Avoiding the Pigeonhole

On page 56, Luker touches on the attractiveness of using a "linear" research model to mask one's social science as "normal science." Over the past decade (or so), there has been a calculated push toward multidisciplinarity in many of the social sciences, and a resulting backlash has emerged recently. The backlash is, of course, predictable, and echoes many of the arguments made in the quantitative vs. qualitative wars. At the root is the search for relevance. Relevance leads to - or helps persuade people of - big t Truth, or so we're led to believe!
I'm an unabashed multidisciplinarian. I changed my major 7 times while pursuing an undergraduate degree, then returned 10 years later to take what were, on paper at least, totally unrelated courses. I am now pursuing graduate education in a field seemingly unrelated to my background, and I plan to pursue research that has no real "home" in Information Studies, but draws from a number of different wells.

What I am worried about is something that seems to happen to multidisciplinarians as they mature: they get pigeonholed into publicly commenting on whatever area of their research they become most known for, and often end up becoming grounded in said area.
Someone who I have been inspired by over the years is Donna Haraway, a multidisciplinarian to the truest letter of the word. Haraway is a trained biologist who resisted the path of a "true" scientist by, first, emerging as a primatologist - but also as an historian of science at the same time - and then as a cyborg theorist/cyborg feminist, and later as a feminist technoscientist and cyberculture theorist. Now, Haraway is a "theorist" to some, a "feminist technoscientist" to those interested in feminism... but never a primatologist, or a biologist. Why? Because she defies classification? Or, specifically because she is claimed by constituents of particular fields? Is Haraway no longer a scientist? Has she been pigeonholed into the category of "feminist theorist" because it produces the sexiest headlines? Why is she not a scientist AND theorist who happens to have a very broad understanding of biology, constructivism, feminism, and cyborg anthropology, and can masterfully draw links between these fields in her research? I worry that inter/multidisciplinary is becoming a dirty word again. Why does an academic or researcher have to be an "expert" in one narrow, and some would argue limited, field? Does a lack of peripheral vision and an adherence to specific rigid methodology really produce the best and most easily quantifiable "results." I reluctantly acknowledge that there is careful dance between the ideas of exploration and explanation, but I honestly wish that academia does not trend back toward the narrow. More Issac Asimovs! More Grace Hoppers! Let the age of the polymath dawn again!!