brace of multi-sited research.^48 A sociologist portrays this anthro-
pologist—who during deliberations had described work at multiple
sites as “lite anthropology” and criticized “people who don’t have
twelve months to sit in one village or in one family”—as a person
who “seemed to be a gatekeeper in this kind of very reactionary way,
like he wanted to return anthropology to pre-1985. Not that I’m so
into people just doing auto-ethnography...butIthink that anthro-
pology can go forward.” These remarks allude to an ongoing debate
over a larger and more fundamental issue for anthropology, that is,
whether the technique of combining methods (“triangulating”) is as
desirable a methodological approach as traditional field work. This is
a heavily loaded question, because extended ethnographic fieldwork
is one of the most central ways in which anthropology distinguishes
itself from qualitative sociology.
Debates within anthropology—over methodological issues or
around questions of reflexivity—are pervasive and include the four
departments that historically have been most centrally involved in
graduate training (those at Columbia University, the University of
Chicago, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University
of Michigan), as well as other departments that some now see as be-
ing on the rise (those at Princeton and New York University in par-
ticular). Since these debates influence how anthropologists and an-
thropologists-in-training handle theory and frame their work, they
also affect research proposals, and how academics from other disci-
plines react to those proposals. One historian notes:
A lot of Columbia anthropology, and we tend to get a lot [of pro-
posals from them], it has a lot of jargon in it...Inalotofcases,
the historical methodology side is pretty weak. I don’t want to
sort of be in a position of always giving low grades to Columbia
anthropology, so I have given this [one] actually a higher grade
than I would’ve [otherwise]. But in the course of the debate, other92 / On Disciplinary Cultures