Regarding the politics of anthropology--

At one time, the Smithsonian Institution had a much broader, inclusive view
of anthropology.  A perusal of old Smithsonian annual reports years ago
revealed that the "Department of Anthropology" once included anything
man-made, regardless of culture.  Thus collections of European and American
technological and scientific artifacts were considered "anthropological," as
opposed to the "natural history" departments of geology and biology.  This
simple structure had a great deal to recommend it.  However, I caution people
not to read too much into arbitrary distinctions which place certain areas of
cultural anthropology into the realm of "natural history" while others get
separated out into other categories.  Based on my experience with museum and
other institutional reorganizations--which sometimes are driven by internal
politics and arbitrary rationales to justify them, rather than really
critical and logical divisions of fields of knowledge--I would suggest that
institutional imperatives in museums and universities sometimes influence the
ways we look at the world, rather than the other way around.  It's a complex
process.

I don't discount the roles of prejudice and unenlightened views of
non-Western cultures in determining how museums and scholars divide up the
world and knowledge about it in terms of collections, disciplines, etc., but
it seems to me that sometimes purely organizational motives--getting an
institution to look good on a chart, balanced in terms of collections, staff
distribution, etc.--can have unintended consequences.  After you reorganize
your institutional departments, you then have to dream up names for them, and
linguistic factors then come into play.  It becomes "politically incorrect"
to refer to the old names for a previous structure because they don't
coincide with the new structure, and the memory of the old structure and its
nomenclature fades.  In other words, it seems to me that "practical"
considerations can trump ideology.  To what extent such factors did or could
have played a role in relegating some cultures, but not others, to "natural
history" or "anthropology" departments, I don't really know, but I do think
that such mundane considerations can have a much greater impact than is
generally recognized.

David Haberstich

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