set of evaluative criteria common in anthropology that may not be
applicable to other disciplines:
[These non-anthropologists] didn’t speak or read a single lan-
guage other than English, as far as I know never have been [to
Eastern Europe], or if they have been, they probably stayed in
some luxury hotel for a couple of days. They could just as easily
have proposed to study Guatemala...That does get at this issue
which tends to divide anthropologists from at least some of this
stuff. Finding somewhere an anthropologist reviewing a proposal
like this which he will like is never going to be easy...Ithink
[the proposal is] more misleading than anything else; I wouldn’t
want to use funds to support it.This panelist’s comments suggest how readily preferences and
evaluative criteria specific to one discipline can be seen as baseline
standards for other fields. An anthropologist’s summary of the situa-
tion also conveys how disciplinary boundary work contributes to the
construction of the field’s identity:
There’s certainly a number of anthropologists, including some
very influential ones, [who] look askance at people who work
with numbers, and tend to be dismissive...Myownposition on
science would be seen as hopeless positivism in some parts of an-
thropology. For any kind of economist or 99 percent of demogra-
phers, I’d be seen as some terrible post-modernist...WhatI
thought was most off-putting and most divisive was, at least some
members [said that]...whattheyweredoingwassomehow po-
litically enlightened and what other people were doing was serv-
ing the interests of colonialism, imperialism, racism, and every-
thing else, and [they were] linking that to...epistemological
issuesaswellas...even[linking] the utmost quantitative inter-90 / On Disciplinary Cultures