Pathways to Anthropology

Abstract

At the time of preparing this special doubleissue of Anthropology in Action, British anthropologists are debating the implications of current British government policy aimed at evaluating the infl uence of academic disciplines. One of the key functions of the Research Evaluation Framework (REF) is to measure the ‘impact’ of a subject-area’s activity, the extent to which it can be shown to have economic and social eff ects beyond the quoting circles of colleagues in print or at conferences. The merits or otherwise of the REF can be debated. Arguably, however, it misses one of the key areas where a subject such as anthropology can have a signifi cant eff ect on the world: the teaching of its basic concepts, both in universities and in other contexts where cultural ‘relativism’ and the recognition of other legitimate ways of being in the world can gain purchase. In this issue, then, we examine the teaching of anthropology, but from a particular perspective. We are primarily interested in an area that remains relatively unexamined: how do people come to know about anthropology in the fi rst place, and then choose to study it for three or more years at university? We originally used the metaphor of a ‘pathway’ to anthropology in a conference we organized at the University of Sussex in the autumn of 2007, sponsored by C-SAP (the Higher Education Academy Subject Network for Sociology, Anthropology, Politics). At that forum, we a empted to bring together people from some very diff erent contexts where the teaching of anthropology might be found: not only universities, but also primary and secondary schools, museum programmes, summer outreach courses for gi ed and talented children, and so on. We found, as Bob Simpson notes in his A erword to the issue, that there is no single pathway to the discipline, that students’ initial encounters with it may be as serendipitous as those we experience in the fi eld (see David Benne , this issue). However, it is striking how li le we know about the pathways in – or out – of anthropology that are taken by the people who, a er all, fund much of our work through the teaching income that comes to universities. At the same time, it appears that we are allowing the public perception of what we do to be defi ned by others, who are all too likely to consign our work to the exotic and ornamental section of the academic range of disciplines. As Colleen Popson and Guven Wi eveen put it in their contribution, referring to the U.S. but in a way that is surely also relevant to the U.K.: ‘Anthropology as a subject has a public relations problem’. If anthropology is something of an invisible or perhaps ‘obscured’ (see Callan and Street, this issue) discipline in this country and the U.S. – in a sense a ‘muted’ discipline (cf. Ardener 1975) – then one of the ironies is that we have contributed to such invisibility/ obscurity by our relative lack of engagement with publics and institutions beyond either