Interview with Erve Chambers, November 1, 2001

FREIDENBERG: As you know, uh, I'm Judith Freidenberg, I'm a member of the SFAA Oral History Committee and we've decided to have you as a recognized intellectual in the field of applied anthropology in the U.S. tell us about your career. I'm talking today with Erve Chambers who is professor at the University of Maryland and the first thing that I have in mind is, uh, about how you became an applied anthropology, Erve? Where was the field when you entered it? How did you become interested in the field? Was it a project you were doing or something in your personal life or current events in the U.S.? What really prompted you to enter this field at the time when it was developing?

CHAMBERS: Well, that's a long way back. I think probably I didn't enter anthropology with the idea of being an applied anthropologist. And I entered 00:01:00anthropology mostly because I didn't know what else to do and the only real choice I had was going back to school after I got out of the army or working on my uncle's chicken farm. And I'd taken a course in Anthropology in France, actually, while I was in the service. And I thought it was interesting and interesting enough, it was the only major in the school I wanted to go to then that didn't require a foreign language, which is kind of curious.

FREIDENBERG: Yeah.

CHAMBERS: And . . . and I was convinced at the time that I wasn't competent to learn a foreign language. But I saw some interesting topics so I . . . I went to school there and I . . . I didn't plan a career at all and didn't know what I wanted to do when I got out of having a B.A. A couple of professors suggested I should go to graduate school so being docile I applied and I got accepted and I 00:02:00got some grants to go to school and I chose the University of Oregon. I still wasn't interested, particularly in applied. I did my . . . my major advisor was Homer Barnett who was an applied anthropologist and a very distinguished applied anthropologist. And he . . . he later reti . . . re . . . retired and Phil [Philip D.] Young became my advisor. But even in, you know, my development and my dissertation was really looking at . . . at a transition into a middle-class lifestyle of . . . of elementary school teachers in Mexico. I wasn't an applied interest at all, it was more dealing with class structure in . . . in Mexico. Uh, so, I . . . you know, I went . . . went through graduate school and I still wouldn't identify myself as an applied anthropologist. But then I got out and I needed a job and it turned I had two opportunities and one was . . . I did have an offer of a small academic job in a . . . in a school in Denver and also an opportunity to do a research job with Abt Associates, which was doing the . . . 00:03:00is a company in Massachusetts, a major kind of social research company, that was doing some housing program and they wanted to hire what they call "on-site observers."

FREIDENBERG: Hmm.

CHAMBERS: And they were looking at anthropologists and so I went to work for them because they paid more money and it looked like a more exciting job. And as a result, I learned probably more in my first six months with them about doing social research than I'd learned in graduate school in four years. And it was a very exciting and very interesting job. And I got out . . . after two years I got out of it and I went back to the University of Oregon to teach a one-year assignment and they asked me teach applied anthropology. And then at the same time . . . that was right . . . that was the time in the early 1970s when the job crisis kind of came up and people . . . [Roy G.] D'Andrade had written his 00:04:00article about we're training all these people in anthropology and there aren't going be any jobs for them, we either got to sto . . . stop training them or find other things. And they're like the AAA . . . I remember the AAA president at -- I can't even remember who it was -- but at the time he'd made some announcement about . . . about what we have to . . . you know, we have to encourage people work in other kinds of career things. And I remember I wrote a letter to the Anthropology Newsletter and I can't even remember what was in it anymore but it was kind of an outline of, you know, my experiences, an anthropologist working outside of academia and why I thought, can't the AAA . . . didn't really know what it was talking about in terms of developing practice. And unfortunately, I can't even remember what the issues were, you know, but [chuckle] but it's there, published somewhere in the Anthropology Newsletter. Uh . . .

FREIDENBERG: So, obviously the . . . these were kind . . . excuse me for 00:05:00interrupting . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . but I . . . I want to take you back to your experience as an observer at Abt . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . uh, this was . . . this . . . this was a . . . a new kind of . . . of position. I mean there were . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . not many like this. How did you, uh, what . . . what were the expectations of your job? How did you think of yourself as a -- perhaps then you didn't know it -- as an emergent applied anthropologist . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . and . . . and did you . . . did you use these experiences to teach that first course in applied anthropology?

CHAMBERS: Well, clearly I used some of those experiences and . . . and, you know, I mean what . . . what that job did for me was, it kind of took the idea of applied anthropology out of kind of a scholarly context in which you . . . you normally would read about in Human Organization into a real con . . . 00:06:00context where there were at the time important policy issues to be figured out. There was a whole lot of more resource than anthropologists usually talk about.

WARREN: What times are we talking about?

CHAMBERS: This is . . . this is like the . . . the very early '70s, like from 19 . . . from about 1971 to '73. The project I was working on was an experimental housing allowance program funded by HUD, which turned into ultimately into Section 8 Housing . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . which is an existing program. But this was an experiment . . . with experiments all over the country going on where this program was actually being operated and then there were people doing the research on it to see how well it worked including . . . and this was at the time very unique. Ethnographers at each site, you know, recording and . . . and interviewing and doing all kinds of things from very different parts of the program. Now, what was exciting about that and kind of made applied anthropology interesting to me, 00:07:00one, it seemed important and consequential and . . . and second, it got into the fact that . . . ultimately my job with Abt was . . . or one of my last jobs was to . . . to try to help coordinate the differ . . . some of the different field sites. And what we learned was, anthropologists are very different in the way they worked and some of them worked better than others in terms of the goals of the program and understood the goals of the program. And I think realizing that kind of created one of the first themes, which ultimately led to my book in applied anthropology. That is, that we aren't trained as anthropologists really, to understand the policy context in which we're asked to work.

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: So, an anthropologist who goes in and thinks, you know, he's going to New Guinea to study some tribe, you know, without any . . . any . . . well, it's 00:08:00a different kind of . . . of . . . an entirely different kind of research. [inaudible]

FREIDENBERG: [inaudible] for New Guinea, I mean . . .

CHAMBERS: Even for New Guinea, yeah, you're right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . you know, the idea that . . . it's . . . if the anthropologists are going there would have taken better account of the policy implications of colonial relationships, I guess . . .

CHAMBERS: Right. Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . their observations . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah, if that's what they were trying to . . . well, which anthropologists are doing that now, you know . . .

FREIDENBERG: Yeah.

CHAMBERS: . . . and looking much more at the . . . the historical context, the political economy and so on and so forth. Well, you know, I mean that . . . those issues became important to me back then as kind of a . . . as a result of that experience. And, uh, so, when I got out of that I found myself kind of put in a position of advocating for the idea that applied anthropology wasn't just a matter of, you know, taking what you've learnt in school and, you know, studying some presumably applied or consequential program but was really a scholarly 00:09:00exercise in its own right. That is, that . . . that you had to know things as an applied anthropologist and approach problems in a . . . as an applied anthropologist that were different than the way you would as an anthropologist trained to another end . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . or to another purpose. And I felt, by-and-large, most people within the profession who are advocating new jobs for anthropologists really didn't believe that or talked about it much. They were just talking about, you know, train the people the same way we train them and then somehow help them get jobs in different things. And to my mind that . . . that trained . . . turned out people who were an embarrassment. They were an embarrassment as researchers because they didn't understand the context in which they were working and . . . and they were . . . you know, they . . . well, my favorite image is, you know, 00:10:00you tell an anthropologist you got a problem to study and they . . . they immediately kind of pack their field kit and figure they're going to be gone for a year or two, you know. But they . . . a . . . a lot of applied research required a whole different attitude towards fieldwork and research and all that and those issues were just beginning to kind of . . . kind of . . . kind of come into the picture. I found myself almost reluctantly, I think, becoming an advocate for looking at the way we do applied anthropology and the way we practice anthropology outside of academia. And probably to this day I still have a certain reluctance about that advocacy. That is, probably if I had chosen my career totally in terms of my most basic interest I'd be a poet or something like that and I'd probably be an academic of academics and not . . . not spend so much time thinking about applied anthropology. But I think, you know, through 00:11:00the whole . . . through my whole career it's just been something that I got caught up in it . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . and it seems that wherever I ended up there was a place where I have strong feelings about the way it's being talked about and that I felt I had to play a role in this development.

FREIDENBERG: And . . . and that is . . . appears in the article that you published in Human Organization about poets.

CHAMBERS: Oh, is that the one on Spicer or . . .

FREIDENBERG: No, the . . . the one on, either poets . . . poets allowed here or something that you published in Human Organization.

CHAMBERS: Oh, yeah, that was about . . . that was about Ed [Edward H.] Spicer . . .

FREIDENBERG: Oh.

CHAMBERS: . . . some . . . some of his short stories that he had written.

FREIDENBERG: Oh, oh, okay.

CHAMBERS: Because Ed Spicer, you know, again a very . . . a very great applied anthropologist was a hidden short-story writer . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . and kept his short stories kind of . . . they were actually shown to me after he died. That's interesting.

FREIDENBERG: Now, let's go back to that because I . . . I'd like to enter now 00:12:00into the field of what are the issues that you -- according to your experience -- think are important to document for an SFAA Oral History and also I like to know what your perception of what worked and what didn't work and, uh . . . let's go back to this very important issue that I think is still current, that you mentioned, uh, between advocacy anthropology, action anthropology, and applied anthropology. How do you see those issues and is that something that we should be concerned about in the future of applied anthropology?

CHAMBERS: Was that on your list of questions . . .

FREIDENBERG: No.

CHAMBERS: . . . you were going to ask me? [chuckle]

FREIDENBERG: I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

CHAMBERS: That's okay.

FREIDENBERG: I'm sorry.

CHAMBERS: Uh, [chuckle] . . .

FREIDENBERG: We can . . . we can skip that.

CHAMBERS: No.

FREIDENBERG: But I . . . I guess . . . I guess what I . . . I guess another way of formulating this is, let's go back . . . it wasn't too clear for me when you 00:13:00talked about advocacy . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . within the context of applied anthropology in academia and outside of academia, what exactly you meant. So, perhaps I need some clarification.

CHAMBERS: Okay. Uh, well, I think, you know, traditionally we thought of the . . . I . . . I mean anthropology has . . . had a strong advocacy relationship from the first . . . some of the first United States organizations that involve professional anthropologists along with . . . with lay people were aboriginal protection leagues . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . and so there's always been . . . I think, it was [Sir Edward B.] Tylor who said anthropology has one foot in science and one foot in salvation. And so, there's always been this advocacy, link. Now, in my own efforts to kind of describe applied anthropology and the practice of anthropology outside of academia, I think I tried to acknowledge kind of the . . . the advocacy link and 00:14:00. . . and the . . . the will and desire of anthropologists to stand up for, particularly, marginal people and things like that but also to . . . to, you know, support the idea that . . . that the range of things that anthropologists might do and the particular perspective they might take on their work really has to be an individual choice.

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: And as some anthropologists are drawn to anthropology because of an advocacy sense and have found wonderful ways to apply that and to build careers around that and some are not as taken with the idea of advocating for particular causes or groups of people or so on and so forth and are interested in other aspects of anthropology and working with other kinds of clients. And to my mind, that's an equally legitimate, you know, approach . . .

FREIDENBERG: Yes.

CHAMBERS: . . . or a role to play in anthropology. To tell you the truth -- because I'm such an undecided person -- I still don't know where I stand in . . 00:15:00. in regard to those positions. Uh, sometimes I find myself involved in research where I . . . I find a . . . a kind of advocacy role being played out and other times I, like the research that I did with Abt where we were talking about housing. I remember one time we . . . we were having a conference where we were talking about, uh, about how some of the anthropologists had gotten too caught up in the cause of the low-income people so that they couldn't see the whole relationship to the agencies that were involved with everything else and they became advocates to the extent of under . . . to the expense of understanding, I think, what was going on. And I remember making a remark in that conference that . . . that I thought . . . somebody had asked me why . . . how I felt I had done 00:16:00what they perceived to be a very good job in that role. And I made this facetious remark where I said, "because when I went to work I came with the attitude that I didn't give a damn whether poor people got housing or not." [both laughing] So, it . . . it seems to me, I guess, part of the answer is that it depends on your role in a particular time and during . . . uh, what's-his-name . . . [James] Spradley said this once and he's talking about the . . . his . . . his work with the homeless and . . . and alcoholics in Seattle, that it . . . some . . . you take different roles at different stages in your career and sometimes you are an advocate and sometimes you're not and . . . and . . . and the important thing is figuring out when you should be and when you shouldn't be, I guess.

FREIDENBERG: Right. Right. Well, thank you very much for clarifying my question. Sorry, and I promise that I will go back to . . . to what we said we would be discussing again. [Chambers chuckling] And again, back to, uh . . . then moving on to the issues that you have discovered in your experience that are important 00:17:00to document for this project that I'm helping them, contributing to an SFAA Oral History and not only what are the issues but also what worked and what did not work. Uh, I noticed, for example, that you're being prominent in your role of developing institutional mechanisms to bring practitioners and academics closer together and even, uh, provided a publication outlet for practitioners. And so, can you talk to us about founding and editing Practicing Anthropologists?

CHAMBERS: Yeah. Very good. I mean, this is another thing that just sort of happened and its certainly true I didn't plan on that. I mean, it's . . . that after I had, you know, finished my work with Abt and worked at Oregon for a year on a temporary job, uh, and I was drifting around and looking for other work and I ended up at the University of South Florida, which had just started their 00:18:00master's program in applied anthropology. And they've had the idea . . . Practicing Anthropology had actually originated from a visit that Sol Tax paid to the University of South Florida where he made . . . before I got there. He made some kind of remark that, uh, you know, what you all are doing -- which is trying to train people to work outside of academia with an anthropology degree -- is really good, wouldn't it be nice to have some kind of publication for these people to all communicate among each other? And he just dropped that idea and the people there took it up and planned to . . . to create that publication and Bob Wulff, Robert Wulff, was going to be editor of it. And then just as I was coming into the department, uh, Bob Wulff got a job outside of academia working for US Housing and Urban Development and so took off. And he and I talked and he asked me if I'd take over the publication, which was really just an idea at the point, you know, and we hadn't even figured out the name. As . . 00:19:00. I . . . in fact I think one of the names was going to be Anthropology at Work and there were other names. And then this name, Practicing Anthropology came up. And what I liked about that, was that at the time we had no way of referring to people who worked outside academia, we called the, usually we called them "non-academic anthropologists" or people working outside of academia, both of which have a kind of a negative connotation . . . they're describing them in terms of what they are not.

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . and that didn't seem right. And so, that is how Practicing Anthropology sounded like a good title. And, you know, it's interesting that then it became also the name of a group of people, practicing anthropologists, which wasn't really going through my head that much at the time.

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: Now, some people complained with the first issues and I remember I already got one letter to the editor said, he didn't like that title because, uh, he said that we should be probably be through practicing and should actually 00:20:00be doing something else. [chuckle] You know, so . . . so, people saw the title in different ways but anyway, the idea of the publication was . . . was really to . . . the original idea was to create a forum for both, for practicing anthropologists to identify themselves, people working outside academia and talk about what they were doing, uh, and also to create a bridge between academia and practice and between, like, programs like South Florida and then, you know, that were developing these applied issues. So, once again, I found myself in kind of an advocacy role for . . .

FREIDENBERG: for practice.

CHAMBERS: . . . for practice that [coughs] excuse me, that I hadn't really planned on and it took an awful lot of my time because we didn't know . . . I mean, we had no idea how to create a publication. We . . . we started with a very small grant from . . . from the SFAA, uh, and there was nothing . . . I 00:21:00remember . . . have you ever seen the early issues? They kind of look like . . . they're about the same size, they were on newsprint . . .

FREIDENBERG: Yeah.

CHAMBERS: . . . as the TV guide . . .

FREIDENBERG: Yeah. Yeah.

CHAMBERS: . . . that you get in the newspaper. Well, that was the model, that as I saw . . . the TV and said that's about the size . . . that's about what I'd like to have. [Freidenberg chuckling] So, I took that to a printer and said, you know, "Well, could you do something like this?" And I had to do the typesetting . . . a lot of the typesetting. I had to do the formatting of the . . . I had to learn how to format a publication. We had almost no money. And then we . . . the students and I would get together and actually put the labels on the publication, prepare it, package it for mailing and take it down to the post office.

FREIDENBERG: But you must have liked it because you stayed there as editor-in-chief for about eight years?

CHAMBERS: Eight years, yeah. Well, I thought . . . again, it was . . . I liked it and I didn't like it. You know, a lot of things in your career are like that. Like it took a lot of time and sometimes I resented the time it took. On the other hand -- particularly at the beginning of it, you know -- I thought it was . . . it was important and it was good for me. I mean, it . . . it got me attention and, you know, people . . . and the reception of the publication was . 00:22:00. . was good. I think it's changed. I . . . I think the original idea has kind of gone out of Practicing Anthropology now and it's become more like another journal instead of a . . . you know, again, if you look at the . . . the old issues there's just a lot of news items, there's a lot of discussion, things were . . . people were writing very small parts con . . . contributions and part of that was based on the idea that people who are out there practicing don't necessarily want to write articles . . .

FREIDENBERG: Right.

CHAMBERS: . . . about things but they want to communicate with each other.

FREIDENBERG: Exactly.

CHAMBERS: And . . . and I think we have lost some of that.

FREIDENBERG: You mean, networking developed . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah. [coughs]

FREIDENBERG: . . . You can take this water.

CHAMBERS: Okay.

FREIDENBERG: Uh, it's not imported from the American Anthropologist.

CHAMBERS: [chuckle] Okay. Okay.

FREIDENBERG: [chuckle] Uh, another role that, I think, you were very, uh, helpful in was in developing training programs to provide academic and 00:23:00professional preparations to enter the discipline of applied anthropologies . . . uh, anthropology. Uh, and at the University of Maryland, for example, you had an important role working, uh, for a master's of applied anthropology as a terminal degree and as a professional degree. So, tell us about your experience training applied anthropologists and what you think worked and did not work?

CHAMBERS: Well, again, that started with the . . . at the . . . when I was at the University of South Florida and I was there for, I think, four or five years and had an opportunity to . . . to get in close to the beginning of their program, which at the time was a stand-alone master's degree program too. And I learned . . . I learned a lot. And I had, you know, then after that the opportunity to come to Maryland to . . . to help develop a . . . a stand-alone program. I think partly, you know, the experience that I'd had at South Florida 00:24:00plus getting to know what was happening in other areas like Memphis was developing a program, uh, Georgia was developing a program, uh, that . . . one that kind of tweak the model a little bit and . . . and tried to create a thoroughly professionalized kind of program. And . . . and the idea . . . the first part of that idea was that even the degree name would be different. So . . . so, we created . . . proposed a master of applied anthropology, which is not a master of Arts degree. And to me that was very important because it was then ma . . . it was making the declaration that this is a professional degree. Yeah, whether we could stand up to that promise, you know, I think in the early days particularly, was . . . was very questionable and they were all worried about it. And we had some pretty good people, uh, coming in and we've gotten, you know, very good people since then but I think the differences, you know, that . . . that . . . that we tried to introduce there, uh, [coughs] were . . . again, 00:25:00you know, relate to a lot of just fundamental ideas that I have about applied anthropology. Uh, the experiential, the internship being an important part of that, that we . . . that we reemphasized by kind of making a regular internship, adding a pre- and a post internship process so it became a much more extensive kind of experience than in most of the other programs. Uh, the idea that, you know, the whole . . . most of the last year the program would be devoted to the student developing competence in an particular area or domain of interest which might include a lot of work outside of anthropology, which relates, again, to the idea that . . . that I feel very strongly that anthropologists are pretty helpful . . . helpless if they, in applied context, if they don't know what's going on in the related fields around that and that that . . . so, that became really fundamental to . . . to the notion what we're doing at . . . at Maryland. There is something . . . oh, well, then the whole notion that this was not going 00:26:00to be a spin-off to a doctorate, that . . . that . . . that this was going to be a stand-alone degree that was going to produce, uh, what I like to think of as not just applied anthropologists, not just practicing anthropologists, but scholars of practice. That is, people who are, uh, equipped, you know, like say, equipped and inclined to take a notion of scholarship to the idea of applying anthropology. And that relates then sys . . . probably in five or six other steps, to the whole idea that applied anthropology should be a fifth field of the discipline and . . . and that, again, is a controversial notion within but that has its own level of knowledge and so, an intellectual interest and its own problem . . . and its own intellectual problem. And its intellectual problem is what happens when you bring anthropological knowledge into the world. And that, 00:27:00unfortunately, is something we don't really do a lot of inquiry about to really try to systematize and understand what really happens when our knowledge comes into the world.

FREIDENBERG: As different from other types of knowledge?

CHAMBERS: Yes. They're from . . . from other kinds of knowledge. That is, a scholarship of applied anthropology to . . . to really try to understand those processes, uh, and the good and the bad and . . . and the ugly that results, I think, from . . . from practice and from our involvement in the world. And that's what I've always hoped and to some extent I think it's happening within the University of Maryland program that that kind of sense would be there, that we were not only just be training people for interesting jobs outside of academia but that we would, as a faculty and as students, be engaged in this broader inquiry about the nature of applying anthropology . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . and making it a true sub discipline in . . . in the act of 00:28:00giving it a . . . an intellectual core.

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm. Umhmm. And I noticed that you continue to very instrumental in thinking about . . . thinking through and promoting how we were to train applied anthropologists because you founded, I believe, a consortium of programs that offers masters in applied anthropology recently?

CHAMBERS: Yeah. I didn't really found it. Linda Bennett actually founded it. I . . . I just . . . I talked about it for about fifteen years and with a number of people, including people of Memphis where . . . where Linda is, uh, and I've always thought that it be very important and it'd be very beneficial if we had a consortium of the different applied programs to talk about some of these common issues and to move the field and its intellectual content forward. You know, it's actually Linda then who kind of picked up the ball and accomplished it and . . . and did it, and put it together which is very great. Uh, and I've been a 00:29:00participant and have been ever since and, you know, it's still . . . it's just a few years in the making, you know, but I think it's a very important kind of . . . kind of gesture.

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm. Was that . . . that part of your agenda when you also had an important role within a professional organization, promote the discipline and the link academia practitioners like when you were president of the Society for Applied Anthropology? Was that one of your interests as president to promote this link through education?

CHAMBERS: Yes. Oh, yeah, clearly it was. And I think, you know, there is kind of a qualification like in my own life, the idea of practicing anthropology outside of academia became a cause that kind of accidentally happened to me, that then I became more and more associated with so that as a result everything I've done 00:30:00consequentially, uh, somehow, I feel responsible to that idea. That . . . because that is, uh, you know, that's kind of weird because you're advocating a kind of anthropology that you're not and so I'm always dependent on real practicing anthropologists to . . . to create the thing I'm talking about, which is kind of an awkward [chuckle] situation to be in, I think, but I guess that's applied anthropology too. Uh, so and, you know, and when I became president of the . . . of the Society, which was . . . pooh, it's a long time ago . . .

FREIDENBERG: 198 . . . in the late 1980s.

CHAMBERS: . . . late . . . late 1980s, I guess, certainly one of the . . . there are a couple of things. I . . . I was very interested in . . . in supporting and getting together the local practitioner organizations when . . . that had been forming and some had already been in existence like WAPA [Washington Association of Professional Anthropologists] for some time and there were a lot that were 00:31:00just beginning. So, we would ask them to come in and we talked to them and see as . . . how we could assist them and . . . and things like that. And then, of course, I was very interested in getting more practitioners, people practicing outside of an . . . anthropology, involved in the Society itself and . . . and trying to make that possible. And, again, I think that's something that's kind of fallen off in recent years. So . . . so, I think we were more active in that respect ten or fifteen years ago, than we are now.

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: I've got some students right now who are looking at the extent to which practitioners are represented in the Society's various activities . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . and well, something like . . . they're coming up with like . . . something like 50 percent of the membership of the Society is composed of practitioners, only 20 percent of them ever participate in the annual meetings or in publications or so on and so forth . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . which is kind of . . . it's . . . it's a big concern. You know, I think for all, you know, the amount of the time . . . like most of my career I've been involved in this, I don't think we've accomplished very much. We've accomplished recognition of the idea of practice. We've acknowledged practice and certainly our attitudes about practice are very different and more receptive than they were twenty years ago, but the actual figuring out how to bring our societies and our institutions to the service of practice, how we do . . . restructure the annual meetings of the SfAA so that they are more beneficial to people who are not academics . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . to people who need it to make a justification to their workplace that this was a professionally important thing for them to do.

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: And we haven't been very successful in getting that next step, I think, which is to really integrate practice as an essential part of . . . of our discipline.

FREIDENBERG: And why do you think that has happened?

CHAMBERS: Uh . . .

FREIDENBERG: Because you mentioned in a way also . . . when you mentioned that Practicing Anthropology was not that much an outlet . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . outlet for practitioners . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . that that was a trend that we had fallen into, right?

CHAMBERS: Yeah. I mean I don't know how . . . there's several possible reasons or excuses. I mean, one is that [coughs] we're creatures of habit, you know, and so we always refer back to what we're familiar with and all the inst . . . of all our institutions and publications were created in an academic milieu and that's the only way we really know how to do things.

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: And, you know, we add a workshop here and a workshop there but, you know, to make . . . like the workshop concept may be the primary part of . . . of a . . . of a meeting would be more interesting in a . . . in a way in that. So, it's easier to go on doing the way we're doing, just kind of try to bring in practitioners on the fringes of that but they recognize very clearly that . . . that they are on the fringes . . . left on the fringes of it.

FREIDENBERG: Why would . . . it sounds like a -- and this is sort of off our questions too, but just curiosity -- it sounds like there would be academic anthropologists . . . applied anthropologists looking for opportunities to engage more practitioners . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . I wonder why the other movement is not happening.

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: Why aren't practitioners, you know, demanding . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . being more important in the SFAA and publishing more . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . and practicing?

CHAMBERS: Right. Good question, you know. I guess . . . I guess when I had kind of . . . was, you know, as my own involvement in all these issues started, I guess, that's the scenario that I imagined was that by this time, uh, you know, twenty years later, that . . . that practitioners would be running all this stuff.

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm. And it hasn't happened?

CHAMBERS: And . . . and it hasn't. You see, I mean there's some practitioners that have played very active roles in the Society and organizations like WAPA, NAPA, National Association of Practicing Anthropologists, and all that but they 00:35:00really haven't, I think, pushed . . . pushed the agenda, uh, out and beyond in a way that's very imaginative. They . . . in a sense where they participated they've done the same things that . . . that we do. I mean . . . and I was talking to somebody the other day about that, the . . . the kind of the idea that those practitioners who become most successful in place like the Society, and even in . . . in the National Association of Practicing Anthropologists to some extent, are those who are most like us, you know, who kind of have academic aspirations [chuckle] and . . . and tendencies and leanings and therefore they fit well within the current structure but . . . but the vast majority of . . . of others don't fit well and I think part of it is that . . . and this has to do with what I was saying about kind of a scholarship for practice is . . . I . . . I actually. . . I don't think we have learned how to prepare people to be very 00:36:00effective practitioners in a huge variety of settings; we have not been able to discover in any really substantial sense what it is that they all have in common, you know, what is it that makes them anthropologists, that we could then reinforce . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . you know, so that they would not only want to but need to come back to meetings and to entertain and participate in the publications of a group like the SFAA because that was continually teaching them something about what they do and . . . as anthropology, you know, and I don't . . . I don't think we've gotten there.

FREIDENBERG: Right, something like a continuing education . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . or if we think of our . . . of the . . . the discipline of applied anthropology as really a . . . a profession, it would be like physicians going back to be . . . to take boards . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . to certify them . . .

CHAMBERS: Yes. Yes.

FREIDENBERG: . . . uh, to be able to practice.

CHAMBERS: Yeah. Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: And . . .

CHAMBERS: Well, even . . . I mean if you think about it, there's so many interesting, in like, people trying . . . working in different research or . . . or in . . . in not-research practicing modes who would have so much to learn about . . . by something that somebody else is doing somewhere else . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . you know, but then we don't . . . cannot make those connections and . . . and find out how to make those connections. So, there's still a whole lot of work to be done to . . . to kind of realize that.

FREIDENBERG: I wonder whether, uh, another of your prominent roles, which is on thinking and reviewing and evaluating the role of internships in applied anthropology, is not a good way to start thinking about this because we train these applied anthropologists to go and be practicing anthropologists within an academic context but in a sense, we've going to institute mechanisms for them to 00:38:00continue being members or associated with academia. In other words, when we prepare them to do internships it's almost like we send them away . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . but we . . . we . . . uh, we don't use, perhaps, internships as a way of training people who have to continue to truly practice outside of academia but who will feel that need that you were talking about of constantly connecting . . .

CHAMBERS: Yes.

FREIDENBERG: . . . to academia not only for reading papers but also to establish collaborative projects or, perhaps, to consult . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . some . . . some . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . kind of continuous link.

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: And I wonder whether your experience, for example, at the University of [South] Florida reviewing internship at the training level . . .

CHAMBERS: Umhmm.

FREIDENBERG: . . . could help us figure out what we could do in this respect.

CHAMBERS: Well, yeah, I think that . . . I mean, that experience was, again, at their early part of the program and it was mostly kind of an evaluation of the 00:39:00internship at that point in which we learned a lot of very interesting things. Uh, one of the most interesting was -- that I thought -- was that when we interviewed people who are not anthropologists, who had had anthropology internships, that when we asked them what was the difference between having them an anthropologist as an intern and somebody else, they pretty clearly identified what we hold to be some of our most important values. They . . . they said . . . said, these people had a much more ability to work to understand the context in which they worked in, a broader . . . a broader point of view or, you know, acceptance of . . . an understanding of what's going on and essentially this defined the ethnographic and holistic perspective of anthropology in different terms, in terms that made sense to them, which made you think it as really working, you know.

FREIDENBERG: Yeah, definitely.

CHAMBERS: But the question . . . then the question you bring up, you know, is then, can you use that experience to go on . . .

FREIDENBERG: Yes.

CHAMBERS: . . . and create the further linkages. Uh, I . . . I certainly think 00:40:00that's what we need to do. I . . . I don't think we've done very much of it and I don't even know at what level you do it. And certainly, some departments . . . our own department here at Maryland, for example, is developing stronger alumni ties and . . . but a lot of the relationships are very personalistic. I mean, you just . . . and I think various . . . every training program has certain numbers of really star graduates, you know, that are affiliated with them and . . . and that, you know, benefit from association with them as the programs do from their association with those practitioners. But to do that on a more institutionalized basis, I think . . . I think that certainly is a step we need to go in . . .

FREIDENBERG: Right.

CHAMBERS: . . . that we haven't gone in.

FREIDENBERG: Because I notice that you, for example, have also being very active in continuing, uh, to . . . to promote a scholarship of practice you have been editor of the Adventures in Applied Anthropology series of the State University 00:41:00of New York Press and that's to advance the pu . . . and promote the pu . . . the scholars of practice would publish but we . . . as we have these academic presses helping us promote those, uh, the publication of scholars of practice, we don't have similar institutional mechanisms to promote the practitioners.

CHAMBERS: Right.

[End of Tape 1, Side 1]

[Begin of Tape 1, Side 2]

FREIDENBERG: . . . whether they publish, uh, books or journals, peer-review journals, or they publish reports and there's a lot of excellence in reports as well . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . which we don't, I think, recognize.

CHAMBERS: Right. Yeah, and I think . . . I think one has the sense of the idea of scholar of practice is, not that scholarship is necessarily recognized in the way we recognize it in academia through publication and teaching directly in the classroom that that . . . there are . . . there is a scholarship of practice and 00:42:00I think the . . . I'm trying to think of the name of, uh . . . I can't think of his name now, a guy at MIT wrote a book called, The Reflective Practitioner and it's always . . . it impressed me a great deal. It's not about anthropology at all but his . . . he'd gone out, he'd . . . he'd acted like an anthropologist . . . he'd gone out and he interviewed a lot of people, you know, a lot of different fields like urban planners, social workers, I think, you know, different practical kind of fields, and come back with the idea that, sure these people go to school and they're trained in their particular professions but when they get out they enter a different kind of scholarship and they operate on the basis of work-related theories and . . . and . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . and notions of what's going on and they create their profession and it . . . it . . . it is a . . . it's a . . . well, his term is "reflective", 00:43:00like it's a reflective theoretical notion and it's different from what they learned in school.

FREIDENBERG: Right.

CHAMBERS: It's unique in and of itself, so, urban planners are what he called, "not just practitioners but they're reflective practitioners."

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: They're creating ideas, theories what they're doing all the time.

FREIDENBERG: It's almost like grounded theory?

CHAMBERS: Yeah. Yeah, like grounded theory.

FREIDENBERG: Yeah.

CHAMBERS: So, the idea would be that, you know, how do you get a hold of that in terms of what applied anthropologists do? What are the kind of on-the-ground theories that they construct and create as they get mixed up in the world, you know, in their particular ways they do? And can you create that to me as a scholarship practice? And then you bring that back also to the training program so, because then you . . . you have more knowledge about, you know, and created more of a relationship between these two scholarships.

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm. Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: But I guess, it takes some people who really want to devote themselves to, you know, thinking about those things and . . . and working some of that 00:44:00stuff through.

FREIDENBERG: Right. Right. Well, I . . . I noticed . . . do you need a break?

CHAMBERS: Yeah, I'll take a break. [chuckle] [break] Okay. So, there's something . . . during our break I was just thinking about that . . . that . . . I want to clarify a little bit was, uh, this whole issue of a scholarship for practice and how you create one was, if . . . if you look back at what I was saying about when we created the program here at Maryland, the idea was it would be modeled after a professional program was very important and . . . and, you know, like right now the kind of professional program I think about is nursing because that's what my wife does and so we talk about it a lot. But if you look at the way nursing is, both as an academic exercise and as a practice, that the idea of practice is absolutely essential to what goes on in the academic institutions 00:45:00that train nurses. That is, the goal of the inst . . . of the training program is . . . although it does research and the research is generally based on how you make better nurses and how you equip nurses to deal with the kinds of issues . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . and problems that they . . . they go on and that should be the goal of a professional applied anthropology program. It should be how do you make better applied anthropologists, practicing anthropologists? And to do that we need to understand what people do when they get out. We un . . . need to understand that as our fundamental issue and our fundamental problem. Well, we do . . . as a rule right now, as we maintain our own research interest, uh, and relate those to our students' interest but the driving force of what we do as scholars within . . . even within applied training programs, is not what our students will ultimately do but it's . . . it's developed out of our own careers 00:46:00and our own struggle, you know, to put that kind of scholarly practice together. So, I think the transition, you know, the transition that needs to be made -- and maybe it's a just very gradual kind of thing -- is where not all of anthropology but people like us who purport to prepare and train people to go outside of academia to practice a profession that that practice itself is our fundamental problem in scholarship. And that's what we look at and that's what we try to articulate and learn how to better prepare people to do it.

FREIDENBERG: So, are you suggesting that, uh, that we try to research what applied anthropologists actually do?

CHAMBERS: Exactly, just like a nurse researcher, a Ph.D., in a nursing program goes out to hospitals, you know, works with nurses and, you know, whether, you know, it's transcultural nursing and they identify a problem related to problems 00:47:00nurses are having and . . . and try to solve it in the context of the work that nurses are doing and that's what nurse scholarship is all about.

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: But that is what our scholarship should be all about in . . . in the same sense.

FREIDENBERG: But if that was the case then our professional societies should be interested in funding such studies?

CHAMBERS: Yeah, I think so, yeah.

FREIDENBERG: Right.

CHAMBERS: [chuckle] Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: Okay. Well, that . . . that would be a very important . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . change. Uh, I think I'm . . . I think that this is very interesting and we've gone over a lot of your roles in which you've gone . . . helped found and nurture the discipline of applied anthropologists but I'd like to go back to your work as a teacher and as a scholar as well and ask you . . . I've noticed that you teach a variety of courses including one that I'm intrigued about, Writing Anthropology, uh, and how does that fit in terms of 00:48:00training applied anthropologists if . . . if supposedly they're not going to be asked to write all that much?

CHAMBERS: Well, God, I really haven't thought about it that much because I don't perceive the course -- even though most of the students who . . . who take it now are in our applied program . . . and are applied, it's also open to undergraduates who not, particularly interested in applied -- I don't perceive it as an applied course. It's really about . . . and it's not a course about writing conventional anthropology, it's really an opportunity for students to sit around and talk about what is -- now, I've going to contradict myself because it is applied -- what the course is about is . . .

FREIDENBERG: [inaudible]

CHAMBERS: . . . what the course is about is looking at what I call, cultural discourse and recognizing that. It's not just anthropologists who are involved in cultural discourse but that discourse about culture is being convened in all kinds of ways throughout society. So we look at the way a journalist writes about culture. We look at the way short-story writers write about culture. We 00:49:00look at the way anthropologists write about culture. And we talk about that and then we do our own writing. And most of the people don't write, you know, about applied topics but relied . . . re . . . write on a more . . . try a personal level about cultural . . . cultural relationships, uh, and . . . yeah, and we really focus on the quality of writing, quality of communication, and . . . and the ability to talk about culture in a kind of an uncompromised way, you know, not to trivialize culture as so much writing does. But this . . . to your second thought, I don't think of it as applied but it sort of is. It's a course . . . it's a course that I love teaching but the other part of your question was, you know, why writing for an applied anthropologist is . . . you know, we have all these discussions and . . . and students -- certainly applied students -- get very anxious about whether they're getting all the skills they need and, you know, this and that to the point that there's no way you can give all the 00:50:00students all the skills they need in a program such as ours or in any program. You probably teach them to acquire skill more than give them, you know, the whole set of skills. But I think there are two fundamental skills that we all need and that's the ability to write well and with clarity and the ability to speak reasonably well. I'm a much better writer [chuckle] than I am a speaker so I emphasize writing.

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: But . . . and that applies as much to applied anthropologists, practicing anthropologists in general as anybody else.

FREIDENBERG: Exactly.

CHAMBERS: I was . . . I was just having lunch at the meeting last week with Bob Wulff who makes his . . . and he's an anthropologist who for twenty years has made his living developing real estate property in a . . . in some pretty high . . . at some pretty high levels of . . . of financing and so on and so forth. And he just spontaneously said, "You know, the difference between me and the other people I work with and what makes me successful is that I've learned how to 00:51:00write well." And I mean . . . I think that applies to virtually any . . . any profession.

FREIDENBERG: And I think it's very important personally . . . even more important for applied anthropologists who work, for example, in the field of development and they have to -- not only write well -- but write with the ability to communicate with, say, economists or agronomists . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . about what it is that they're saying about culture and not just . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . noticing that these people are different or these behaviors are different but, you know, something more [chuckle].

CHAMBERS: Right. Right. Right.

FREIDENBERG: So, I . . . I . . . I think that that's an important course. I was just intrigued that in an applied program, uh, you saw a course with that title.

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: Talk to us about another course that I think that is quite novel, uh, within anthropology and particularly applied anthropology, which is Community Tourism.

CHAMBERS: Well, that's a new class. I've . . . teach tou . . . tourism as over the past probably ten years has become my major area of interest and I teach a 00:52:00couple of courses on tourism. Now, a community based tourism is a new one and it's . . . I mean, its aiming to be a little more applied to look at the issue of both the . . . the impacts of tourism on a community level and how . . . how communities can participate more -- I hate the word empower so I don't . . . I don't want to say empower communities to participate but that's what I mean [chuckle] . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm. Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . uh, but essentially how . . . how you can develop alternative tourism strategies that are a benefit to the communities in . . . in which tourism occurs. So, it's . . . it's probably one of the most challenging courses I've taught because it requires a lot of work and a lot of reading and . . . and starts out by problematizing the idea of community itself and then problematizing the idea of sustainability and then asking what all this has to 00:53:00do with . . . with tourism and . . . and the [inaudible] of it, I guess, a culturally socially sustainable kind of tourism.

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm. Yeah, that's . . . that's great. Does that relate at all with, uh, your role and finding and developing the track in cultural resource management at the Department of Anthropology at Maryland?

CHAMBERS: Yeah, it does. Again, the track is fairly new and the Maryland program just went to the track system fairly recently and . . . and that happened at a time when I knew of my commitment to kind . . . looking at tourism in an applied perspective was . . . was pretty strong and I kind of felt that a tourism track wasn't . . . wasn't going to be . . . wasn't going be the most appropriate but to combine, uh . . . to . . . to try to think about new kinds of tracks that would incorporate a lot of things of interest in anthropology and we chose 00:54:00resource management to combine issues related to environmental development, tourism development, heritage issues, uh, so on and so forth and all . . . all with a very strong notion of . . . of, you know . . . people keep asking, well, why did you chose the word resource, you know?

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: And I think there's a very particular context there. One . . . well, first of all, Resource Management is a recognized kind of area of practice in a lot of the areas that we were interested in like forestry resource management, environmental resource management . . .

FREIDENBERG: Water.

CHAMBERS: Yeah. Yeah, water resources. So, something that can be recognized by people we work with as a . . . a term that has salience and . . . and significance. But then our own internalized meaning of that term, uh, is really based on the idea that . . . that we would look at human relations and we would 00:55:00look at, you know, human relations with other things from the point of view of them being resources rather than liabilities. And so, this relates to it . . . something we've got an asset theory now and from the asset prospective that, you know, you think of a . . . a kid in the inner city and your . . . your prospective quite often and you're . . . you've learned . . . been learned to think of that kid as kind of a liability and a problem and . . . but how does your mind turn around in terms of applied anthropology if you think of him as a resource, the loss of which is a fundamental loss to society? And so, you try to find what is the resource that you develop, how . . . how do you solve the problem or get rid of the liability? And so we have applied that idea to . . . to, you know, all the things we're interested in and . . . in terms of tourism, you know, what are the resources of the community that can be built through tourism rather than, you know, how do you solve a community's problems through 00:56:00tou . . . tourism, which you really can't do anyway. You know, you can't . . . I don't think you could solve anybody's problems with tourism. It be more likely to . . . to exacerbate them.

FREIDENBERG: [inaudible] [chuckle].

CHAMBERS: But how can you -- by taking a look at the community -- how can you enhance a community's resources through tourism is a different kind of question. And that relates to the course I was talking about, you know, it's a . . . you look for linkages between, you know, more commercial tourism and the community itself and how you can support the community as . . . as well as whatever the economic or commercial enterprise is.

FREIDENBERG: You were saying earlier that you started that course with the notion of problematizing community . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . and . . . and, you know, how . . . how do you . . . how does it work when there's different interests promoting the . . . the interest . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . dif . . . different communities as it were . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . promoting their own interests and . . . and how do you . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . how do you address that in . . . in your . . . in your teaching?

CHAMBERS: Well, I mean, that's what we talked a lot about and, you know, I guess, uh, you know, the . . . probably the end . . . the end result is . . . you . . . you expect that there's going to be different perspectives in . . . in different communities within communities and so, and what they have tried in this course and never really thought of trying before is that a couple of the resources they use are extremely conservative ideologically.

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: I use the book called Community in Tradition which is about, you know, the conservative view of what community is. And most of the books they use are the kind of books we all use which tend to be highly liberal, you know, and . . . and, if not radical in one way or another but, you know, it's kind of interesting to have this, you know, there is a conservative view of what community is and it's very different and it's in fact . . . threatened by, you know, another view of what community might be. And then when you get into community development, you know, you see these conflicts occurring and what I 00:58:00want to do is cover the range of view to realize that, you know, you see, again, applied anthropology, you send students out, uh, or you graduate them, they go into communities that have a completely different value system. And then there are . . . there are . . . most rural communities around here that we work with are extremely commu . . . conservative communities. And we don't even know anything about why they are, you know, or . . . or the basis of belief . . . for fundamental beliefs, say, that created that idea . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm. Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: So, you know, so, we've really a problematizing the idea of community and that we're looking at it from very different perspectives. And then one thing we . . . that I've been talking about recently is the idea of . . . you begin to see as you look at these different views and different agendas where they can fit together, you know, I don't even think you want them to fit together but they can fit together in very interesting ways so you can have a bunch of liberal kind of folklorist, for example, developing heritage in 00:59:00different communities and they're developing it from an ideology and a framework in which diversity is good . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . and so they are encouraging diversity of all these different . . . say, take the Appalachian region, for example, diversity of expression, you know, from the . . . you know, indigenous music styles to quilt making to African-American practices in these different communities and that fits their kind of liberal paradigm. And yet, you look at a lot of the communities and these are tourist projects that work. They're effective. And if from . . . from the community perspective they're not looking at diversity as good, they're looking at our value and our culture is good and can be put forth and they're not interested in diversity necessarily. And yet, it's the same program and it's working for both. It's working for the kind of traditional liberal . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . who had a diversity perspective and it's working for the more insular kind of conservative community perspective. And to me that's just intriguing.

FREIDENBERG: Very intriguing. It also brings out to my mind the fact of what you said earlier on that applied anthropology is important . . . uh, for an applied anthropologist it's important to look at history and the policy context.

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: And it's almost like reversing that . . . that assumption in saying, you know, sometimes policy makers do not take, uh, the community context . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . so much into consideration and . . . and they should learn how to . . . how to adapt . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . more.

CHAMBERS: Right. Yeah and also . . . I . . . I mean also what we've done . . . and what anthropologists, I think, more, uh, that it post-modern kind of approach stands positive. I recognize much more to the idea that, uh, you know, people in communities aren't just passive victims, they're active agents in . . . in that they learn how to use the people who control their lives in . . . in a different sense and learn how to . . . to manipulate meaningful lives out of 01:01:00those contexts and . . . you know, that's another interest of mine is that there's so much being learned from kind of the more political economy even a post-modern perspective that's really important for applied anthropologists to know because they're talking [interruption] . . . I forget what we were talking about I guess.

FREIDENBERG: We were talking about the importance of using, uh, conceptual framework of political economy . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . of postmodernism to . . . to, I . . . I suppose if I understood . . . if I understood you correctly, to go back to this policy context.

CHAMBERS: Right. Right. And I think there are a lot more compatibilities and, you know, that are being recognized by a lot of applied anthropologists, not all of them, that . . . that we have a lot to learn some of the way anthropology in general is, uh, kind of challenging the idea of culture and culture . . . the way the culture concept is being used and . . . and the idea of kind of the agency of different actors in . . . in different roles in the society that those 01:02:00are all extremely important things for applied anthropology too. Unfortunately, there . . . there is a . . . it's . . . it's really interesting to me, I think, probably in the last twenty years clearly the two most fundamental movements in anthropology has been the postmodern perspective and applied anthropology. You know, they are the two forces that have really driven the profession, I think . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . in . . . in . . . in the last twenty years. And yet, there is very little interrelationship, uh, between the two in . . . in a lot of ways.

FREIDENBERG: Some archeologists who consider themselves applied anthropologists use postmodernism some to a great extent nowadays?

CHAMBERS: Very . . . I mean, some do. You know, I know some colleagues [chuckle], very close colleagues, that do but I think they're far, far in the minority within archeology as it . . . almost accidental applied 01:03:00anthropologists, you know, in . . . in some way. So, but I guess I define myself in the same way so . . .

FREIDENBERG: [chuckle] Umhmm. How is . . . going back to this book that you were mentioning The Reflective Practitioner, are . . . are you suggesting that perhaps archeologists, uh, as applied anthropologists have to be more reflective about their practice? Is . . . is that . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah, that's something I'm working on now. I'm working on a edited volume with a colleague Paul Shackel to look at archeology as applied anthropology and . . . and recognize it . . . you know, in their own career development the archeologists have gotten involved, uh, particularly in the last ten years in more and more kind of, uh . . . become more and more dependent on public involvement in furthering and developing archeology so that they really need to be good applied anthropologists as well as archeologists and there's . . 01:04:00. unfortunately, there is very little discussion about that or about what that means or . . . or . . . or, you know, where to go with it although as it develops, I think in some ways it might be easier to develop kind of a . . . a kind of coherent sense of being an applied archeologist than it is to develop a sense of what it is to being an applied cultural anthropologist just because you got a large group of people who do pretty much the same thing, uh . . .

FREIDENBERG: And work at the same . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . agency perhaps.

CHAMBERS: Yeah, just in the same way that it was easier for . . . for archeologists to kind of put forth legislation that favored the property that they dealt with because it was so easy for the public to see what an archeologist is. They have tools. They have material, objects, [chuckle] and things that identify them as a profession. So, they were very successful in the 01:05:00early '70s in putting forth legislation that made them essential to the development process and . . . and that they had to be consulted and they had to be brought in. Whereas cultural anthropology, we certainly made gains in that respect but it's much harder, both to articulate and to distinguish ourselves . . .

FREIDENBERG: Right.

CHAMBERS: . . . from like sociologists . . .

FREIDENBERG: Yeah.

CHAMBERS: . . . and . . . and other people.

FREIDENBERG: Maybe it's also because of what you were interested in teaching in your course on Writing Anthropology about cultural . . . a culture as discourse . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . that as a discourse that it is appropriated by. . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . the [inaudible] in absolutely every discipline.

CHAMBERS: Right. Exactly. Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: Now, tell us more about your own interest. You have a . . . a very impressive CV and you've published in numerous journals and you've published several books. As you go back into your career, what . . . wh . . . where you think your major contributions have been in additions to the ones that I . . . 01:06:00that we've discussed?

CHAMBERS: Wow, I don't know [chuckle] . . .

FREIDENBERG: Or . . . or . . . or . . . or maybe let me rephrase that. You know, what . . . what other major, uh, uh, domains, uh, in applied anthropology would apply . . . or anthropology in general that you, uh, that you have . . . obviously, you brought, uh, uh, for a long time to develop a field of tourism, the field that, you know, the . . . the . . . to . . . you founded the track in cultural resource management at the University of Maryland, uh, do you see . . . I'm sure I'm not asking this question as I have it in my mind but do you see . . . you . . . you know, in terms of the process of developing a career . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . do you see a . . . a link . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah, [chuckles] I see, vaguely, vaguely, I see a career there. [both chuckling] I think . . . I . . . I think, you know, if you look at a lot of . . 01:07:00. I've written comparatively little about the research I've done, most of which has been applied research and . . . and, you know, is in . . . is in reports more than . . . like a lot of applied anthropologists but where I published the most is . . . is in kind of . . . well, you can call it different things, commentary, uh, you know, material which tries to synthesize different aspects of the field that . . . that I like to think of as a kind of meta-anthropology and that's the idea that what we don't do . . . I mean we're so trained be ethnographers to go out and talk about our little place and our little people that we study and things and to build our . . . our research on that that we kind of develop these atomistic kinds of relationships with each other and we . 01:08:00. . we're almost afraid to talk each other's work and to try to assess it and . . . and bring it together. And, of course, that makes it very hard then to create any sense of a synthesis about what it is that anthropologists do or . . . or how to train them or whatever. So, it seems . . . but I've always . . . no matter what my particular interest is at any time what I've always been most interested in was that trying to create that sense of synthesis. So, part of the first . . . one . . . one of the first things I wrote was -- with Phil Young at the University of Oregon -- was a synthesis for The Annual Review of Anthropology of Mexican community studies because I had been reading them, I was fascinated by them and I thought, nobody has ever tried to compare all these things, nobody has ever said, you know, "If you took them all together, would that tell you anything?"

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: You know, or are they so disparate, it . . . it doesn't tell you anything. And I always look for the patterns so . . . any things like that. So, 01:09:00I don't know where I got that idea that that was what I liked to do but it's kind of being consistent with what . . . that's what I've done like I've done that . . . to me, applied anthropology is just something I write about but it's a research topic for me . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . you know, that I do research on applied anthropology and . . . and then I write about that. And then the same thing . . . certainly the first things I've . . . the first thing I did in tourism was to . . . to look at it and write a book about the whole field again . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . and to try to synthesize and to say, if you put it all together [coughs], what are people saying, you know, how do you count for the differences and so on and so forth. So, I guess, if there is one strain that's that . . .

FREIDENBERG: Yeah.

CHAMBERS: It . . . it's that idea of trying to create a kind of a different conversation outside of our own individual research where we . . . we . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . and I think it's . . . you know, I think it's something more people should be doing . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . and . . . and not, you know, usually they see it as writing a 01:10:00textbook or something but that's not what it is. It's . . . it's just moving the kind . . . creating a kind of meta-sense of . . . of . . . of . . . of what we're doing around any particular topic.

FREIDENBERG: And we are supposed what include the practitioners. You've mentioned a couple of minutes ago, that a lot of what you had written was, uh, hidden in reports . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . well, you didn't use the term hidden but you . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . implied that and we in academics, you know, the way we practice, uh, applied anthropology in academia is that we rarely read reports.

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: We only do actually ourselves write reports . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . when we are mandated to . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . uh, by contract or by any kind of formal agreement, uh, and yet, uh . . . and yet, you know, that's also what anthropologists do . . .

CHAMBERS: Right. Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . what applied anthropologists do. So, I guess, if . . . I . . . I noticed that your book Applied Anthropologist, Anthropology is still the . . 01:11:00. the most cited textbook in applied anthropology in the U.S. and . . . and . . . and abroad. I've used it my course in Argentina. Do you think that this might be a . . . a good way to continue on that work, that this could be like Volume II of Applied Anthropology if you were to do kind . . . to write about your experiences researching Applied Anthropology?

CHAMBERS: I don't know . . . I . . . first, I think, my buddy, John van Willigen might wonder whether my books are the most cited or not and I think this is questionable. I mean, his books are cited a lot too and . . . and I don't know which one is . . . is cited the most. But I mean, it has gotten some attention and I don't . . . there have been a couple of points where I thought doing an addition would be a good idea and I've always rejected that idea. I . . . I 01:12:00forget your questions. [chuckle]

FREIDENBERG: At . . . we agreed we can . . . we have read that if there was this a . . .

CHAMBERS: To create another . . .

FREIDENBERG: . . . a link . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . and . . . and . . . and that put your career in perspective was your

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . interest for so long in researching Applied Anthropology . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . and what applied anthropology stood including both . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . people in academia and people outside of academia . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . uh, so . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . I thought, you know, if . . . if that's the way you sort of sy . . . synthesize your career . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . then maybe if you ever had an idea of writing a new edition or . . . or a new book on applied anthropology maybe it could be on that.

CHAMBERS: Yeah. I am writing a new book on applied anthropology, it's not going to be related to the other book at all and be very different and be very short in that will be done sometime within the next six months to sixty years [Freidenberg chuckles] but because I'm . . . but essentially the idea of that book is to address the question of . . . the . . . the question I find plaguing 01:13:00our graduate students so much is -- and . . . and it's a very legitimate and important question -- as they get into a program like this and they start, you know, being taught, you know, you need to know this, you need to know this, and you need these various general skills that other people have in other, you know, like it's not just anthropology, and then they start wondering, well, uh, you know, is . . . when . . . when I go out and try to sell myself or make myself useful what it is really about anthropology that makes any difference? You know, and they begin to get . . . and I think we all as a profession we begin to think that, you know, what is it specifically about anthropology that makes the difference, that makes a real professional role that you could call anthropologists and that's what I'm interested in right now . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . to answer that question.

FREIDENBERG: Yeah, well, that sort of . . .

CHAMBERS: Nobody . . . nobody answers a simple question forever, you know, but. . .

FREIDENBERG: Right.

CHAMBERS: . . . to . . . to address that question and . . . and to write a 01:14:00little book that would try to get a sense that there is something, uh, that's very important about anthropology that is cohesive, that is the property of anthropology and somebody could try to steal it but they'll never get away with it because they don't have the experience, that there's something experientially based in anthropology that's fundamental to being applied anthropologist.

FREIDENBERG: And . . . and is that something that you wish to answer for, uh, for the . . . for the . . . to the . . . to the training of applied anthropologists or you think that it would be good to educate the non-anthropologists that employ applied anthropologists?

CHAMBERS: Well, it might. I mean it might begin as . . . certainly it would be written on a level that . . . that I would want it to . . . you know, be of interest to people besides anthropologists but my most . . . mostly . . . I think the audience that I most clearly envision are people who are beginning or anticipating a career in anthropology. Uh, and again, I want to look at issues, 01:15:00you know, between the kind of the more positivistic drift of . . . of anthropology and what the more postmodern kind of view of . . . has to contribute but that . . . that will have be done soon.

FREIDENBERG: I noticed also, uh, that you've had international experience. You've done work in Thailand and you got a Fulbright Award for that and you've done work in Mexico and you got an NIMH to do that. Can you . . . can you tell us how that . . . those two, uh, uh, stages in your scholarship apply to the topics that we're talking about?

CHAMBERS: Uh, no, I guess, I can. I mean I don't . . . I've had . . . I've been fortunate in that I have had, you know, opportunity to spend a fair amount of time in different places and it started even before I was an anthropologist, you know, I was in France for three years. This was an important opportunity for me. 01:16:00Mexico, that's where I did my . . . my dissertation research and, again, it was . . . it was just kind of a . . . I'd actually wanted to go to Asia and I had the grant and the opportunity to go anywhere I wanted but the significant other that I was with didn't want to and being a compliant person, you know, did whatever I had to do. So, I went to Mexico and then that was a good . . . I don't . . . you know, it was a good experience for me.

[Transition from Tape 1, Side 2 to Tape 2, Side 1]

CHAMBERS: . . . I've got my, this going to sound strange, I guess. I don't see . . . I got, you know, probably about ten years ago, I started getting my chance to go . . . finally to go to Asia in . . . in a relationship to work was like . . . at first that was after I was chair of the department at Maryland and I just the . . . sensing I wanted a break and I wanted to finally go, so I planned the 01:17:00trip where I traveled as much as I could around Asia. And I had to have, you know, a . . . excuse. So, I said I was going to study tourism which at that . . . that time I didn't know anything about. But that that . . . that's . . . that's a neat thing. [both chuckling] And so, in a way the trip around . . . that trip around different places in Asia did more the way I began to think about tourism but in a very informal sense, you know, like it wasn't like . . . uh, like it was a deliberate . . . you know, doing very deliberate work at the time but it was an important experience. And, of course, I've been back then probably fifteen times, most often to Thailand . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . since that time for various sites and had the . . . the Fulbright was actually to consult with tourism training programs on developing probably community-based tourism, which was a wonderful experience and . . . and 01:18:00developed ideas about tourism a lot.

FREIDENBERG: And you wrote a report for that?

CHAMBERS: Wrote a report for that . . .

FREIDENBERG: Yeah.

CHAMBERS: . . . and . . . and wrote some more articles about that experience.

FREIDENBERG: And is that report being used in your course on Community Tourism? Is that . . .

CHAMBERS: No.

FREIDENBERG: Uh-huh.

CHAMBERS: No, actually I never thought of that. That's a good idea. [both chuckling]

FREIDENBERG: What are the other, uh . . . have you also gotten the Praxis Award, uh, what did you get the Praxis Award for?

CHAMBERS: Well, I didn't get the Praxis Award for praxis, I got it for being a judge. And when they first gave the Praxis Award they gave it the Praxis Award also to the judges . . .

FREIDENBERG: Oh.

CHAMBERS: . . . uh, recognizing that it was kind of . . . that is was an effort on their part.

FREIDENBERG: Oh.

CHAMBERS: So, I didn't get it because I did anything.

FREIDENBERG: Well, that . . . you . . . you did get it early on . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . and the . . . at the . . . at the time when the Praxis Award was instituted so . . . uh, I guess . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . it was almost like also helping to develop another mechanism 01:19:00to . . . to develop this scholarship of practice, is that what we're talking about?

CHAMBERS: Yeah. And that was . . . I mean that was, again, with Bob Wulff and Shirley Fiske put the award together and I was on the first two juries, I guess.

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: And what was interesting about it . . . of course, nobody had any experience. I mean, this was an award where people nominated themselves and talked about, you know, their practice, uh, in some specific project and how important that was and we had a.. . I can't remember all the members on the juries but it was a very diverse group and George Foster, you know, was in the group and Setha Lowe was on the group, won the second year, I think. Uh, they . . .

FREIDENBERG: Were there lots of people in . . . in academics, uh, [inaudible]?

CHAMBERS: They were . . . no, there were so . . . there were . . . find, uh . . . as I kind of wonder whether . . . who is the . . . Eliot Richardson was one . . . one on it. Uh, so, a lot of these people who never really talked to each 01:20:00other and, yet, when you get down . . . you know, they got all these nominations and they read them all, everybody agreed like they're . . . I mean, you just . . .. they took all the results. They didn't even discuss it because they were in different parts of the country but when you got them altogether there was just absolute agreement about . . . and this was in judging, you know, a level of being an applied anthropologist and nobody even discussed the point. You know, so, you didn't even know what the criteria of good practice was.

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: And yet, everybody did, this was Number One, this is Number Two, this is Number Three.

FREIDENBERG: Actually, going back to your, uh, thought of putting together what applied anthropologists do, did would be like what applied anthropologists think applied anthropologists should do then?

CHAMBERS: And it's there and I guess the lesson is that we do know that but we don't know how to articulate . . .

FREIDENBERG: Right. Right.

CHAMBERS: . . . you know, and that's kind of a scholarship of practice again, you know . . .

FREIDENBERG: Right.

CHAMBERS: . . . and that's this reflective practitioner that . . . what's his name [chuckle], you know, I was talking about, that it's there.

FREIDENBERG: Yeah.

CHAMBERS: . . . that . . . that we know what this stuff is but we don't know how 01:21:00to articulate it.

FREIDENBERG: Do you think that it has to do with -- that is my own . . . uh, spontaneous invention -- with your profe . . . professionalization?

CHAMBERS: Oh . . .

FREIDENBERG: Are we afraid of . . . of coming out as real professionals like, you know, say, an attorney or . . .

CHAMBERS: I think some of us are, well, that's alright. And I think, you know, some anthropologists are afraid of . . . some anthropologists are terrified of seeming to have vested interest in anything, you know, even though they, you know, are firmly and securely ensconced in an academic profession, the . . . the idea of making a business out of something or . . . or profiting from something is very difficult. And . . . and so there are some obstacles to -- still after all this time -- to talking about professionalization that, uh . . . I know, I think . . . I know, I think one thing that started happening in the '70s that was very threatening to a lot of people was when the AAA began to be not just a 01:22:00disciplinary organization but a professional organization. And you can see the transit -- if you can see it -- beginning to occur and I could hear people, you know, beginning very nervous. And that's why, I think, partially why an organization like the Cultural Anthropology Group split off, you know, and that's still . . . and wanted to have their own meetings because they didn't want to have all this discussion about professional issues . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . particularly since they expanded beyond academia in the areas that would be suspect to us.

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm. Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: Now, that is interesting.

FREIDENBERG: Yeah, it is . . . it is interesting. It makes me think also of whether there . . . going back to your . . . to your, uh, pointing out that the Society for Applied Anthropology now does not have that many practitioners involved in the running of the organization, whether it could be that in a sense, uh, was developing to two distinct communities or cultures.

CHAMBERS: Right. Right.

FREIDENBERG: And, you know, so that . . . that . . . until we find that out, uh 01:23:00. . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . it's going to be difficult to put those together.

CHAMBERS: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think the one thing that it is really interesting that . . . I've been thinking quite a bit about recently is . . . is I . . . there's something happening to the nature of practice itself and I've no idea what it means yet. But if you look back at people . . . like when I first got interested in practicing anthropology and I was always talking to practitioners who were about my age and, you know, to . . . mostly people getting out of school and starting their careers and . . . and like . . . we're all kind of getting old now, you know, but there's a whole generation of us and if you talk to them, well, what I'm trying to say, like . . . this doesn't apply to everyone of them but there is a very significant percentage of those people who like me, 01:24:00uh, kind of envisioned an academic career . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . even . . . because at the time there wasn't really much else to envision, you know, and so in a way, even when you talk to them now, even though they are very successful -- sometimes very successful practitioners who have created really interesting careers for themselves -- there is still this kind of reluctance and this kind of reticence and this kind of sense that this is not really what I wanted to do, this isn't really what I was, you know, going to do. And . . . and so, there is that kind . . . there is a little negativity . . .

FREIDENBERG: Yeah.

CHAMBERS: . . . to the message that comes across and that comes so clearly . . . and yet, I see the students that we get now in a program like ours and they come, uh, motivated only to be a practicing anthropologist, not all of them but a lot of them. And they know what it is. They know that there are opportunities. They have quite often a very clear idea of what they want to do and it has 01:25:00nothing to do with academia.

FREIDENBERG: Exactly.

CHAMBERS: And if anything we . . . you know, we get to start to keep up with them because . . . because they, uh, you know, and they're bright and they have . . . we're . . . in our program we figured out finally that the GREs course of our last two years, people were higher on the average for our doctoral programs, which means to me -- and I think this is very important -- that these are people who are selecting a program and . . . and a master's kind of career oriented program because they don't think they can get into a doctoral program . . .

FREIDENBERG: Exactly.

CHAMBERS: . . . but in fact, they can get into a doctoral program but they want a program like this. Now, what those people do in the next five, ten years to me is going to be the critical dimension in everything I've been interested in for twenty-five years . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm. Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . because this is the first generation of people who entered the field of desire . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . and highly motivated. And the question is, are our institutions 01:26:00and our academic programs going to be able to serve that desire and that motivation rather than divert it and turn it off because we're so antiquated in it of ourselves. So, this is . . . I mean, the greatest challenge is right now.

FREIDENBERG: But that would be, uh, a . . . a great project for the consortium you mentioned.

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: Uh, is there any thought of doing, uh, a project like that collaboratively?

CHAMBERS: I don't know because I've . . . I mean, I've just begun to think about it myself and I don't know how many people are thinking about it and, you know, I think for most people -- who are even in training programs -- that . . . that they haven't made that transition like I was talking about with the nursing program . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . where their real important subject are the people that are going to come out of their programs and I don't think, uh . . . I could be wrong . . . I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think there are very many people in my position 01:27:00thinking that the people we are training are our future and are our absolute future.

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: Uh, I just don't think there are. I think again there is still . . .

FREIDENBERG: You mean the future of the discipline of applied anthropology?

CHAMBERS: Of . . . at least of that kind of applied anthropology that we talk about when we talk about going out to train people to work outside. I mean, we are a very elite special group of people. We've made a commitment presumably to pushing anthropology outside of academia and to training people . . . training people to do that. So, we've only put half of . . . one of our feet in that water and we haven't put both of our feet in that water yet. And . . .

FREIDENBERG: You're working about anti [inaudible]. Is this something that would apply . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . to this conversation? [chuckle]

CHAMBERS: Yeah, I think it is. Very good. And it's . . . you know, and . . . and you just . . . I mean, I think the two critical factors, one that you have . . . 01:28:00we have now which is an out-coming cohort of the people who are highly motivated to be practitioners and the other is then a . . . a cohort of . . . of trainers in professional program . . . people in professional program who will jump in with both two feet . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . and say, this is what we do. But that is not where we are now.

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: Again, where we are is, we're still creating our own research careers, our own research ac . . . activities that may involve our students but that our students are not essential to it, our students, that . . . that we aren't either way. The students aren't essential to it either. Uh, so we developed that and then we do the best we can to create a good program and to encourage people to do this but we don't jump the bridge with them.

FREIDENBERG: Exactly.

CHAMBERS: And until we do that, uh, we will never be doing what we should be doing. We'll always be just half of a truth.

FREIDENBERG: Right, including the danger that we might instill in . . . in our 01:29:00highly motivated, uh, masters in applied anthropology the same sense of frustration that . . . those that did, you know, that . . . that did not get . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . through academic programs still feel even, like you said, successful.

CHAMBERS: Yeah. Yeah. So, that's . . . yeah, and that's the danger that will take this much more highly motivated cohort and they'll jump out there and they'll find there's no one with them and they'll be kind of threading water and . . .

FREIDENBERG: Yeah.

CHAMBERS: . . . and . . . because there's not . . . outside down the road there's not, you know, much to embrace them and there is more the temptation for them to become a part of something else . . .

FREIDENBERG: Right.

CHAMBERS: . . . that does support them.

FREIDENBERG: Yeah.

CHAMBERS: So, they go into urban planning, they become urban planners rather than anthropologists or they go into this field or that. So, it is a real, you know . . . the more I think about it right now this moment that it's . . . it's a critical moment.

FREIDENBERG: It is a critical, uh, moment, I agree with you, and a dilemma as well because . . . you know, and it brings us back to something that we discussed early on which is, what institutional mechanisms might our 01:30:00professional organizations in applied anthropology promote or start . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . so that we address the situation head on?

CHAMBERS: Right. Yeah. And there, I think, the consortium is . . . has the potential to do that, uh, and would be important. And I think we also . . . you know, I think we need all of our kind of . . . parts of our institution that we . . . we need to be able to think how they can address this, you know. What . . . what are we doing, uh, at the meetings to create this relationship, you know, and how should we restructure the meetings in the way are to . . . to a way that creates this dialogue and creates this . . . this kind of unity between academia and practice?

FREIDENBERG: And perhaps with more continuity, that the occasional meetings . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . that we get together, which takes me into also -- although we have been discussing applied anthropology in the new millennium, you know, in a 01:31:00sense, uh, - now I want to ask you directly what you think, uh, where do think applied anthropology in the U.S. -- well you told me where you think it is, but what do you think it is moving to? What should we do? What should we not do? What should we encourage the younger generation, the students we train to . . . to do? And what are your thoughts on this? And this is . . . of course, we can't predict but, you know, in terms what you . . . your experience is, I think.

CHAMBERS: Yeah. Yes, there are a lot of . . . you know, what I've been mostly talking about is that relationship to practice and the way training programs are involved in that. And, you know, but there are a lot of different approaches and ideas and . . . and ways of being an applied anthropologist. And it . . . the trends I see here, I . . . I think there's . . . in one sense there's going to be a more kind of sub-specialization . . . like stronger areas of 01:32:00sub-specialization within applied anthropology. Uh, I . . . you know, I would like to say that I think where the future goes in terms of my own interest in practicing anthropology outside of academia, is that what I was just talking about will happen, you know, and . . . and there will be a commitment to . . . on the part of our institutions, our academic institutions and our professional institutions, to build practice, you know, and to take advantage of all this power and enthusiasm that . . . that we're . . . that we're involved with. But I'm not sure at all that that's going to happen. I think it's more likely that it won't happen actually and I think it's more likely that . . . that we'll continue to . . . to kind of move with tentativeness and uncertainty into our future, each of us kind of, uh, looking after our own little domain of interest 01:33:00or . . . or . . . or that and appearing at the meetings with our self-importance. And, you know, that . . . that seems like the way it's been certainly, uh, all my career and I think that's likely to be the way that it will end up. Nice [inaudible] [both chuckling]

FREIDENBERG: Well, you know, it made me think about the . . . the profession of nursing that we were discussing earlier . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . and what is it and not only from our past experience within our discipline but from other disciplines and . . . and the way they professionalize themselves . . .

CHAMBERS: Right.

FREIDENBERG: . . . you know, it wasn't until quite recently that the profession of nursing, uh -- or even the profession of medicine -- had these continuing education workshops and their demand put on the practitioners by the professional organizations to pass them and actually continue to . . . to . . . 01:34:00to be board certified for the practice of a profession. We don't have that.

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: Uh, do you think that . . . that . . . that having that, instituting that might help, uh, kind of coming out with a more response . . .

CHAMBERS: Well, I mean, I think that could a response, it could be helpful. I think it's . . . if there is something much more fundamental, I think, and I think it's that, uh, . . . we need a practitioner group that's much more assertive and aggressive and, you know, to . . . to move the idea of practice along to identify and demand, what the institutions need to do for them but the problem is that we don't . . . the reason, I think, we don't have that kind of aggressive, assertive practitioner arm is because when . . . when we bring these people through the school we train them to think of themselves as second-class citizens. We don't respect them as scholars. And, again, I'm speaking in 01:35:00generalizations and I'm speaking for everybody but from my experience like, we have never -- even those of us whose business it is to train people to be practitioners -- most of us have never kind of encouraged those people to think of themselves . . . to think as themselves as a particular important part of the profession. And that goes back . . . I think I already said that, you know, a couple of times in this [inaudible].

FREIDENBERG: Get . . . let me reverse the . . . the . . . the question, could it be that the . . . that the ca . . . that the current institutions and . . . and . . . and organizations that we have to represent the professions are no longer representative or that maybe, you know . . .

CHAMBERS: Well, they're not. Yeah, they're not.

FREIDENBERG: . . . you know, maybe these people who are made to feel that they're second-class citizens could invigorate those . . .

CHAMBERS: Could . . . could invigorate but . . . but, again, I think they need 01:36:00more . . . I mean, it's a socialization thing and it's . . . like I had so . . . some students that, you know, I've been talking to recently who are very interested in like going to the SfAA and trying to work some of the stuff out and they're graduates now, you know, and they're out and they feel the isolation . . .

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: . . . and . . . and, you know, we've been talking about how to do . . . make this movement and we were talking the other day and I said, "Look, you've got to have, you know, two things that you're going to accomplish in the first year because if . . . you're going to burn out very quickly, you know, I mean because it's such a thankless kind of thing and it's such a, you know, unrecognized kind of thing that if . . . if you go into like the Society, uh, and try to make change and . . . and try to, you know, move things along in the direction you think should be, you're going to have mostly just 'does' and 'does' and 'does' and assurances and 'that's a good idea', and 'yeah,' 'okay,' and that but you're not going to get any real support. And so you need to be 01:37:00one, more radical and second, you need to . . . to really set forth, you know, that you're going to accomplish this by this year and this by this year and . . ." because that's what I worry about. You see people coming out, you know, and little workshops being held about, you know, how you can solve this kind of problem and everything and then you see that this kind of drifts off and it goes away. And that's been happening for a long time.

FREIDENBERG: And that . . . that's very scary . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . to get . . . to lose that cohort of people . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . you know, we can lose as much as a generation of applied anthropologists?

CHAMBERS: Yeah. I mean, we still have those that are associated with academia but I mean it's not only losing them but it . . . it really . . .

FREIDENBERG: Not learning from that.

CHAMBERS: . . . what it really says for those of us in training programs is, it really says we're not doing what we say we're doing. That is, we're not training practicing anthropologists. We're training practicing something that goes out 01:38:00and does something and gets good jobs but we're not training people who ultimately self-identify as anthropologists and feel the importance of staying with the club in a sense. And if that's all what we're doing, then why are we doing it? Except, you know, that it's competitive like we get lots of applications because that we're saying we're doing.

FREIDENBERG: Umhmm.

CHAMBERS: And, you know, it sort of makes . . . in a sense it serves our own purposes but I mean it's about time we ask whether it serves the purposes of the reason for our being here, that is of the students [inaudible].

FREIDENBERG: I . . . I . . . I think that's a terrific question and I think that just by asking those questions straight on that we can find the answers . . .

CHAMBERS: Yeah.

FREIDENBERG: . . . and that . . . and in this particular case I think that allying ourselves with those practitioners and recent graduate students is the . . . the way to at least not lose the ability of hearing all the voices.

CHAMBERS: Right. Okay.

FREIDENBERG: Dr. Chambers, thank you very much.

CHAMBERS: [chuckle] Thank you. Thank you very much.

[End of interview.]