Like many anthropologists, I’ve long been interested in the relationship between patterns of discourse and practice, or in more simplified terms, between what we say and what we do. (“Saying” and “doing” is a more simplified presentation in that it potentially confuses the non-mutually exclusive nature of discourse and practice. Discourse and practice are not so much different human activities, as different modes of interpreting human activity – what we say, our discourse, is a key sort of practice, and our patterns of behavior constitute not just what we “do,” but also constitute a form of discourse – something recognized in phrases like “actions speak louder than words.”)
Recently, much of my own research has focused on public health issues, including especially the study of cultural models of drinking and related activities. I’ve also been interested in thinking about novel ways to do ethnography through utilization of a broader set of research methods than are typically used by anthropologists. (See my previous posts: Thinking Problem, Measurement and Interpretation, A Clarification on "Qualitative" and "Quantitative," Ethnographic Research Methods and Ethnographic Writing.)
On a topic such as this, it’s relatively easy to collect data on drinking discourse and on what people claim about their own drinking behavior – and in some cases observational data from participant observation style research can complement and inform such discursive data, but this often depends on the specific nature of the population being studied. For instance, along with other colleagues at my university, I’ve been specifically interested in students’ cultural models and actual drinking patterns. I could do participant observation on drinking behavior with this population, but I’m under no illusion that what I would see would come remotely close to “natural” behavior – while I strongly feel that participant observation is the best research method to use for some research purposes, here it’s simply not a very efficient or reliable way to go about studying the cultural context, and the precise relationship between what students claim about themselves and what they do when not being asked questions by pesky researchers is left murky.
I recently encountered an interesting news story on the website Medical News Today, Evidence in Sewage of Community-Wide Drug Abuse. Researchers analyzed raw sewage and were able to discern distinct community patterns of drub use. The research says nothing about any individual’s actions (and so, at least debatably doesn’t violate confidentiality or infringe upon informed consent rights – though that’s a debate I think would be worth having), but this style research could say quite a bit about aggregate patterns concerning any patterned behaviors which would result in chemical traces in urine. (I’m not sure what that range of patterned behaviors that could be studied this way would be, but it’s interesting to think about. On a related note, I remember reading a science news article from last January or so that talked about ecologists having detected elevated traces of cinnamon in Puget Sound as a result of people’s holiday baking.)
I certainly don’t expect ethnographers to dive into this style of research, but I do think it’s worth considering whether unconventional research methods such as this could be of use to the anthropological study of cultural patterns. In instances where behaviors result in chemical traces, such analysis could open an insightful window on that complex relationship between discourse and practice.
Showing posts with label discourse. Show all posts
Showing posts with label discourse. Show all posts
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Friday, June 29, 2007
A Review of Recent News and Views from the Web
Race and How Americans Talk About Race
In several recent posts, I’ve discussed race and discourse about race (See “Talking about Race,” and “Racism and Free Speech,” Parts I, II, and III).
An article in Medical News Today, “Americans couch feelings about race in happy talk of diversity speak,” points out some interesting things about how Americans tend to talk about race. Americans in general tend to value diversity, even if when pressed, they often have difficulty describing or defining what they mean by it.
At the same time, “The study found a majority of Americans -- cutting across race, class and gender lines -- value diversity, but their upbeat responses to the term contradict tensions between individual values and fears that cultural disunity could threaten the stability of American society. Also regardless of race, Americans' definition of diversity places white people at the neutral center and all other groups of people as outside contributors.”
Another article in Medical News Today discussed the role of income and race segregation of schools in shaping children’s reading abilities. The article says, "Children in families with low incomes, who attend schools where the minority population exceeds 75 percent of the student enrollment, under-perform in reading, even after accounting for the quality of the literacy instruction, literary experiences at home, gender, race and other variables, according to a new study.”
A quotation from another section of the article: “‘Good instruction is essential, but it's not enough,’ said Kirsten Kainz, an investigator at FPG, senior research associate in the School of Education and author of the study. ‘Most current reading instruction initiatives and policies are aimed at improving classroom instruction,’ Kainz said. ‘This research shows that characteristics of the child, the home, the classroom and the school influence reading development, and that maximally effective reading policy should address all four systems simultaneously.’ The researchers found that one key factor having to do with the classroom context was the percentage of students reading below grade level. Regardless of the quality of other aspects of the educational situation, having a large percentage of children who read below grade level in the class, a situation common in low income and/or minority-majority classrooms, hinders the development of reading ability for children in the class generally.
Death and Politics
In an article on First Things: The Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life, Joseph Bottum has an interesting article on “Death and Politics.” His main propositions are:
“(1) The losses human beings suffer are the deepest reason for culture, (2) The fundamental pattern for any community is a congregation at a funeral, (3) A healthy society requires a lively sense of the reality and continuing presence of the dead.”
In this interesting article, he argues persuasively that death and loss have profoundly shaped the development of human culture, including through things like the development of inheritance customs and laws.
I’d like to acknowledge the website Arts and Letters Daily. It was on that site, which is essentially a clearinghouse of links to articles in the humanities, that I encountered a link to this article.
Farm Subsidies
Two recent online articles discuss the issue of economic subsidies to American farmers.
Tom Philpott, in “The Hand that Feeds: Don’t Blame Farmers for the Farm-Subsidy Mess” on Grist magazine, argues that while many farmers don’t actually benefit much from the U.S. government’s large farm subsidies – instead it is the agribusiness giants like Monsanto or ConAgra that provide seeds, fertilizers and other farming supplies, as well as the distributors of agricultural produce, that have reaped huge profits piggy-backing on the subsidies – farming is worthy of some public support, even if the current subsidy program is a mess. One of Philpott’s main points is that, contrary to both free trade globalizers and anti-globalization sustainable ag types who see agriculture as just another business that shouldn’t be subsidized any more than any other, agriculture is a different sort of enterprise because food is a different sort of commodity, because it’s not just desirable but absolutely essential.
Joyce Mulama’s article “U.S. Farm Subsidies Hurt Africa’s Progress,” on AllAfrica.com, lays out arguments against economic subsidies to U.S. farmers (by extension, the same arguments apply to European farmers). Subsidies to farming in the rich world allow that produce to be sold at artificially low prices, against which non-subsidized farmers in the developing world have difficulty competing. As Mulama’s article argues, this impedes economic development of agriculture in a variety of poor African countries, which in turn creates a further indirect impediment to economic development generally in poor countries as wealth that could potentially be created and reinvested in the country within a “fair trade” context is in fact not created in the first place.
Aboriginal Australia and Government Paternalism
There has been relatively extensive media coverage online concerning the Australian government’s move to ban alcohol and pornography sales in Australian aboriginal communities as part of an effort to stem sexual abuse of Australian aboriginal children. In part, the Australian government’s move is baffling to me. I don’t see the connection, how either the use of alcohol or pornography causes sexual abuse of children (and if it did, shouldn’t the appropriate measure be to ban their sale to anyone?) nor how the lack of alcohol or pornography would cure or otherwise stop someone with pedophilic urges. As any number of commentators, aboriginal or not, have pointed out, the whole thing smacks of racism – when Aborigines drink or view pornography, they abuse children. There are two good commentaries on the situation on the Australian group blog Culture Matters: “A new paternalism for Aboriginal Australia” and “Media Coverage of the Government Intervention ‘to protect indigenous children.’”
In several recent posts, I’ve discussed race and discourse about race (See “Talking about Race,” and “Racism and Free Speech,” Parts I, II, and III).
An article in Medical News Today, “Americans couch feelings about race in happy talk of diversity speak,” points out some interesting things about how Americans tend to talk about race. Americans in general tend to value diversity, even if when pressed, they often have difficulty describing or defining what they mean by it.
At the same time, “The study found a majority of Americans -- cutting across race, class and gender lines -- value diversity, but their upbeat responses to the term contradict tensions between individual values and fears that cultural disunity could threaten the stability of American society. Also regardless of race, Americans' definition of diversity places white people at the neutral center and all other groups of people as outside contributors.”
Another article in Medical News Today discussed the role of income and race segregation of schools in shaping children’s reading abilities. The article says, "Children in families with low incomes, who attend schools where the minority population exceeds 75 percent of the student enrollment, under-perform in reading, even after accounting for the quality of the literacy instruction, literary experiences at home, gender, race and other variables, according to a new study.”
A quotation from another section of the article: “‘Good instruction is essential, but it's not enough,’ said Kirsten Kainz, an investigator at FPG, senior research associate in the School of Education and author of the study. ‘Most current reading instruction initiatives and policies are aimed at improving classroom instruction,’ Kainz said. ‘This research shows that characteristics of the child, the home, the classroom and the school influence reading development, and that maximally effective reading policy should address all four systems simultaneously.’ The researchers found that one key factor having to do with the classroom context was the percentage of students reading below grade level. Regardless of the quality of other aspects of the educational situation, having a large percentage of children who read below grade level in the class, a situation common in low income and/or minority-majority classrooms, hinders the development of reading ability for children in the class generally.
Death and Politics
In an article on First Things: The Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life, Joseph Bottum has an interesting article on “Death and Politics.” His main propositions are:
“(1) The losses human beings suffer are the deepest reason for culture, (2) The fundamental pattern for any community is a congregation at a funeral, (3) A healthy society requires a lively sense of the reality and continuing presence of the dead.”
In this interesting article, he argues persuasively that death and loss have profoundly shaped the development of human culture, including through things like the development of inheritance customs and laws.
I’d like to acknowledge the website Arts and Letters Daily. It was on that site, which is essentially a clearinghouse of links to articles in the humanities, that I encountered a link to this article.
Farm Subsidies
Two recent online articles discuss the issue of economic subsidies to American farmers.
Tom Philpott, in “The Hand that Feeds: Don’t Blame Farmers for the Farm-Subsidy Mess” on Grist magazine, argues that while many farmers don’t actually benefit much from the U.S. government’s large farm subsidies – instead it is the agribusiness giants like Monsanto or ConAgra that provide seeds, fertilizers and other farming supplies, as well as the distributors of agricultural produce, that have reaped huge profits piggy-backing on the subsidies – farming is worthy of some public support, even if the current subsidy program is a mess. One of Philpott’s main points is that, contrary to both free trade globalizers and anti-globalization sustainable ag types who see agriculture as just another business that shouldn’t be subsidized any more than any other, agriculture is a different sort of enterprise because food is a different sort of commodity, because it’s not just desirable but absolutely essential.
Joyce Mulama’s article “U.S. Farm Subsidies Hurt Africa’s Progress,” on AllAfrica.com, lays out arguments against economic subsidies to U.S. farmers (by extension, the same arguments apply to European farmers). Subsidies to farming in the rich world allow that produce to be sold at artificially low prices, against which non-subsidized farmers in the developing world have difficulty competing. As Mulama’s article argues, this impedes economic development of agriculture in a variety of poor African countries, which in turn creates a further indirect impediment to economic development generally in poor countries as wealth that could potentially be created and reinvested in the country within a “fair trade” context is in fact not created in the first place.
Aboriginal Australia and Government Paternalism
There has been relatively extensive media coverage online concerning the Australian government’s move to ban alcohol and pornography sales in Australian aboriginal communities as part of an effort to stem sexual abuse of Australian aboriginal children. In part, the Australian government’s move is baffling to me. I don’t see the connection, how either the use of alcohol or pornography causes sexual abuse of children (and if it did, shouldn’t the appropriate measure be to ban their sale to anyone?) nor how the lack of alcohol or pornography would cure or otherwise stop someone with pedophilic urges. As any number of commentators, aboriginal or not, have pointed out, the whole thing smacks of racism – when Aborigines drink or view pornography, they abuse children. There are two good commentaries on the situation on the Australian group blog Culture Matters: “A new paternalism for Aboriginal Australia” and “Media Coverage of the Government Intervention ‘to protect indigenous children.’”
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Talking About Race
Nicolette Bethel has an interesting recent blog post: “On Why Race Matters” (Nicolette Bethel’s Blog, May 24). I’d like to quote one passage in particular:
“It’s time, I believe, for us to open our mouths and start talking to one another. Until we examine the things that shape our race relations — like slavery, emancipation, labour’s struggle, the fight for equality, and the massive influx of Haitian immigrants — we can never hope to build a united society. Although it’s no longer a matter of law or custom, there are still churches and clubs and parks and professions and schools that are avoided by whites or blacks. There is still very little opportunity for mingling, for getting to know the people beneath the skin. And we have to say so.”
Bethel’s words refer specifically to the Bahamas, but with one minor tweak, they speak to the contemporary U.S. context as well. Except for South Florida, Haitian immigration is not a hot button issue in the U.S., though immigration in general clearly is.
I do think that the U.S. (and most every other nation-state in the Americas) needs more dialogue on race and more interaction across racial and ethnic lines. However, for those interested in a society based on equality and where race doesn’t matter, we also need to talk differently about race.
In his History of Sexuality series, one of Michel Foucault’s important arguments was against what he called the “repressive hypothesis,” proponents of which argue that to be sexually liberated, we need to talk more about sexuality in order to eliminate sexual repression. Foucault pointed out that in western culture people talk endlessly about sexuality, but in ways that pretend to not talk about it, or which express distaste (a good example would be the countless news editorials from about ten years ago which professed to be tired of speaking of the Monica Lewinsky – Bill Clinton scandal and then proceeded to discuss it at length), and ultimately in ways that subject some, such as women (though Foucault doesn’t acknowledge that so much) and homosexuals.
Foucault’s point was that there’s little reason to hope that simply talking more about sex and sexuality would liberate anyone – at least not unless the content of the discourse also changed. In the U.S. and elsewhere, we face an analogous situation with regard to race. In the U.S., we talk quite a bit about race, but mainly in ways that don’t transform the basic premises of people’s discourse.
Recently, there’s been endless high profile discussion in the U.S. about immigration, especially undocumented/illegal immigration, and about Don Imus’ racist comments about the Rutgers’ women’s college basketball team. Most of the conversation consists of continuous (and usually simplistic) rehashing of a few basic themes, though. Immigrants are a threat to the American way of life vs. immigrants make the American way of life possible. Don Imus’ comments were racist vs. Don Imus has an inalienable right to free speech.
More of the same sort of discourse won’t change much. How to talk about race differently, though? I don’t have a blueprint, but I do know that we need to discourse differently on race if we’re to move toward a society where race actually matters less. I do have a couple suggestions:
1. More of the mingling that Bethel seems to be looking for would help – so long as it’s done with an open mind, lest it actually be counter-productive.
2. We can each individually try to talk about race differently. Counter arguments to racist propositions are important and necessary, but so are arguments that change the shape of the debate altogether.
To take again the immigration and Imus examples, discourse which simply presents the goals, motivations, aspirations, and experiences of immigrants could help make the discussion less about “aliens,” and perhaps at least ratchet down support for the most hate filled anti-immigrant screeds.
As for the Imus affair, most debate has seemed to miss the point to me. I’d suggest instead an argument that takes something like the following form: Obviously Imus has an inalienable right to free speech, including to say stupid, offensive things. Just as obviously, the corporation he worked for, as a private entity, has the same right, including to not be associated any longer with his speech, and other citizens have the same right to express disgust and anger at him. Now, why would he want to say what he did? What does the whole affair say about him or anyone else?
Again, I don’t claim to have a blueprint for how to go about engaging in a different sort of discourse on race, one that works more to open up dialogue and understanding and less to subject people (in Foucault's sense of discourse and subjection). I do know that when our public debate takes the form of people yelling the same things back and forth, more of the same isn’t going to change anything.
“It’s time, I believe, for us to open our mouths and start talking to one another. Until we examine the things that shape our race relations — like slavery, emancipation, labour’s struggle, the fight for equality, and the massive influx of Haitian immigrants — we can never hope to build a united society. Although it’s no longer a matter of law or custom, there are still churches and clubs and parks and professions and schools that are avoided by whites or blacks. There is still very little opportunity for mingling, for getting to know the people beneath the skin. And we have to say so.”
Bethel’s words refer specifically to the Bahamas, but with one minor tweak, they speak to the contemporary U.S. context as well. Except for South Florida, Haitian immigration is not a hot button issue in the U.S., though immigration in general clearly is.
I do think that the U.S. (and most every other nation-state in the Americas) needs more dialogue on race and more interaction across racial and ethnic lines. However, for those interested in a society based on equality and where race doesn’t matter, we also need to talk differently about race.
In his History of Sexuality series, one of Michel Foucault’s important arguments was against what he called the “repressive hypothesis,” proponents of which argue that to be sexually liberated, we need to talk more about sexuality in order to eliminate sexual repression. Foucault pointed out that in western culture people talk endlessly about sexuality, but in ways that pretend to not talk about it, or which express distaste (a good example would be the countless news editorials from about ten years ago which professed to be tired of speaking of the Monica Lewinsky – Bill Clinton scandal and then proceeded to discuss it at length), and ultimately in ways that subject some, such as women (though Foucault doesn’t acknowledge that so much) and homosexuals.
Foucault’s point was that there’s little reason to hope that simply talking more about sex and sexuality would liberate anyone – at least not unless the content of the discourse also changed. In the U.S. and elsewhere, we face an analogous situation with regard to race. In the U.S., we talk quite a bit about race, but mainly in ways that don’t transform the basic premises of people’s discourse.
Recently, there’s been endless high profile discussion in the U.S. about immigration, especially undocumented/illegal immigration, and about Don Imus’ racist comments about the Rutgers’ women’s college basketball team. Most of the conversation consists of continuous (and usually simplistic) rehashing of a few basic themes, though. Immigrants are a threat to the American way of life vs. immigrants make the American way of life possible. Don Imus’ comments were racist vs. Don Imus has an inalienable right to free speech.
More of the same sort of discourse won’t change much. How to talk about race differently, though? I don’t have a blueprint, but I do know that we need to discourse differently on race if we’re to move toward a society where race actually matters less. I do have a couple suggestions:
1. More of the mingling that Bethel seems to be looking for would help – so long as it’s done with an open mind, lest it actually be counter-productive.
2. We can each individually try to talk about race differently. Counter arguments to racist propositions are important and necessary, but so are arguments that change the shape of the debate altogether.
To take again the immigration and Imus examples, discourse which simply presents the goals, motivations, aspirations, and experiences of immigrants could help make the discussion less about “aliens,” and perhaps at least ratchet down support for the most hate filled anti-immigrant screeds.
As for the Imus affair, most debate has seemed to miss the point to me. I’d suggest instead an argument that takes something like the following form: Obviously Imus has an inalienable right to free speech, including to say stupid, offensive things. Just as obviously, the corporation he worked for, as a private entity, has the same right, including to not be associated any longer with his speech, and other citizens have the same right to express disgust and anger at him. Now, why would he want to say what he did? What does the whole affair say about him or anyone else?
Again, I don’t claim to have a blueprint for how to go about engaging in a different sort of discourse on race, one that works more to open up dialogue and understanding and less to subject people (in Foucault's sense of discourse and subjection). I do know that when our public debate takes the form of people yelling the same things back and forth, more of the same isn’t going to change anything.
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