The new contexts of anthropology as a discipline, at the global level of the professional organization, and at the local levels of the Programs in Anthropology at Teachers College,  require a re-presentation, that is a new presentation, to their public of what anthropologists do.  As Goffman taught us, as well as generations of anthropologists and sociologists, such  “presentations of self” in the everyday lives of our practices, will have a feedback effect on these very practices.  Resisting these transformations may be honorable but it may also be counter-productive.  Alternative presentations preserve the fundamental contributions of the discipline to the world and indeed allow for the reconstitutions of these contributions in an otherwise hostile environment.  This post develops an earlier one: “Potential student to TC anthropologists: what is anthropology good for?”

In general, anthropologists have been at the forefront of the argumentation that, precisely, “selves,” including disciplines, are the difficult, temporary and temporal, products of complex social and historical processes that are revealed in the very struggles to produce and control these selves.  This kind of argumentation allowed for a continuing renewal of the peculiar contribution of anthropology to political (and policy) debates, starting with the representations of the then-often-labeled “primitives” by the first generations of scholars in England, France, and the United States.  That the research that produced these representations was often commissioned by colonial administrations in their service does not mean that their contributions was not 1) quite different from what other disciplines produced; 2) often challenging to usual representations; and 3) foundations on which subsequent work could be built, even as the people who commission our work remain involved, more or less directly in State matters.  The same things can be said about the second generation of work by anthropologists as they began to address systematically what they noticed in the then-often-labeled “under-developed” worlds, from Japan to Indonesia to Africa, the Americas, etc, in the contexts of debates about development, independence from colonial powers, the constitution of new states and international agencies (United Nations, World Bank, International Money Fund).  The same struggles characterize the third generation of work by anthropologists when they focused their attention, as they did not have much choice to do, on the United States and other now often labeled “neo-liberal,” “global,” “etc.” worlds.  The attention of our publics shifted to matters of poverty, social stratification, mental health, disability, etc., and anthropologists entered the conversations.  Often, again, their work was coopted by State concerns and again, often, their work stood as challenges to the more politically acceptable representations.

Our students will conduct what I imagine as the fourth generation of our collective work.  They, I am quite sure, will face the now classic dilemmas of participation: does addressing current concerns, often when funded by agents of the dominant States, lead to simple cooptation? Or is it withdrawal that ends up conspiring with dominant representations that will proceed in our absence?  As I see it, at Teachers College, for the past 50 years, anthropologists have chosen the risks of cooptation over the risks of absence.  In the process all have challenged, in one way or another, the more usual representations.  They have addressed drug policies, the contexts and impacts of HIV, bilingual education, the implicatures of school assessments, the complexities of literacy programs, among other matters often developed by our students.  We intend to continue this work.  We just need to re-present this work given the evolution of the positions and concerns of the States that attempt to control us.  Matters that we thought settled have to be addressed again (for example our relationships to applied sociobiology–see my “Taking on (socio-)biologists“).  Other matters need to be addressed differently (for example our relationships to fellow social sciences–see my “Where do (psycho/socio)- metricians fit?“).  And, I am sure, new matters are emerging that will only become obvious in retrospects.

Our work is cut out for us.

Two of my favorite students, Michael Scroggins and (Dr.) Gus Andrews, have been manning (peopling? personing?) the defenses of cultural anthropology against Razib Khan (who “has an academic background in the biological sciences and has worked in software”).  One of Khan’s blog is published under the banner of Discover magazine, the popular science magazine I subscribe to (and which I have quoted in my blog).

Khan once wrote that “I want to aid in spreading the message [cultural anthropology] should be extirpated from the academy” (in bold no less).  Scroggins countered with a broad side against Khan now countered by Khan (and the exchanges continue).  Most of the commenters to Khan’s reply support him against “the anthropologists” except for Andrews who has joined the defense.  Not surprisingly, the issue has been simplified to a question of “believing,” or not, in genetic determinism.  Scroggins more subtle arguments about the production of knowledge have been, mostly, left aside–and particularly the production of anthropological knowledge which, perhaps like the production of biological knowledge, might be left to anthropologists (why not claim the scientific autonomy that is generally granted to the other sciences?).

I have been encouraging my students to engage the (socio-)biologists like Boas did more than a century ago.  Most of our publics are now hostile (including in the social sciences), and many of our colleagues have retreated unhelpfully from modernity into (literary) critical ivory towers.  Particularly to the extent that we might want to influence policy, quite like other scientists have done, then we must be on the offensive.  But how? With what weapons?

When I was in graduate school the University of Chicago, from 1968 to 1972, we laughed when we heard that some of our faculty, when conducting fielwork in the 1930s or 1940s, had been asked to take with them calipers and other anthropometric tools used by the first Boasians to counter the dominant socio-biological theories of the late 19th century.  We were told that none of them ever used these tools. I, personally, have never held them in my hands.  By our advisers’ graduate student times, the arguments had been won and we, a generation later, did not have to become experts in biological theory.

We were wrong.

And we dismissed, with superior shrugs, the publication of E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The new synthesis (1975).  Marshall Sahlins did tackle it (1976) but some of us thought that it was not even worth the effort.  Sociobiology would die of its own.

We were naive, as well as wrong.

And then we went foolish when some of us took literally the metaphor “culture is text.” This metaphor could be used to focus our attention to the detail of semiotic processes, to the very practical act of “writing” (composing, producing) a career, to the production of culture and, indeed, its historical evolution from inescapable pasts to unpredictable futures.  Texts, when they are inscribed in history, are anything but abstractions.  Take the moment when a few human beings became lactose tolerant and spread this tolerance across northern Europe and, later, the Americas.  This development in the history of humanity, granting for the moment the underlying genetic biology, is a significant challenge to any of the disciplines concerned with what makes homo sapiens different.  It implies that biological evolution of the species has not stopped; and it suggests that some events in human history can impact this evolution in unimaginable ways.  Who could have predicted, 10,000 years ago, that the bunch of probably quite sick people who had to drink milk would be so successful, 10,000 years later, that they would impose their language (heavily transformed on the basis of linguistic processes) onto about all human beings over the globe?

Archeologists will have to weigh in.  Did the human beings who moved into the plains of Russia where they had to survive on milk did so because of wanderlust (?)? Were they pushed out by people with better weapons and military tactics?  What sort of kinship systems did they produce?  What political, religious, and moral systems did they develop?  Actually, we may have some information about this by looking, precisely, at the texts that some of these people left us 5,000 or 6,000 later in the Avesta and the Rigveda.

We do need to take the (socio-)biologists very seriously.  I suggest we not do so as political adversaries or on ideological grounds.  This has not worked.  It will not work.  And it would not have worked for Boas if he had not taken the (socio-)biologists with their own tools, with a deep knowledge of their discipline, as well as of the disciplines that would demonstrate the limits of their attempts to deal with human behavior from their perspective.  Which is why, I believe, Boas insisted that anthropologists also understand archeology (history), linguistics (semiotics), and evolutionary biology.  Of course, he insisted that we take on (socio-)biologists through ethnography, that is through the demonstration that what is most distinctive about humanity is not that, for example, we are driven by sexual instincts to mate and reproduce, but that, as Lévi-Strauss summarized, human beings distinguish between parallel and cross-cousins.  Move forward and wonder how the New York Metropolitan area, in the 1990s, would produce both Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift?

Then we can move the conversations with the audiences of (socio-)biologists from the realm of biological abstractions to the realm of, precisely, those facts that are both glaringly human and inexplicable, in their actual detail, in biological terms.  Not that biology is not involved, but that, as Lévi-Strauss once wrote, it has been transformed into something else plausibly labeled “culture” about which (socio-)biologists can say as little as we can say about their field.

My (M’I) experience(s) of the Colloquium

I have written about participants’ “experience” of moments, settings, scenes, such as–say–a seminar when first and second year doctoral students in anthropology present their work and discuss it in front of program faculty.  At Teachers College, what is known as “The Colloquium” is famous among all who participate, or have participated, as “quite an experience.”

The faculty like to tell students, during discussions of difficult passages in Durkheim, Marx, or Weber, to imagine how this or that point might apply to, precisely, this colloquium in which they are participating.  Now, how would one phrase a research question about the colloquium to address the possibility, attested by anecdotal reports in bars and corridors, that it is indeed “quite an experience?”

A good student might ask “how do students (faculty) experience the colloquium?”  and then spend a lot of time writing about the room, the demographics (gender/age/ethnicity/etc.) of student and faculty, the biographies of some, the rules spelled out by the faculty, etc.  At the end of the presentation of all this information, a faculty member might ask: what does this information tell us about the students’ experience?  Another one might quip that it depends on what you mean by ‘experience’ and how the question is asked–given that there might be at least two not quite commensurable ways of understanding ‘experience’, asking research questions about it, and then using particular techniques to answer the question. Still another might ask what the distinction is.

Very briefly, what might wonder what are the matters that trigger an experience, a wonder that might be phrased as “what do participants experience in the colloquium?” with answers such as “some participants evaluate performance, other participants are evaluated.”

One might also wonder what is the personal experience of the colloquium, a wonder that might be phrased in the same way but with answers of the type “some are anxious, some are bored, some are angry” leading to questions differentiating participants with answers such as “more women are anxious than men” which of course would be misleading given that in recent years there have been very few men among the students while all faculty are men.  So we would be led to divide the participants further, adding other categories (such as race, age, citizenship status, etc.).

The possibility of confusion has a long history.  So, when I teach anthropological methods, I always start with the last two pages of Malinowski’s classic introduction to The Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1961 [1922]).  Malinowski starts with a  list of everything an ethnographer should collect:

1. The organization of the tribe, and the anatomy of its culture must be recorded in firm, clear outline. The method of concrete, statistical documentation is the means through which such an outline has to be given.
2. Within this frame, the imponderabilia of actual life, and the type of behavior have to be filled in. They have to be collected through minute, detailed observations, in the form of some sort of ethnographic diary, made possible by close contact with native life.
3. A collection of ethnographic statements, characteristic narratives, typical utterances, items of folk-lore and magical formulae has to be given as a corpus inscriptionum, as documents
(1961 [1922]: 24)

This is a list the Foucault of The Order of Things (1970 [1966]) would appreciate in the wonderful arbitrariness of its distinctions.  But Malinowski then proceeds to tell us that all this is only a step towards “The final goal [which] is to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world” (1961 [1922]: 25).  This phrase has had a famous history in Geertz’s discussion (1976) which led him to the skepticism of the end of his career when he despaired of anthropologists ever getting at this “point of view” which he understood as a personal, though public, matter.  He had pushed Weber (not to mention Margaret Mead and most second generation Boasians) into an impasse.  Almost by definition, particularly given our current understanding of the limits of linguistic or symbolic expression, personal experiences are unreachable.

I agree with this and it is one of the reasons why I have more and more systematically presented my work as not concerned with something that psychologists may still struggle to get at, but which I am convinced no extent ethnographic technique can reach.  But I do not agree with my “post-modernist” peers on what is to follow for anthropology.  Malinowski, like Boas, and then many others in sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, and indeed anthropology, have kept telling us that there are other matters of human activity that are reachable.  Moreover, precisely because of what we have learned about the historical consequences of public symbolic expression, we have no choice but to pay very close attention to such expression, as it unfolds in time and space—and to challenge each other to ever greater rigor.

To summarize, provocatively perhaps, “my” experiences of the colloquium are not “m’I” experiences.  That is any experience one might plausibly attach to Hervé Varenne’s “self” (in G. H. Mead’s sense) or “identity” (in what I take to be the most common sense of the term these days), are at best “interpretations,” classifications into a culture or discourse.  M’I experiences are un-speakable and so, as McDermott and Varenne have said, we should turn aside and look for what others do to ‘I’.

[This is something of a development on my December 28, 2010, post]

One corollary of the systematic doubt about the epistemological status of any “it” for social science inquiry, is that it makes it hard to state simply what a project is “about.” There are at least two aspects to this corollary.  Both are matters of practice, but within different polities (communities).

I may return to the first of these polities.  For now, to those outside our immediate field of disciplinary practice, we say that our project is about the “it” of their concern.  Foundations, policy makers, informants, etc., can be told that we are studying “autism in Queens” or “adolescent health in Harlem.”  We are not dissembling when we say this, even as we proceed on the basis of the critique of the status of the phenomenon such statements transform into objects.  Actually, it is only because we proceed in term of the critique that we can actually contribute to our ethical/political responsibilities outside our own practice.

So, when we study ‘autism’ (as we say to those whom we thereby place outside our disciplinary polity), we start with any practices that are matter of factly relevant to some practices that are usually packaged as aspects of autism, but we do not limit ourselves to these, nor do we necessarily weigh practices the way they are usually weighed.

The preceding paragraphs are a summary of my previous two posts (On Following Indexes… , Recapturing Phenomena).  But neither addressed something that has become more salient as I have mentioned in various settings that I am directing research on “autism, health, and information technologies” as one project, or “settings for education in Harlem” (not to mention the dissertations I am sponsoring on indigeneity in Vancouver child welfare, women seminary in Iran, Bangladeshi in Detroit, political representation in Belfast, etc.).  How could all these matters be addressed together?  Throughout my career at Teachers College, I have greatly enjoyed working with students on what can also appear as a very miscellaneous multiplicity of topics.  But when I approach someone with a request for support, then I find myself challenged: What is my field of expertise?  “Anthropology” in most professional or policy setting is not much of an answer, or one that might lead to polite redirection to those who fund “anthropology.”  By grounding myself at Teachers College, I accept the responsibility to contribute to the understanding of issues of importance to the more encompassing of our polities (and not only national ones).  Which is this issue (some ‘it’)?  It is not easy to be convincing when I claim expertise about social processes of human everyday life even as I refute the reality of any of the ‘it’s around which expert authority is usually organized.

Trying to take this into account, here is part of the message I recently sent to the “Director of Sponsored Programs” at Teachers College.  I wrote:

my working group has received two small grants (one from the Provost Investment Fund, and one from Google) to explore aspects of informal education about matters of major life crises (autism, adolescent health, information technologies) when people have to figure out who has authority, expertise, resources, and then corral their understanding to organize their future.

(Note that I am making us a “working group” for TC purposes since the Center is not approved…) .

This is an initial attempt to state simply (I hope) where I am placing my expertise: “Education into matters of major life crises.”  “Major life crises” becomes the index to phenomena that have the property of breaking the routine and, I postulate, triggering what I call “education” (figuring out constraints, possibilities, and constituting futures given conditions and bricolage).  If ‘totemism’ revealed itself to hide a very general human process of constituting paradigmatic correlations among what Western classifiers had conceived as separate “domains,” then autism may reveal itself as just another case of the “world” (the body, ecology, social structure, symbolization, etc.) imposing itself on our consciousness and requiring a transformation in our ongoing practices.

In other words, for those to whom this will make sense, I am generalizing Garfinkel’s concern with disruptions, not only as a tool that reveal what people do to maintain an order, but also as the ongoing possibility that order will not be maintained.  We all work hard at driving down a highway so that we can leave it unscathed.  But accidents do occur.  What happens next?

This is the second in a series of reflections about ethnographic methodology given theoretical critiques of the initial constructing of the ‘it” which we investigate. In the first, I mused about what to do when we come to doubt that this “it” might be a place (the Trobriand Islands, County Clare in Ireland). If we are not sure that there are places “there”, then where do we go? Geertz summarized this doubt, but then appeared to suggest that the solution was in substituting what might be most charitably labeled an ideal-type as the ‘object’—for example “colonialism.” But Lévi-Strauss had already obliquely shown the dangers involved in that step when he wrote about “totemism” (1963 [1962]) at a time when anthropologists had come to doubt whether totemism was any kind of “it.”

I remembered the book as I advised Jeff Schiffer in his struggles with “indigeneity.” Undoubtely, there are many people in Canada and elsewhere around the world who are quite sure this indigeneity is an “it” of some sort. And, to this extent, indigeneity is an “it” of precisely that sort: it is an object around which political conversations are organized, institutions as reconstituted, careers are made. But that sort of what I have called “cultural facts” are awkward matters to investigate. The question being: how do I know I am looking at what I am interested in investigating? Is this (a regulatory text about ways of properly referring to some people) and instance of that (indigeneity)?

This is the problem Lévi-Strauss addresses in the first two chapters of Totemism. He starts with a provocative sentence in the context of much that interests students in anthropology:

Totemism is like hysteria, in that once we are persuaded to doubt that it is possible arbitrarily to isolate certain phenomena and to group them together as diagnostic signs of an illness, or of an objective institution, the symptoms themselves vanish or appear refractory to any unifying interpretation. (1963 [1962]: 1)

Initially, students come with interests like “identity,” “nationalism,” “autism,” “indigeneity.” They immediately bump into the problem of “definition” and Max Weber is not much of a help. Lévi-Strauss might be more of a help but this is not quite obvious at first sight since he compares his topic to something that has been so discredited as an object that even the phenomenal symptoms appear to have vanished. Nationalism, autism, indigeneity have not been so discredited (yet?), but the method requires that we suspend belief.

If we do, suspecting that the verisimilitude of these objects is the product of what Lévi-Strauss calls “cultural conditions,” what do we do next? Following Lévi-Strauss’s argument could be a starting point.

The first thing to notice is that Lévi-Strauss is embedding two arguments. The first argument starts with a postulate: that totemism (hysteria) is a historical product so that understanding what happened to make it real, and then un-real, requires a diachronic account of the conversation (my word). The embedded argument that allows for the rest of the book is that the conversation was about something, that is about some phenomena, that remains.

The first chapter is, essentially, a review of the literature that destroyed (we would now say “deconstructed”) the idea that there was some institution that coalesced 1) a social element; 2) a psychological element; 3) a ritual element (Lévi-Strauss’s summary of Rivers 1963 [1962]: 8).

The second chapter is a reconstruction starting with a postulate: “certain phenomena, arbitrarily group and ill analyzed … [are] nevertheless worthy of interest (1963 [1962]: 15). The rest of the chapter is an introduction to what became known as a peculiar form of structural methodology which has proven to be altogether a dead end (at least to the extent that about no one in anthropology used it as Lévi-Strauss proposed it).

What remains is Lévi-Strauss’s insistence that there was some phenomenon some where, and that the ethnographic activities that inscribed this phenomenon in observations, field notes, and field reports, were not purely the product of a culturally produced hallucination as bad post-modernism sometimes made it appear. People have been seen associating animals with groups of people. Whether this association is “totemism” or not must not make us doubt our senses radically. But it must refocus our reporting. Sports team in the United States, like political parties, are often named after animals (Marlins, Tigers, Panthers, Lions, Eagles, Bears, etc., as well as donkeys or elephants), and much ritual behavior builds up around these identifications. Where these activities are totemism should not the issue anymore. The issue should be how these identification arise, how they are reconstituted in everyday practice, by whom.

In that perspective, Lévi-Strauss’s conclusion that “totems are good to think, not to eat” (1963 [1962]: 89) makes sense—though I would not put it that way unless we take “thinking” as it has been developed by Michael Cole and his followers as a social process of distributed conversation.

In this perspective, “autism,” like all labels for organizing mental properties, is a bunching of activities. And so is indigeneity, nationalism, learning and, of course, education.

[still more to come…]

Ethnography, like most (all?) scientific methods, must initially proceed on the postulate that there is, over there, some “it” to write about.  All critiques of ethnography have succeeded in demonstrating that, for human phenomena at least, this postulate cannot stand.  Anthropologists, as Geertz put it, do not study villages, they study “in” villages (1973: 22).  The new question that has not been answered: what do they do when they arrive in a village, if they are not going to study “it”?  Geertz suggests they might study “colonial domination” but does not quite explain what that might be. I suspect Geertz would say this is an ideal-type (Weber 1949: 89-95). Parsons might say it is a “formal category.” In either case, the anthropologist is just as much as a loss as when Malinowski or Boas told her to record “everything.”

I venture to say that most anthropologists of the past half-century have, uncomfortably, proceeded “as if” there were some there there, and I have often proceeded in such a matter—or let students proceed as if they would find objects to write about.

We have to find a clear way of stating what one is to do in the absence of a postulated ‘it’.  Many have argued for what they call “multi-sited” ethnographies which, I think, it intended to account for ethnographic activities when the ethnographer moves from one setting to the next in an attempt to … do what?  I have not been convinced.  First, there is the danger that one is led back to the initial problem: what is a “site” that there can be several?  Second, there is the matter of the selection of the sites.  Does one make this selection on the sense that there is a population of sites from which one select a sample?  How else might one proceed?

Working with students this past academic year, planning various research projects, and continuing to think about webs/networks, polities, etc., has re-opened this question with some urgency.  At this moment, I am exploring the following in an expansion of Garfinkel as compounded by Latour.  The fundamental methodological principle is: trust the people to tell you what makes them make differences in their lives and that of others.  The people, too, are trying to figure ‘it’ out, and, in the process ‘constitute’ it.  All we have to do is follow them.  This, of course, is not easy since the constraints on their methods (getting their work acknowledged as relevant to the task in such a way that the task is accomplished) are not those under which we operate (getting work acknowledged as ‘social science research’).  So:

1. start with a salient phenomenon in some population (cohort). That is, start with a local (national) topic of conversation among the population. The more contentious this conversation, the better for our purposes.
   1. NCLB, indigeneity, autism would be such phenomena (to mention ongoing work by Jill Koyama, Jeff Schiffer, Juliette de Wolfe). These are salient in the United States or Canada. They generate a lot of talk. And that talk is easy to find in many setting.
      1. Do not attempt to define, say, “autism” or “indigeneity.” The participants, in their talk might make it look as if it is an ‘it’. You can remain agnostic while accepting that the practices in which the participants engage are very real and produce concrete consequences.
      2. Do not attempt to define the setting either. Again, the people will tell you its boundaries and reach through their own practices.
   2. Postulating a web means that one can start anywhere convenient.
2. The danger is to take this starting point as THE core point. To prevent this, it may be best to start with a setting “obviously” peripheral
3. listen carefully for indexical sequences (e.g. “We are doing this against our better judgement because they make us do it.”)
   1. these sequences are going to be included within larger conversations and will include many indexes to the current conversation and cohort, as well as to other conversations and cohorts.
   2. again, the more contentious the conversation, the more likely it is that linked matters will be indexed.
   3. the indexical sequences need not be verbal though one can start with the verbal as it may be easiest to access
4. follow the indexes to the next convenient setting/moment
5. repeat until exhausted (or a year has passed—though the temporality of such a search needs also to be addressed).

More to come.