As in my experiences with Eli since he was a Cornell undergraduate, I marvel at the combination of scope, incisiveness, and ultimately at the combination of critique and generosity that his work embodies. This analysis of Gusterson’s ideas is one more case in point.

Critical point 3
Gusterson engages in what is a replay of the objectivity argument, the search for an unmediated position of analysis. This affects much more than feminism an identity theory and is an epistemological, methodological, and moral dead end.

Critical point 4
I think the idea even of the elite “we” is now a fantasy. It is clear now that senior university administration now have taken over the “university” and they appropriate the “we”. So it seems to me that Gusterson does not realize his own now subordinate position in the university.

Critical point 5
Anthropology as good guys is quaint. Every field has always good and bad guys. Consider the academic “rock stars” who have lived off the elitism of the academic system and helped perpetuate it. Are they the “good guys” while the “poor” educational anthropologist are the janitors of the system?

Critical point 6
This position not only subordinates educational anthropology but continues the internal hegemonies that subordinated the work of the anthropologists who focused on contemporary institutions, science and technology and areas like Europe. The conceit of anthropology as non-Western, non-modern, pre-scientific no longer characterizes most of the field but was a key dynamic that affected my own career for at least 30 years. It is surprising to see the same processes of subordination deployed in reference to educational anthropology at this point in history.

Critical point 7
Methodological nationalism is not just an error but makes understanding causality impossible. The spread of the neo-liberal model of higher education around the world is general but does not take a uniform trajectory. Had anthropology operated in this ethnocentric way in earlier generations, we would have continued to take the nuclear family as the norm and all other forms as exotic variants. This is an ethnocentric dead end.

Conclusion
In particular, I oppose the subdisciplinization of critical university studies. The neo-Taylorism of academic silos has permitted domestication of the social sciences in studying rather than acting in the world. It has turned each innovation into a new form of disciplinary commodity production rather than promoting reformist inquiry into the causes of a host of social ills. This is why I lived most of my academic career outside of the department of anthropology working in interdisciplinary and multi-national programs.