Second essay: Who represents the future of anthropology and why?

Default due date: May 23, 2025 at 11:59 p.m.

Word count: 1500 words

Your second essay will be based on your close reading and analysis of the ideas and arguments of a scholar who is in conversation with the main ideas in anthropology. In your essay, you should argue for why you think this scholar’s ideas and arguments speak back to or build upon the ideas we have discussed in class. Specifically for your chosen scholar X, you will be answering the question:

• Why does the work of X contribute to, build upon, or speak back to the conversations in the field of anthropology?

You should make a claim that this scholar takes up a specific position within anthropology, and explain what that position is. You will support this claim by explaining their ideas as you see them in this scholar’s empirical work.

Since your chosen scholar is speaking back to and building upon what has come before, they are the future of anthropology. They represent a new direction. In this paper you are not required to examine a scholar from 2025, or from any specific time or era. Making an argument about “the future” is not the main thing in this essay.

To prepare for this essay, you should first find one person who is carrying out empirical research that contributes to anthropology. You should read this scholar’s empirical research as deeply as you can in the time that you have. As you read, think about what kind of a perspective this scholar applies to the facts that they collect, and how this perspective informs the conclusion they draw. In the earlier weeks of class, we discussed the idea of a theoretical framework as a kind of conceptual metaphor. When you think of societies as organisms it makes it hard to think of them as rivers. When you think of cultures as languages, you stress the metaphorical langue of a uniform cultural worldview over people’s parole in everyday life. When you employ a theory, you are making a choice about how to see things. In the same way, you want to identify the choice of conceptual framework or heuristic that your scholar uses to discover an answer to the questions they ask about a specific topic.

The evidence for your claim about a scholar will be what this person says in their scholarship, but evidence does not support a claim on its own. You have to explain your reasoning for why a specific fact about their research leads you to conclude something about their thinking. For every piece of concrete evidence you provide, you need to provide even more step-by-step logical reasoning to connect this evidence to a larger conclusion about someone’s perspective.

Keep in mind that this is an essay, and an essay lives and dies on the strength of its argument for a single claim. An essay puts forward one idea, and everything in the essay must in some way contribute to making your reader see why you have this idea. When I read your essay, I am trying to determine how well I can understand your reasoning for your idea (and how well you understand your own ideas as well). For that reason, an essay is not graded on formal attributes (having sections, having a minimum number of sources, using specific words). Everything in the essay must serve a functional purpose. It doesn’t matter whether it looks right or sounds right; it only matters if the choices you make to explain your idea work to communicate your reasoning for your ideas to me as a reader.

There are, however, a few minimal requirements for this essay:

• Your essay must interpret the ideas of a scholar¹⁾, and must make a claim for how these ideas build on or speak back to other ideas that are important in anthropology.
• You need to use at least one example of empirical research by this scholar as a source of information, and your use of this kind of source must show that you have read it fully.
  • The best sources will be published scholarly research in the form of journal articles or essays. A monograph by your chosen scholar is acceptable if you demonstrate that you have read the book entirely. Theses or dissertations by a scholar are not appropriate for this essay, because by definition these are not the mature form of this research.
  • The minimum number of sources you need to have in your essay is one. There is no maximum. The strongest possible essay will come from a close reading of multiple works by a single author. Relying on the minimum number of sources is a minimal effort.
• You should choose someone whose work has not been assigned for class. Ideally their empirical research would be on topics that are not covered in the class readings too.
  • Why have this requirement? Well, it’s not to make the essay harder or trickier. It’s because (1) this class only represents core ideas in anthropology, but anthropology by its very nature is varied and eclectic, and I want you to explore this complexity; and (2) finding connections between ideas from a class reading and work you discover on your own is an important intellectual skill I want you to develop.

Notice that there is no requirement that your chosen scholar has to “be an anthropologist.” There is no requirement that your chosen scholar’s work explicitly cites works from our class readings, or works on the same topics we have covered in this class.

These kinds of requirements are inherently flawed, and would be misleading to you as students of anthropology. There is no way you can prove definitively that someone “is an anthropologist.” There is no absolute definition of anthropology. To paraphrase the immortal Forrest Gump, “Mamma always said that, ‘anthropology is as anthropology does.’” Demonstrating that a person who’ve you’ve chosen to learn about is part of anthropology is a big part of your task. You have to make a judgment about whether or not someone’s empirical research is relevant to anthropology, and whether it speaks back to or builds upon the main ideas in anthropology. When you argue that someone’s ideas build upon or speak back to key ideas in anthropology, you have to also argue that they are part of whatever anthropology is. You have to argue for what makes them an anthropologist. “Actually, X is an anthropologist. They build up and speak back to a conversation among other anthropologists.” might be a necessary step in your argument that supports your overall claim.

How would you do that? It’s the same way you build an argument for any claim. You would need to explain what you mean by “anthropology”—You would need to define “anthropology” as a category that you can use in your analysis of someone’s ideas and research. Then you could explain how basic, concrete facts about them—they conduct immersive participant-observation fieldwork, they are constantly faulting people for ethnocentric biases in their thinking, they seem fixated on proving that economics and psychology are based on a latent bourgeois ideology of individualism—lead you to conclude that this person is an anthropologist and is making a contribution to anthropology.

So, how do you know you are making a good choice to work on? There are several ways. First, ask yourself why you are interested in this work. How did you find out about it and why is it relevant to your interests? Is this person citing or discussing some of the ideas from our class? (This too is not a requirement of the essay and is not a basis for your grade. It is… how shall I say it… a good idea. By itself, this would not prove that someone is taking a position in a conversation among anthropologists, but it would be a good clue to you that they are, and you would have to read their work closely to figure out what position that they do take.)

More importantly, though, is to consider who the author is writing for. Anthropologists write for other anthropologists, and specifically will be addressing people with whom they disagree, even if they do not mention them by name. This is an important step in your analysis of their ideas. If you can figure out whose ideas they oppose and why they oppose them, then you will be better able to describe what position they are taking and what they are contributing to the conversation that is the field of anthropology.

I am happy to discuss your ideas as you work on them one-on-one. Please email me to set up a time to talk or drop into my office hours.

Formatting and software requirements

For a description of the required appearance and file format of a writing assignment, see the page Formatting and software requirements.

References

Comaroff, John L., and Jean Comaroff. 2009. Ethnicity, Inc. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Englund, Harri, and James Leach. 2000. “Ethnography and the Meta‐Narratives of Modernity.” Current Anthropology 41 (2): 225–48. https://doi.org/10.1086/ca.2000.41.issue-2.