Reading your post gives/makes me ‘allegroa’ (my ‘Eurasian slow cooking’ daughter lives in Italy).

A voice from outside the academia in The Netherlands. I am a ‘clinical-systemic’ anthropologist publishing mostly in non-anthropological journals and handbooks. Increasingly with non-anthropological co-authors.
Among other stuff I co-educated transcultural family therapists in Amsterdam. One major methodological thread in their work is to learn to find, and to listen to, voices least heard in the social systems (families/communities) they guide. For us anthropologists, I think, this rings a bell.

I have many, anthropological and other, contacts/friends in the academia but could never make it there beside some guest lectures every year. What I missed is exactly why I stayed, after graduating in 1988, outside the academia.
The battle you, as anthropologists, fight from within the academia gives me hope while I quit my (4 years) PhD project three years ago at 65. The passion I cherished for decades in working/publishing as a clinical anthropologist with young men and their families was slowly but definitely killed. Not just by my doctoral advisor but by the ‘doxic’ sterilized system, of which you and hyperlinked co-authors try to unravel.

But there are voices least heard somewhere in your thematic thread. Are you (the reserve army of post-doctorates) ‘prisoners of your own device’ (Hotel California)? Are you, just like any member of any cultural/ethnic/indigenous group, part of a social system which leaves you with a particular, but rather limited, agency?

What I miss in a lot of academic knowledge producing stuff are the ‘parallel (reflexive) processes’ between the peoples/systems/meanings we study and your own, badly paid but still privileged (??), lives in universities as (Batesonian) ‘runaway’ systems.

Paul Simon sang in 1986: …Well, it’s not just me. And it’s not just you. This is all around the world…

Our ‘anthropological archives’ (of 140 years of ethnographies) are overloaded with applicable insights and BOKSes (Bodies Of Knowledges and Skills) for problems in our urbanized societies. Waiting to be ‘translated’.

Including ways to understand/heal our schismogenic academic systems.

I earned my money, as a clinical anthropologist/social entrepreneur for almost thirty-five years, by translating some of these insights towards maturing young men multicultural contexts. Outside the academia. http://www.anthropo-gazing.nl

…protecting and tuning my ‘talmudic craving’… wanting to understand…

…free at last…

thank you for your efforts

Dirck van Bekkum
PS Andreas Weber, as one of the forerunners, in his enlivement/biopoetics publications is coming closer and closer to re-connect biology with anthropology.