Tony Agbali:

The New Witchcraft: Faculty Politics and Disembowelment

I am not a faculty member, and so I do not know whether this observation is worth any salt. But if the issue of being an anarchist is such a problem, isn't it scary that this is happening in a department- anthropology- that privileges the Culture Paradigm as its major crust of academic identity, not to be able to handle diverse folks with diverse ideology? I say this with tongue in cheek as an anthropologist, whose first impression of an anthropology department almost sent me packing and decrying my initial choice of trying to study to become an anthropologist.  However, in my case, such challenges urged me on, helping me to determine what is significant and what is not.

Not quite long ago, the American Anthropologist Association (AAA) had something about students and mentoring, and they figured out that minorities- ethnic, racial, and gendered suffered most in terms of their mentors' ability to be fully involved in their studies and future career.

Now, isn't it odd, apart from all these politics, and I bet Grabner, made some hardcore choices on his mode of operations, between "political correctness" and his "moral imperative" that the anthropologists that studied and towered over the so-called "primitive peoples" and "archaic forms of civilizations" are worst than the Yanomama in their attempt to crudely disembowel their game. Well, it is not surprising too, given that Anthropology News some years ago talks about the phenomenon of witchcraft in anthropology,  thus articulating the mode of 'vulture eats vulture' (or is it dog eat dog) mentality as evidenced in many departments of anthropology and among faculties.

In any case, whether this is department or University politics overall, I hope that Professor Grabner is able to move on. Life is like that, and overall anarchists do not privilege a static view of reality, they are always tumbling things over, so maybe this is another opportunity for Professor Grabner to act like a hunter-gatherer in search of sustenance.