I recently read Robert Lowie’s The German People. It’s an ethnography of sorts of German culture, at least in the sense that it’s a “writing of culture” (more on this text as ethnography below). So far as I can tell, it’s a largely forgotten book, certainly much less widely read by anthropologists today than several other Lowie books, such as The Crow Indians, Primitive Religion, or Social Organization.
As I read The German People, I couldn’t help but to think of a more popular and more widely read ethnography, Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and The Sword. The two books have some important things in common. Both were written and published during World War II, and both can be seen as attempts to understand “the enemy,” both for the war and the succeeding occupation. (Benedict’s research was specifically commissioned by the U.S. government for this purpose.) In the processing of making sense of the Germans and Japanese respectively, the two texts also no doubt offered an important humanizing of the two nationalities.
The two works have a very different “feel” in other ways. Neither is the conventional ethnography written on the basis of participant observation field work in the culture in question. Benedict’s work was largely based in extensive interviews with Japanese-Americans (so that there was the use of interview methods typical of ethnography, but without the often more prominent participant observation). Benedict’s work “feels” very much like a conventional ethnography, even if based on for the time an unconventional total methodology. Ironically, Lowie’s experience of German culture was much more direct than Benedict’s of Japanese culture (Lowie was not a participant observer there, but had had extensive first hand experience of the culture as a student earlier in the century), while his text has little of the stylistic “feel” of an ethnography at all, really fitting more into the genre of social history.
Fortuitously, while I was reading Lowie’s The German People, I was also reviewing the various essays in the mid-1980s text Writing Culture for an upcoming discussion with grad students in a seminar on culture theory.
In Mary Louise Pratt’s essay in the collection, “Fieldwork in Common Places,” she writes (p. 32; parenthetical note on “it” added):
“James Clifford speaks of it (the persistence of personal narrative alongside objectifying narrative) as ‘the discipline’s impossible attempt to fuse objective and subjective practices.’ Fieldwork produces a kind of authority that is anchored to a large extent in subjective, sensuous experience. One experiences the indigenous environment and lifeways for oneself, sees with one’s own eyes, even plays some roles, albeit contrived ones, in the daily life of the community. But the professional text to result from such an encounter is supposed to conform to the norms of a scientific discourse whose authority resides in the absolute effacement of the speaking and experiencing subject.”
This quality of the ethnography does several things.
1. It gives ethnography a distinctive feel. Those texts we call ethnography generally do present in some way the ambivalence between personal, subjective narrative and third person, objectifying narrative. The lack of this subjective and personal element is largely what makes The German People feel like it’s not an ethnography, even if it is “writing culture.”
2. The tension between these elements in ethnography is, I think, what is largely responsible for the long history of conscious experimentation with the form of ethnography – something that’s been going on far longer than the writers of Writing Culture tend to acknowledge (see Experimental Ethnography Old and New).
3. This tension is one of the things that makes ethnography continually interesting because it is continually problematic at its formal core – more on ethnography as interesting or boring in my following post.
4. As Clifford and Pratt are pointing out, it’s the inclusion of the personal narrative that grounds the authority of the ethnographic narrator who experienced the culture and gives credence to the objectified narrative. Without such rhetorically established authority, why should we trust the strange things we read about in so many well written ethnographies are true? (Of course, being aware of this source of authority, why trust what we read to be true and not simply an interesting account of something which may or may not correspond to anyone’s lived reality?)
5. The continual presence of personal narrative as grounding authority is the chief means through which field work as rite of passage (as discussed so well, or at least so nicely by Lévi-Strauss in Tristes Tropiques) is interjected into the text, creating what Susan Sontag called “The Anthropologist as Hero,” the ethnographer venturing out to where others dare not go and returning to bring us comprehension of the other. Contra the construction of anthropology as the “softest” of social sciences on the part of many other social scientists, we have here an image of anthropological ethnography as the most macho of social science endeavors, and one trafficking in an essentializing division of self and other. All of this is problematic (and silly), but I’d argue it’s still very much a part of the image and appeal of anthropology and ethnography. (In my own socialization into the discipline in a Ph.D. program in the 1990s, this was still part of how anthropologists thought of ethnography. My research along the U.S./Mexican border was suspect as ethnography, because my others might not have been other enough, and frankly because I’d be doing ethnography in places with running water and electricity, and that I could drive there, though ultimately, the fact that I’d be doing participant observation in some specific contexts that were sometimes actually potentially dangerous and always perceived as dangerous made it just acceptable. A friend, who did participant observation on human rights issues at the U.N. in Switzerland, never seemed to be able to shake people’s perceptions that he somehow wasn’t doing “real ethnography,” even if everyone agreed his work was “important.”)
Showing posts with label anthropology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anthropology. Show all posts
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Jane Hurd, A Remembrance
1.
Jane Hurd, my grandmother, whom I always called Nana, passed away a few months ago. She died after a battle with throat cancer, about which I’ll only say that as much pain as she did suffer from her illness and treatment, I’m thankful that up until almost the very end, she remained cogent and emotionally herself, and that she seemed to have experienced much less pain than is typical with her particular disease.
2.
Nana was a good grandmother, both in the sense that she was a good person and a good person to have as a grandmother and in the sense that she was good at embodying an archetype of grandmotherliness.
Much of my experience of Nana, many of my feelings about her, much of our relationship was conventional. My relationship with her was in many ways almost the epitome of what a grandmother-grandson relationship is often thought supposed to be like in modern North America. She was utterly devoted to me and my sister, loving, indulgent even (she taught me to break open Nutter Butter cookies and add peanut butter, because they didn’t have enough peanut butter for her grandchildren), and always proud of her grandchildren (if she was ever not proud of me, and there must have been times, she never let it show). I certainly tried to be as good a grandson as possible for her.
Much of our experience is powerfully shaped by social structure, discourse, and structured expectations, and certainly in our culture today there are fairly clear ideas about what grandmothers and grandsons are like (or supposed to be like), embodied in the everyday discourse of conversation, in greeting cards, in popular culture, so that I can meaningful refer to my relationship with Nana as “almost the epitome of what a grandmother-grandson relationship is often thought supposed to be like in modern North America.”
To recognize that a relationship or set of experiences is strongly shaped by social structure and discourse in no way makes a relationship or experience any less real, authentic, or meaningful. There is a tendency, by many contemporary North Americans at least, to want to see ourselves as purely products of our own actions and to feel cheapened or lessened when actions or feelings are partly due to outside influence. But, the fact that our interactions with one another and our feelings toward one another were in part (but never completely) the playing out of social expectations and structuring doesn’t in any way change the fact that we interacted in certain ways, with accompanying real feelings.
3.
One of the key traits I associate with Nana is hospitality and generosity. She had a great concern to serve others and that others be served.
Especially with me, and my sister, and my cousins, this was probably partly due to her “grandmotherliness.” She was concerned with generosity and hospitality with everyone (it was very difficult to not eat or drink something when visiting her house – a string of questions, such as “Would you like some cookies?,” “Would you like some coffee?,” “Would you like a sandwich,” would generally continue until something was accepted), but she was especially generous with her grandchildren. When I was a child, at Halloween Nana would always have good candy to hand out to all the neighborhood children (not the little packets of two sweet tarts you’d get at some houses, but candy bars), and she’d typically hand out two or three candy bars to each kid. For children she knew, she’d have special bags with extra candy made up ahead of time, but my sister and I would get a veritable mound of candy. For that matter, I don’t think she ever taught my mother and uncle to add peanut butter to Nutter Butters when they were children – not that she wasn’t a loving, nurturing mother, but that being a grandmother was something a little different.
Another part of my grandmother’s concern with hospitality and generosity was, I think, generational. My grandmother and grandfather grew up as pre-teens and teenagers during the height of the Great Depression. They had known severe and widespread scarcity growing up and one thing I often saw in them, and in many others of similar age, was a concern with scarcity and having enough, and in making sure that everyone was well fed. My grandparents were also very much a part of the WWII generation, with the great emphasis on serving country (with my grandfather joining the navy when he was old enough, and my grandmother training as a nurse) no doubt contributing to an emphasis on service and hospitality generally.
At the same time, I don’t think that Nana’s personality can be reduced to social structural factors like her generation or the playing of a social role of grandmother. Her concern with hospitality and serving or helping others was more thorough-going than with many other grandmothers or women of her generation that I’ve met. For example, in her career as a nurse (a career field in keeping with her personality in general), she spent much of her career as a nurse for the local department of public health, in part no doubt because that was an available nursing job, but in part because she saw that as a specific nursing job where she could make an important contribution to the community in serving many poorer members of the community most in need of help.
4.
Another trait I associate with Nana is strength of character, expressed in simple (though never simplistic) unadorned and elegant fashion.
She was not a flashy person. She was never one to call much attention to herself, in how she dressed, or spoke, or did anything else. She was a soft-spoken person. At the same time she had an amazing strength of character and will. For all her soft-spokenness, she was not one to be pushed around, and she always stood firmly for her convictions (truth be told, as with many, or really most, members of my family, myself included, she could be downright stubborn at times – though in her case usually in a non-argumentative way – she’d generally simply do what she wanted to do or thought was right).
5.
These traits come together in something I associate with her: cooking. She didn’t cook much in her later years, but both her sense of hospitality and her simple strength were reflected in her cooking.
I don’t think of that many recipes when I think of her. She didn’t cook a vast array of things, and her food wasn’t flashy – it was simple and good.
There are two recipes in particular, though, that almost always come to my mind when thinking of her, Chicken and Biscuits and Pound Cake, both things she often made when there was a crowd around. During most important family holidays, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Easter, these two recipes would make an appearance, usually not on the day of the holiday itself when some holiday specific meal would be fixed, but the day before or after, when a large number of family might still be gathered.
Her Chicken and Biscuits were not particularly complicated: roast chicken with a chicken gravy, with peas always in the gravy, carrots sometimes added, served with or on biscuits. Anyone who basically knows their way around a kitchen could produce some version of the dish, but her version was always particularly well done, though as with a lot of simple dishes well done, it’s nearly impossible to state exactly what made hers so good.
Her Pound Cake was quite simply the best I’ve ever encountered, and almost anyone who ever tried it wanted the recipe – and another slice of cake.
This was her recipe (she always freely shared it, so I’m not exposing her secret recipe here, and I think she’d be happy if anyone were to see the recipe and use and enjoy it):
Jane Hurd’s Pound Cake
6 eggs
2 ½ cups sugar
3 sticks butter (3/4 pound)
3 cups flour
½ tsp. baking soda
1/3 cup buttermilk
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. lemon extract
Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
Cream sugar and butter in a mixer.
Add one egg at a time and beat well. (She always insisted the each egg be given 5 minutes of mixing time in the mixer for a total of 30 minutes of egg mixing. The recipe’s not particularly difficult to make, but she always insisted that you had to take the time to do it right with no short cuts.)
Sift the flour and baking soda.
Alternately add flour mixture and buttermilk to the egg/butter/sugar mixture, mixing each addition well.
Mix in vanilla and lemon extracts.
Bake 1 ½ hours at 325 degrees in a greased and floured tube or bundt pan.
The first time I used the recipe myself, my partner asked if I was going to glaze it. I answered no, that it didn’t need any if I did it right, that it would be moist inside, with a crisp, flaky crust all around the outside. He was skeptical – until he had a few bites, whereupon he agreed that this cake was best left to stand on its own unadorned.
6.
I’ve perhaps presented a too tidy picture thus far. As with most people, Nana could be characterized by a few key traits that run through much of what she said and did as key themes of her personality, and it’s mostly those things I’ve talked about thus far. At the same time, no more than with anyone else could she be completely or sufficiently encapsulated by a few traits or characteristics. There are many aspects of her that I cherish as much as those things I’ve already mentioned that must be left more as loose ends – qualities of her that can’t be so easily wrapped up into a tidy package of grandmotherliness, hospitality, strength of character, and so forth. As such, I’ll simply mention a couple and try to resist the temptation to wrap things up neatly.
She always had an avid curiosity about history and related topics. As far as I know, this was something she mainly shared with me. I’ve had a passion for history since I was quite young, that ultimately led me into anthropology through an exploration of topics related to history when I was an undergraduate. I remember fondly, ever since I was a child, talking with Nana about history. Some of this was her sharing stories of her own experience of the Depression, or World War II, or other events and times, but it was also conversations about the American Revolution, or the Civil War, or other topics of mainly but not exclusively America history. Later when I developed an interest in anthropology, she was one of the few non-academics I met or knew who didn’t necessarily assume that this meant archaeology, or digging up mammoth bones. Instead, her question was “You mean like Margaret Mead?”
She didn’t talk openly much about politics, but she was a strongly partisan Democrat. (Growing up in a liberal Democratic family in a strongly conservative area made for an interesting time growing up. I always had at least a slight sense of outsiderdom at school, something intensified by the fact that my mother and maternal grandparents were “Yankees,” on occasion leading me to be similarly labeled a “Yankee” in elementary school in a semi-rural setting in the South, despite the fact that I was born in the South and my father’s family had been in the South since before the American Revolution.) I remember the morning after Reagan was elected president in 1980. I had had many conversations about the election with Nana beforehand. On the night of the election, it had been my bedtime (I was nine) before the election results were in. On school mornings, my mother dropped me off at Nana’s on her way to work, and I went to school from there. That morning before school, I asked Nana who had won, and I still recall her deep sadness when she told me that “We lost.” This was much in contrast to the triumphal glee in evidence (by teachers and students) that day at school, and I took (and take) more comfort in her sadness. Much later, I remember her anger and indignation at all the attacks directed at Bill Clinton during his presidency. While I had (and have) my own problems with Clinton, I take much comfort in that righteous anger, also.
Jane Hurd, my grandmother, whom I always called Nana, passed away a few months ago. She died after a battle with throat cancer, about which I’ll only say that as much pain as she did suffer from her illness and treatment, I’m thankful that up until almost the very end, she remained cogent and emotionally herself, and that she seemed to have experienced much less pain than is typical with her particular disease.
2.
Nana was a good grandmother, both in the sense that she was a good person and a good person to have as a grandmother and in the sense that she was good at embodying an archetype of grandmotherliness.
Much of my experience of Nana, many of my feelings about her, much of our relationship was conventional. My relationship with her was in many ways almost the epitome of what a grandmother-grandson relationship is often thought supposed to be like in modern North America. She was utterly devoted to me and my sister, loving, indulgent even (she taught me to break open Nutter Butter cookies and add peanut butter, because they didn’t have enough peanut butter for her grandchildren), and always proud of her grandchildren (if she was ever not proud of me, and there must have been times, she never let it show). I certainly tried to be as good a grandson as possible for her.
Much of our experience is powerfully shaped by social structure, discourse, and structured expectations, and certainly in our culture today there are fairly clear ideas about what grandmothers and grandsons are like (or supposed to be like), embodied in the everyday discourse of conversation, in greeting cards, in popular culture, so that I can meaningful refer to my relationship with Nana as “almost the epitome of what a grandmother-grandson relationship is often thought supposed to be like in modern North America.”
To recognize that a relationship or set of experiences is strongly shaped by social structure and discourse in no way makes a relationship or experience any less real, authentic, or meaningful. There is a tendency, by many contemporary North Americans at least, to want to see ourselves as purely products of our own actions and to feel cheapened or lessened when actions or feelings are partly due to outside influence. But, the fact that our interactions with one another and our feelings toward one another were in part (but never completely) the playing out of social expectations and structuring doesn’t in any way change the fact that we interacted in certain ways, with accompanying real feelings.
3.
One of the key traits I associate with Nana is hospitality and generosity. She had a great concern to serve others and that others be served.
Especially with me, and my sister, and my cousins, this was probably partly due to her “grandmotherliness.” She was concerned with generosity and hospitality with everyone (it was very difficult to not eat or drink something when visiting her house – a string of questions, such as “Would you like some cookies?,” “Would you like some coffee?,” “Would you like a sandwich,” would generally continue until something was accepted), but she was especially generous with her grandchildren. When I was a child, at Halloween Nana would always have good candy to hand out to all the neighborhood children (not the little packets of two sweet tarts you’d get at some houses, but candy bars), and she’d typically hand out two or three candy bars to each kid. For children she knew, she’d have special bags with extra candy made up ahead of time, but my sister and I would get a veritable mound of candy. For that matter, I don’t think she ever taught my mother and uncle to add peanut butter to Nutter Butters when they were children – not that she wasn’t a loving, nurturing mother, but that being a grandmother was something a little different.
Another part of my grandmother’s concern with hospitality and generosity was, I think, generational. My grandmother and grandfather grew up as pre-teens and teenagers during the height of the Great Depression. They had known severe and widespread scarcity growing up and one thing I often saw in them, and in many others of similar age, was a concern with scarcity and having enough, and in making sure that everyone was well fed. My grandparents were also very much a part of the WWII generation, with the great emphasis on serving country (with my grandfather joining the navy when he was old enough, and my grandmother training as a nurse) no doubt contributing to an emphasis on service and hospitality generally.
At the same time, I don’t think that Nana’s personality can be reduced to social structural factors like her generation or the playing of a social role of grandmother. Her concern with hospitality and serving or helping others was more thorough-going than with many other grandmothers or women of her generation that I’ve met. For example, in her career as a nurse (a career field in keeping with her personality in general), she spent much of her career as a nurse for the local department of public health, in part no doubt because that was an available nursing job, but in part because she saw that as a specific nursing job where she could make an important contribution to the community in serving many poorer members of the community most in need of help.
4.
Another trait I associate with Nana is strength of character, expressed in simple (though never simplistic) unadorned and elegant fashion.
She was not a flashy person. She was never one to call much attention to herself, in how she dressed, or spoke, or did anything else. She was a soft-spoken person. At the same time she had an amazing strength of character and will. For all her soft-spokenness, she was not one to be pushed around, and she always stood firmly for her convictions (truth be told, as with many, or really most, members of my family, myself included, she could be downright stubborn at times – though in her case usually in a non-argumentative way – she’d generally simply do what she wanted to do or thought was right).
5.
These traits come together in something I associate with her: cooking. She didn’t cook much in her later years, but both her sense of hospitality and her simple strength were reflected in her cooking.
I don’t think of that many recipes when I think of her. She didn’t cook a vast array of things, and her food wasn’t flashy – it was simple and good.
There are two recipes in particular, though, that almost always come to my mind when thinking of her, Chicken and Biscuits and Pound Cake, both things she often made when there was a crowd around. During most important family holidays, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Easter, these two recipes would make an appearance, usually not on the day of the holiday itself when some holiday specific meal would be fixed, but the day before or after, when a large number of family might still be gathered.
Her Chicken and Biscuits were not particularly complicated: roast chicken with a chicken gravy, with peas always in the gravy, carrots sometimes added, served with or on biscuits. Anyone who basically knows their way around a kitchen could produce some version of the dish, but her version was always particularly well done, though as with a lot of simple dishes well done, it’s nearly impossible to state exactly what made hers so good.
Her Pound Cake was quite simply the best I’ve ever encountered, and almost anyone who ever tried it wanted the recipe – and another slice of cake.
This was her recipe (she always freely shared it, so I’m not exposing her secret recipe here, and I think she’d be happy if anyone were to see the recipe and use and enjoy it):
Jane Hurd’s Pound Cake
6 eggs
2 ½ cups sugar
3 sticks butter (3/4 pound)
3 cups flour
½ tsp. baking soda
1/3 cup buttermilk
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. lemon extract
Preheat oven to 325 degrees.
Cream sugar and butter in a mixer.
Add one egg at a time and beat well. (She always insisted the each egg be given 5 minutes of mixing time in the mixer for a total of 30 minutes of egg mixing. The recipe’s not particularly difficult to make, but she always insisted that you had to take the time to do it right with no short cuts.)
Sift the flour and baking soda.
Alternately add flour mixture and buttermilk to the egg/butter/sugar mixture, mixing each addition well.
Mix in vanilla and lemon extracts.
Bake 1 ½ hours at 325 degrees in a greased and floured tube or bundt pan.
The first time I used the recipe myself, my partner asked if I was going to glaze it. I answered no, that it didn’t need any if I did it right, that it would be moist inside, with a crisp, flaky crust all around the outside. He was skeptical – until he had a few bites, whereupon he agreed that this cake was best left to stand on its own unadorned.
6.
I’ve perhaps presented a too tidy picture thus far. As with most people, Nana could be characterized by a few key traits that run through much of what she said and did as key themes of her personality, and it’s mostly those things I’ve talked about thus far. At the same time, no more than with anyone else could she be completely or sufficiently encapsulated by a few traits or characteristics. There are many aspects of her that I cherish as much as those things I’ve already mentioned that must be left more as loose ends – qualities of her that can’t be so easily wrapped up into a tidy package of grandmotherliness, hospitality, strength of character, and so forth. As such, I’ll simply mention a couple and try to resist the temptation to wrap things up neatly.
She always had an avid curiosity about history and related topics. As far as I know, this was something she mainly shared with me. I’ve had a passion for history since I was quite young, that ultimately led me into anthropology through an exploration of topics related to history when I was an undergraduate. I remember fondly, ever since I was a child, talking with Nana about history. Some of this was her sharing stories of her own experience of the Depression, or World War II, or other events and times, but it was also conversations about the American Revolution, or the Civil War, or other topics of mainly but not exclusively America history. Later when I developed an interest in anthropology, she was one of the few non-academics I met or knew who didn’t necessarily assume that this meant archaeology, or digging up mammoth bones. Instead, her question was “You mean like Margaret Mead?”
She didn’t talk openly much about politics, but she was a strongly partisan Democrat. (Growing up in a liberal Democratic family in a strongly conservative area made for an interesting time growing up. I always had at least a slight sense of outsiderdom at school, something intensified by the fact that my mother and maternal grandparents were “Yankees,” on occasion leading me to be similarly labeled a “Yankee” in elementary school in a semi-rural setting in the South, despite the fact that I was born in the South and my father’s family had been in the South since before the American Revolution.) I remember the morning after Reagan was elected president in 1980. I had had many conversations about the election with Nana beforehand. On the night of the election, it had been my bedtime (I was nine) before the election results were in. On school mornings, my mother dropped me off at Nana’s on her way to work, and I went to school from there. That morning before school, I asked Nana who had won, and I still recall her deep sadness when she told me that “We lost.” This was much in contrast to the triumphal glee in evidence (by teachers and students) that day at school, and I took (and take) more comfort in her sadness. Much later, I remember her anger and indignation at all the attacks directed at Bill Clinton during his presidency. While I had (and have) my own problems with Clinton, I take much comfort in that righteous anger, also.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Some Books By Non-Anthropologists For Cultural Anthropologists To Read
Like most scholars, I have a passion for books. Having enjoyed putting together two posts (here and here) on my favorite books from last year, I’ve decided to begin a semi-regular feature of discussing books I’ve found rewarding that I think other cultural anthropologists (or anyone else) might also find engaging, interesting, provocative, or otherwise worth reading.
The Riddle of the Dinosaur, by John Noble Wilford, Knopf, 1986.
I read this book when I was just beginning to organize the writing of my dissertation. I was reading a wide variety of non-fiction pertaining to an array of topics and disciplines to get a sense of the diversity of ways of organizing the presentation of a topic (a strategy I’d recommend for anyone now writing theses or dissertations). This book didn’t particularly influence my writing in any formal way. Instead it influenced my thinking about my relation to ethnographic data. (It’s also a fun read for anyone with a fascination for dinosaurs.)
You’ll learn a lot about dinosaurs from this book, but you’ll also learn much about the history of the paleontology of dinosaurs. Wilford’s account is essentially an epistemological history, tracing the history of the development of conceptualizations of dinosaurs and methods for studying them (I tend to think of methodology as applied epistemology – and I’ve found thinking about research methods a lot more interesting ever since I started thinking about it that way).
In most ways, paleontology and ethnography have little in common. In reading Wilford, I realized that one thing they have in common, albeit for different reasons, is that they’re both scholarly endeavors that tend to foreground epistemological concerns, if not to exist in a perpetual state of epistemological crisis. As I said the reasons for this are different: with paleontology, one is faced with a paucity of information and a real concern about what can legitimately be reconstructed about the anatomy and physiology, much less lifeways, of these creatures from 65+ million years ago with in most cases minimal and highly fragmented information; with ethnography, the researcher is generally overwhelmed with data, but with concerns about the effects of the researcher’s own prejudices and predilections on interpretations and even observations, and the reader is left with the task of attempting to discern the merits of the ethnographer’s text with no ability to engage in anything like laboratory replicability.
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, Pantheon, 2003, and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, Pantheon, 2004, both by Marjane Satrapi.
Although I’m no expert on the Middle East, much less Iran or Persian culture specifically, I’ve read quite a few books about Iran in recent years, several of them excellent, including Fredrik Barth’s minor class Nomads of South Persia (an ethnography from the 1950s), Michael Fischer’s Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (an ethnography written right after the revolution, and one of the more insightful accounts of it), and Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ali Mohammadi’s Small Media, Big Revolution: Communication, Culture, and the Iranian Revolution (another insightful account of the revolution focusing on the use of media technology by the revolutionaries).
Satrapi’s two volume graphic memoir (probably already familiar to fans of graphic novels and non-fiction, and recently made into a movie) is the one thing I’ve read, though, that gave me a sense of growing up and being in contemporary Iran (not that the memoir is confined to Iran alone – it also entails an account of Satrapi’s years in a European boarding school, for example).
Reading Satrapi’s memoir, as well as other graphic non-fiction, such as the various works of graphic journalist Joe Sacco, makes me wish I could draw. I don’t think any particular medium is the best way to write or present culture, but the form used here does have the unique ability to draw on the strength of the word and the image and to avoid to an extent some of the pitfalls of each, e.g. the way in which so much ethnography feels enervated, missing so much of the sensual reality of culture (though of course even here, the sounds, smells, and even colors [it’s in black and white drawing] are still missing), or the ambiguous quality of many images – lacking in context and conceptualization without commentary, yet coupled with an often overbearing sense of reality deriving from their visual impact.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond, W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
I may be one of the few cultural anthropologists who likes this book. Many cultural anthropologists have criticized this book, mostly as being geographically determinist (which is an incomplete charge at best, given the importance of the availability or absence of domesticated animals to societies in Diamond’s argument) or for reducing the highly various tapestry of cultural diversity to a simple narrative.
If you take Diamond’s account as a sufficient explanation of everything cultural, then it’s a disappointment, because it doesn’t do that, as if any theoretical framework could. Perhaps I’m overly charitable, or just plain wrong, but I don’t think Diamond claims to have explained everything in any case, but just to have laid out a set of arguments that explains much about human cultural history in general.
Insofar as Diamond draws our attention to factors many anthropologists might have otherwise not considered, such as the presence or absence of domesticated animals, directional orientation of trade and other cultural contact networks, or relative ease of transportation over long distances in different world areas, Diamond’s account is useful in making us aware of patterns that over long stretches of time have significant impact on the particular histories of specific societies.
Part of many anthropologists’ resistance to Diamond probably stems from the longstanding particularist bent of American cultural anthropology, the important emphasis on detail on cultural uniqueness, but also a sometimes corresponding resistance to identification of general patterns. (See Kerim’s post on the Savage Minds blog on this topic from about two months ago.)
Part of the resistance likely also stems from an academic turf-war mentality and a resistance to non-anthropologists poaching on anthropological territory. (There’s reason to be wary of the variety of sociobiologists, chaos theorists, meme theorists, economists, etc., who attempt to explain better than anthropologists the topics conventionally seen as anthropologists’ own. [If it makes any difference, Diamond, trained as a geneticist, is also poaching on geography’s turf.] Still, poaching doesn’t always make them wrong.)
There’s also a bit of internecine anthropological squabbling in disguise going on here. Though Diamond’s synthesis is highly readable and insightful, it is ultimately a synthesis of a lot of many scholars’ work from the previous few decades, notably William McNeill’s The Rise of the West, as well as Europe and the People without History by anthropology’s own Eric Wolf. I suspect a lot of the anthropological resistance to Diamond comes from anthropologists opposed to the more generalist approaches within the discipline, whether in the form of political economy, cultural materialism, or structuralism and their various progeny.
The Riddle of the Dinosaur, by John Noble Wilford, Knopf, 1986.
I read this book when I was just beginning to organize the writing of my dissertation. I was reading a wide variety of non-fiction pertaining to an array of topics and disciplines to get a sense of the diversity of ways of organizing the presentation of a topic (a strategy I’d recommend for anyone now writing theses or dissertations). This book didn’t particularly influence my writing in any formal way. Instead it influenced my thinking about my relation to ethnographic data. (It’s also a fun read for anyone with a fascination for dinosaurs.)
You’ll learn a lot about dinosaurs from this book, but you’ll also learn much about the history of the paleontology of dinosaurs. Wilford’s account is essentially an epistemological history, tracing the history of the development of conceptualizations of dinosaurs and methods for studying them (I tend to think of methodology as applied epistemology – and I’ve found thinking about research methods a lot more interesting ever since I started thinking about it that way).
In most ways, paleontology and ethnography have little in common. In reading Wilford, I realized that one thing they have in common, albeit for different reasons, is that they’re both scholarly endeavors that tend to foreground epistemological concerns, if not to exist in a perpetual state of epistemological crisis. As I said the reasons for this are different: with paleontology, one is faced with a paucity of information and a real concern about what can legitimately be reconstructed about the anatomy and physiology, much less lifeways, of these creatures from 65+ million years ago with in most cases minimal and highly fragmented information; with ethnography, the researcher is generally overwhelmed with data, but with concerns about the effects of the researcher’s own prejudices and predilections on interpretations and even observations, and the reader is left with the task of attempting to discern the merits of the ethnographer’s text with no ability to engage in anything like laboratory replicability.
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, Pantheon, 2003, and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, Pantheon, 2004, both by Marjane Satrapi.
Although I’m no expert on the Middle East, much less Iran or Persian culture specifically, I’ve read quite a few books about Iran in recent years, several of them excellent, including Fredrik Barth’s minor class Nomads of South Persia (an ethnography from the 1950s), Michael Fischer’s Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution (an ethnography written right after the revolution, and one of the more insightful accounts of it), and Annabelle Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ali Mohammadi’s Small Media, Big Revolution: Communication, Culture, and the Iranian Revolution (another insightful account of the revolution focusing on the use of media technology by the revolutionaries).
Satrapi’s two volume graphic memoir (probably already familiar to fans of graphic novels and non-fiction, and recently made into a movie) is the one thing I’ve read, though, that gave me a sense of growing up and being in contemporary Iran (not that the memoir is confined to Iran alone – it also entails an account of Satrapi’s years in a European boarding school, for example).
Reading Satrapi’s memoir, as well as other graphic non-fiction, such as the various works of graphic journalist Joe Sacco, makes me wish I could draw. I don’t think any particular medium is the best way to write or present culture, but the form used here does have the unique ability to draw on the strength of the word and the image and to avoid to an extent some of the pitfalls of each, e.g. the way in which so much ethnography feels enervated, missing so much of the sensual reality of culture (though of course even here, the sounds, smells, and even colors [it’s in black and white drawing] are still missing), or the ambiguous quality of many images – lacking in context and conceptualization without commentary, yet coupled with an often overbearing sense of reality deriving from their visual impact.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond, W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.
I may be one of the few cultural anthropologists who likes this book. Many cultural anthropologists have criticized this book, mostly as being geographically determinist (which is an incomplete charge at best, given the importance of the availability or absence of domesticated animals to societies in Diamond’s argument) or for reducing the highly various tapestry of cultural diversity to a simple narrative.
If you take Diamond’s account as a sufficient explanation of everything cultural, then it’s a disappointment, because it doesn’t do that, as if any theoretical framework could. Perhaps I’m overly charitable, or just plain wrong, but I don’t think Diamond claims to have explained everything in any case, but just to have laid out a set of arguments that explains much about human cultural history in general.
Insofar as Diamond draws our attention to factors many anthropologists might have otherwise not considered, such as the presence or absence of domesticated animals, directional orientation of trade and other cultural contact networks, or relative ease of transportation over long distances in different world areas, Diamond’s account is useful in making us aware of patterns that over long stretches of time have significant impact on the particular histories of specific societies.
Part of many anthropologists’ resistance to Diamond probably stems from the longstanding particularist bent of American cultural anthropology, the important emphasis on detail on cultural uniqueness, but also a sometimes corresponding resistance to identification of general patterns. (See Kerim’s post on the Savage Minds blog on this topic from about two months ago.)
Part of the resistance likely also stems from an academic turf-war mentality and a resistance to non-anthropologists poaching on anthropological territory. (There’s reason to be wary of the variety of sociobiologists, chaos theorists, meme theorists, economists, etc., who attempt to explain better than anthropologists the topics conventionally seen as anthropologists’ own. [If it makes any difference, Diamond, trained as a geneticist, is also poaching on geography’s turf.] Still, poaching doesn’t always make them wrong.)
There’s also a bit of internecine anthropological squabbling in disguise going on here. Though Diamond’s synthesis is highly readable and insightful, it is ultimately a synthesis of a lot of many scholars’ work from the previous few decades, notably William McNeill’s The Rise of the West, as well as Europe and the People without History by anthropology’s own Eric Wolf. I suspect a lot of the anthropological resistance to Diamond comes from anthropologists opposed to the more generalist approaches within the discipline, whether in the form of political economy, cultural materialism, or structuralism and their various progeny.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Identity Politics and Faculty-Graduate Student Relationships
A short while back (a couple months ago if memory serves correctly – which it may or may not), there was a nice section of essays written by anthropology graduate students on the topic of graduate student – faculty relationships published in Anthropology News.
There was one sentence in one of the essays that particularly struck me. (I won’t say which essay, in part because as is typically the case, once I had finished reading the issue, I left it in my department for someone else to pick up and read, and as a result I don’t have it in front of me, and in part because it seems nasty to me to single out a graduate student as if for attack – not really my intent anyway – on the basis of one sentence out of an otherwise nice essay – and in any case, my reactions are more to the sentiment expressed there, which I’ve encountered among other students, too, while the rest of the essay seemed more original or unique in its content.) The sentence basically argued that faculty can’t really understand or fully relate to graduate students because they’re not in the structural position of being graduate students.
Even though I discarded the copy of the issue, I’ve kept mentally coming back to that statement since. I have three sorts of reactions to the sentiment expressed in it.
1. My initial and immediate reaction (and one I still hold, though it’s no longer my sole reaction) was to think something along the lines of, “That’s ridiculous. Of course, faculty can relate to graduate students.” One thing virtually all faculty have in common is that we’ve been graduate students. Many, if not most, faculty can relate to the experiences of current graduate students because we had similar experiences when we were graduate students. And if (a big “if”) understanding or relateability derive from experience of a structural position, faculty are in an ideal position to understand graduate students, even if the reverse is not true, at least not most of the time (I add this last qualification, because part of the experience of graduate school is often the gaining of things like “teaching experience” by partially occupying the position of “faculty member” – the division between graduate student and faculty is more of a graded continuum than a clear and absolute line).
2. My second reaction is that this is a strange position for an anthropologist to take. If direct experience in occupying a particular social position or structural position is a prerequisite for understanding or relating, then the discipline is in serious trouble (and there are many who think it is for many reasons, with a long line going back at least several decades at this point of worrying [or anticipating] that the discipline of anthropology is immanently going to fly apart, implode, disintegrate, deteriorate, or otherwise have big troubles).
If we take the sentiment that faculty can’t relate to or understand graduate students and extend it logically at all, we might wonder how graduate students might relate to one another – they don’t occupy the same exact positions and have the same exact experiences, or indeed how we might really understand anyone at all – a longstanding and still significant philosophical question. If we take philosophy and psychoanalysis at all seriously (and I do – at least much of the time), we might, even must, conclude that we don’t really understand or relate to our selves.
All of this is true, though in a sense operationally and pragmatically false – no one who functions in the world operates as if it is true. Put another way, this is to confuse total understanding with understanding at all, total relateability with ability to relate at all. In pragmatic terms at least, most of us relate to ourselves at least tolerably well; we relate to and understand those around us not absolutely but well enough to function almost as if we did; ethnographers understand something, even much, about their research subjects’ lives without, and without need of, total understanding.
3. I think what the student might have meant was that faculty members might not be able to relate to students in the here and now because being a grad student here and now is different from faculty member’s past and usually spatially/institutionally different experiences.
I often can relate quite well to my students, but it might be provisionally wise to proceed as if my first reaction is not true, and to attempt to relate to graduate students in the same way that anthropologists attempt to relate to research subjects – to stop, look and listen carefully.
Structural positioning doesn’t determine consciousness, experience, or actions deterministically, but it does matter, and my students don’t have the same experiences as I did as a student. Like a lot of scholars, I had experience in more than one graduate institution, in my case earning degrees from one quite large state university (the University of Georgia) and one medium-to-large private institution with lots of money (Cornell University). In some ways, my grad student experiences parallel those of the students I now work with – there are certain commonalities to the grad student experience the characterize most institutions of higher education – but teaching at a mid-size regional state university (the University of West Florida) with much less student funding available than at the graduate institutions I attended (just to identify one, albeit an important, variable – student funding), the students I work with in some ways have very different experiences and concerns than I did as a student.
That is, just as I do think the student writer was incorrect in arguing that faculty can’t relate to or understand graduate students (understanding or relating doesn’t depend on experience of the same exact structural positioning, and in fact in any case faculty have had structural experience as graduate students), having occupied a social structural position or having had experience of a particular identity category (in this case “faculty” or “student,” but the point could apply to identity categories and politics generally) doesn’t translate into automatic or necessarily easy understanding of others occupying the category.
There was one sentence in one of the essays that particularly struck me. (I won’t say which essay, in part because as is typically the case, once I had finished reading the issue, I left it in my department for someone else to pick up and read, and as a result I don’t have it in front of me, and in part because it seems nasty to me to single out a graduate student as if for attack – not really my intent anyway – on the basis of one sentence out of an otherwise nice essay – and in any case, my reactions are more to the sentiment expressed there, which I’ve encountered among other students, too, while the rest of the essay seemed more original or unique in its content.) The sentence basically argued that faculty can’t really understand or fully relate to graduate students because they’re not in the structural position of being graduate students.
Even though I discarded the copy of the issue, I’ve kept mentally coming back to that statement since. I have three sorts of reactions to the sentiment expressed in it.
1. My initial and immediate reaction (and one I still hold, though it’s no longer my sole reaction) was to think something along the lines of, “That’s ridiculous. Of course, faculty can relate to graduate students.” One thing virtually all faculty have in common is that we’ve been graduate students. Many, if not most, faculty can relate to the experiences of current graduate students because we had similar experiences when we were graduate students. And if (a big “if”) understanding or relateability derive from experience of a structural position, faculty are in an ideal position to understand graduate students, even if the reverse is not true, at least not most of the time (I add this last qualification, because part of the experience of graduate school is often the gaining of things like “teaching experience” by partially occupying the position of “faculty member” – the division between graduate student and faculty is more of a graded continuum than a clear and absolute line).
2. My second reaction is that this is a strange position for an anthropologist to take. If direct experience in occupying a particular social position or structural position is a prerequisite for understanding or relating, then the discipline is in serious trouble (and there are many who think it is for many reasons, with a long line going back at least several decades at this point of worrying [or anticipating] that the discipline of anthropology is immanently going to fly apart, implode, disintegrate, deteriorate, or otherwise have big troubles).
If we take the sentiment that faculty can’t relate to or understand graduate students and extend it logically at all, we might wonder how graduate students might relate to one another – they don’t occupy the same exact positions and have the same exact experiences, or indeed how we might really understand anyone at all – a longstanding and still significant philosophical question. If we take philosophy and psychoanalysis at all seriously (and I do – at least much of the time), we might, even must, conclude that we don’t really understand or relate to our selves.
All of this is true, though in a sense operationally and pragmatically false – no one who functions in the world operates as if it is true. Put another way, this is to confuse total understanding with understanding at all, total relateability with ability to relate at all. In pragmatic terms at least, most of us relate to ourselves at least tolerably well; we relate to and understand those around us not absolutely but well enough to function almost as if we did; ethnographers understand something, even much, about their research subjects’ lives without, and without need of, total understanding.
3. I think what the student might have meant was that faculty members might not be able to relate to students in the here and now because being a grad student here and now is different from faculty member’s past and usually spatially/institutionally different experiences.
I often can relate quite well to my students, but it might be provisionally wise to proceed as if my first reaction is not true, and to attempt to relate to graduate students in the same way that anthropologists attempt to relate to research subjects – to stop, look and listen carefully.
Structural positioning doesn’t determine consciousness, experience, or actions deterministically, but it does matter, and my students don’t have the same experiences as I did as a student. Like a lot of scholars, I had experience in more than one graduate institution, in my case earning degrees from one quite large state university (the University of Georgia) and one medium-to-large private institution with lots of money (Cornell University). In some ways, my grad student experiences parallel those of the students I now work with – there are certain commonalities to the grad student experience the characterize most institutions of higher education – but teaching at a mid-size regional state university (the University of West Florida) with much less student funding available than at the graduate institutions I attended (just to identify one, albeit an important, variable – student funding), the students I work with in some ways have very different experiences and concerns than I did as a student.
That is, just as I do think the student writer was incorrect in arguing that faculty can’t relate to or understand graduate students (understanding or relating doesn’t depend on experience of the same exact structural positioning, and in fact in any case faculty have had structural experience as graduate students), having occupied a social structural position or having had experience of a particular identity category (in this case “faculty” or “student,” but the point could apply to identity categories and politics generally) doesn’t translate into automatic or necessarily easy understanding of others occupying the category.
Friday, December 28, 2007
Some Good News on Species Preservation
The Association of Zoos and Aquariums (an organization mostly in the news at the moment in relation to the Christmas tragedy at the San Francisco Zoo) has released its “Top Ten Wildlife Conservation Success Stories in 2007.”
Two of the stories were of particular interest to me. One caught my attention as an anthropologist, as it involves attempts to save a primate species, the black and white ruffed lemur, while a second was of special interest to me as it involved a species inhabiting in the wild only a single barrier island off Pensacola where I live and teach, the Perdido Key Beach Mouse.
The following paragraphs are from the AZA press release:
Black-and-white ruffed lemurs born in zoos are getting a feel for their new home at the Betampona Natural Reserve in eastern Madagascar. The Madagascar Fauna Group (MFG), and the Duke Lemur Center coordinated the plan to reintroduce zoo-bred lemurs to the wild, with the help of other MFG partners and institutions, including Salt Lake City's Hogle Zoo, the Los Angeles Zoo and the Santa Ana Zoo. The released individuals are being monitored and have fared well so far, with four offspring born from three reintroduced lemurs.
This summer, Santa Fe Community College Teaching Zoo, in Gainesville, Florida, began housing 52 Perdido Key beach mice to protect the species from extinction. The mice originated from the University of South Carolina, but needed to be relocated after damage from Hurricane Ivan. The Brevard Zoo, Florida Aquarium, and Palm Beach Zoo have since shared in the responsibility of caring for and studying the mice. There are only a few hundred individuals left in the wild, inhabiting just one barrier island off the coast of Pensacola. Researchers fear that a hurricane could be disastrous to the beach mice, potentially causing the species to become extinct in the wild. Breeding studies have commenced to safeguard their numbers.
Two of the stories were of particular interest to me. One caught my attention as an anthropologist, as it involves attempts to save a primate species, the black and white ruffed lemur, while a second was of special interest to me as it involved a species inhabiting in the wild only a single barrier island off Pensacola where I live and teach, the Perdido Key Beach Mouse.
The following paragraphs are from the AZA press release:
Black-and-white ruffed lemurs born in zoos are getting a feel for their new home at the Betampona Natural Reserve in eastern Madagascar. The Madagascar Fauna Group (MFG), and the Duke Lemur Center coordinated the plan to reintroduce zoo-bred lemurs to the wild, with the help of other MFG partners and institutions, including Salt Lake City's Hogle Zoo, the Los Angeles Zoo and the Santa Ana Zoo. The released individuals are being monitored and have fared well so far, with four offspring born from three reintroduced lemurs.
This summer, Santa Fe Community College Teaching Zoo, in Gainesville, Florida, began housing 52 Perdido Key beach mice to protect the species from extinction. The mice originated from the University of South Carolina, but needed to be relocated after damage from Hurricane Ivan. The Brevard Zoo, Florida Aquarium, and Palm Beach Zoo have since shared in the responsibility of caring for and studying the mice. There are only a few hundred individuals left in the wild, inhabiting just one barrier island off the coast of Pensacola. Researchers fear that a hurricane could be disastrous to the beach mice, potentially causing the species to become extinct in the wild. Breeding studies have commenced to safeguard their numbers.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Humans as Predators
Science Daily has posted an interesting article: "The Fisherman is a Predator like any Other."
The article reports on a recent study of commercial fishers off the coast of Peru, specifically studying their movements over the sea in search of their prey (in this case anchovies) over a period of a few years. The researchers compared the search strategies of the human fishers with those of non-human predators searching for prey (the article specifically mentions albatrosses and seals) and found that the search strategies employed by all the predators, humans included, paralleled one another.
The article reports on a recent study of commercial fishers off the coast of Peru, specifically studying their movements over the sea in search of their prey (in this case anchovies) over a period of a few years. The researchers compared the search strategies of the human fishers with those of non-human predators searching for prey (the article specifically mentions albatrosses and seals) and found that the search strategies employed by all the predators, humans included, paralleled one another.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Culture, Culture Change, and the Ethics of Cultural Intervention
In an article from 1958, “The Fox Project” (Human Organization, V. 17, pp. 17-19), Sol Tax both described an applied anthropological project with the Fox Indians of Iowa and laid out the basis for anthropologists’ engaging in processes of culture change in what he called “action anthropology.” Why revisit this almost 50 year old article? Primarily because it lucidly gets at the crux of what applied or action anthropology is about, as well as some of the ethical and value considerations associated with it.
Culture and Culture Change
Tax was clearly aware that in attempting to aid the Fox Indians in the economic development of their community, he and his students were engaging in an intervention into culture and engaging directly in a process of culture change. Recognizing this, he also recognized a need for basic ground rules for such intervention into culture. He writes of the potentials for culture change in the Fox community:
“The two irreducible conditions of community-wide changes are that the new behavior does not require either (1) a loss of Fox identity, or (2) violation of Fox moral beliefs. One takes for granted also that the change is practicably possible – that the new behavior required is understandable and feasible, and that there is some reason, from the point of view of the Indians to make it. Given these two general limitations, we suppose any change is possible.”
Implicitly, a particular sense of “culture” is being used here. Anthropologists and others typically recognize two senses of the word “culture” – one the ethos, manners, mores, and patterns of high culture, the other the sense more typically employed by anthropologists focusing on a total patterned lifeway of a people or population. In an important article, “Culture – Genuine and Spurious,” Edward Sapir noted that there are three important senses in which “culture” is used. He recognized that “culture” in the sense of high culture represented a restricted subset of the sense of culture as a total lifeway in that it represented the lifeway of a particular class context. He also noted, though, that there is another important way in which we used “culture.” As with “high culture,” we often use “culture” in a way more restricted than to refer to all aspects of the total patterned lifeway of a population. In this third sense, we mean the core premises of identity, values, ethos, and worldview and a restricted set of practices taken as “typical” or “essential.” It is typically these elements of the lifeway which are most durable, most valued, or that are the intended reference when people speak of their culture. So, for example, maquiladora factories and Coca-Cola are part of the total lifeway of Mexico today, and thus are part of Mexican culture in one sense of the word, but are not the sorts of things people (Mexican or otherwise) typically intend when speaking of “Mexican culture.”
For Tax or the Fox, behaviors or ideas that were simply part of the total lifeway’s set of practices were readily subject to change without controversy. It was those behaviors and ideas seen as essential to identity and moral beliefs (and I would venture to guess also those seen as essential to ethos and worldview) that were highly cherished and not changeable without controversy. Likewise, in contemporary controversies surrounding cultural description, critique, or intervention and cultural relativism, it is change with regard to those elements of the total patterned lifeway that are locally constructed (on whatever basis – in some cases ethos may be most highly touted, in others certain behaviors, in others elements of the worldview) as “the culture” in this third sense that generate controversy. No one (at least no one I can think of or imagine) is likely to criticize a critique by a non-Mexican of maquiladora factory production in Mexico City or Juarez as an example of cultural imperialism (if anything, such industrial production might be seen as cultural imperialism). A critique of “Mexican Machismo” very well might generate controversy, though.
The ethics of cultural intervention
Tax’s article is also useful in laying out provisional value orientations for engaging in applied anthropology and intervening in a particular cultural context. He lays out three values ideally involved when engaging in cultural intervention (or as he even says, “interference”).
His first value is that of truth. While ascertaining truth is an often formidable task, to value truth as a principle seems to me straightforward and non-controversial (except, perhaps, when it’s not – for example in cases where an anthropologist’s view of truth might stand in opposition to that of those being aided via applied anthropological work).
Tax continues:
“Second, we feel most strongly the value of freedom, as it is classically expressed and limited. Freedom in our context usually means freedom for individuals to choose the group with which to identify and freedom for a community to choose its way of life. We would also be embarrassed if it were shown that we are, for example, encouraging Indians to remain Indians, rather than to become something else, or trying to preserve Indian cultures, when the Indians involved would choose otherwise. All we want in our action programs is to provide, if we can, genuine alternatives from which the people involved can freely choose…”
In other words, Tax held (and I hold) the autonomy of the individual as a fundamental value.
Tax’s third value is what he called a “kind of Law of Parsimony which tells us not to settle questions of values unless they concern us.” This is an important pragmatic principle for operation, where, for example, even though some anthropologists involved in the Fox project felt that assimilation was in the interest of the Fox and others did not, Tax felt that it was inessential for them to decide, and in any case, given the higher valuation placed on the autonomy of Fox individuals, this was not the anthropologists’ decision in any case.
He discusses further the possibility of additional operating principles or premises, but decides against this. He uses the following example:
“People are always asking whether we think cannibals have a right to self-determination. With respect to cannibalism, would we not have to impose some value of our own? Now, I neither eat human flesh, nor like the thought of being eaten; I am revolted as others in our culture by the whole idea. I have no notion what I would do if I found myself involved in an action program on a cannibal isle; I can only think of jokes to say. If I attempt to answer seriously I am beset with all the value contradictions involved in so-called cultural relativism. But whatever my personal position on this, it has no significant bearing on what we should do tomorrow to help the Fox Indians develop more constructive relationships within their community, or with other Iowans.”
Frankly, I’m not sure why this example creates a conundrum, insofar as if one take the valuation of the autonomy of each individual at all seriously, then the autonomy of one person to develop themselves and determine their life to the extent possible (which obviously entails continuing to live) clearly outweighs the autonomy of another to eat them. (If you had a cannibal isle where some really autonomously consented to be eaten, then you’d have a real conundrum.) Still, Tax is right that the ethics of one case don’t really impinge on the ethics of another, so such hypothetical cases are pragmatically beside the point. Recognizing that it is pragmatically and ethically efficacious to avoid making decisions or judgment calls when not necessary, though, doesn’t help in knowing what to do when such decisions cannot be avoided. While anthropologists today are unlikely to have to grapple with the autonomy of cannibals, there are cases in virtually every cultural context where different individuals’ effective autonomy stand at odds and impinge upon one another.
While I find Tax’s article wanting in essentially evading this sort of all too common dilemma, at the same time I find that his three basic values (which are essentially the values of the Enlightenment project) serve us well. On the one hand, the combination of ethical parsimony, cultural relativism, and the valuation of individuals’ autonomy in many situations leads us anthropologically to simply attempt to describe and understand the context at hand. On the other, when the effective autonomy of individuals is at odds or is compromised (e.g. Philippe Bourgois’ example of Costa Rican plantation workers’ lives being largely shaped by decisions of landowners and managers – an example of individuals having opposed interests, or many examples of imposed female genital modification – an example where one individual’s autonomy is compromised by others for reasons typically seen as being in that person’s interest), then we must either be willing to critique such practices or realize that our lack of critique passively and tacitly accepts the imposition of power on the weaker.
Culture and Culture Change
Tax was clearly aware that in attempting to aid the Fox Indians in the economic development of their community, he and his students were engaging in an intervention into culture and engaging directly in a process of culture change. Recognizing this, he also recognized a need for basic ground rules for such intervention into culture. He writes of the potentials for culture change in the Fox community:
“The two irreducible conditions of community-wide changes are that the new behavior does not require either (1) a loss of Fox identity, or (2) violation of Fox moral beliefs. One takes for granted also that the change is practicably possible – that the new behavior required is understandable and feasible, and that there is some reason, from the point of view of the Indians to make it. Given these two general limitations, we suppose any change is possible.”
Implicitly, a particular sense of “culture” is being used here. Anthropologists and others typically recognize two senses of the word “culture” – one the ethos, manners, mores, and patterns of high culture, the other the sense more typically employed by anthropologists focusing on a total patterned lifeway of a people or population. In an important article, “Culture – Genuine and Spurious,” Edward Sapir noted that there are three important senses in which “culture” is used. He recognized that “culture” in the sense of high culture represented a restricted subset of the sense of culture as a total lifeway in that it represented the lifeway of a particular class context. He also noted, though, that there is another important way in which we used “culture.” As with “high culture,” we often use “culture” in a way more restricted than to refer to all aspects of the total patterned lifeway of a population. In this third sense, we mean the core premises of identity, values, ethos, and worldview and a restricted set of practices taken as “typical” or “essential.” It is typically these elements of the lifeway which are most durable, most valued, or that are the intended reference when people speak of their culture. So, for example, maquiladora factories and Coca-Cola are part of the total lifeway of Mexico today, and thus are part of Mexican culture in one sense of the word, but are not the sorts of things people (Mexican or otherwise) typically intend when speaking of “Mexican culture.”
For Tax or the Fox, behaviors or ideas that were simply part of the total lifeway’s set of practices were readily subject to change without controversy. It was those behaviors and ideas seen as essential to identity and moral beliefs (and I would venture to guess also those seen as essential to ethos and worldview) that were highly cherished and not changeable without controversy. Likewise, in contemporary controversies surrounding cultural description, critique, or intervention and cultural relativism, it is change with regard to those elements of the total patterned lifeway that are locally constructed (on whatever basis – in some cases ethos may be most highly touted, in others certain behaviors, in others elements of the worldview) as “the culture” in this third sense that generate controversy. No one (at least no one I can think of or imagine) is likely to criticize a critique by a non-Mexican of maquiladora factory production in Mexico City or Juarez as an example of cultural imperialism (if anything, such industrial production might be seen as cultural imperialism). A critique of “Mexican Machismo” very well might generate controversy, though.
The ethics of cultural intervention
Tax’s article is also useful in laying out provisional value orientations for engaging in applied anthropology and intervening in a particular cultural context. He lays out three values ideally involved when engaging in cultural intervention (or as he even says, “interference”).
His first value is that of truth. While ascertaining truth is an often formidable task, to value truth as a principle seems to me straightforward and non-controversial (except, perhaps, when it’s not – for example in cases where an anthropologist’s view of truth might stand in opposition to that of those being aided via applied anthropological work).
Tax continues:
“Second, we feel most strongly the value of freedom, as it is classically expressed and limited. Freedom in our context usually means freedom for individuals to choose the group with which to identify and freedom for a community to choose its way of life. We would also be embarrassed if it were shown that we are, for example, encouraging Indians to remain Indians, rather than to become something else, or trying to preserve Indian cultures, when the Indians involved would choose otherwise. All we want in our action programs is to provide, if we can, genuine alternatives from which the people involved can freely choose…”
In other words, Tax held (and I hold) the autonomy of the individual as a fundamental value.
Tax’s third value is what he called a “kind of Law of Parsimony which tells us not to settle questions of values unless they concern us.” This is an important pragmatic principle for operation, where, for example, even though some anthropologists involved in the Fox project felt that assimilation was in the interest of the Fox and others did not, Tax felt that it was inessential for them to decide, and in any case, given the higher valuation placed on the autonomy of Fox individuals, this was not the anthropologists’ decision in any case.
He discusses further the possibility of additional operating principles or premises, but decides against this. He uses the following example:
“People are always asking whether we think cannibals have a right to self-determination. With respect to cannibalism, would we not have to impose some value of our own? Now, I neither eat human flesh, nor like the thought of being eaten; I am revolted as others in our culture by the whole idea. I have no notion what I would do if I found myself involved in an action program on a cannibal isle; I can only think of jokes to say. If I attempt to answer seriously I am beset with all the value contradictions involved in so-called cultural relativism. But whatever my personal position on this, it has no significant bearing on what we should do tomorrow to help the Fox Indians develop more constructive relationships within their community, or with other Iowans.”
Frankly, I’m not sure why this example creates a conundrum, insofar as if one take the valuation of the autonomy of each individual at all seriously, then the autonomy of one person to develop themselves and determine their life to the extent possible (which obviously entails continuing to live) clearly outweighs the autonomy of another to eat them. (If you had a cannibal isle where some really autonomously consented to be eaten, then you’d have a real conundrum.) Still, Tax is right that the ethics of one case don’t really impinge on the ethics of another, so such hypothetical cases are pragmatically beside the point. Recognizing that it is pragmatically and ethically efficacious to avoid making decisions or judgment calls when not necessary, though, doesn’t help in knowing what to do when such decisions cannot be avoided. While anthropologists today are unlikely to have to grapple with the autonomy of cannibals, there are cases in virtually every cultural context where different individuals’ effective autonomy stand at odds and impinge upon one another.
While I find Tax’s article wanting in essentially evading this sort of all too common dilemma, at the same time I find that his three basic values (which are essentially the values of the Enlightenment project) serve us well. On the one hand, the combination of ethical parsimony, cultural relativism, and the valuation of individuals’ autonomy in many situations leads us anthropologically to simply attempt to describe and understand the context at hand. On the other, when the effective autonomy of individuals is at odds or is compromised (e.g. Philippe Bourgois’ example of Costa Rican plantation workers’ lives being largely shaped by decisions of landowners and managers – an example of individuals having opposed interests, or many examples of imposed female genital modification – an example where one individual’s autonomy is compromised by others for reasons typically seen as being in that person’s interest), then we must either be willing to critique such practices or realize that our lack of critique passively and tacitly accepts the imposition of power on the weaker.
Saturday, February 10, 2007
Experimental Ethnography Old and New
In many natural and social science disciplines, there are relatively formalized conventions for writing that make the assessment of text (including the ascertainment of the text as “scholarship”) fairly straightforward (and certainly this would be true of more social science oriented cultural anthropologists). In humanities disciplines (and cultural anthropology has always been as much linked to humanities as to social science scholarship), however, this is much less the case.
There is a long tradition in the humanities of concern with text, and related to this a long history of formal experimentation and play with text in scholarly writing, something that has been intensified since the 1980s with the influence of postmodernism and cultural studies. Below I address this long history of formal experimentation and play in ethnographic writing, as well as the specific changes or intensifications in this tradition since the 1980s.
The history of anthropological ethnography is rife with “unconventional” texts. Given that ethnography is the writing of culture, it has been natural that anthropologists explore ways in which various forms of writing or presenting culture shapes our understanding or provides new perspectives on the cultural contexts at hand. Tristes Tropiques (1955), by Claude Lévi-Strauss, is part memoir, part travelogue, is filled with novelistic detail, and is one of the classics of the ethnographic literature, shedding light on Native South American cultures and on how one anthropologist came by understanding and knowledge about those cultures.
Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian (1920), “by” Paul Radin, and The Children of Sanchez (1961), “by” Oscar Lewis, engaged in explorations of ethnographic form through having research subjects speak directly to the reader in their own voices. Balinese Character (1942), by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, presented the visual aspect of Balinese culture via a montage of thousands of photographs with brief caption commentaries.
The Savage and the Innocent (1965), by Daniel Maybury-Lewis was a memoir of his time researching the Sherente and Shavante, but simultaneously an important contribution to the ethnographic literature through a combination of its rich cultural descriptions and its account of the social relations between Maybury-Lewis and Sherente and Shavante individuals which constituted his ethnographic research. Certainly, the discipline of anthropology has also produced more “conventional” social science texts, many of which have been quite influential, e.g. Robert Redfield and Alfonso Villa Rojas’ Chan Kom (1934), Roy Rappaport’s Pigs for the Ancestors (1968), or Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) (a conventional social science text produced via unconventional ethnographic methods).
However, such conventional, highly formal, social scientific texts have never been the way of producing ethnography, and many of the most influential ethnographies have been the most unconventional, e.g. Tristes Tropiques, The Children of Sanchez, or In The Savage and the Innocent (which had far more influence in fact that its conventional companion piece Akwe-Shavante Society [1967]), perhaps precisely because their unconventionality forced readers to think about culture from different perspectives and think about their suppositions of culture and ethnography anew.
What changed in anthropological ethnography in the 1980s or so, then, was not an introduction of unconventionality or informality. Those were already long present in ethnography. Rather, more and more there has been a concern with the relationship between culture and representations of culture, with understanding the role of the individual researcher, with their background, agenda, and potential biases; in producing understandings of a cultural context and representations of such; with understanding the dialogical relations between ethnographer and research informants which constitute the “data” of ethnography as the social relationships that they are; with understanding the role that textual form plays in shaping our reading – and hence our understanding of the cultural context being represented, and because of the importance of textual form in all that, in calling attention to ethnographic writing and reading.
In Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan (1980), Vincent Crapanzano presents us not with a standard social science analysis of Morocco, but with transcripts of his interactions with Tuhami in a technique which hearkens back to Oscar Lewis or Paul Radin, but which also demonstrates the ways in which Crapanzano’s questions and presence shaped the interaction and thus the information available for interpretation.
In A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (1999), Diane Nelson presents an anecdote concerning two encounters with a torture victim. The first involved her work as applied anthropologist with a human rights organization witnessing the acid burns and scars of the man and transcribing his testimonial about his torture. The second encounter was a chance meeting with the same man on a bus where the man proceeded to make a pass at Nelson. Why does Nelson include this anecdote, especially of the second encounter – it certainly has no place in a conventional social science text. The experience jarred Nelson’s understanding of what had transpired in the first encounter which she had understood in terms of the conventions of Latin American torture testimonial (a literary genre in its own right), with herself as mute transcriber of the testifying victim – a context in which she presumed an absence of erotic desire which had in fact been part of the man’s experience. In the inclusion of the anecdote, most readers’ assumptions are similarly jarred.
One of Michael Taussig’s latest books, Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia (2003), is an ethnography – a writing of culture – in providing the sort of rich description of contemporary Colombian society characteristic of Taussig’s writing, but it also is a diary, one which ruminates on the ways in which the very personal and informal forms of the diary might shape our understandings of the world around us being written about – a critical concern for ethnographers since the primary means of data recording has long been the field diary. Such examples of interjecting the ethnographer as participant in the social scene being described, of representing the social interactions between anthropologist and informant which comprise the ethnographer’s data, of interjecting messiness (Nelson speaks of bodies and texts that are splattered if that terminology is preferred) have become in fact common and conventional in ethnographic writing.
By presenting the ways in which texts are formulated and the ways in which research was conducted in specific instances, such messiness is not sloppy, haphazard, or lazy. Instead, presenting the mode by which the text was produced provides an opportunity for readers to more objectively evaluate texts and the cultural understandings presented therein by allowing us to more critically examine the way in which they were produced and the ways in which the ethnographer’s specific actions shaped the understanding being presented.
There is a long tradition in the humanities of concern with text, and related to this a long history of formal experimentation and play with text in scholarly writing, something that has been intensified since the 1980s with the influence of postmodernism and cultural studies. Below I address this long history of formal experimentation and play in ethnographic writing, as well as the specific changes or intensifications in this tradition since the 1980s.
The history of anthropological ethnography is rife with “unconventional” texts. Given that ethnography is the writing of culture, it has been natural that anthropologists explore ways in which various forms of writing or presenting culture shapes our understanding or provides new perspectives on the cultural contexts at hand. Tristes Tropiques (1955), by Claude Lévi-Strauss, is part memoir, part travelogue, is filled with novelistic detail, and is one of the classics of the ethnographic literature, shedding light on Native South American cultures and on how one anthropologist came by understanding and knowledge about those cultures.
Autobiography of a Winnebago Indian (1920), “by” Paul Radin, and The Children of Sanchez (1961), “by” Oscar Lewis, engaged in explorations of ethnographic form through having research subjects speak directly to the reader in their own voices. Balinese Character (1942), by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, presented the visual aspect of Balinese culture via a montage of thousands of photographs with brief caption commentaries.
The Savage and the Innocent (1965), by Daniel Maybury-Lewis was a memoir of his time researching the Sherente and Shavante, but simultaneously an important contribution to the ethnographic literature through a combination of its rich cultural descriptions and its account of the social relations between Maybury-Lewis and Sherente and Shavante individuals which constituted his ethnographic research. Certainly, the discipline of anthropology has also produced more “conventional” social science texts, many of which have been quite influential, e.g. Robert Redfield and Alfonso Villa Rojas’ Chan Kom (1934), Roy Rappaport’s Pigs for the Ancestors (1968), or Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946) (a conventional social science text produced via unconventional ethnographic methods).
However, such conventional, highly formal, social scientific texts have never been the way of producing ethnography, and many of the most influential ethnographies have been the most unconventional, e.g. Tristes Tropiques, The Children of Sanchez, or In The Savage and the Innocent (which had far more influence in fact that its conventional companion piece Akwe-Shavante Society [1967]), perhaps precisely because their unconventionality forced readers to think about culture from different perspectives and think about their suppositions of culture and ethnography anew.
What changed in anthropological ethnography in the 1980s or so, then, was not an introduction of unconventionality or informality. Those were already long present in ethnography. Rather, more and more there has been a concern with the relationship between culture and representations of culture, with understanding the role of the individual researcher, with their background, agenda, and potential biases; in producing understandings of a cultural context and representations of such; with understanding the dialogical relations between ethnographer and research informants which constitute the “data” of ethnography as the social relationships that they are; with understanding the role that textual form plays in shaping our reading – and hence our understanding of the cultural context being represented, and because of the importance of textual form in all that, in calling attention to ethnographic writing and reading.
In Tuhami: Portrait of a Moroccan (1980), Vincent Crapanzano presents us not with a standard social science analysis of Morocco, but with transcripts of his interactions with Tuhami in a technique which hearkens back to Oscar Lewis or Paul Radin, but which also demonstrates the ways in which Crapanzano’s questions and presence shaped the interaction and thus the information available for interpretation.
In A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala (1999), Diane Nelson presents an anecdote concerning two encounters with a torture victim. The first involved her work as applied anthropologist with a human rights organization witnessing the acid burns and scars of the man and transcribing his testimonial about his torture. The second encounter was a chance meeting with the same man on a bus where the man proceeded to make a pass at Nelson. Why does Nelson include this anecdote, especially of the second encounter – it certainly has no place in a conventional social science text. The experience jarred Nelson’s understanding of what had transpired in the first encounter which she had understood in terms of the conventions of Latin American torture testimonial (a literary genre in its own right), with herself as mute transcriber of the testifying victim – a context in which she presumed an absence of erotic desire which had in fact been part of the man’s experience. In the inclusion of the anecdote, most readers’ assumptions are similarly jarred.
One of Michael Taussig’s latest books, Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia (2003), is an ethnography – a writing of culture – in providing the sort of rich description of contemporary Colombian society characteristic of Taussig’s writing, but it also is a diary, one which ruminates on the ways in which the very personal and informal forms of the diary might shape our understandings of the world around us being written about – a critical concern for ethnographers since the primary means of data recording has long been the field diary. Such examples of interjecting the ethnographer as participant in the social scene being described, of representing the social interactions between anthropologist and informant which comprise the ethnographer’s data, of interjecting messiness (Nelson speaks of bodies and texts that are splattered if that terminology is preferred) have become in fact common and conventional in ethnographic writing.
By presenting the ways in which texts are formulated and the ways in which research was conducted in specific instances, such messiness is not sloppy, haphazard, or lazy. Instead, presenting the mode by which the text was produced provides an opportunity for readers to more objectively evaluate texts and the cultural understandings presented therein by allowing us to more critically examine the way in which they were produced and the ways in which the ethnographer’s specific actions shaped the understanding being presented.
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