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May 14, 2005
Daddy, please come home
This week the Anthropology Club at the World's Greatest University hosted a really nice event where senior thesis writers volunteered to give short presentations on their work to an audience of faculty, staff, and fellow students. There are some excellent theses this year, and the presentations were interesting.
The club founder gave a little speech after his own thesis presentation in which he riffed on the "good fences make good neighbors" theme, imploring us not to "turn the fences into walls." This to faculty members absolutely segregated by subfield, there in the room, by building (socioculturals from archy/bios, anyway), social life (I think), and governance. The student's tone reminded me of an adolescent pleading for his parents to get back together and can't life just be like it was? Um, like back in the fifties? Doesn't he know it's all over except for the occasionally-ugly-but-usually-not alimony and child support negotiations? He suggested more cross-subfield requirements rather than the fewer the department seems to be leaning towards.
I don't really see what's at stake in the four-field debate for undergraduates in a big department with a marriage-of-convenience model like Harvard's. They grasp or are told of the huge methodological and theoretical gulfs between the fields. Their work is assessed by faculty in their chosen subfields. So, the question is, What are they reading or hearing that makes f-f anthro seem viable to them? Do they want their cross-subfield friendships validated disciplinarily? If so, why? Certainly they have friends in history or English or social studies and feel engaged with them in a somewhat common project without an overarching structure, no? It's a real mystery to me.
Posted by johnn at May 14, 2005 11:44 AM
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Posted by: Anonymous at May 14, 2005 11:44 AM
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