My own department (Durham) has one of the broadest ranges of any UK anthropology department in the country today, although not as far as four field. As of September 2008 we shall share a building with Durham Archaeology and will move a bit closer towards a 'three' fields school. One thing that is abundantly clear to most, if not all, of us, is that there are real conflicts of interest between these subdisciplines and it takes more than a common ideological commitment to holism to make us collaborate efficiently. When it comes time to hire new staff members every group within my department puts forward their case for an additional expert in X, Y or Z and they all typically have merit. One of the areas that bridges all of our research clusters within anthropology turns out to be what we have labelled informatics. This roughly includes the number crunchers, the modellers and those whose primary interest in computers is the capacity to manage traditional data types more effectively. To this end, we implemented research wikis to facilitate research cooperation which is expressly NOT for teaching of undergraduates (though some people do integrate it into UG teaching) and is NOT for public dissemination. It's to make it possible to work with people despite geographic distance. One of the most interesting things for me has been the take up of these wikis-- it is not just the usual suspects of people comfortable with computers. And it has spawned a new wave of cross research cluster bids for HPC (High Performance Computing) to enable computationally demanding research to be done by people from any field of anthropology.

The thing that seems to have come out of a common interest in computational capacity has been the emergence of a set of common interests. We have always had a handful of people in Durham who were commited to biosocial approaches, but now we have an additional handful who are committed to a set of tools which are powerful and flexible enough to be useful to specialists in a wide range of disciplines and sub-disciplines. What this seems to have done is provide additional neutral(ish) ground for us to share some research goals without suddenly having to sacrifice what really interests us in order to have any sort of meeting of the minds. Within my department (with biological, medical, development and sociocultural anthropology research groups or clusters), it can be fragmented at times (though we're not impolite and don't have the battles I've heard of in other places), but the shared desire to use tools which in fact enhance different aspects of what all of us do, has given us reasons to pool resources and submit joint bids for infrastructure.

It seems to me that one of the ways in which e-anthropology relates to the four fields, is that it offers an area for investment which needn't privilege any one field over another (unlike, for example, a wet lab which might not get used by 75% of staff members). While this may seem trivial and slightly tangential. I think this has contributed to increased unity within the department and made us more tolerant (and supportive) of one another's sub-disciplinary enthusiasms.

--Stephen Lyon 18-Jun-2007 00:46 BST