasons that are only tangentially related to "quality,"
are now in a position to virtually monopolize the placement of the
present generation. It is not unheard of, for example, for a department
to construct a short list composed entirely of the graduates of a single
department. Structurally, a few conical clans are in position to domi-
nate the field for the first time since before World War 11, as common-
er lineages find themselves in danger of dying out.
Intellectually, this results in a shrinking of diversity in the field,
20/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

and this is the fourth trend we need to consider. A range of perspec-

tives and arguments, and of large and small departments in which
they can flourish, is especially important for the nourishment of a
variety of politically engaged anthropologies. This diversity was an
unanticipated consequence of the growth and ferment of Period 1,
whch undercut the old conical clan structure; it was reproduced, if
unevenly and not as broadly as one might have hoped, in Period 2.
By filtering out much of the work (and a generation of scholars)
coming out of the more "peripheral" departments, the present
restructuring threatens to radically constrict the range of anthropo-
logical practices, thus closing the spaces in which politically
engaged anthropology and history can be practiced.
These assertions may seem exceedingly strange when we consider
the fifth trend of the period, which is the third intellectual crisis itself:
the crisis of representation and the emergence of poststructuralist,
postmodernist, and postcolonial perspectives. For many, this has
been experienced as a period of increasing openness-to new, critical
perspectives, to more diverse, "multicultural" authorships and texts,
to a wider range of styles of work, texts, forms of representation, and
so on. Much of this is true, and some of it is overstated.
There is much in the work that has emerged over the past decade
that is new and represents a genuine break with the past, but it is
also connected with, or rests upon, earlier work, especially that
which emerged in Period 2. The critique of colonialism, for example,
or of the politics and ethics of fieldwork, owes much to the unac-
knowledged or partially acknowledged work and debates of the late
1960s and early 1970s. More importantly, the rejection of science,
systems, social wholes, and even that now-thoroughly discredited
account, the grand or master narrative, has roots in the hermeneutic
movement that constituted one dimension of the work that came out
of Period 2, especially as it developed out of the writing of Clifford
Geertz. Many of the descendants have gone beyond and turned
upon the master, but the lineal connection with various strains of
symbolic and interpretive anthropology, especially as taught and
practiced at certain core institutions, was of central importance in
granting the crisis literature of Period 3 a kind of core or central, as
opposed to marginal, status almost from the beginning.
I do not wish to enter here into a criticism of the work itself, on
either intellectual or political grounds. Although I have reservations
on both counts, I think much of it is good and necessary and that it
belongs within an imaginable range of critical, politically engaged
work.14
 THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF ANTHROPOLOGY/21

What I find disconcerting is its apparent success in shrinking the

range of such work. This success should not be understood at the
discursive level alone. The "posts" are not the first to make an exclu-
sive claim on insight, intellectual sophistication, or political recti-
tude. They owe their relative success, however, to their position
within the conical clan and the consequences of the structural crisis.
With regard to their clan status, one of the remarkable features of
the present intellectual ferment is how thoroughly it has been spon-
sored by core institutions in the field. As with earlier movements,
this crisis eventuated in the creation of new journals and book pro-
jects. Where the earlier generation's Critique of Anthropology or
Dialectical Anthropology were at first low budget, marginal opera-
tions, however, many of the new journals associated with the "post"
movement are centrally located, published by major university
presses or, in the important case of Cultural Anthropology, a pioneer-
ing journal in the creation of a postmodernist anthropology, by the
American Anthropological Association itself. Despite the language
of marginality, the present movement has been uniquely successful
in gaining editorships, chairmanships, jobs, attractive book con-
tracts, and the like.
The combination of their core status with an economic crisis
means that the crisis managers and mongers may actually be in a
position to put their exclusivist and exclusionary claims into effect.
Not by means of conspiracy but as a structural effect of a range of
individual decisions regarding funding, publishing, hiring, tenur-
ing, and so on, it is possible that, as members of the present genera-
tion who do work that has fallen out of favor are not hired, whole
lines of work will disappear.
What has fallen out of favor? In practice, it seems to be any work
that is too ethnographic, too sociological, too structural, too political,
too economic, or too processual. It certainly includes, but is not lim-
ited to, any of the work that develops the cultural history tradition
of period 1, and most of the work that develops the Marxist, or more
broadly materialist, tradition of period 2. Thus, in spite of its politi-
cal claims, it rejects much of the politically engaged anthropology of
the post-World War I1 decades, collapsing it into a vaguely defined
"traditional," "conventional," "monumentalist," even "conserva-
tive" anthropology. To the extent that the present crisis managers
are successful in ensuring the nonreproduction of these traditions,
they will have succeeded in accomplishing what generations of uni-
versity administrators and Republicans could not accomplish-
purging a whole range of politically engaged anthropologies.
22IRADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

This is an extreme claim, and I hope I am wrong. But let us return

to a less extreme way of posing the problem: that the conjunction of
the two crises, given their respective structures, is resulting in the
shrinking of the range of anthropological work in general, and of
politically engaged anthropology more specifically. I regard either
shrinkage as a loss, but let us concentrate here on politically
engaged anthropologies. What, exactly, is in danger of being lost?
Most broadly, it is the very attempt to analyze and understand the
relations and structures of power in, through, and against which
people live, which serves as a basis for such an anthropology. For
such analysis and understanding, histories of colonialism or capital-
ism are never sufficient, but they remain necessary. Class analysis is
never sufficient, but it remains necessary. Processual analysis, scien-
tific and otherwise, is never sufficient, but it remains necessary.
Ethnographic analysis of local fields of power is never sufficient, but
it remains necessary. ”Grand narratives” (I am willing to let ”master
narratives,” whatever they are, go) are never sufficient, but they
remain necessary.
We still need, in short, the kind of social and cultural history and
ethnography that has provided both our basic knowledge of rela-
tions and structures of power in, through, and against which ordi-
nary people have lived, and the basis for important political debates
and arguments. If this kind of work is ”airbrushed out” as a com-
bined result of a theoretical shift in the discipline and a prolonged
economic crisis, politically engaged anthropology will be impover-
ished as a result. Lest there be misunderstanding, I am not calling
for the mechanical reproduction of decades-old traditions, but for
their active development, through internal and external argument,
criticism, incorporation of new perspectives, arguments, and
sources, and so on. For such development to be genuinely self-sus-
taining, however, it requires an active sense of tradition, and a
respect for a range of projects and perspectives, or of ways of being
political. Otherwise, we end up with anthropology-lite,which might
fit rather well in a restructured, defunded academy.

Notes.
1. I have written this essay while in rural Mexico, with limited access to books and
articles. I have therefore not discussed any particular works in detail but instead pre-
sent an interpretive history of politically engaged anthropology that concentrates on
broad intellectual and political themes and suggests, again in broad terms, a changing
structure of academic production.
2. Nor, in my view, does this understanding of ”radical” anthropology require any
particular position on ”scientific” versus ”interpretive” approaches, though individ-
ual anthropologists, of course, have strong positions on the matter. There have been
periods in which anthropological attempts to understand relations of power have
 THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF ANTHROPOLOGY /23

been primarily "scientific," others in which they have been primarily "interpretive."
My own attempt here is to understand the emergence of particular kinds of politically
engaged anthropology in the context of specific arguments. In periods dominated by
obscurantist approaches depending on the inspiration and vision of an individual
author, a "scientific" examination of the relations and structures of power may be the
most important step a politically engaged anthropology can take. In periods dominat-
ed by scientific positivism that serves to rationalize structures of power, a hermeneu-
tic critique is necessary.
3. The danger is that many of the contributors to the new movement reject that
combination, invoking power in the form of "capitalism," "colonialism," or "the state"
without actually analyzing its forms, relations, structures, histories, or effects. History
as process, as understood by both the culture history generation and the political
economists of the second generation is actively rejected. The new authors are, for the
most part, lineal descendants of the authors who called for hermeneutic anthropology
of history as pattern during the second period, but they have set aside the substantive
concerns (and the real discipline?) that could produce an Agricultural Involution or
Negara. Thus a central dimension of a politically engaged anthropology-the attempt
to understand and explicate the relations and structures of power in, through, and
against which ordinary people live their lives-may be set aside.
4. The simplifications involve erasures-friends and comrades who did not get
funded, or did not get published, or did not get hired, or got stuck at a marginal
school, who got depressed, whose work does not appear in any bibliographies, or
who cut his or her intellectual sails to catch the changing winds. These were, of
course, their own troubles, and one can usually find particular reasons for an individ-
ual's relative lack of success: she does not write well; he is too inflexible or mechani-
cal; her theoretical take is not quite sophisticated enough and has not incorporated
the latest French twist. But to adopt C. Wright Mills' old and still useful language,
those personal troubles must be fit within and understood in terms of public issues,
in this case the structure of a discipline and the process of its reproduction.
The battle for ideas and the perception and resolution of crises takes on one
appearance in the seminar room and in the publication of particularly important
papers or books; it takes on a rather different appearance in the subsequent structure
of departments or the retrospective representation of a debate. The students of Don X,
Professor in a "top ten" department whose work has been convincingly criticized (or,
often enough ignored) by other students in other departments, are quietly funded, do
their research, publish monographs and articles, are hired by other "top ten" depart-
ments, and tenured. When they sit down to write their review essays, or a job
description, or compose a departmental self-study in collaboration with other ex-stu-
dents, the debates of an earlier generation are rewritten and ... resolved.
The structure of reproduction therefore assures a kind of hierarchy of schools and
departments, of lineages of scholars and traditions of work, of networks through
which reputation and distinction are affirmed, of funding sources and, to a certain
extent, priorities. This is not to say that there is no room for dynamism and/or
change, or that structure determines all. The moments of crisis I identified have repre-
sented periods of profound intellectual ferment, connected with broader social and
political movements and shifts, and have produced structural changes in the disci-
pline-new traditions and styles of work, new departments, new scholarly lineages
and networks, new journals, and so on.
I do mean to suggest, however, that even as the moments of crisis have produced
structural change, the preexisting structures and networks have acted as a kind of fil-
ter. Certain intellectuals, ideas, perspectives, and projects do not make it through the
filter and, therefore, do not make it into the review essays, histories, and intellectual
genealogies. As they are "airbrushed out of history," so to speak, the movements and
debates are simplified in retrospect.
5. In the analysis that follows, I consider the differential fate of generations of
graduate students in terms of hierarchy of "elite" or central and more peripheral
departments. A none-too-surprising conclusion is that the graduates of elite depart-
24/RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW

ments get the best and most jobs, and that graduates from more peripheral depart-
ments are comparatively disadvantaged in general, are shut out entirely-for the most
part-from appointments in elite departments, and are especially disadvantaged in
periods of academic retrenchment. What needs to be addressed more explicitly is the
question and problem of quality. By one simplistic way of understanding the situa-
tion, there is no problem: the "best" students go to the "best" schools; the "best" grad-
uates, the ones who wrote really "great" dissertations get the "best" jobs; and so on.
For this to be true, the structural hierarchy of elite and peripheral schools would have
to be perfectly mapped onto a universally agreed upon standard of quality, which in
turn would have to mapped upon a distribution of students (again in terms of a uni-
versally agreed upon standard of quality). I do not wish to argue the opposite
extreme, one that would claim a more or less equal distribution of "excellent" and
"mediocre" students across the structural hierarchy, or that would claim no connec-
tion between quality of program and position within the hierarchy.
Clearly, some programs are better than others: they have more human, biblio-
graphic, and financial resources; they have more integrated curricula; they teach
intellectual history better or do a better job of engaging area literatures and studies.
They attract more funds and students. Because of the availability of research and
training funds and bibliographic facilities, some of their students (who may well start
out "better" in terms of some universally agreed upon standard of quality) become
"better" in the course of their graduate education, and as they research their ("excel-
lent") dissertations. But anyone who has served on a search committee knows that the
"best" programs also turn out dunces, and it is not uncommon for the dunces from
the "best" programs to be hired while the "best" graduates of peripheral programs go
jobless.
Moreover, one problem with universally agreed upon standards of quality, espe-
cially when applied to programs, is that they ignore the emergence of innovative pro-
grams or constellations of perspectives, particularly but not solely in periods of intel-
lectual crisis or ferment-programs that are able to take as a collective project the
recognition of a problem or movement in a new interdisciplinary direction. There is
no reason why such movements and programs cannot be located in elite depart-
ments, and at times they have been. But there is also no reason why they should be so
located, and they generally have not. Small, relatively peripheral departments may
create programs and communities of graduate students who, despite relative lack of
funding and resources, undertake projects and move in innovative directions that stu-
dents in elite departments do not or cannot. Some of these students produce really
"excellent" dissertations, "better" than or as "good" as the "best" dissertations from
elite departments. But they have a harder time getting funded, published, and hired,
and in retrospective review essays that consider their generation-essays written by
graduates or professors at the "best" programs-they and their work may be "air-
brushed out."
Of course, most of the anthropologists who are hired are "good," and some are
"brilliant." I am not suggesting that there is no relation between the structure of the
core and peripheral departments, or the emergence of central intellectual figures and
the quality of work done in those departments or by those figures. I am claiming that
the modes of differentiation are not perfectly mapped upon each other, and that to
understand the lack of fit between the two we need to consider the operation of a
range of social and political filters, only some of which are considered in this essay.
The filters do not determine but neither are they insignificant.
6. Paul Kirchoff, "The Principles of Clanship in Human Society," in Readings in
Anthropology, vol. 2, ed. Morton Fried. (New York: Crowell, 1959).
7. I am thinking here of such important scholars as Eric Wolf, Sidney Mintz,
Stanley Diamond, Robert Manners, Eleanor Leacock, Helen Codere, just to limit our-
selves to the Columbia circle. Moving beyond that circle, it is necessary to include
such scholars as June Nash. Moving beyond the "culture historians," strictly speak-
ing, at Columbia, we find the important early work of people like Elman Service,
Marshall Sahlins, Marvin Harris, who were moving in a more evolutionary direction
 THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF ANTHROPOLOGY /25

theoretically, but who also produced important, politically engaged historical work.
8. Joan Vincent, Anthropology and Politics: Visions, Traditions, and Trends (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1990), 23341.
9. The reference here is to Dell Hyme's edited collection, Reinventing Anthropology
(New York: Pantheon Press, 1972), which can be taken as one of the central texts of
this period of ferment. Others include Tala1 Asad's Anthropology and the Colonial
Encounter (London: Ithaca Press, 1973); the "Social Responsibilities Symposium" in
Current Anthropology (1968/69), and a series of debates on ethics and politics in such
surprising journals as Human Organization. A still-necessary text for this period is
Joseph Jorgensen and Eric Wolf, "Anthropologists on the Warpath," in the New York
Review of Books (1971).One can also get a good idea of the range of approaches within
a reinventing anthropology by surveying edited collections devoted to questions that
were being imagined and reimagined, most importantly in gender. See Rayna Rapp's
Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), and
Louise Lamphere and Michelle Rosaldo's, Woman, Culture, and Society (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1974).
10. Sherry Ortner, "Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties," in Comparative
Studies in Society and History (1984); George Marcus and Michael Fischer, Anthropology
as Cultuval Critique (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1985).
11. I make reference here to the new emphasis on writing that marks much of
postmodern anthropology, most famously in James Clifford and George E. Marcus,
Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1986),which along with the journal Culfural Anthropology is still the
best place to capture the mood of the present in American anthropology. See as well
Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1989).
12. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers,
1989),151, fig. 2.10.
13. It is helpful to see these trends in quantitative terms as well. According to sta-
tistics provided by the American Anthropological Association, twenty anthropology
Ph.D.s were awarded in the United States in 1950; the annual production of anthro-
pology Ph.D.s since the early 1970s has been about four hundred. Although some sev-
enty-four percent of graduates took academic jobs in anthropology departments in
the early 1970s, by the 1990s this figure had dropped to around 40 percent. Of those
that have taken academic jobs, some two-thirds are not in tenure-line positions, see
Anthropology Newsletter (September 1995).
14. See Nicole Polier and William Roseberry, "Tristes Tropes: Postmodern
Anthropologists Encounter the Other and Discover Themselves," Economy and Society,
18 (1989): 245-64; William Roseberry, "Multiculturalism and the Challenge of
Anthropology," Social Research, 59(1992): 841-58.