Previously you wrote: "Since my profession is anthropological research, I figure I might as well do the thing properly and give the usual solid ethnographic year that is field-approved for participant observation, put serious work into understanding the beliefs and practices, history and so forth behind the religion, and dedicate serious time to the depth of it." (your post #36) To me this sounded like someone planning an involved study.
It is. But not one bound by science, anthropological or otherwise. Using the anthropological toolkit, as it were, doesn't mean that I'm bound to the entire anthropological approach, or more generally, the scientific approach. I suppose this could fit under the phenomenological approach, which has been used to some degree in anthropology (though mostly in European anthro). But I don't feel the need to justify an experiment that would involve my own life and is avowedly personal. At the same time, it seems to me to be foolish not to use the skills, ethical understandings, and so forth that I have acquired professionally to make this personal experiment as thorough and well-informed as possible.
It might help in avoiding personal bias.
I think that is a mistake in Western science- to assume the antithetical argument lacks bias. Atheism is as biased as any other way of approaching theism. One could say agnosticism is an approach that lacks personal bias, but to be honest I have never met a person who lacked bias altogether.
I think the more honest approach is to deeply reflect on one's biases and then acknowledge them, particularly in any kind of social science.
It's very hard to take on existing theories. They may be are easy to dispute a a theoretical level, but gathering replicable evidence that actually disconfirms the predictions made from a theory is very difficult. It usually takes a series of studies to rule out the possibility of negative results due to methodological flaws. Studies that report negative findings are usually not publishable because a scientific field is set up for the systematic confirmation and refinement of theories that most scientists can agree on. Scientists build on each others' work. The likelihood of someone coming along with something really innovative is very slim because of the fundamentally conservative way that science grows.
Yep, I agree. Which is why I am not particularly interested in pursuing this from a scientific approach.
All that said, at least in anthropology this is a little more open because of the inherent nature of the field. It is nearly impossible to replicate anything, so theory still tends to build on itself, but in a way that is not so dependent on the work from before. In some ways, it builds on itself through the anthropology of anthropology itself. That is, we learn over time of methodological flaws through turning a critical lens back on our own field and work rather than hoping research will reveal it, since culture change and the researcher's presence itself has effects that put replicability as suspect. In many regards, we are closer to astronomy than to chemistry. We have to build our science on observation, since we cannot experiment with society, past or present. Yet, unlike even astronomy, our presence impacts the observation...
I'm talking about the short term. Recognition in the field can be helpful in getting funding. Making a name for oneself is a major concern for many academics, especially if they're employed by a research university.
That's why I do other stuff as an academic. While this sort of journey could certainly inform the other stuff- give some ideas, give some venues and contacts for survey or interview work, etc.- it's not something you can write a series of brief academic articles about. And, quite frankly, it isn't something that I'd want to boil down into a few boring lines written for a limited audience.
For starters, having publications can be important to getting a job. I'm aware of some folks who landed positions who had 10+ publications before they even got out of graduate school. The decision to hire or to tenure a professor is rarely based only on numbers of publications. But if you don't have enough of them, you're at a disadvantage compared to folks that do have them. This is more an issue in an environment that's geared toward research grants. The ability to get grant money is highly dependent on publications, which is why promotions and tenure at a research university are directly influenced by number of publications.
Yes. I find it sad, in some ways, but all institutional systems are imperfect. There is no real universal proxy measure of the depth of one's contributions, so publications have to do.
However, I think the problem is that the academic journals encourage a style of writing that is inaccessible to the public, so much of science never gets anywhere in "real life." Which is all really too bad, since we use the public's money to do our work and ostensibly should be contributing something back to public education and life. Yet, there is real resistance in making any field transparent to the public, getting stuff out of the ivory tower and recognizing that what we do, as a whole in academia, is not so different from your average person's ponderings... we just learned to do it more self-critically and systematically.
Essentially, I am told I have to write boring articles and get grant money over time, and I know this. I was a grant writer for two years and am well used to constructing them. But to be honest, I found getting millions of dollars in grants to be not much excitement compared to really sharing my field's unique perspective with the public. I figure I will publish what I must, if I must, in the academic style. But my joy is in writing creatively for myself and for the public.
I am finding quite a bit of leeway if I play my cards right. Anthropology at least allows for quite a bit of creative license in ethnography, and there is no rule against publishing other stuff that is non-academic so long as you fulfill your academic obligations. So, I see it as just having to be more prolific than average. We'll see how it all works out, I suppose. If I fail at something, I'd much rather fail in being a good academic than in contributing something to society in general. And I am very much into art and see writing as art as well; I write a lot of prose and poetry as well as this sort of extensive journaling. If I had to pick and choose, I'd take the art of writing over academia.
Regarding research funds, maybe the project you have in mind does not call for them now. But you could easily decide to broaden the scope in a way that would require financial support.
I could, but then it'd ruin it for me. Having financial support means having some of my own artistic and creative license taken away. It means having to work within the limitations and goals of some or another institution. I'd rather keep the project separate from this sort of thing. If I absolutely had to go after support with a project like this, I'd go after private foundation funding. My experience has been they allow far more creative license on the part of the researcher. But I'd prefer to just do my own thing. There are other things I do that require grant funding, and I'd far prefer to keep my personal projects separate from those I do with grants.
It's quite possible that a funding agencies dont even look at grant aplications prepared by investigators who have fewer than thirty publications. They just put them in another stack.
It depends a lot on the grant and funding institution. But naturally I understand the need to publish if one is going to work at a research university. I just don't think my personal projects are what I want to public academically. I do other work that is far more amenable to the usual academic trajectory and that are far less demanding on my intellect, but somehow more valuable to most academics. I guess it works out nicely.
Unless you play the game, the tenure evaluation committee will get the impression that you don't value the game.
I don't value the game, though I do value the purpose behind it. All that said, not approaching
every project in my life academically and writing about it academically does not mean I do not have other projects. I just pick and choose. I know a great deal about horseback riding, too, and have long pondered what it is to be human given my extensive experience with horses as other social mammals, but I don't consider that suitable for academic publication either.
Young academics often have a hard time getting anything going because they initially move around before they get a permanent post. A project that may be personally interesting but has a low probability of yielding publishable articles could complicate matters. A book would give you only one byline. A series of articles might make more sense. Just some thoughts.
Thanks for the input, Netti! At this point, I have enough data from my dissertation fieldwork to keep me in articles for a long, long time. I also have an ethnography to put out later this year, and another book I am co-authoring on for 2010 on anthropology of religion (and no, it isn't like the stuff I write here- I'd like to think it is not exactly boring, but it is strictly academic).
I think what I am entertaining at this point is whether or not I want to devote a substantial amount of my life writing things in a style that doesn't appeal to me as a writer or artist. But then, I find academic writing far easier than creative writing, so it isn't like it takes up a ton of my time. The research takes a lot of time, but I enjoy that anyway. So far, I find that I can take much more extensive projects such as this one I am proposing- that are for me, personally- and section off some sub-set of the inquiry that works well with anthropology and do that "properly" and write the results up academically. It's just a matter of comparmentalization and approaching some small portion of a much larger interest of mine in the "correct" way given my field.
