Writing the history of Russian anthropology (2012)

The status of any area of research is directly linked on the one hand to its recognition as an independent discipline within the system of transferring knowledge as it exists in higher education, and on the other, to the acknowledgement and recognition of such an area of research as an independent domain of knowledge production within modern academia’s overall division of labour. The metaphor of the division of labour, borrowed by science studies from economics, is based on several premises, among which are ideas about the cumulative nature of knowledge, about the fundamental unity of reality and about the uniqueness of the remit and methods of a particular area of research laying claim to relative autonomy and independence that is shaped by these underlying principles. As a rule, modern problem-oriented knowledge ﬁts poorly into the strictinstitutional and disciplinary matrix, something which is reﬂected in the growing level of inter-disciplinarity of many current academic projects. In addition, the aforementioned matrix – the institutionalised and legitimised division of labour in academia – also suggests a corresponding specialisation of administration and ﬁnancial support for research. In other words, the system of disciplines that has been formed, which is based on their classiﬁcation, formalised by legislation, and corresponds to the management of academic research and funding, contradicts the variable and changeable conﬁgurations of knowledge in speciﬁc academic areas. In the best case scenario this gives rise to hybrid disciplines, and in the worst it essentially puts a halt to the development of research into ‘border’ (that is, inter-or transdisciplinary) issues. The boundaries of anthropology as a discipline have always been problematicand relative, but in the last quarter of a century they have proved to be considerably more so than is the case for the boundaries of the other social sciences, humanities, and disciplines such as history, sociology, psychology and philosophy. The fragmentation of its topics of study, and numerous alliances and mésalliances with neighbouring academic disciplines, have facilitated the spread of a feeling of crisis not only in Russian, but also in American anthropology, which is today the largest anthropological community in the world. A quarter of a century ago, in 1983, the American Anthropological Association(AAA) underwent a fundamental reorganisation. The aim of the reorganisationwas to reﬂect changes in the conﬁguration of research ﬁelds, which had led to the formation of a multitude of specialised ‘anthropologies’. The reorganisation also led to the doubling of the number of ‘societies’ included within the association. Institutionalised in this way, the system of specialisation can only metaphorically be termed a ‘system’, since its constituent parts – the numerous ‘societies’, ‘associations’, ‘councils’ and ‘groups’ – rarely possess the whole range of identiﬁers which are ideally typical of a discipline: a subject with deﬁned boundaries, special methodologies and techniques for research, an idiosyncratic system of concepts and so forth. However, virtually all of the member organisations of the AAA as a rule have their own journal and often a corresponding faculty or special courses in universities, their own array of interdisciplinary partnerships, and of course networks of researchers linked by collaboration and communication. In other words, there has been a profound institutionalisation of the academic division of labour that reﬂects the specialisation of research interests; I emphasise once again that it is a matter of speciﬁc interests, not unique methods or an original conceptualisation. I will name just a selection of these organisations here. Examples ofbroad, general organisations are the American Ethnological Society, the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology, the Society for Cultural Anthropology, the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, and the General Anthropology Division, which is quite specialised despite its name. Alongside these are the remnants of the Boasian ‘four research areas’ – the Archaeology Division, the Biological Anthropology Section and the Society for Linguistic Anthropology. Given such diversity, and the extreme fragmentation of research ﬁelds, asexpressed even in the naming of associations, groups and divisions of the AAA – and even more so in publications in the main relevant journals – one can assert that American anthropology as a whole is oriented towards searching for solutions to the burning social issues of the day, as arising in all kinds of social sub-systems – from the spheres of education to ecology, medicine and social work. In Russia, on the other hand, social motivation is often replaced by politicalincentives. Research into the ruling elite’s own problems (conﬂicts between diﬀerent interest groups, issues of eﬀective ‘spin’, political ratings and so on) are willingly ﬁnanced, whereas those which are encountered by ordinary people (poverty, the collapse of the free education and public health systems, the decreasing standard of living) are funded only meagrely. As a result, in a country where more than half of the population are living below the poverty line, economists prefer to invent indicators and measuring systems that mask the social chasm between the rich and the poor (for example, calculations relating to the cost of a basket of goods or to relative wage levels are regularly ‘massaged’). Where they research the social divide at all, researchers concentrate on peripheral problems, making no attempt to analyse the underlying reasons for the social crisis. Even the emergence of extremist movements is often explained by psychological and ideological ‘deviations’ amongindividual people, rather than by the growing level of deprivation in the population of whole regions of the country. It is only in highly specialised literature that we ﬁnd a comparison of current life expectancy and life expectancy in the 1980s, or birth and mortality rates over the same period, so badly do the statistics reﬂect on today.2