The Personality of Anthropology 
Rebecca Lemov
Having just moved, I was recently unpacking some boxes containing my collection of the American Anthropologist, circa 1950s (the 1940s having been left in the trunk of my car), when I came across a 1959 article by Kroeber with the title, “The History of the Personality of Anthropology.” Thinking this might shed some light on the discussions shared with me between ARC and its interlocutors, I took a look. Most pressingly, it strikes the reader how little the field today has in common with the vision that Kroeber was painting in order to discover its “personality.” Even the idea of the discipline having a personality is somehow quaint. Yet North American anthropology almost fifty years post-Kroeber is recognizable, still, and that is perhaps even more surprising. (Here I find resonances with the initial discussion between Marcus and ARC, because it seems that there are different ways of seeing one’s connection with the past of a discipline and its first-and second-order practices.)
Perhaps salvagable from Kroeber’s analysis, most of which is utterly unhelpful, is Kroeber’s view of the anthropologist’s relationship to ‘the real.’ Aside from the shared urge of anthropologists to be holistic–“perhaps what is most distinctive of us as a group,” avers Kroeber–is a countervailing set of other qualities: “This is balanced by a love of fact, an attachment to phenomena in themselves, to perceiving them through our own senses…. There are anthropological museums of tangible objects, but no sociological museums….” On fieldwork, reinforcing this theme of no-ideas-but-in-things, Kroeber had this to say about anthropologists: “We insist on fieldwork as an opportunity, a privilege, and a professional cachet. We want the face-to-face experience with our subjects….”; elsewhere Kroeber speaks approvingly of those fieldworkers who can successfully describe “concrete culture functioning.”
Instead of either grab-bag empirical studies or top-down theoretical ones [the scourge, too, of many new academic approaches], he describes a radical empiricist approach of encountering but not reducing the empirical (perhaps akin to what ARC calls “soundings”?) and minimizing but not eliminating the theoretical (ARC’s ‘critical rectification’?). Here is something possible to grasp and use. To put it another way, it is to sidestep a pitfall inherent in attempting to study reality in a systematic way, by means what Rheinberger describes as the goal to “perforate any nontemporal dichotomy between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ between fact and artifact, that pitfall of naïve realism.” Likewise what can be rescued from Kroeber, and perhaps located in ARC, is this strand of non-naive realism. I do believe this is related to the present goal of ARC, which seems to entail a renovated and non-deterministic, non-naive functionalism, although taking care to steer clear of such anthropological impossibilities as cultural materialism or “naïve objectivism” or even functionalism as it was generally expressed within anthropology proper in its heyday.
Of course, Kroeber very comfortably could speak of “we” anthropologists, whereas the ARC group can do nothing of the sort, at least not to gesture a smidgeon beyond its own membership. (That’s what some of conversation seems to come down to: what is this “we” of ARC and who can potentially be included?) Yet in some ways, to me, the project seems to represent the re-instauration of a trajectory and a tradition. Its own emphasis on being forward looking, tuned to emergence, and the apparently contradictory fact that its “in-house language” may seem, as Marcus puts it at one point describing some of the shared tropes, a throwback, is a point of interest. Faubion makes a similar point, I think, in mentioning ARC’s and others’ eagerness to identify “rupture” with the anthropological past & yet the harking-back feeling one gets from ARC’s somewhat stern emphasis on reference rather than the tendential. In ARC there appears to be a rehabilitation of some scholarly and systematic strivings that have not been much called on of late.
I’m still in the midst of thinking about what these strivings might be, how they are characterized, and how they differ from the kind of thing that often circulates in the field in the name of defining anthropology by means of forward-looking “cutting edge” theory or backward-looking moralistic finger-wagging. I think it hinges on the question of method. In fact, the ARC discussions so far have caused me to look with new interest at almost every discussion of method I come across – for example, the complacency with which fieldwork is considered, inherently and of itself, a “method.” It is interesting to mark it as a technique, and to observe that method inheres within the application of a certain discipline of inquiry. Distinguishing fieldwork-as-technique from the search for adequate methods seems at the heart of the ARC undertaking. Fieldwork, to be seen as method, must incorporate not simply the bare encounter with the empirical “this” and “now” but the generative interaction by which ideas are found to inhabit the tumult of things and of the field. The language ARC used of “thrashing around” in the field was interesting. Thrashing around implies that there is a tolerance for being at the intersection of knowing and not-knowing, which will allow the critical rectifier (?) to express what hasn’t hitherto found formal expression. “What we are trying to talk about is not on the level of technique but on the level of methodology or mode of inquiry.” It is about seeing empirical inquiry always in relation to its conditions of possibility.
A last comment: Although this impression comes admittedly from brief familiarity, it strikes me that Rheinberger’s historical view of how experimental systems work is quite in line with what ARC is doing as second-order observers. I don’t see Rheinberger privileging the search for the “scarcely imaginable” new exclusively over the identification of norms and forms by which meaning is produced. Phrases he uses such as “a never ending ramification” to describe scientific research as pattern formation do not exclude finding form and even formal properties. Also, interestingly, he doubles his analysis by characterizing his own observations of observers (research on researchers) as a parallel struggle to express emergent entities that could not hitherto and up to that moment be expressed. In all this, I’m reminded of Robert K. Merton’s methodological use of what he called “strategic research materials,” about which he elaborated in the 1950s-1970s: “Strategic research sites, objects, or events exhibit the phenomena to be explained or interpreted to such advantage and in such accessible form that they enable the fruitful investigation of previously stubborn problems and the discovery of new problems for further inquiry.” Such materials—sites, objects, events, or areas that are strategic—will highlight “turning points” in the sciences to great and un-ignorable advantage.