Abstract
Not many years ago both anthropology and political science experienced internal disputes—in the first case over the publication of a book accusing a noted anthropologist of endangering indigenous subjects and in the second over the nature of the field. While the first led to polarization, the second produced a partial convergence and modest reforms. This article examines the two processes and seeks the key mechanisms that produced those differences, closing with a call for broadening the study of contentious politics to cover non-public controversies like the ones examined in this article.
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Notes
It was not actually known whether “Mr.” Perestroika was actually male—or even a single person. This was part of “his” appeal to many people who were devoted to the idea of participatory democracy and rejected elitism.
I am indebted to anthropologist Donald Brenneis, who—after reading a draft of this article—remarked on the possible relevance of Bateson’s work to the direction it was taking. He helped me to see that an article that was originally organized around “the politics of knowledge” was really about the process of polarization.
Wikipedia provides what I think is a fair introduction to this hybrid field, whose proponents would play an important role in the controversy to be dealt with below: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology.
My thanks to Michèle Lamont for allowing me to quote from her forthcoming book and for commenting on a draft of this article.
I take this subhead from the title of Robert Borofsky’s textbook on the controversy, Yanomami: The Fierce Controversy and What We Can Learn From it (2004).
For information on Chagnon’s career and research interests, go to http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/chagnon/.
Far from a random effect of primitive passions, violence, for Chagnon, in the words of his editors, “is well regulated and an integral component of both internal social organization of the villages and political dealing between villages” (Chagnon 1983:vii).
I am grateful to Roger Masters for putting in this way what I had intended to say but lacked the knowledge to articulate as well as he could.
The now-famous e-mail can be found on many sites. I found it at www.ratical.org/ratville/Yanomami.html on 8/28/2006.
Chagnon had been engaged in a longstanding dispute with Salesian missionaries, who work in the Venezuelan Yanomami territory. This eventually led to a session at the 1994 AAA meeting, where Turner, from the audience, rose to accuse Chagnon of dishonesty and unprofessionalism for criticizing a Yanomami leader, Davi Kopinawa, for supposedly being “a mouthpiece for NGOs.” The incident is summarized in Borofsky et al. 2004:37.
For one among the many technical responses to the claim in Tierney’s book that Neel’s inoculation of the Yanomami might have cause measles to spread among the tribe, see the letter of Dr. Samuel Katz, in Appendix XI of the “Preliminary Report on the Neel/Chagnon Allegations,” at www.anth.ucsb.edu/uscbpreliminaryreport, visited on 7/29/07.
For the full UCSB “Preliminary report,” go to www.anth.uscb.edu/ucsbpreliminary report.pdf. Also see Mann 2001.
Because there had been controversy in the past about the association’s right to investigate the ethics of its members, the Board was careful to call the work of the task force an “inquiry,” not an “investigation,” and cast it in very broad terms “addressed to the future of anthropology, not its past.” The charge to the Task Force and its membership were found at: http://membvers.aol.com/archeodog/darkness_in_el_dorado/documents/0459.htm.
I have discovered that anthropologists harbor a broadly catholic idea of postmodernism, far broader than what is found among the adepts of that persuasion in the humanities.
Some of my informants also saw the resonance of two previous debates: the Vietnam years, when some anthropologists were involved in suspicious dealings with the CIA (Wakin 1992: ch. 6). Those who were professionally active in the 1980s also remembered the controversy surrounding the exposé of Margaret Mead’s landmark Coming of Age in Samoa by Derek Freeman (1983), which argued that her work with pre-adolescents was deeply flawed. That three such different debates could resonate with the same cleavages should tell us, if nothing else does, that the Chagnon/Tierney dispute reflected a deep-seated fractal division.
The “open letter” was drafted by Rogers Smith and distributed through the rapidly growing “Perestroika listserv” to a large number of self-recruited Association members of whom over 200 signed on. Interview with Rogers Smith, January 8, 2007.
In particular, the Western Political Science Association meetings, since the 1960s a more grassroots forum than the massive APSA meetings, emerged as a hothouse for ideas, discussions, networking, and internal debates among Perestroika activists.
On the distribution of work using formal modeling, and quantitative and qualitative research in the APSR, see the statistical study by Bennett et al. (2003: 376). It turns out the move towards formal modeling has been far less dramatic than many critics supposed but that both APSR and its sister American Journal of Political Science are heavily tilted towards quantitative research. The imbalance shifted somewhat after the Perestroika episode (see Pion-Berlin and Cleary 2005).
In contrast to the greater pluralism demanded by Perestroikans, a distinguished empirical theorist called for “a clearer conception of our core concerns,” sounding remarkably like a call for Political Science to be more like Economics (Ostrom 2002: 191). A noted comparativist called passionately for “the best approximation to science that the data and our abilities will allow” (Laitin 2005: 132). A student of democracy regretted that “the dispute became political rather than intellectual”, like James Bond’s vodka martini, “shaken but not stirred” (Dryzek 2005: 509). A normative theorist expressed doubts about the logical cogency of the Perestroika project (Steinberger 2005:548). A self-declared “quantoid” defended the dominance of quantitative methods in political science and argued that the Perestroika movement “should fail” because it was insufficiently catholic (Bennett 2002:177–179).
It is worth pointing out that the Perestroika listserv was open to anyone who wished to participate in it, including some who identified themselves with mainstream political science.
Three kinds of campus issues emerged: first, the weakness of qualitative training among graduate students; second, opposition to “campus pressures on departments to reduce political science to a few specialty areas due to budgetary constraints and cutbacks”; and most important, the practice of some departments of making hiring and promotion decisions largely on the basis of articles accepted by a small number of mainstream journals, like the APSR and the American Journal of Political Science. The shift in scale from the national, associational level to home campuses was perhaps the most interesting aspect of Perestroika, but was too dispersed and too detailed to be properly researched in this article.
David Swartz, in commenting on an earlier version of this article, also suggests what a Bourdieusian analysis of the two fields might have brought to light, in particular, the different stance of the two fields vis a vis American institutions. I am grateful to Professor Swartz for these observations.
Kindly provided by Lee Sigelman from his e-mail message to the Perestroika forum on May 10, 2001. Substantial portions of it, revised, were published in his “Notes from the (New) Editor,” American Political Science Review 96 (2002). When Sigelman’s term ended, management of APSR devolved on an editorial group of nine (count them!) members of the UCLA political science department.
That decision may have produced the most interesting outcome of the episode: that the perestoikans appear to have reproduced themselves at the grassroots, with what appears to be a large number of younger supporters who did not—as their predecessors did—experience the movements of earlier decades.I have no data to support this impression, apart from the testimony of several respondents.
Mayer Zald, in a private communication to the author, writes that “the rift between quantoids and qualitative narrativists is being lessened by the younger generation who pragmatically try to combine them.” I am grateful to Patrick Jackson and to Mayer Zald for the comments that led me to add the final paragraphs to this article.
See the brief account in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_sociology, and the sources cited therin.
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Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this article was presented to the Cornell Institute of the Social Sciences Theme Project on Contentious Politics, March 2007 and to the Central European University Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology. I am grateful to my colleagues in the ISS project for their comments on that paper and to Donald Brenneis, Scott Frickel, David Greenwood, Jane Hill, Patrick Jackson, Don Kalb, Robert Keohane, Adam Kuper, Louise Lamphere, Rena Lederman, Roger Masters, Sally Engle Merry, David S. Meyers, Kristen Monroe, Jane and Peter Schneider, Diane Vaughan, and Mayer Zald for thoughtful reactions to that version of the paper. David Swartz and two anonymous reviewers for Theory and Society made exceptionally useful comments to which I have tried to respond as best I could without turning this essay into a book. And as usual, Doug McAdam and Chuck Tilly were inveterate kibitzers who knew what I was driving at long before I knew it myself.
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Tarrow, S. Polarization and convergence in academic controversies. Theor Soc 37, 513–536 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-008-9065-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-008-9065-1