How does one learn to become an anthropologist?
The question
I am working with a couple of doctoral students who are part of my project team researching migrant children in Polish schools. They also attend the Doctoral School of Humanities at Adam Mickiewicz University. Neither came to doctoral study with a background in anthropology, yet both will eventually receive doctorates in anthropology. This has made me wonder about something deceptively simple:
Where and how, exactly, does one learn to become an anthropologist?
They learn how to design research, prepare an Individual Research Plan, write grant applications, publish, present at conferences, undergo a midterm evaluation, and a myriad of other things. They attend weekly seminars at the Department of Anthropology and Ethnology. They work closely with their supervisors.
But where is the systematic encounter with anthropology as a discipline? What are doctoral students actually being taught? If someone is going to receive a doctorate in anthropology, where in the doctoral-school curriculum do they learn anthropology?
My colleagues do not seem particularly concerned about this, but most of them supervise doctoral students who already have an MA in anthropology. Perhaps that is why these questions keep nagging at me.
Much of the public discussion about doctoral schools in Poland has focused elsewhere. Understandably, considerable attention has been paid to doctoral stipends, the legal and institutional status of doctoral students, their employment conditions, supervision, and the demands imposed by evaluation. These are important questions. The creation of doctoral schools addressed some very real problems in the previous system of doctoral education, and I am not arguing for a return to that system.
But I am interested in something that seems to receive considerably less attention: the curriculum.
What responsibility does a doctoral school have not only to train someone to conduct research and complete a dissertation, but also to educate that person in the discipline in which the doctorate will eventually be awarded?
How I learned
When I started working on my doctoral dissertation, I already had an MA in anthropology, or rather ethnography. In my master's program, the curriculum was composed solely of anthropology, ethnology, and ethnography courses. Everyone acquired a shared disciplinary foundation before pursuing very different research interests.
In addition to taking courses, seminars, and ćwiczenia (exercises), we also participated in an ethnographic field camp in Ciechanowiec, where students and professors from several Polish universities returned year after year to the same villages. We learned ethnography collectively—comparing what we had noticed and missed, and gradually turning techniques such as interviewing, observation, and fieldnotes into an anthropological warsztat.
This wasn't a golden age. Communist Poland meant limited access to international books and limited opportunities for international travel. I was lucky: a high school friend worked at the American Consulate in Poznań and helped me obtain books in cultural anthropology that otherwise would have been difficult to find.
While I enjoyed my studies, I have no desire to recreate the anthropology curriculum in which I was educated. But working with younger scholars who come to anthropology from other disciplines has made me appreciate the common foundation my generation acquired almost without noticing. We had time to learn an anthropological way of seeing before we were expected to specialize. There was no uncertainty about where one learned anthropology.
Today's doctoral students are educated in a very different system, and I am not arguing for a return to the old one. The more useful question is how doctoral schools might be organized so that the opportunities offered by interdisciplinary education do not come at the expense of disciplinary formation.
Exposure is not education
Our doctoral students are required to attend the weekly seminars of the Department of Anthropology and Ethnology. These seminars are an important part of their education. They hear anthropologists present current research, see how ethnographic material becomes part of an argument, listen to scholarly disagreements, and watch experienced researchers respond to questions. They also learn something about how—and sometimes how not—to give an academic presentation.
But a departmental seminar exposes students to anthropology. It does not systematically teach anthropology.
Seminar speakers assume a certain amount of disciplinary knowledge. They may mention Margaret Mead's Growing Up in New Guinea when talking about children and childhoods, or refer to an argument that emerged from a particular moment in anthropological theory. A student can look up the reference afterward, of course. But reading an isolated text is not the same as understanding the intellectual conversation it entered, what came before it, what it challenged, and what subsequent anthropologists did with it.
Writing provides a good example. I have shared with my doctoral students Kristen Ghodsee's From Notes to Narrative: Writing Ethnographies That Everyone Can Read and encouraged them to read Kirin Narayan's Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov. We have also talked about novels that accomplish something remarkably ethnographic. These are wonderful ways of thinking about the craft of writing ethnography.
But craft has a history.
Why do contemporary anthropologists worry about voice, authority, representation, positioning, and who gets to represent whom? Writing Culture did not invent all of these concerns, but it occupies an important place in the history of debates about ethnographic representation.
Reading it means something different when one understands something about how ethnographies had been written before it, what its contributors were challenging, and the debates that followed.
Where Are the Courses?
My university does not lack graduate courses in anthropology. There is not one but two MA programs, including an English-language MA, CREOLE (Cultural Differences and Transnational Processes). Doctoral students can audit courses offered by these programs, but they cannot receive credit for them, even if they complete all the work assigned by the faculty.
I find this puzzling. At Georgetown University, a 400-level seminar could accommodate a graduate student who completed additional graduate-level requirements and received the dean's approval. I am not suggesting that we import the American system. I simply want to point out that different institutional arrangements are possible—and they need not require much additional work on the part of faculty.
The irony is that doctoral students are required to attend seminars that often presuppose disciplinary knowledge, while courses that could help them acquire that knowledge are available down the hall but cannot become part of their credited doctoral education.
Different Students, Different Needs
Not everyone arrives at a doctorate in anthropology by the same route. Some students complete an MA in anthropology and pursue a PhD as the next stage of their disciplinary education. Others come to doctoral research through funded projects, bringing backgrounds in sociology, education, public health, psychology, languages, or other fields. Such projects are typically organized around particular research questions and problems rather than around the disciplinary education of the people hired to work on them. Yet doctoral degrees are still awarded in particular disciplines.
This does not mean that anthropology PhD students should simply repeat an MA curriculum. Someone arriving with five years of anthropology needs something quite different from someone encountering the discipline for the first time. Why couldn't doctoral students and their supervisors identify gaps in disciplinary preparation and incorporate appropriate courses into an individual program of study?
The needs would differ. Someone studying children might benefit from a course in the anthropology of children and childhoods. Someone conducting ethnographic research without much previous anthropology might need more grounding in anthropological theory. Another student might need to understand contemporary debates about ethnographic writing in their historical context.
Not another universal checklist, but disciplinary education tailored to what a particular student already knows and still needs to learn.
Learning Anthropology
None of this is an argument against interdisciplinarity. My own work in migration studies has always brought me into conversation with scholars from other disciplines, and doctoral students benefit from those encounters. But interdisciplinary research requires crossing disciplinary boundaries, and it helps to know where those boundaries are—and where one is crossing from. Perhaps what doctoral students need is both a disciplinary home and opportunities to travel outside it.
For me, the answer lies in greater flexibility in how students acquire the disciplinary preparation they need: recognizing different backgrounds at entry, allowing students to take appropriate courses across programs and levels for credit, and adjusting requirements when necessary to make those courses appropriate for doctoral study.
A doctorate, of course, does not mark the end of becoming an anthropologist. I have been doing anthropology for decades and am still learning what it means to see, listen, write, and think anthropologically. But lifelong becoming still needs somewhere to begin.
If our universities are going to award doctorates in anthropology, they also have a responsibility to make sure there is somewhere within doctoral education for students to learn anthropology.
How else does one learn to become an anthropologist?
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