... [what] I don’t like to see is theory using people...scholars
should be using the theory.
An anthropologist sees the abuse of theory in the use of con-
voluted sentences and an overly abstract language that, to her, signals
preciousness. About one proposal she particularly disliked, she says,
“I also found the writing style just insufferable.” In this instance,
however, the panel “overlooked the style and went for the content.”
Many of the historians interviewed reject the use of theory as a
tool for generalization. One evaluator states that she “only likes middle-
level generalizations, because that’s where you have the possibility of
saying something that’s actually useful... I’m not interested in the
connections at the level that will explain three societies at once across
all time.” For historians, theory is particularly irritating if it is not ad-
equately integrated with the empirical material. A French historian
explains that she is not opposed “to theory itself,” but she was put off
by a particular proposal because it “seemed to kind of tack on theory
about the public sphere, and it isn’t well integrated...Ifound that it
was kind of intellectually pretentious.” A similar commitment to a
restrained use of theory is clear in the comments of a historian asso-
ciated with cultural studies. He is irritated by the aura of “hipness”
that is associated with theorists, the “kind of originality that consists
of somebody trying to ride the sort of leading edge with a lot of buzz
words and jargons that’s kind of compulsive...Somebodylike[a
certain well-known anthropologist] annoys the hell out of me a lot
of the time... He would be a good case of somebody who went from
useful experiment to compulsive originality, where...everything
you write has to look fundamentally unlike the last thing that you
wrote.” Considered together, these quotes suggest that theory, a poly-
morphic term, can be the source of different types of tensions.
Feasibility. The final formal criterion of evaluation provided to
panelists by funding programs is that of feasibility, which refers to
186 / Recognizing Various Kinds of Excellence