Pascal Boyer, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis has a new paper that addresses this question. The paper is titled From Studious Irrelevancy to Consilient Knowledge: Modes Of Scholarship and Cultural Anthropology, and a draft version is available on his web site here (it’s the first one down). The paper came out of a talk Boyer gave at the University of British Columbia. The talk can be seen here, although the sound quality is not great.
I won’t give away Boyer’s answer, but it involves the way scholarship is defined and recognized. Thinking back, I’d say that it’s also the main reason I switched from cultural anthropology to archaeology.
H/T to Michael E. Smith at Publishing Archaeology
