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 practice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label practice. Show all posts
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Enlightenment Values
The most important contribution to world culture of the Enlightenment was the promulgation of a set of important ideas and values, most notably those of freedom/liberty/autonomy and equality. These are ideals that have continued to have value well beyond the specific 18th/early 19th century period usually referred to as “The Enlightenment,” so that we can speak of an ongoing “Enlightenment Project” of implementing these basic ideals. (There were/are varieties of Enlightenments and Enlightenment Projects. Associated with the French Revolution was the famous triad of liberty, equality, fraternity. Coming much later, but still very much associated with the continuing project of expanding freedom, the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata emphasized land and liberty, the emphasis on both the ideal and the material condition necessary to implement it. In the U.S., liberty/freedom has been especially foregrounded as an ideal. Equality of opportunity and equality before the law have been generally held ideals, while equality of social condition has not been as widely held as an ideal, and the French “fraternity” is largely absent from consideration.)
In practice, Enlightenment values have always been coupled with contradictory practices, e.g. practices of slavery and Jim Crow laws alongside values of equality and freedom.
As a matter of historical or social analysis, these contradictions between ideals or values and practices must remain coupled. Both are part of historical or current social realities.
Further, refusing to decouple Enlightenment values from contradictory practices enables us to better understand things like racist thinking associated with slavery and/or colonialism and their aftermaths. These are syntheses of the contradiction between values and practices. Much scholarship on race in early colonial North America indicates that masters felt no particular need to distinguish greatly between white and black forced laborers, nor a particular need to defend such practices. Racism grew up alongside developing notions of freedom and equality. As the radical inequality associated with forced labor began to seem wrong, but the profits generated were hard to pass up, the development of notions of inherent racial inequality served as useful rationalization – one could treat some unequally because regarded as naturally unequal.
A similar type of thinking developed concerning gender and the growing contradiction between the value of equality and realities of gender inequality. In an engaging essay, “Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology” (the essay can be found in The Gender/Sexuality Reader, edited by Roger Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo), Thomas Lacqueur discusses changes in scientific thinking about female and male reproductive anatomy and physiology in the late 18th/early 19th century. Earlier, it had been typical to think of males and females as manifesting degrees of difference along a continuum, with this related to a lingering humoral conception of the body. Male and female genitalia were thought of as the same structures, for example, with “hotter” male bodies extruding the genitalia and cooler female bodies having the same reproductive structures introverted, i.e. females were males inside-out, or perhaps outside-in. Beginning in the late 18th century, males and females began to be seen more and more as different species in terms of their biology, with females’ rationality in particular being affected by menstrual cycles.
As a matter of values for ongoing scholarship and engagement with the world, though, historical and current contradictions between ideals and practices should be decoupled. I don’t mean that practices, now or in the past, that contradict the values of freedom and equality should be ignored, forgotten, justified, or anything of the sort. Far from it. I mean that contradictory practices in themselves don’t undermine or invalidate the values.
The fact that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder doesn’t undermine his words regarding liberty and equality. It makes him a hypocrite, something he himself was aware of, but it doesn’t and shouldn’t make his words in the Declaration of Independence any less stirring (nor do you have to be a communist to be stirred by the evocation of those very words by Ho Chi Minh against French colonialism in the mid-20th century). Nor was his slaveholding a part of an Enlightenment Project. Instead, this was a practice resisting such a project and contradicting his own stated values.
In practice, Enlightenment values have always been coupled with contradictory practices, e.g. practices of slavery and Jim Crow laws alongside values of equality and freedom.
As a matter of historical or social analysis, these contradictions between ideals or values and practices must remain coupled. Both are part of historical or current social realities.
Further, refusing to decouple Enlightenment values from contradictory practices enables us to better understand things like racist thinking associated with slavery and/or colonialism and their aftermaths. These are syntheses of the contradiction between values and practices. Much scholarship on race in early colonial North America indicates that masters felt no particular need to distinguish greatly between white and black forced laborers, nor a particular need to defend such practices. Racism grew up alongside developing notions of freedom and equality. As the radical inequality associated with forced labor began to seem wrong, but the profits generated were hard to pass up, the development of notions of inherent racial inequality served as useful rationalization – one could treat some unequally because regarded as naturally unequal.
A similar type of thinking developed concerning gender and the growing contradiction between the value of equality and realities of gender inequality. In an engaging essay, “Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology” (the essay can be found in The Gender/Sexuality Reader, edited by Roger Lancaster and Micaela di Leonardo), Thomas Lacqueur discusses changes in scientific thinking about female and male reproductive anatomy and physiology in the late 18th/early 19th century. Earlier, it had been typical to think of males and females as manifesting degrees of difference along a continuum, with this related to a lingering humoral conception of the body. Male and female genitalia were thought of as the same structures, for example, with “hotter” male bodies extruding the genitalia and cooler female bodies having the same reproductive structures introverted, i.e. females were males inside-out, or perhaps outside-in. Beginning in the late 18th century, males and females began to be seen more and more as different species in terms of their biology, with females’ rationality in particular being affected by menstrual cycles.
As a matter of values for ongoing scholarship and engagement with the world, though, historical and current contradictions between ideals and practices should be decoupled. I don’t mean that practices, now or in the past, that contradict the values of freedom and equality should be ignored, forgotten, justified, or anything of the sort. Far from it. I mean that contradictory practices in themselves don’t undermine or invalidate the values.
The fact that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder doesn’t undermine his words regarding liberty and equality. It makes him a hypocrite, something he himself was aware of, but it doesn’t and shouldn’t make his words in the Declaration of Independence any less stirring (nor do you have to be a communist to be stirred by the evocation of those very words by Ho Chi Minh against French colonialism in the mid-20th century). Nor was his slaveholding a part of an Enlightenment Project. Instead, this was a practice resisting such a project and contradicting his own stated values.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
Habitus of Poverty
In several posts in recent days, I have discussed the work of Oscar Lewis and the concept of a culture of poverty. Here I would like to discuss a change of terminology that I find useful in my own thinking about poverty and practices associated with contexts of poverty, a change from speaking of “cultures of poverty” to a “habitus of poverty,” using the concept of “habitus” from the practice theory of Pierre Bourdieu.
In Outline of a Theory of Practice (p. 72), Bourdieu defined habitus (he defines the concept in slightly different terms in several places in the book, though each time with essentially similar connotations):
“The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively “regulated” and “regular” without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.”
I have several reasons for preferring the term “habitus of poverty.” A first and simple reason for switching terminology is to attempt to avoid some of the problems associated with using the term “culture of poverty.” “Culture of poverty” has negative connotations to many, most commonly of “blaming the victim.” As I discussed in my first post on the topic (“Oscar Lewis and the Culture of Poverty”), I think this has more to do with popular distortions of Lewis’ concept than with Lewis’ anthropological theorizing. In any case, the result is that use of the term “culture of poverty,” because of the reactions it so often elicits, gets in the way of seriously considering patterns of practice associated with poverty that must be considered if we care about alleviating poverty. If a change in terminology could help get around this, so be it. (This is possibly also the least persuasive reason to change to speaking of “habitus of poverty.” Those who see “culture of poverty” as fundamentally flawed will likely see this as simply new clothes for the same bad idea.)
A second reason to speak of “habitus of poverty” is an emphasis on practice – in Lewis’ and Bourdieu’s works. The traits and patterns Lewis associated with the culture of poverty, and which I’ve discussed in three previous posts in recent days, are mainly patterns of behavior or practice, rather than lists of cultural objects produced or settings or contexts for particular rituals or events. Lewis’ descriptions of the culture of poverty are very process oriented and to a large extent congruent with contemporary practice theory, in contrast to much anthropological theory contemporary to him that was more object oriented.
Finally, and I think most importantly, a shift to habitus clarifies the ways in which the patterns of behavior associated with a “culture of poverty” are produced and reproduced. Habitus consists of durably patterned dispositions and practices. These become regular without being the result of a conscious aiming towards producing such regularity. They are also regular without being the result of strict obedience to a set of explicit rules (though I’d argue that obedience to explicit rules does occasionally play a role in structuring practices and habitus) or the action of any sort of “orchestrator.” The patterns of behavior associated by Lewis with a “culture of poverty” and which I would here call the “habitus of poverty” are largely the result of many individuals each individually acting as rationally and/or irrationally as individuals in any other social context to meet their basic needs and interests, with this leading to certain tendencies in patterned practice. Further, once in place, the patterned practices of a habitus of poverty strongly predispose (which does not mean “determine”) towards reproduction of the same or similar tendencies and patterns – Bourdieu’s “structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures.” As with Lewis’ work, this does not blame the victim – the “structures predisposed to function as structuring structured” do not exist a priori, nor are they the result of individuals’ choosing or flawed nature, but are instead themselves “structured” through individuals having to act within highly constrained material conditions, with all the factors discussed by Lewis in La Vida contributing to these constrained options and possibilities for action and rational choice.
In Outline of a Theory of Practice (p. 72), Bourdieu defined habitus (he defines the concept in slightly different terms in several places in the book, though each time with essentially similar connotations):
“The structures constitutive of a particular type of environment (e.g. the material conditions of existence characteristic of a class condition) produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively “regulated” and “regular” without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor.”
I have several reasons for preferring the term “habitus of poverty.” A first and simple reason for switching terminology is to attempt to avoid some of the problems associated with using the term “culture of poverty.” “Culture of poverty” has negative connotations to many, most commonly of “blaming the victim.” As I discussed in my first post on the topic (“Oscar Lewis and the Culture of Poverty”), I think this has more to do with popular distortions of Lewis’ concept than with Lewis’ anthropological theorizing. In any case, the result is that use of the term “culture of poverty,” because of the reactions it so often elicits, gets in the way of seriously considering patterns of practice associated with poverty that must be considered if we care about alleviating poverty. If a change in terminology could help get around this, so be it. (This is possibly also the least persuasive reason to change to speaking of “habitus of poverty.” Those who see “culture of poverty” as fundamentally flawed will likely see this as simply new clothes for the same bad idea.)
A second reason to speak of “habitus of poverty” is an emphasis on practice – in Lewis’ and Bourdieu’s works. The traits and patterns Lewis associated with the culture of poverty, and which I’ve discussed in three previous posts in recent days, are mainly patterns of behavior or practice, rather than lists of cultural objects produced or settings or contexts for particular rituals or events. Lewis’ descriptions of the culture of poverty are very process oriented and to a large extent congruent with contemporary practice theory, in contrast to much anthropological theory contemporary to him that was more object oriented.
Finally, and I think most importantly, a shift to habitus clarifies the ways in which the patterns of behavior associated with a “culture of poverty” are produced and reproduced. Habitus consists of durably patterned dispositions and practices. These become regular without being the result of a conscious aiming towards producing such regularity. They are also regular without being the result of strict obedience to a set of explicit rules (though I’d argue that obedience to explicit rules does occasionally play a role in structuring practices and habitus) or the action of any sort of “orchestrator.” The patterns of behavior associated by Lewis with a “culture of poverty” and which I would here call the “habitus of poverty” are largely the result of many individuals each individually acting as rationally and/or irrationally as individuals in any other social context to meet their basic needs and interests, with this leading to certain tendencies in patterned practice. Further, once in place, the patterned practices of a habitus of poverty strongly predispose (which does not mean “determine”) towards reproduction of the same or similar tendencies and patterns – Bourdieu’s “structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures.” As with Lewis’ work, this does not blame the victim – the “structures predisposed to function as structuring structured” do not exist a priori, nor are they the result of individuals’ choosing or flawed nature, but are instead themselves “structured” through individuals having to act within highly constrained material conditions, with all the factors discussed by Lewis in La Vida contributing to these constrained options and possibilities for action and rational choice.
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