Anthropologist’s new book urges rethinking of discipline’s methods

BY FRANZ BROTZEN
Rice News staff

In his new book, Rice anthropology Professor James Faubion calls for a re-evaluation of what it means to be a practicing anthropologist. Titled “Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be: Learning Anthropology’s Method in a Time of Transition” (Cornell University Press), the book is an effort “to articulate a different model,” Faubion said.

	JAMES FAUBION

For years, critics of the discipline accused anthropologists of merely “producing case studies,” Faubion explained. In the new book, he urged anthropologists to adopt a broader overview, declaring, “that the fieldworker today is caught in a field that is quite literally everywhere.” To accommodate this expanded approach, Faubion posed questions like how anthropologists should go about their inquiries, how fieldwork can be connected to a broader purpose and how to teach anthropology graduate students to relate their field studies to more universal questions.

The book is actually a compendium of essays edited by Faubion and former Rice anthropologist George Marcus. It includes chapters by Rice anthropology graduates on field research in such disparate areas as a South Korean venture capital firm and archeologists studying Mayan civilization in the Yucatan. Faubion’s essay is titled “The Ethics of Fieldwork as an Ethics of Connectivity, or The Good Anthropologist (Isn’t What She Used to Be).”

Rice anthropologists have been in the forefront for decades of a movement that applies an intellectual/critical approach to the study of modernity. The approach has come to be known across the discipline as the “Rice School” of anthropology. Marcus’ “Anthropology as Cultural Critique” (1986) is one of its seminal works, Faubion said.

“Fieldwork Is Not What It Used to Be” is the latest addition to the discussion on the evolving goals of anthropological research. In his essay, Faubion cited “connectivity” as a fundamental goal of fieldwork, based on a triangle composed of three vectors: moral, epistemological and ontological.

He proposed the concept of “commensurabilities” as the key to researchers’ contributions to the study of anthropology. He wrote of “the postulation of the commensurability of the domain of inquiry to another or others; the articulation of the commensurability of one or more of the aspects of the phenomena within that domain as a question of investigation; and the stipulation of the conceptual metric or metrics provisionally taken for granted that place the domain of inquiry in conceptual proximity to other domains yet to be charted or already explored.”

“Fieldwork is not of itself adequate to answer the questions that modernity poses,” Faubion said in an interview. Accordingly, he said, anthropologists must pursue “particular work at the level of the empirical in light of questions of much broader scope.”