on anthropological representation

about ethnoethnography

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I am always viscerally skeptical of fads in anthropology. Often, they disappear after only a few years, or move back into obscurity (“ontology”?) and I can ignore them. Others, like “identity” become mainstream and take over the discipline—as I discovered while playing “session roulette” at the AAA meetings over the past decades. So, often, I resist, though, sometimes, I attempt to appropriate some of what triggered me (to use a recent, and possibly useful, cliche). This is what I do today with what I would probably classify as the first kind of possibly obscure fad: autoethnography.

Autoethnography had been in my peripheral vision for a while and I found it easy to dismiss until I stumbled on the possibility that, after all, autoethnography was something I had always been doing, particularly in this blog. At that moment of course, the scholar in me noticed that I actually knew very little about the “official,” if not canonical, or at least most often cited, literature on the topic. So, I did what I suggest all doctoral students do when they shape bibliographies about topics that might be relevant to what they want to do, I explored the literature. Given that that we are well into the 21st century, I postponed going to the library and started by questioning ChatGpt.

I asked: “what is autoethnography?” On January 23, 2025 ChatGpt responded:

“Autoethnography is a qualitative research method that combines personal narrative with cultural analysis and interpretation. It allows researchers to use their own experiences as a lens through which to explore broader cultural, social, or organizational phenomena.”

I then asked: “Who are the 4 most cited authors using autoethnography?” ChatGpt responded:

Carolyn Ellis: A distinguished professor emerita … Her notable publications include … [Wikipedia]

Arthur P. Bochner: A distinguished university professor … has made significant contributions to narrative inquiry and autoethnography. His infuential works include … [Wikipedia]

Leon Anderson: Known for his seminal article “Analytic Autoethnography” (2006), Anderson…
[Oxford Research Encyclopedia]

H.L. (Bud) Goodall Jr.: A pioneer in autoethnography and narrative ethnography, Goodall authored … [Wikipedia]

I noted with some professorial satisfaction that ChatGpt now cites its sources which, of course, I double checked. I confirmed to my equal satisfaction that ChatGpt knows how to read and can be useful as a starting point, but it will not do much if you are wondering about the archaeological underpinning of autoethnography, its history within anthropology, or what to do next with it, if anything.

I dug further and looked at a 2017 paper by Susanne Gannon that was linked by the Oxford Research Encyclopedia.   This paper is titled “Autoethnography” and is summarized as follows:

Autoethnography is an increasingly popular form of postpositivist narrative inquiry that has recently begun to appear in educational contexts. The multiple lineages of autoethnography include the insider accounts of early anthropologists, literary approaches to life history and autobiography, responses to the ontological/epistemological challenges of postmodern philosophies, feminist and postcolonial insistence on including narratives of the marginalized, performance and communication scholarship, and the interest in personal stories of contemporary therapeutic and trauma cultures.

Ah Ah! As I suspected: ontology… postmodern… feminist… narrative…. marginalized… performance… trauma … educational contexts.

I was reminded of a mostly negative review I wrote (Varenne 1990) about two books published in the late 1980s. Both could be claimed by “authoethnography” (though they did not label themselves that way, or did not make into the current canon–as far as I can tell now). Both strongly emphasized that they were written by a particular individual with particular experiences. They were written by “’I’, an ex-hippie-estranged- graduate student, a man with a battered car, who (does not) get arrested by ‘Police Commissioner Rizzo’s dreaded Highway Patrol’” (Rose 1989: 1-19; Dorst 1989: 209-210). Rose is most extreme as a third of the book is dedicated to an “oneric flight through America” (1989: 78), a collage of extracts from letters “to his mother,” “to his advisor,” and fieldnotes that were actually specifically written for the book and could thus be considered “fictional”—though Rose probably would argue that this would have been true even if they had been written while he was in the field.

If what Gannon indexes, and what authors like Dorst or Rose did, is  indeed “authoethnography” then I would not do much with it and would warn students against it. But, if one looks beyond the box ChatGpt and Wikipedia summaries construct, then one finds that many anthropologists did write about their personal experiences in the field, often in quite personal ways.  So there may even be something to appropriate here.

Some examples from my personal canon:

The most classical of those, in my generation, was Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques ([1955] 1963). More fun, and quite powerful as a teaching tool, is Laura Bohannan’s novel about her times with the Tiv of West Africa ([1954] 1964). She published it under the pseudonym Eleanor Bowen given her fears for her academic career. But it does everything an autoethnography should do: tell us much about the people and the challenges of learning about them so that she could report her experiences back to us. All of this is magnificently summarized in her most famous article: “”Shakespeare in the bush” (Bohannan 1966) where she tells, now under her own name, of what she was taught telling the story of Hamlet to the Tiv.  Another powerful ethnography is that of Robert Murphy chronicling the silencing of his body (1987).

One can go further outside the box to notice that it is quite common in recent ethnography for the author to reveal how they actually triggered what they then report. Tobin did something like this when he showed video sequences from one place to people from another place and made them comment (2011). Gilmore writes powerfully about her son and his friend constructing a language only them could understand (2016). Kalmar’s reports on farm workers from Mexico teaching each other English build on the ways the workers taught him how he, and his co-teachers, were actually ignorant so that they could notice a local knowledge usual methods might have not seen (2001). At some extreme one could say that all these are instances of the kinds of experiments Garfinkel devised as he challenged people to respond to the unknown or surprising.

One can go even further by making oneself the “subject” (“object”? depending on your ontological predilections) of the ethnography.  Take for example three tellings of my experiences in a large hospital in the large urban center of a galaxy far far away (Columbia Presbyterian in New York City) (Varenne 2018, 2019, 2021). In each case I place myself at the center, directly experiencing what the “natives” (as they would have been called a century ago) or “interlocutors” (as they may be referred to now) experience at such moments. As next of kin, or patient, I very much belonged in the set of natives/interlocutors of analytic concern in the literature on American medicine, from the least (say Glaser and Strauss on dying 1965) to the most (Foucault [1963] 1973) critical . At those times, I was not a (participant-)observer but rather a participant(-observer). I placed myself at the center.  I  hinted how these experiences triggered powerful emotional responses but those were not what I was concerned to publish.

Some therapists may have diagnosed me as in some sort of “denial” as I watched young policemen flirt while standing guard over a room next to the one where my wife laid unconscious after a severe stroke.  That I was in denial, or trying to defend myself emotionally, may be interesting but dwelling on it does not contribute to anthropology. What I have hoped may contribute, and is the rationale for much in this blog, is that the sketch of such a case may tell anthropologists more about moments in life that may be difficult of access. In this case (2019) I got to wonder about a classic problem with Lave’s model of the “community of practice” concerning the implicit boundary between the non-apprentice and the apprentice (or between the legitimate and illegitimate apprentice) that was highlighted as I, a non-apprentice in all the communities watched apprentices moving toward fuller participating into different communities (say physicians, nurses, policemen) while in continual contact across the “communities” thereby re-opening very classic issues in social systems where labor is divided. In another case (2021), I traced the movement through a social field which, at every stage, re-identified me into the kind of person they could deal with legitimately (e.g. the movement from the parking lot of the hospital into an operating room for heart surgery). In both cases, and in others, I used myself as a way to bypass the kind of IRB strictures that would make it very difficult, if not impossible, to follow a patient into an operating room so that we could understand in greater analytic detail how exactly bodies get disciplined (in Foucault’s terms).

Most classical ethnographies were specifically written to hide the author as a person.  The more recent include a “positionality” statement that is all too often only mentions a few traits (mostly gender and race, very rarely if ever religion, political ideology, age) without specifying how exactly these might have made a difference.  I would argue for example that this blog is “authorized” more by my status as a Full Professor in a Research One Institution than by my status as “white.”  This argument would then be developed into matters of theory and ethnography.

This would be good and leads to my conclusion today that  expanding the box to include all this will make anthropologists accept that all anthropology already is based in “autoethnography” and that those who discipline themselves to anthropology should just develop further how to make it useful for research and teaching purposes.

References

Bohannan, Laura   1966 Natural History 75:28-33.

Dorst John   1989     The written suburb. University of Pennsylvania Press

Gilmore, Perry   2016     Kisisi (our language). Wiley Blackwell

Glaser, Barney and Anselm Strauss   1965     “Temporal aspects of dying as a non-scheduled status passage.”  American Journal of Sociology 71:48-59.

Foucault, Michel   [1963] 1973 The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical perception. Pantheon Books.

Kalmar, Tomas   2014     2001 Illegal alphabets and adult literacy: Latino migrants crossing the linguistic border. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude   2014     Tristes tropiques. Publisher

Murphy, Robert   1987     The body silent. Henry Hold & Co.

Rose, Dan   1989 Patterns of American culture: Ethnography and estrangement. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Tobin, Joseph and M. Karasawa   2011 Preschool in three cultures revisited: China, Japan, and the United States.  University of Chicago Press.

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Culturings, on the popular

powerful representations of a culture

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[this was drafted in August 2024 but could not be posted at the time]

« Un spectacle extraordinaire, unique au monde et dans l’histoire des Jeux qui, je crois, a rendu nos compatriotes extrêmement fiers. » Emmanuel Macron ne tarit pas d’éloges sur la cérémonie d’ouverture des Jeux olympiques de Paris 2024, qui s’est déroulée sur la Seine vendredi 26 juillet. Ce samedi, le président de la République s’est réjoui du « formidable spectacle […] que les artistes et les athlètes ont donné ».
(published in various French newspapers in late July 2024)

As many noticed, the opening ceremonies to the Olympic games in Paris have been the occasion for much commentary. They will probably remain one of the most remembered ceremonies. I did not notice any cultural anthropologist weighing in and so, as I prepare to teach my first introductory course in the discipline, I thought I would write something and, given some of my critics who say I am not concerned enough with “power,” I will start with the paradoxes of governmentality.

In exerg to this post, I have quoted what the President of France said about the ceremonies. To emphasize the governmentality of these. I also mention that they, by themselves, have cost something like $150,000,000 to the French government. I am not exactly sure of the process that led to the selections of the main designers and directors of the “tableaux” that punctuated the athletes’ parade (as is the case for the actual production of governmentality, the actual people involved, in whatever multiple capacities, and in whatever settings is something that would be very hard to trace). What is certain is that nothing publicly seen arose for some mysterious “collective consciousness” (“culture” as the water the fish do not know about).

So, what was it was shown publicly? Most saliently it was the set of short theatrical pieces held in and around famous places along the Seine. These were projected giant screens (and transmitted by the media). According to one of the official sites, the tableaux represented the following themes:
Enchanté, Synchronicité, Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, Sororité, Sportivité, Festivité, Obscurité, Sollenité, Solidarité, Éternité.
These themes are abstractions which the authors (producers, directors, etc.) represented using all the tools now available: music, song, fireworks, artificial intelligence, etc.

Now, lets play anthropologist and pay attention. The list of the themes is exactly what one would expect from any State in this occasion, and, in this case, from the French State, starting with the inclusion of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” expanded as what might expect in the 21st century. I will assume that this list was proposed to the State, reviewed by the State, and approved by the State through its various bureaucracies and hierarchies. I will also assume that the scripts of each tableaux was similarly proposed, reviewed, approved. No spokesperson for the French State has mentioned being surprised by what was finally published on the giant screens set up by the Seine, and transmitted on all visual media.

This was not the product of a poor poet composing a revolutionary play in his garret fearing arrest by the State.

This leads us, of course, to the two tableaux that became fodder for most of the commentaries published in the media. The one representing Liberté (Freedom) and the one representing Festivité (Feasting). Not only did many of the usual “celebrities” (political, religious, artistic) weighed in but YouTube and Tik Tok was soon full of people reacting to the tableaux in the first seconds of their appearance.

woman with French flag on top of a barricadeLiberté starts with an enactment of a very famous painting of an allegory of Liberté (a half dressed woman) leading French troops to victory. The image of this (imaginary) woman is followed by the image of another woman (an immigrant from Austria?), in a bright red dress, headless, holding her head adorned with a high hairdo. The head sings “A ça ira, ça ira,” liberally translated as “All will be well” (don’t worry? Be happy?)—as long as you are not an “aristocrate” for, as the next verse of the song says “les aristocrates, on les pendra” (“we will hang the aristocrats”). The people around the world who have attended French schools, or are even vaguely aware of French history, will have recognized, in the first second, Marie-Antoinette, headless woman in a red dress holding her head and singingthe queen who was beheaded for political reasons. The same will probably recognize the song as the song that may have been sung while she was guillotined. This last a few seconds and is immediately followed by explosions, red fog, a very hard rock version of the song accompanied by the evocation of blood flowing from the sky.

Festivité starts with a brief still image many Christians around the world, as well as people who know Western art, and probably more, immediately recognized as an evocation of a famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci. people sitting in various positions behind a table drapped in white clothThomas Joly, the director, argued that it was actually an animation of a painting by the Dutch painter Jan van Bijlert titled “The feast of the gods.” Given that the tableau moves to a apparition by the Greek god Dionysus, a god that appears in van Bijlert painting but not da Vinci’s, then Joly may be reporting on an initial inspiration.

Joly claimed he had never noticed what many many did notice: the opening of the tableau reminded people of da Vinci’s Last Supper—whom they knew about, and very few of any of van Bijlert whom very few had ever head about. Furthermore there is evidence that the latter was actually trying to represent the Last Supper in a Protestant, humanist, setting that frowned on Catholic representations. Van Bijlert did put Apollo in the Christ position, something that had been done before. One can also mention that da Vinci’s painting has been caricatured many times (for example in a very funny sketch by Monty Python).

So, what does all this have to do with “culture”?

First, as monumental governmental production, the event belongs to “high culture” even though it borrowed heavily from what is usually classified as “popular culture.” By placing various styles of rap and heavy metal rock-n-roll in the context of a critique of French history, it transformed it. Some might say that it was appropriated by the French State for its own political purposes.

But, generally, cultural anthropologists are not overly concerned with “high culture,” particularly when wondering about contemporary State productions. They generally prefer the view from below, from the point of view of those who were not involved in the production but may have been variously triggered by it. At this point is that anthropologists have very little evidence about what someone watching the ceremonies about anywhere in the world have made of it—though any sampling of reactions of YouTube and elsewhere demonstrate that people made all sorts of things with the intentions of the producers.

In the absence of any systematic way of analyzing the responses, I will just focus on two sets of comments that highlight the complexity of any cultural analysis in the context of any State such as France. First there is what Thomas Joly said in response to the early criticisms of the two tableaux. Second is a comment by the president of France about France and culture.

Joly, in brief, said that his ideas where “republican,” “inclusive,” “kind,” “generous,” “solidary.” And in added that “in France” one can love whomever one wants, one can believe or not believe, and that “in France” one has many rights. It was the “goals of the ceremony” to “make visible these values.” Some anthropologists and sociologists have argued that “culture” is invisible to the people that live by them. In this case, such matters are fully above board: what the spectators were shown illustrated values of France in a full discursive, and multi-modal, way.

Emmanuel Macron, considered here as a “native” with “power,” has spoken often about France and culture. Media commentators like to oppose what he said at various times. This ranges from “Il n’y a pas une culture française, il y a une culture en France et elle est diverse.” [“there is no French culture, there is a culture in France and it is diverse.”] to “[Je refuse] la prétendue vérité de l’identité française, figée, déjà écrite et nostalgique ou d’une modernité qui exigerait l’effacement de pans entiers de notre passé… Notre identité est ce ‘palimpseste’, ce récit encore en cours” [I refuse a pretended truth about french identity as solidified, already written and nostalgic, or a modernity which would require the erasure of entire moment in our past… Our identity is this ‘palimpsest’].

Both Jolie and Macron, more or less explicitly, address other people with some power on the representation of France who present other pictures of France. Among these internal “others,” one is regularly mentioned (including by Joly). He is Philippe de Villiers, a politician famous for the theme park (Le Puy du Fou) he built with theatrical representations of the kind of moments in the history of France over the past two millenia that appeared again and again it in the schools of my generation and earlier.

In brief, and as I have argued many time, if there is a French culture, it is in the ongoing debates about it that can be observed among the French, but also in other conversations with, say, German philosophers (Dumont [1991] 1994), “Americans” (de Tocqueville [1848] 1969), and now of course with the many around the world who were affected by French colonialism, some of whom are not moving into France.

References

de Tocqueville, First   [1848] 1969     Democracy in America. Tr. by G. Lawrence. Doubleday.

Dumont, Louis   [1991] 1994     German Ideology: From France to Germany and Back. Tr. by University of Chicago Press.

 
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consciousness and knowledge, on ignorance, parentings, proposing research

The ultimate ignorant school master?

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[ORIGINALLY POSTED ON FEBRUARY 17, 2024]

One of our doctoral students, Ms. Mako Miura, recently challenged me with a question I had never entertained. We were discussing Jean Lave’s model for learning through participation (1991). We were focusing on some of the examples Lave mentions that point to the asymmetry between those in the “peripheral” position and those in the “full” position. Prototypically, we have an apprentice, initially ignorant but granted the legitimacy to participate, and the master who granted this legitimacy and eventually gets the apprentice to “learn” through participation that which characterizes a particular “shop floor” (to index Garfinkel). I emphasized that Lave is building a “model” to help us through initial analyses of the “educational” (“instructional,” “learning”) aspects of the organization of any floor. And I proposed we approached the encounter between first time parents and their child as just such a floor where a very legitimate participant will be learning everything that already makes this particular “family” (to keep it simple): familial configuration, ethnic or regional particularities, language, “culture.”

As this point, Miura asked: “could we argue that, on this floor, it is the child who is at the center and the parents who are on the periphery as they will have to ‘learn’ parenting?”

I must say that, whenever I have taught Lave (& Wenger)’s book, I have never pondered whether we should also consider the possibility of a feedback learning whereas the apparently “full” person discovers what apprentices are like, how they are learning, and what these apprentices are doing with that. I do not think that Jean Lave (or Ray McDermott with whom I once participated with her in a joint seminar on “ignorance” ) ever considered such a possibility. And yet, particularly if we approach the issue after reading Rancière’s Ignorant Schoolmaster ([1987] 1999), as we did in the class, then the question is one we should take seriously.

The issue is a classic one in cultural anthropology, particularly in the Boasian traditions led by M. Mead and many others who build on what appears to be a common sense generalizations. Here is the way Geertz once put it:

One of the most significant facts about us is that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end up in the end having only lived one.” (1973, 45)

In other words related to ignorance and knowledge, one starts knowing nothing (but able to learn anything) and immediately gets taught in the language, styles, religion, etc., of one’s population, and infant on an educational floor: who is teaching what to whom and how? thereby limiting further and further what one can do with the rest of one’s life. Cultural anthropology is, also, about the ongoing restriction on possibilities (and the powerful ones reenforcing these restrictions).
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of Gender, on America, on language and expression, proposing research

Barbie and their people

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[ORIGINALLY POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 3, 2023]

I would probably not have gone to see Barbie (the movie) if I had not read so much about it over the past few weeks. So, here is another take, including a take on the takes.

In brief, I was entertained by what might have been intended, by movie makers, their financiers, and above all Mattel as a little bit of fluff that would make careers and money. I knew that this was not a movie for most of my sections (the list would be long)—except perhaps for one: after all I am an anthropologist of America and this movie is an event in the history of the United States, a performance that triggered many other performances (particularly by my peers in the American intelligentsia). So, in the spirit of ethnography I will first focus on aspects of the film as object, and then ponder about what future anthropologists might do with this total social fact.

The movie, it turns out, is not just fluff, It can also be “read” (watched and then written about) very seriously (if not ponderously). So, in an initial step, in the theater, and given all I had already read, I listened for all explicit tropes for “feminism” including mentions of  “patriarchy,” put downs of Ken and all other men, etc. These are hard to miss and yet I noticed, as a few of the commentators did, that many of the enactments of the tropes are so heavily drawn to make one wonder whether they were designed as caricatures. I’d say that only the speech by the one “real” woman in the movie is straight faced 21st century official feminism. Everything else could serve as opening the way to a critique of said “feminism.”

advertisement for Barbie's house with young girlThe movie opens with an hyperbolic animation of a young girl’s play fantasy (and/or a Mattel commercial) as it might be remembered, nostalgically, by adult women—unless it is a an animation of the critique of Mattel’s designs for and unto little girls. Barbie Land appears as a pink Eden (Shangri-La) as the designers imagined, with a lot of supporting evidence, little girls imagine as they play with dolls their parents/grand parents paid for. This is land from which boys (as well as parents) are banned, a land without pain … or sex (we are explicitly told that neither Barbie nor Ken have genitalia), or digestive tracks (Barbie Land would not have to worry about sewers!).

That is the setting. And then something happens: A thought startles Barbie (little girls turning into adult women?): death. This may be (or could have been a point) when light comedy entered drama. I  suspect that, in many conversations about the movie, in cars driving home in various suburbs, this came up (ethnography needed!). In the movie, death was lightened by adding cellulite and flat feet as the triggers for Barbie’s exploration of the “real” world that ends with her first trip to a gynecologist (treated as a celebration!). In other words, this may be less a movie about feminism than about growing up female (person with female genitalia): it is about a young girl’s shift from a massively gendered fantasy into the material world—including the material world of mothers with boring jobs, unpleasant bosses, and another of the “big eastern syndicates” which ruin Christmas (as per Lucy in Peanuts)—not to mention sex (which is actually quite absent from the movie). It may be part of Mattel’s capitalistic genius, as a 21st century corporation that it lets itself be represented by buffoons while racking in the dollars. I’d bet there will be a Marxicist take on this movie…

And then setting and adventure (getting arrested in Los Angeles, crashing Mattel) turn into myth. The movie includes a set of scenes with the Creator (not only of Barbie, but also of Mattel–though we are not told that). These culminate with a vision in which She who Is gives Barbie glimpses of what it might be like to live in a world in which one dies—and with the punch line Jews, Christians and Muslims, not to mention Americans, will recognize: it’s your choice (free will). In that world there are many happy children smiling at you (I need to watch the movie again to see this altogether brief sequence). And no mention that, as another story of a woman’s move out from Eden put it, “in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” (Genesis 3:16). In other word, Barbie is very much an
American movie in the evolving liberal humanist ideology that imagines a future world of pleasure and community where every individual can be all they want to be.

But all this is not to be taken as implying I argue that the movie is a product of America (feminism, post-Christianity, capitalistic exploitation, or what have you), or that it is part of a grand systemic plot to “enculture” (“socialize”) young girls, or their mothers (not to mention boys and men).

Rather, and from the point of view of my kind of anthropology, such movies, like all works of imagination (even when greatly enriching stock holders), are statements within ongoing and ever evolving conversations that triggers further statements—particularly statements made by those who cannot be directly controlled at the time when they are discussing the original statements. I
imagine that most people who went to see the movie then talked about it not only with other who saw it, but also with peers, family members, friends, etc. who did not. And this makes me wonder what little girls do/did when playing with Barbie: do they wish they had breasts like hers? notice that these breasts have fascinated all critics of the doll? “criticize” (the way many older girls and women eventually do)? What do they tell each other they are doing? their parents? What do their parents tell them? I hope some anthropologist will take these questions as triggers for investigation. I am sure that one would find many cases (in notes, letters, social media posts) of something I just found out a young girl who would become very famous wrote for her siblings’ enjoyment: For 6 years, from the time she was 12, Jane Austen sketched 21 novels (2017) before composing the famous 6 for which she is famous. These “teenage writings” (like the Bronte sisters’) may have survived because of the eventual fame of their authors, but they could also be taken as evidence for what young people do with the stuff of their every day life in their social conditions, and particularly what they mock (implying that they already knew what these were, and how to mock them). Such texts (performances) should be the sources of any ethnography of the Barbie phenomenon in the United States and beyond.

References

Austen, Jane   2017     Teenage writings. Oxford University Press

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Culturings, on 'culture', on America

Race Consciousness, Racism (and race?): Contradictions with consequences (culture!)

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From the time when I played “les coboilles et les indiens,” 70 years ago, in the streets of small Southern village, I have experienced something, that is, precisely, a “thing” that stood in my way, that I could play with, or fear. This was called “America” by French politicians (etc) as well as five year old boys. “It” (its armies, myths, festivals) was awe-inspiring and also mysterious. After many years establishing myself as an anthropologists of ‘America,’ I would now say that that which still fascinates me is not exactly the kind of object archaeologist might find in some jungle. America, as any other culture I’d say, is more of a set of dilemmas and contradictions that move conversations-with-practical-consequences—and thus, through their consequences do make things that trigger more conversations and things.

Case in point: The recent conversations about what to do (“ask applicants,” “take into consideration,” and other speech acts) when involved in evaluating students for admission into elite colleges.

Like many in these colleges, I have been reading several documents all written by people born, raised, and schooled in the United States (natives?). I read the “Opinion” (certainly not a description of the actual speech act!) by that most bizarre (cross-culturally) of institutions: the Supreme Court of the United States. I read the Opinion, some of the concurring statements, some of the dissenting statements, and many editorials and such summarizing the Opinion and telling what it “really” meant. And so I am left contemplating the ongoing production/construction of a culture (America) that continues to fascinate me as an emergent, and now someone jaded, Franco-European(-American?).

These documents are ostensibly about, “race,” “race consciousness,” or “racism.” But I am never always sure which.  My own opinion (interpretation with no authority or general consequence), is that all “justices” agree that racism is bad and that something, that is some thing (act with consequences) needs be (not) done. They are all, in the very evidence of their writing, very much “conscious” or “race” but they do not agree on what kind of “race consciousness” is a good or bad thing.  Surprisingly to some observers, they do not seem to care much about “race,” as a concept, category or thing of any sort. And so, most people in the United States, particularly actors in the elite universities, are left to their own devices figuring out what do to next in their various responsibilities as faculty, minor administrator, etc., in one of these universities.

The justices and commentators do agree that racism is bad, but the issue, as argued, is not about philosophy, ideology, genetics and other sciences of the human body. It is about institutional consequences that have direct life-long consequences on people. It is about slavery, segregation and Jim Crow laws, separate but equal schooling, limitations on voting, and such matters of state mandates. It is about what the State may allow or require of institutions and people in general. In that sense, it is about facts that constrain people (Durkheim), things with their separate agency (Latour), inevitable objects. That all these facts, things, objects, are man-made (human productions) do not make them less real. I will sometimes say that such constructions may in fact be more immediately real (to be lived and experienced) than matters like gravity or air-pressure, even if, or particularly if, they are so threatened as to continually need reconstructing.

And “race” is now something to be reconstructed in general and in the particularities of admission offices.

In very brief, the ongoing conversations start with a general agreement that America, in its State and mandates, constructed many very bad institutions in the past. It should continue to deconstruct these and construct some new ones. This is, and has been, an ongoing process. To appropriate something Lévi-Strauss once said in his usual pithy way: [America] tends to be dismantled like a palace swept away upon the flood, whose parts, through the effect of currents and stagnant waters, obstacles and straits, come[s] to be combined in a manner other than that intended by the architect” ([1962] 1966: 233). What Lévi-Strauss might have added was that this palace is continually being reconstructed—as everyone in the United States was reminded a few weeks ago.

But this reconstruction is not guided by any architect. The significant speakers/actors (the six justices of the Supreme Court who made a difference) just told any architect what NOT to build. All architects of future admission procedures will have to construct things in ongoing uncertainty without relying on any specific consensus, common sense, or tradition. The justices themselves, spectacularly, do not agree with what is exactly at stake. All use the word “race.” But only some wonder about what exactly, for this or any other purposes, is to be meant by the word. All, in their more consequential pro or con moments, appear to take it for granted. I suspect all of them might agree that the word is about a social construct of some sort, and not a thing of nature or a property of people (as it might have been in the 19th century and still lingering). The conversation is about what is to be constructed that is somehow related to race.  It will involve wondering about materials, institutional places, ecological impact on other constructions, and the imagined future use of the constructed things. On one side, six of justices agree that constructing anything with “race” is a bad thing, as it was in the past. On the other side, three justices agree that, when acting with institutional life-long consequences, those with authority may, or indeed must, make themselves “conscious” of race, using whatever definition they wish. All nine then tar each other, more or less explicitly, with “racism.”

So, what is racism at this moment in United States time: being institutionally “conscious” of race or being deliberately and institutionally NOT conscious of race? Is there anything that anthropology, through ethnography, can offer as part of an answer?

I’d say first that the very ongoing conversations demonstrate that about everyone in the United States is, practically, in their everyday life, “conscious of race.” What is less clear is what, in this everyday life of people with very different responsibilities (university presidents, interns helping sort applications), does this consciousness make happen? I suspect, given “America” that many will transform this into questions of states of mind, identity, or the like. But the Court, most interestingly for an observer, is not actually concerned with states of mind. It is concerned with the State and its statutes and mandates in the minute details of its work as it might be experienced in the everyday life of the people affected. In my own academic world, preliminary local conversations have raised such practical issues as: may an institution still ask applicants for admission to check any kind of box about race (in all its variants)? How can people be given preferential treatment on matters like financial aid? How might this preference be phrased and practically implemented by subsidiary administrators? All these are extremely concrete matters that are continually referred to “legal” since the institution does not want to be sued. All  the actors will remain “conscious of race” but that will remain a private matter. My kind of anthropologist will always look, after a cursory glance at the text of a mandate, at what the people will then do with the mandate. This anthropologist will expect that people will resist, play or, as one commentator said, actively “game the system.” As I like to say, it is by looking at such moments that one eventually discovers what is most consequential for a people—that is, for me, not so much “their” culture as the culture they cannot escape.

 

References

Lévi-Strauss, Claude   [1962] 1966/2021     The savage mind/Wild thought. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

 

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of Corona

The end of Corona

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I first mused about the end of the Corona epoch (a.k.a “COVID-19″) two years ago. I did it again a year ago. In both cases I took into account both my (lived?) experience in the various polities I usually and more or less regularly inhabit (family, church, shops, university), as well as what I found out about the evolution of governors’ mandates, including both those I had to live by in New York City or France, and those I read about. My usual examples involved restaurants, their closure, their re-opening, the mandates about masks while sitting or moving in restaurants, etc.

First, some ethnography:
At Teachers College, one could trace various endings over the past two years. The building was reopened to selected personnel, then to all. There shifts in vaccination reporting and checking, etc. And then, on April 20, 2023 we were told that, among related matters:

COVID-19 requirements and campus access:
TC will no longer link any COVID-19 vaccination or testing requirements to campus access.

This was justified as [resulting] “from the ending of the COVID-19 Federal Health Emergency declaration and decreasing COVID-19 cases among TC community members and across New York City.”

All this is to happen on May 12, 2023, thereby closing the epoch that started sometimes in early March 2020 (the actual starting point could be considered either the first message about the “coronavirus” [it had not yet been named “COVID-19], or the actual physical closing of the buildings when “do not enter” signs were pasted over the doors).

The TC announcement went to every one in the “community” (faculty, staff, students, etc.) and did not cause much of a ripple. When I mentioned it in class someone retorted that she got the message on the same day one of our her friend tested positive. To persist on my theme, governors can re-open restaurants, the virus continues its life career—if viruses are “alive.” something that appears to be controversial among the authoritative scientific experts. As these same experts do tell us: whether alive or not, the virus is with us for the foreseeable future.

So “SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the Covid-19 disease” was noticed by human beings in the Fall 2019 and remains with us while “Corona” (as culture epoch) started in February or March 2020 and has been ending to the point when many now use the past tense when talking about “COVID-19,” the current, common, and apparently uncontroversial, label.

And now, to play at anthropology:
• Given that Corona has obviously been a (social) construction (by and for about the whole 9 billion human beings).
• And given that Corona will continue to evolve in narratives and other forms of discourse (art, policy, science, etc.).
Can we also say that the virus was constructed?

Both current speculations about the origin of the virus involve human activity and complex, though quite different, actor-networks. As some tell it, perhaps a worker in the local lab did not clean up quite well and carried the virus out of the lab. This leads to question about why the lab was making viruses, why it was located where it was, who funded it, etc…. Alternatively, perhaps a merchant bought an infected animal from some hunter and then sold it to some customer. This hypothesis would then lead to investigations into the traditions (cultures) that make some wild animals edibles “there and then” (though they might not be “elsewhere and elsewhen”). And then, in either case, the spread of the virus depended on much that is human (airplanes, policies, etc.).

And yet … the virus itself is not human. Humans cannot talk to it, threaten it, regulate it, teach it—or any of the other acts that human can perform on each other. At most humans can attempt to control each other in the hope that, in that fashion, they might control the virus. And this brings us back to governors issuing mandates on partially resistant populations.

In other words, human beings, when confronted to the dangerous “thing-ness” of an object in their experience will do something (culture) but the thing remains, possibly hidden but always susceptible to re-emergence … as the next virus will do.

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on 'culture', on America, on community, on identity

While crossing Manhattan on 14th Street

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Half a century ago, when I searched for a catchy title for the book building on my dissertation (1972), I came up up with Americans Together (1978). I am not sure what I then meant by “Americans”—though I am sure that, from the time when I proposed the research (in 1970), I had been looking for a “pattern” or “structure” as I interpreted Benedict, Lévi-Strauss, or Dumont, to have done. But I may also have accepted that the plural “AmericanS” somewhat referred to a plurality of individuals. And thus I fell to American (patterned) common sense.

As far as I can check, I never used the plural noun again, though I continued to use “American” as an adjective and “America” as a proper, always singular, noun—and I persist. And, now, after many years teaching Garfinkel, Latour, Lave, and those inspired by them, it came to me that I should have titled the book “Together in America” which would in fact had fit better the subtitle to the book: “Structured diversity in a Midwestern town.”

This subtitle directly stated the main ethnographic point of the book that, while Paw Paw, Michigan, (“Appleton” in the book) may appear indistinguishable from thousand of such towns, it was internally (as I am sure all other such towns are) extremely varied religiously, ideologically, generationally (and probably also by all the most commonly invoked 21st century categories of race, gender, ethnicity that also appeared in my fieldnotes). But, to me then and now, the more interesting internal variability was in the organization of settings where people came together and manipulated identity symbols (as we would currently say in anthropology). One example that made it into the book is the moment when “ethnic background” briefly emerged during a round of introductions when I first partied with a group of friends of my age (1978: Chapter 4). When narrating (!) my (lived?) experiences in Paw Paw, I like to embroider my travels through the town, on a Sunday, when I started (dressed in a suit and tie) at a Sunday School then service at the Methodist or Presbyterian church (where/when all men wore suits and tie), before driving to the apartment of friends (where I was told to take off my tie), and ending the day at a Catholic mass (where the congregation was dressed in everything from dirty blue jeans to fur coats). Depending on I am not sure what, I was sometime positioned as a high school exchange student, an awkward young male with a funny accent, a doctoral students at the University of Chicago, etc. (including other things I may not have been directly told, though I remember several attempts to test my “orientation”). Eventually I was also struck by the diversity of politico/economic interests as I explored the many governing board regulating this or that aspect of everyday. This was most salient perhaps in the school board when town’s people and farmers clashed over taxation, curriculum, etc. only apparently coming together for ritual performances (football games, graduation ceremonies, etc.).

All this came back to me as I day dreamed walking across Manhattan on 14th street. From 8th Avenue to Avenue C, I crossed what some sociologists of the Chicago school called, a century ago, “ecological zones” (a concept for understanding cities it might be worth resurrecting). Each of these zones stood out to me mostly because of variation in density of human occupation, presentation of self in dress and demeanor, not to mention phenotype and age. A very much not exhaustive list might include:

– prosperous and/or glitzy stores and businesses (particularly between 8th and Park Avenues)

– crowds of young adults probably related to the nearby universities (particularly around Union Square)

– starting on 3rd avenue street, a sharp drop in human density and then vendors spreading their miscellaneous used wares (“junk” the young adults would probably label them) on blankets laid out on the pavement in front of no longer glitzy stores. The vendors appeared mostly black and from China, as well as older.

It is certainly the case that detailed ethnographic work on that street would correct some of these initial very superficial characterizations. The only point I want to make at this moment is that, as I walked, I came close to many many “different” polities (“communities”) (re-)producing themselves in some contact with others. Whether I also came close to various “cultures” or whether I remained in “America” throughout is the question.

I finally reached my ostensible goal where a small band of musicians performed for a small audience in an East Village park. There, I was a very peripheral participant in this polity as the guest of one of the musician. As the anthropologist always fascinated with symbolic displays (identity markers?), I noted musical styles (“misc jazz/brass and Mambembé” as I was told), dress (“informal” in, to simplify, the “East Village” styles), phenotype, age, sex (actually easier to “see” than gender) and other such matters easily accessible to a casual observer. More on this in a future post, and the human complaint that artificial humans (AI) often find it difficult to identify a (wo)man as (wo)man.
I was also struck about how well organized it all was. The performances were complex and obviously well rehearsed even in their improvisational moments. And then, as I moved with my friend to another park for another performance with another set of fuller participants, In that park, various polities of performers and their audiences performed in ways that were both internally organized and externally coordinated with each other within a more encompassing polity (“HONK NYC!”) separate but dependent to the administration of New York City through its “Department of Parks and Recreation.”

Also, and most probably NOT organized by any of these polities, but still delicately coordinated with all other people together in the park, were two almost caricaturely tall blond young men throwing a football in long arcs next to and sometimes over the other assemblies.

The question that started this is: what is a cultural anthropologist to do with all this? Many (most/) anthropologists might tell me to drop “culture” (and “America”). My answer is that, as I walked and day dreamed about the multiplicities (and I only sketched a tiny number) I got close to, I remained convinced that all the people who found themselves together on that day were doing so at a particular time, in a particular way (both internally and in relation to each other), with particular affordances that both constrained them (and disabled them) and opened possibilities (both for reproduction and transformation), and that these particularities can be modeled and so that any science of humanity (anthropo-logy) needs a concept that might just as well be labeled “culture.”

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on anthropological theorizing, pattern, structure, system

on pattern recognition by humans and machines

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September 16, 2022

“Pattern recognition”: inevitable though fragile (and necessarily dis-…ing?) productions on which to base some future action—or not.

Two recent pieces in the New York Times triggered my anthropological imagination. The first is an enthusiastic review of recent developments in “Artificial Intelligence” (“We Need to Talk About How Good A.I. Is Getting,” Kevin Roose, Aug. 24, 2022). Would you believe that you can ask, in text, for a “Black-and-white vintage photograph of a 1920s mobster taking a selfie” and you get an image that makes sense, to an aging professor and apparently many others in 2022? Roose’s piece mentions in passing that AI generated representations could be politically problematic. They have already been. A day earlier, another piece had been published that gives a sense of what can happen next when AI is let loose. That piece was titled “Capitol Drops ‘Virtual Rapper’ FN Meka After Backlash Over Stereotypes.” The piece was about “a virtual ‘robot rapper’ powered partly by artificial intelligence, who boasts more than 10 million followers on TikTok” (Joe Coscarelli, Aug. 23, 2022). As some critics wrote the robot rapper is built on “an amalgamation of gross stereotypes, appropriative mannerisms that derive from Black artists, complete with slurs infused in lyrics.”

In other words the critics recognized the image as that of a Black rapper and thereby accredited that the AI algorithms had indeed caught what in other AI contexts is called a “pattern.” This recognition confirms Roose’s evaluation about “how good A.I. is getting.” Whether this pattern should be used to produce something (not so) new is another thing altogether.

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consciousness and knowledge, Governing power, on ignorance, on language and expression

on the grounds of instruction into grammaticality

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… scholars and other shamans might be as puzzled as two senior professors when they read the title of an edited volume by de Oliveira et al.  It goes: Multiliteracies in English as an additional language classrooms (2021).  As members of the audience addressed by this volume, they wondered whether there was a typo someplace, whether the title was ungrammatical or proof of bad editing, whether it was an attempt to Joycean play or a form of Jabberwocky.

Then a less senior professor pointed out that “English as an additional language” is to be treated as a package as it is the current proper way to say what used to be said as “English as a second language.” Thus the title should be parsed as “Multiliteracies in EAL classrooms” and is thus fully grammatical. It is also indexes that the authors are up to date in expected academic education research writing about the topic. The whole thing is normal and orderly and it allows for two senior professors to be shown ignorant and in need of an EAL teacher. And it also allows for a suspicion that they were being somewhat disorderly and in need of instruction into the appropriate.

Given that the two professors pride themselves on their work on literacy, language, culture, power, etc., they could not just stand corrected. They also had to wonder what exactly is grammatical in English and how it is established. If, as someone quipped a long time ago, a “language” is a dialect with an army—as well as schools of education, school teachers and other institutions in charge of publicizing the proper or normal (orthography, word order, pronominal usage, etc.), then one may wonder how this army exactly does its work of ordering the normal when so many keep disordering it. If, as another great man once said “here comes everybody,” what will they do when they arrive?

So, I write:
“Ignorant education research one university faculty member blog writer says…” that he expects this string of nouns to be taken as acceptable, proper, normal (as well as pedantic) and does convey that “one writer of blogs who is member of the faculty of a university famous for its research is also ignorant …” I keep seeing such strings in the titles of articles in the New York Times, as well as in scholarly publications. Stringing nouns for titles must thus be considered “grammatical” in English. However, it is essential to note that it is not grammatical in the other “language” I “know” well: in French where, for example, “faculty member” must be rendered as “membre de la faculté” (and NOT as “faculté membre”). It is also essential to note that people with decades of speaking English (one who got to it as an “additional” language, and one for whom it has been the only one) can be puzzled by such strings.
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consciousness and knowledge, of Corona

Experiencing life and constructing a local “next”

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If a “lived experience” is one that one has, personally, experienced, then I have never experienced COVID (the virus). I have experienced Corona (the cultural epoch) but, to the extent that I have never been sick from the virus, and have not even ever tested positive (so far?), then the virus is something I only know through conversational and textual means: I have talked a lot about it with many people. I have read a lot about it. And I have written about it. I have experienced the pressure to explain myself when (not) wearing a mask. In contrast, these past few months I (lived) experienced open heart surgery or, more precisely, the weeks leading up to it, and the recuperation after it: anesthesia does make it impossible to experience the surgery itself!

Various authorities requested that I be tested and this has happened such a number of times that I have lost count. Those requests (actually orders) concern, in my analysis, Corona as cultural fact. As for the virus, I’d say that my experience is, at most, “vicarious” or, in jargon, “entextualized.” I do know people who had close relatives who died. I do know people who were seriously sickened. I also know people who tested positive and showed (“experienced”?) no symptoms. But this “knowledge” is conversational—that is I was told about these cases but did not have to deal with them personally
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Musings about possibilities in the scholarly life of a professor of education and anthropologist