of others in very significant ways, perhaps branching out, expand-
ing other important work.Anthropology’s Fragile Boundaries
Anthropology has four branches—archeology, physical anthropol-
ogy, linguistic anthropology, and social/cultural anthropology—each
producing its own type of scholarship. Since the character of the
funding competitions I studied made them compatible mainly with
social/cultural anthropology, the great majority of proposals (and
panelists) were from this branch. Thus the observations here refer to
these fields only.
The past thirty years have been characterized by a growing interest
in things cultural across the social sciences and the humanities. This
is reflected by internal changes not only in the fields of English and
history, as we saw, but also in departments such as visual studies and
communication, and in sociology.^42 The influence of cultural an-
thropology grew considerably during this period, as the work of Clif-
ford Geertz, Mary Douglas, Victor Turner, and others began to feed
development in fields outside anthropology. Some anthropologists
viewed this proliferation as a threat to the discipline’s monopoly
over the concept of culture. This concern became more acute as the
traditional object of social/cultural anthropology—so-called primi-
tive societies—disappeared and/or was reconceptualized (as post-
colonial societies). Worries over disciplinary focus also rose as the
field sought new vitality by broadening its reach to include advanced
industrial societies and by embracing topics that previously had
been the privileged object of other disciplines (for example, immi-
gration, political economy, and science). At the same time, the num-
ber of PhDs conferred remained relatively stagnant.^43 Accordingly,
even recent writings often stress the field’s state of crisis,^44 point-
ing out that disciplinary consensus has been replaced by perma-
On Disciplinary Cultures / 87