Changing Styles of Anthropological Work

Abstract

years have · seen an enormous growth of ins titutions devoted to anthropological enterprises, membership within the discipline, and students, text­ books, and paraphernalia. From a tiny scholarly group that could easily be fitted into a couple of buses, and most of whom knew each other, we have grown into a group of tremendous, anonymous milling crowds, meeting at large hotels where there are so many sess ions that people do well to find those of their colleagues who are interested in the same specialty. Today we look something like the other social science disciplines, suffering some of the same malaise, and becoming cynical about slave markets and worried when grants and jobs seem to be declining. It has been a period of excessive growth; it is astonishing, looking back, to recount . how many large enterpri ses have been undertaken. The year 1953 marked the end of the Korean war and the final exodus from Washington of almost all the remaining anthropologists who had lingered on to make the kind of contribution to national affairs that had developed in wartime. Most of the ventures that had been specifically influ enced by the immediate post-World War II world drew to a close: Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures, Studies in Soviet Culture, Ameri­ can Museum of Natural History Research in Contemporary Cultures A and B, (189, 213 ), the Coordinated Investigations of Micronesian Anthropology, the period of affluence in the Foreign Service Institute, the intensive exploitation of the Human Relations Area Files, and the preparation of manuals and directives for participation in technical assistance and foreign aid (13, 191, 269). A few anthropologists stayed on for several more years, but activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee had disillusioned anthropologists with government, and as their partici­ pation in government shrank, so did the receptiveness of govern ment agencies to anthropological contributions because there was no one to inaugurate them, receive them, or interpret them. Anthropologists came out of the war years with several important new orienta­ tions. They had learned that their skills could be applied fruitfully to problems affecting modern societies and the deliberations of national governments and nation