{"id":2192,"date":"2016-05-27T10:33:36","date_gmt":"2016-05-27T18:33:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/?p=2192"},"modified":"2017-10-25T12:33:04","modified_gmt":"2017-10-25T20:33:04","slug":"affiliation-is-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/2016\/05\/27\/affiliation-is-power\/","title":{"rendered":"Affiliation is power (without irony)"},"content":{"rendered":"

As many of my readers probably know, the big\u00a0controversy in my field this year (in American cultural anthropology) has been about\u00a0a proposed<\/a> boycott<\/a> of Israeli academic institutions, essentially as a protest of\u00a0the\u00a0Palestinian situation.\u00a0The substantive politics have been debated for months and years,\u00a0and I’m not going to get into them\u00a0here. But\u00a0this past couple of months, I’ve been subjected to unsolicited weekly email missives from the anti-boycott\u00a0faction<\/a>, and\u00a0as an ethnographer of academic culture, I couldn’t help noticing\u00a0the extremely standardized introductory format that they all use:<\/p>\n

My name is \u2014\u2014. I am the Lucy Adams Leffingwell Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Case Western University. I am also a lifetime member of the American Anthropological Association and President-elect of the Society for Psychological Anthropology<\/strong>. I am writing to ask that you vote against the boycott of Israeli universities.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My name is Dale Eickelman, the Lazarus Professor of Anthropology and Human Relations at Dartmouth College<\/strong>\u2026<\/p>\n

I am Paul Rabinow, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley<\/strong>. I write to urge you to watch this important new video where anthropologists who know something about the matter demonstrate how an academic boycott is ultimately personal.<\/p>\n

I am Ulf Hannerz, Professor Emeritus of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University,<\/strong> Sweden. I have been a member of the American Anthropological Association since the 1960s, and I am a former member of its Committee on World Anthropologies. I have voted against the boycott resolution.<\/p>\n

My name is Myra Bluebond-Langner. I am a medical anthropologist currently at the Institute of Child Health, University College London where I hold the True Colours Chair in Palliative Care for Children and Young People as well as Board of Governors Professor of Anthropology Emerita at Rutgers University<\/strong>. I am a long-term member of the American Anthropological Association and a recipient of the Margaret Mead Award from the AAA and the Society for Applied Anthropology. I am writing to urge you to vote against boycotting Israeli universities in the AAA\u2019s spring ballot.<\/p>\n

I am Tanya Marie Luhrmann, Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University<\/strong>, a member of the AAA for over thirty years. I write to urge you to vote NO on the proposal to boycott Israeli universities in this year\u2019s AAA spring ballot.<\/p>\n

I am Michele Rivkin-Fish from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill<\/strong>. I am writing to urge you to vote NO to boycotting Israeli universities in the AAA\u2019s ballot this month.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These are all the\u00a0opening lines of the anti-boycott emails. I have to say I’m\u00a0struck \u2014 amazed, really \u2014 by the massive recourse to institutional affiliations, titles and credentials.\u00a0It is as if the most important task for these authors was to\u00a0establish their own power, as if that in itself conferred authority. None of these people are untenured; none of them are unemployed; none of them are adjuncts; none of them are working-class, all of them are privileged; and\u00a0we’re meant to know and value that as we imbibe their prose. It’s like a\u00a0parade of academic capital that\u00a0you hadn’t planned on\u00a0watching go by.<\/p>\n

One particular slippage that I find interesting is the\u00a0quite direct\u00a0equation of\u00a0the person with their title<\/em>. I\u00a0am<\/em> XYZ, not\u00a0I work at <\/em>XYZ.\u00a0I find that\u00a0particularly pernicious, as there is nothing more antithetical to the spirit of democratic inquiry than identifying speech\u00a0with the institutional trappings of\u00a0its\u00a0producers. And yet it turns out that the anti-boycott group has an explicit rationalization of this equation. They note in “ten reasons to vote against the boycott<\/a>” that<\/p>\n

Badges we wear at conferences, by-lines at the top of journal articles, resumes and terms we use to introduce each other all consist of names attached to titles and affiliations – institutional idioms that define who and what we are.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But is it really the\u00a0titles and affiliations that define who and what we are? It’s an idea fit\u00a0for\u00a0a\u00a0feudalism re-enactment camp, but apparently for this group of\u00a0academics,\u00a0the thought\u00a0can somehow be defended non-ironically. Do they not realize that this proposition amounts to saying that unemployed scholars are nothing<\/em>? And that\u00a0their recourse to their own titles tends to make their whole discourse nothing but an argument from authority?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As many of my readers probably know, the big\u00a0controversy in my field this year (in American cultural anthropology) has been about\u00a0a proposed boycott of Israeli academic institutions, essentially as a protest of\u00a0the\u00a0Palestinian situation.\u00a0The substantive politics have been debated for months and years,\u00a0and I’m not going to get into them\u00a0here. But\u00a0this past couple of months, I’ve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[485,496,729,498],"tags":[748,660,749],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2192"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2192"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2192\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2467,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2192\/revisions\/2467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decasia.org\/academic_culture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}