Universities and the Construction of Knowledge in Anthropology, 1950-2000: A Study in the Sociology of Academic Discourse

Abstract

Aims: To discover and describe how the presence of anthropology as taught within universities as educational institutions influences the construction of the knowledge that is taught as anthropological discourse. Study Design: Ethnographic study. Place and Duration of the Study: Canada, Britain and The United States. Ten years within the time-span of 1995-2009. Methodology: 45 professional academic anthropologists who were either working or had worked at major universities in the three countries specified, participated in ethnographic interviews. These were supplemented by surveys, participant observation and field notes, as well as archival techniques and content analysis. Respondents from Britain completed e-mail interviews and surveys, all others were effected in person with the researcher. Results: anthropologists constructed an auto-ethnographic account of how institutional atmospheres, specific persons or persona, texts or courses, or the structure of programs and departments influenced the construction of anthropological knowledge. The institutional presence of anthropology was seen as being only equal to the presence of anthropology within the institutional framework. For the first time, we have a personalist accounting of almost a half-century of the presence of anthropology as an academic discipline in a sample of the English speaking university system. Conclusion: the ability of both anthropologists and anthropology to adjust to the symbolic and material constraints of teaching and thinking within an enlightenment and bourgeois institution must continue to be examined and questioned. Scientific knowledge is not immune from its place of dissemination, and does not translate in whole cloth to either students or scholars once it has taken its place as part of a discursive apparatus that includes competing and conflicting material and symbolic interests.