Auto-Ethnographic Reflections on Hierarchies in Anthropology

This commentary column summarizes some of the remarks and observations made at the 1993 Society for Applied Anthropology meeting in San Antonio in a panel discussion titled "Elitism and Discrimination within Anthropology." The panelists were Joan Cassell (Research Associate, Washington University), Merrill Singer (Research Director of the Hispanic Health Council, Hartford, Connecticut), Barbara Johnston (The Center for Political Ecology, Santa Cruz, California), and Anthony Paredes (Department of Anthropology, Florida State University). Additional comments were solicited for this column from several other anthropologists occupying a variety of positions in the profession: Faye Harrison (Department of Anthropology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville), Nathaniel Tashima and Cathleen Crain (LTG Associates, Silver Spring, Maryland, and Turlock, California), Laura Nader (Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley), and Estellie Smith (Department of Anthropology, State University of New York, Oswego).