I wrote the question about anthros supporting sovereignty. .. also
about there being fewer "traditional" anthropologists than there
used to be. In my undergraduate education, I had to read chapter
4 of Vine Deloria's "Custer Died for Your Sins" in the context of
three separate classes. Some of us had the good fortune of learning
the basics from "non-western" anthropologists. In my case, my
"intellectual ancestors" included anthropologists who are from India,
Columbia, as well as anthropologists who have tried to find funding
for projects in the United States (institutional ethnographies of
such institutions as the Forest Service, the BIA, and small Baptist
communities). I find people such as this courageous because they
take the "road less traveled" by really looking into power structures
which exist in United States and how they reproduce themselves.
Such anthropologists have had to continually struggle for a place
in the academy because the academy itself is a structure which
reproduces itself.
I want to work in the academy someday because many of the mentors I
have had have influenced my thinking in very powerful ways. I don't
think much of educators who don't think much about what they
uncritically pass along. I have been unbelievably fortunate to
have had professors who do not simply play "Pass the Paradigm" ;-)
Peshewegunzh has many good points, but just as it is a mistake to
keep living Indian people in a stifling model written in the
"ethnographic present", so also is it less than helpful to fit
anthropologists who are attempting to effect a change of focus
within the discipline itself.
There are many points of agreement here.
P.S. Vine Deloria still talks to anthropologists from time to
time...his unflagging and ironic humor has touched as many as has
his well-documented and logical argument.
Paula