excellent and should be funded. The third evaluator said that they were
not convinced the student had enough background in the study of capit-
alism in general to receive funding–this for a proposal that was primarily
about religious conversion in China. How much would have been
enough? And why was the‘background’deemed more important than
the foreground of the topic itself, its theory, and its methodology?
Competition for grant funding can become so extreme thatanynegative
view can be used to prevail against even a well-informed majority of
positive views. This is not rational, it is not fair, and it is certainly not
mindful, especially it is not mindful of the futures of students whose work
receives an unjustified evaluation of this kind.
This example reinforces much of what we have expressed in this book.
We want to conclude by drawing briefly on the work of a historian, G. R.
Elton, in his bookThe Practice of History (Elton 1987 ). He wrote
(p. 131):“History does not exist without people and whatever is described
happens through and to people. Therefore, let us talk about people, by all
means imposing categories on them and abstracting generalizations from
them, but not about large miasmic clouds like forces or busy little gnomes
like‘trends.’”What Elton says about history here applies also to anthro-
pology. Forces and trends can certainly be invoked, but human agency is
what always underlies and constitutes them, so it is to that agency that we
must mindfully address ourselves in our ethnographic work and our
theorizing.
94 BREAKING THE FRAMES