theoretical genealogies

Since I was an anthropology major in college, of course I had to take a theories course. I don't remember much about it. I remember a lot more about the theories courses I took in grad school. No surprise there, I guess. I was older, it was more recent, I had more grounding in anthropological literature by that time, and so on.

One thing that I did not ever think about, though, was what was the theoretical perspective of my profs in college. It just never came up. But it's important because as a student you will be exposed to the theories that your professors find convincing or important (in a theory class, one would hope you would be exposed even to the theories that the prof thinks are crap).

And this brings me to theoretical genealogies. Anthropology is still and all a relatively new discipline, and it is still possible to trace the genealogies of graduate departments based on where the faculty themselves were trained.

For example, I got my PhD from UVA. Many of the professors in that department were trained at U of Chicago, where Edward Sapir was on the faculty. (In fact, one of our professors emeritus was his son.) That should tell you that there are a few Boasian-leaning anthropologists out there training graduate students along the theoretical lines of Sapir. Kroeber and Lowie were at UC Berkeley, where Dr. MacKinnon received both her BA and PhD. What inferences can one make about her training as an anthropologist? She is first and foremost a biological anthropologist, but she also considers herself a broadly trained generalist. Like.... Kroeber and Boas!

Some of my other professors at UVA were Marxian, and others were symbolic anthropologists. Victor Turner was on the faculty (he died before I got there, but his wife still taught in the department). Dell Hymes was there, too.

As I struggle with ways to approach the teaching of this class, I wonder if it would be fun to trace the genealogies of the departments we come from and use that as a way to talk about theory.