By: John McCreery

John McCreery — Tue, 06 Nov 2018 23:37:58 +0000

David, your question, “What might anthropology have become?” is a good one. I want to suggest, hoping that I am wrong, that anthropology as an academic discipline would no longer exist, and that negative reactions from the powers-that-were would be onl part of the story. Trained in the late sixties , I remember anthropology as a haven for people with peculiar interests brushed aside by political concerns, a place where people who studied Daoist rituals, West African folktales, baboon troupes and kinship systems could hang out together, pursuing their hobbies, and hoping to find something about the fundamental nature of humanity in them. Briefly a member of SDS, I remember a meeting in Ann Arbor, where I was attending the Summer Institute of Linguistics. The Anti-Vietnam War movement was peaking. Many of us harbored Trotskyite/Maoist dreams of crashing the system. At one particularly heated moment, the fellow chairing the meeting asked, “How many of us are in school because we like to study, not just as a way of avoiding careers in business or government?” In a room of fifty or sixty people, three hands were raised.

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By: John McCreery