nent disagreement concerning “just about everything.” According to
Geertz, “One of the advantages of anthropology as a scholarly
enterprise is that no one, including its practitioners, quite knows
exactlywhatitis...[The result] is a permanent identity crisis.”^45
This atmosphere of crisis seems to have led cultural anthropologists
to perceive their discipline’s boundaries as fragile and in need of de-
fense against the encroachment of scholars from other fields. One
aspect of this disciplinary boundary work has involved separating
high-quality research on culture from work judged less sophisti-
cated.^46 This in turn may have contributed to a tendency to seem in-
ward-looking and self-referential. An anthropologist sees the effects
of his field’s insular leanings in the proposals he evaluated:
This actually did come up in some of the proposals from anthro-
pology [that we discussed]: they’ll often not cite a single thing
written by a non-anthropologist, just to give one manifestation of
it...[A]long with that, there tends to be a certain sanctimo-
niousness, at least in a certain influential segment of cultural an-
thropology, that other disciplines, whether sociology or econom-
ics, political science, are following naive, positivistic epistemology
and that maybe anthropologists are better than that. This also
tends to be linked to certain kinds of political commitments as
well. You know, we’re doing things for the people and these other
folks are working for evil governments. So you have graduate stu-
dents working on a topic where there is a substantial literature in
neighboring disciplines, but they’ll know nothing about it and
sometimes their advisers will never tell them to read it. Why
bother—it’s not anthropology, therefore it’s not worthwhile. I
have a grad student, the typical case, who wanted to do a project
on illegitimacy among African Americans in Chicago. I men-
tioned a certain amount of sociological demographic literature on
this and he was, first of all, totally surprised to hear it, and sec-88 / On Disciplinary Cultures