Winifred Mitchell

-

Q: What did you want to be when you grew up?
A: I don’t really know what I wanted to be when I was growing up. It certainly didn’t occur to me to be an Anthropologist. I don’t even think I knew what an Anthropologist was. I think I wanted to be a private eye, a detective, a spy. I also grew up with a lot of sort of housewife brain-washing that said, "Of course, what you’ll really be when you grow up is a mother and a housewife." That’s what my mother was. So I didn’t have any really definite career goals in mind.

Q: What did your dad do?
A: He was a civil engineer, irrigation, dams, stuff like that. Kind of the foundations for Archeology there. Could be.

Q: Is there an event in your life that most affected your career?
A: Well for me, the whole sort of "Sixties counter-cultural movement" very much effected who I am. Not a particular event so much as the time that I was finishing college. The protests against the Vietnam War and all the things that went along with that, had a huge impact on my way of thinking. It changed me from the sort of lock-step, middle class, conservative sort of person that my background engendered, to someone who was much more of a free-thinker and a liberal.

I also think that having traveled to Afghanistan when I was in college, my dad was on an irrigation project there, even though when I was in Afghanistan I wasn’t thinking "Wow, this is cool, I want to be an Anthropologist" but when I returned to college, that’s when I took my first Anthropology course, I think those things really came together as a real interest in all the cool things there are going on in the world, the differences in culture and what people do.

Q: If you had to quit Anthropology, what would you do?
A: Live on a hobby farm with chickens and other sorts of animals, make quilts, bake bread, do all that sort of nonsense.

Q: Ah, so maybe your Mom’s brainwashing wasn’t so lost in the Sixties.
A: You’re right, it’s still under the surface there! I don’t know how I’d pay for it, of course, but I think I maybe would enjoy that life.

Q: What really makes you mad?
A: I hate injustice. I don’t like it when cheaters prosper.

Q: What really gets you excited?
A: Seeing ideas come together, that sense of when you’re studying something and doing research on it, you figure something out and get that sort of "Aha!" moment.

Q: How do these aspects of your personality relate to your career?
A: Obviously, that’s very much the science part of Anthropology. The justice stuff, that comes into the sense of tolerance you know, for other people’s trips. This is a very important part of Anthropology, that cultural relativity, which says that "probably what you’re doing makes sense to you, and you probably have a good reason for it." Most of the time that’s fine, but once in a while, if I really feel that you’re doing wrong, taking advantage of people and getting ahead that way, then I feel very angry. This is usually for individuals. Systems, now they usually work if you give them a chance; most lifestyles are usually pretty good taken as wholes.

Q: At what point did you feel you were an anthropologist?
A: Well I think I probably began putting that label on myself officially sometime in graduate school. But really I think as soon as I decided to study it as a major in college I embraced it in a real identity kind of way. I don’t know if people do this much in other fields, but a lot of Anthropologists do that. It’s a very tribal identity sort of thing.

Q: What do you consider yourself now?
A: I’m an Anthropologist.

Q: You haven’t evolved by being in the University environment?
A: There are times when I’ve put on a form "University Professor" as my occupation, but I actually have thought about that, and I thought "No, that’s not my primary identity." I am a University Professor, but my primary thing is that I’m an Anthropologist, the University Professor thing comes second.

Q: Where’s the "big money" in Anthropology?
A: Ha! I haven’t found it yet, not in my pocket! If you write a big, fat, successful textbook, I think you probably make it , it’s still not big money, but the biggest money that Anthropologists make.

Q: Who would best represent "Pop Anthropology"?
R: Right now Jack Weatherford at Macalester College is becoming quite a "Pop Anthropology" writer and getting a lot of attention. He wrote a book called Indian Giver which is about the misconceptions of relationships between Native-Americans and Euro-Americans. Marvin Harris also writes a fair amount of Pop Anthropology. No longer living but not too long ago: Margaret Mead and Carlos Castenada were both popular sellers.

Q: Do you think that they do a good job of representing the field?
A: Not too bad, people tend to get kind of picky about it, like "it’s oversimplified" or "overstated", but I think some of that is jealousy. For the market that they are writing to, I think they do a really good job, and I think more of us should do more of that writing. Anthropology doesn’t really have a good PR system. Everybody knows what Psychology does (or they think they do) but a lot of people have no clue what Anthropology is about, because we don’t do enough of that "pop" stuff.

Q: Say you received a huge grant, simply earmarked for a project within the field of Anthropology, and were at the same time given an indeterminate sabbatical. What would you do?
A: Well, I’d do research, but I don’t know exactly what. I mean, I don’t have a project waiting in the wings, but I’ve got several that I’d think about doing. I might go back to South America and live someplace where everybody speaks Spanish, hang out and do some more research on gender relations.

Q: That’s been a big part of your previous studies yeah, with the Aymara Indians in Peru.
A: I’ve also done things in Bolivia. That’s another thing, if you had unlimited funds and unlimited time The sorts of things that you don’t usually get in Anthropology right, it would then be tempting to think, "Where could I really do some good?" Then that would mean applying it to some sort of project say, helping people recover from Hurricane Mitch or the earthquake in Columbia, or something more systemic like illiteracy. I could see doing something really cool like reduce infant mortality or increase self-sufficiency of small farmers in Bolivia or something like that.

However, on that note I wrote an article called Pragmatic Literacy, and it’s about how Aymara women can’t read for beans, but they can function in society with what I have called pragmatic literacy. They do what they need to do. I question in that article whether it would really do them any good to learn how to read (maybe their daughters need to) they’ve got their trip all worked out and they don’t need to become literate. With our typical standards of how you tell if a country is underdeveloped, low literacy rates is one really big indicator, and while it’s true it’s too general to give you a decent picture.

Q: So, do Anthropologists actually work for change in some cultures?
A: Yes we do. That’s what we call Applied Anthropology and that means change. It means planned, focused, directed change or the benefit of the people who are changing. Now the question is, of course, who’s going to decide what the benefit is? Some change projects in the past have been very paternalistic you know like, "We’re gonna come in here and show these natives how to do things." Whereas now they tend to be more prefaced in "Let’s empower the natives," give them the tools to go take what they want from a little bit of increased economic development of literacy or whatever. Now we want them to still feel like they are holding the reins as far as their cultural traditions go so that they’re not just swallowed up by a global culture with no identity left. We all have to change; Applied Anthropology would like to think that it can make that change better for people.

Q: What are the shortcomings of Anthropology?
A: Right now we have a, really kind of nasty, debate sort of an intellectual cold war in the field. It’s between the post-modern point of view and the more empirical/scientifically oriented group. I think it’s stupid. I think it’s a very unproductive waste of time to have that kind of division and to have people taking pot shots at one another. Of course, the nature of post-modernism is to critique other kinds of knowledge so it is inevitable that they’re going to say that that other stuff is no good, but it’s gotten particularly nasty and I think that it’s a weak spot in the field right now.

Another shortcoming is that we don’t have good PR (as I mentioned earlier). The typical Anthropologist thinks that Anthropology is the most interesting subject in the world, and that we have all sorts of insights and wisdom about humanity that we can offer to other people, and we sit here and wonder why they don’t come knocking at our door to get it. Well, it’s because we’re not very good at publicizing our usefulness to non-Anthropologists. You kind of have to see the light and join the club first, and that’s a very small group who does.

References:

Personal Interview 1999