In Pursuit of Relevance

I am studying Cultural Anthropology, a field under particular attack in the state of Florida where Governor Rick Scott recently disparaged the discipline as being irrelevant and useless to the job market. And indeed, if you do a simple news search for the term 'anthropology' you will find articles that back up the dismal job placement of anthropologists both in the private sector and in the academy. There is no denying the fact that anthropologists have a hard time securing jobs after any extended period of time in the field, but what is implicitly being stated here is two-fold.

First, relevance is assumed to be tied to the job market and the ability to be a field in which people can get jobs. This is a particular kind of relevance. Rick Scott's comments seem to fall under the category of thinking where colleges and universities should be diploma factories. His vision, and those who share it, is one in which the degree is ultimately irrelevant and the only thing that matters is that it can be hammered out and made to fit into a pre-prescribed slot in the work force. This is what happens when the defending logic runs "anthropologists can be consultants for a number of international firms." This is most certainly true, but not really a great explication of the field of anthropology or what it can uniquely contribute. Economics majors can, and do, go into consulting with the same expectations placed on them by the job. As can English majors. Responses to Scott's statements have been to show that anthropologists can and do find places on the job market, but this doesn't really address the question of why anthropologists may contribute in a unique fashion to their chosen job site.

Second, the notion of relevance itself is bound up in a very limited way. Very few people would deny that economists or political scientists are relevant. After all, these are the people who show up on talk shows and analysis programs most frequently. The social scientists I have heard most frequently on NPR (I know, a great example of relevance, right?) have been political scientists and sociologists (not to mention the fetishism of economists). To be relevant is to be consulted by people who view you as an expert. When something happens abroad, the anthropologists who has spent years in the field there isn't consulted- its the economists or the political scientists who have studied the area who get the call. This is a pretty standard gripe among people in anthropology, but it comes with another angle. When anthropologists are brought into a role of expertise, like in the Human Terrain System, members of the anthropology community immediately become upset. I personally have problems with HTS, but it seems curious to me that the pulls within the field happen in two directions. We want to be heard because we can contribute to thinking through a wide variety of problems, but if we are listened to in certain registers there is an immense backlash.

I think Rick Scott is a bit of a myopic fool for making the comments he did, but he isn't a unique case. Throughout my undergrad years I had many people I knew disparage the social sciences as being "unrigorous" or pale imitations of the "hard sciences" where objectivity is claimed to flourish. And it is the hard sciences that Rick Scott and others believe should dominate the realm of higher education. But I can't help but think that this begs so many problems that people aren't looking into. Anthropology isn't, or at least shouldn't be, modeled after the hard sciences. Their methods and perspectives work well with certain sets of conditions, but they too are fraught with limitations. What I personally think anthropology can do is defend us against our own arrogance and remind us of ourselves when we become too involved in something. While I do think there are a myriad of cases where anthropologists should be consulted (in realms of policy making especially) I think that, more fundamentally, anthropologists can take a moment like the one in which Rick Scott decided to attack the social sciences and see how these are indicative of much larger trends and patterns within a community.

The STEM fields should receive a lot of support, I don't doubt this. But to believe that the STEM fields are superior to the social sciences is a fallacy that begs problems. I very much doubt that an engineer will have the tools at his disposal to answer questions of inter-communal conflicts or the integration and interrelations of ethnic groups in metropolitan centers. And to think that these problems are unimportant is to invite a world of consequences.