people said that the [proposal] didn’t actually live up to what the
person said he/she was going to do.Anthropologists’ relationship to theory may make their proposals
particularly challenging for panelists. For instance, a political scien-
tist comments:
I ended up getting a lot of the proposals in anthropology, but a
lot of them I thought were pretty bad when it comes to sort of us-
ing clear language and being jargon laden. I mean I had to work
harder...totryandfigure out what the significance was. And
sometimes, I must say, it worked to their advantage. I remember
one proposal, it was on the measurement of waste, on refuse,
okay? I think if you look at my score, I gave it a two. I remember
reading this proposal and going, this is either a, no pun intended,
but a bunch of shit, or it’s just a waste, no pun intended again, or
it’s really brilliant. And it seemed to be very self-referential in
terms of the language that he was using to craft the proposal. But
I thought this may be one of these ones where I just don’t get it.
I’m worried I’m going to be overly prejudicial, so I’m going to
giveitatwo...Theother anthropologist gave it a five, and they
looked at me and they went, “What did you see in this?” And I
went, “I don’t know!” I wanted to bend over backwards [to avoid
prejudice]. They said, “Well, don’t do that again.”This respondent’s remarks point to the important methodological
differences that exist between his field and anthropology. An anthro-
pologist, acknowledging that he felt distant from the political scien-
tists on his panel, confirms those differences: “In many ways, yes, it
was one of the major divides in the room among panel members. It
was the political scientists who had the nasty things to say about an-
thropological methods.”
On Disciplinary Cultures / 93