One of my favorite writers—one of my favorite commenters on social affairs—is Conrad Kottak. He writes at The Anthropocene Anthropologist: Reflections on Bizarroland. Maybe I could quote from the introduction of this new Q&A:
… our guest today is Conrad Kottak, one of the leading anthropologists in the world. He is a cultural anthropologist—rather than an archeologist, say, or a primatologist—but he has his fingers in many pies.
He is a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan, where he has taught since 1968. I myself had the privilege of taking one of his classes. He has done extensive fieldwork in Madagascar and Brazil. He is the author of several textbooks in wide use.
In this Q&A, he tells me something interesting—well, many things that are interesting, but I am now thinking of this: He has been writing all his life, since he was a little boy. He always wanted to be a writer, and the writing came before the anthropology. For all these years, he has been writing as an anthropologist.
He went to Columbia University, home of anthropology. Is that what introduced him to the field? Got him hooked on it?
“Well,” he says, “I had a fourth-grade teacher who did a unit on South American Indians that I thought was pretty interesting. It fascinated me. But that lay in abeyance for quite a while until I got to college.”
One of his teachers at Columbia was Margaret Mead, whose name for a long time was virtually synonymous with anthropology. In addition to being an anthropologist, she was a generalist, writing on a variety of subjects for a variety of publications.
Conrad Kottak, too, is an anthropologist and generalist.
Mead was controversial—is controversial—and I ask Professor Kottak to get into it a little, which he does, illuminatingly.
The two countries of his fieldwork, Madagascar and Brazil—they seem to me remote, exotic, romantic. (Those are all forbidden words in anthropology, I’m sure. I almost specialize in forbidden words.) Professor Kottak has seen many sides of life. Indeed, he has examined them up close.
I ask whether he was amused when a hit movie called “Madagascar” came out (2005). The people in Madagascar were not amused, he says. The world seemed more interested in saving wildlife than in addressing human problems.
A blunt question, and a natural one: Did anthropology get flaky? Did a field that once attracted brilliant minds go all soft and political and granola?
In the course of his answer, Professor Kottak says something central: Respect for fact must be paramount. Without a respect for fact, you don’t have science, social or otherwise.
Here is another question: Are differences between peoples more interesting than similarities, or vice versa? Well, any anthropologist worth his salt studies and accounts for both.
One thing Professor Kottak is known for is his inclusion of television. What I mean is, he writes about the impact of television on societies. Here in the United States, we used to be bonded by TV shows. Those bonds are … loosening, as we all look at select material on our phones.
Oh, there are so many things you can discuss with an anthropologist, and with Conrad Kottak in particular. You will enjoy getting to know him.
