ondly, absolutely shocked that nobody else ever encouraged him
to go read any of that stuff or talk with any of the people who
were working on it. You see quite a lot of [this] in anthropology,
unfortunately.In this context of intense disciplinary boundary work, anthropol-
ogists are most clearly preoccupied with epistemological issues con-
cerning the nature of the relationship that develops between the
researcher and her object, and with how this relationship influ-
ences the researcher’s ability to make sense of the object in a non-
reductionist manner. Questions of representations, and of how one
relates to one’s subject, became particularly central and divisive after
the 1986 publication of James Clifford and George Marcus’sWriting
Culture,which pushed scholars to acknowledge the literary quality
of their writings and the epistemological and moral difficulty of
speaking for others. One panelist recalls that “Geertz himself has
been very critical of this position. As he puts it, [just] because we can
never get the operation room one hundred percent antiseptic, does
not mean that we may as well operate in the sewers...It’sveryapt
here...Ifallwecanreallytalk about is our own experiences, then
that’s not very interesting. I’d rather read a good novelist.” While
concerns with reflexivity are not shared uniformly by the respon-
dents, the topic continues to be the focus of considerable attention
within the field.^47
As we will see in Chapter 4, when epistemological preoccupations
lead panelists to adopt discipline-specific criteria of assessment, suc-
cessful interdisciplinary evaluation is jeopardized. An anthropolo-
gist’s criticism of a proposal to study changing public opinion in the
former Soviet Union provides an example. He considers the appli-
cant, a non-anthropologist who planned to travel to a British univer-
sity to use survey data collected by other social scientists, alarmingly
short on contextual knowledge. This leads the panelist to mobilize a
On Disciplinary Cultures / 89