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History, critique and developments on an old, difficult, intuition about life

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.

For this aging anthropologist, it all made me nostalgic for the moments, many years ago, when I first read Patterns of culture (Benedict 1934). I was caught in the wonder of what populations of humans beings could make with their world.  This wonder soon established that I would try my hand at patterning the life of people in “downstate Illinois.” I also read some critics of what one might imagine the Zuni or Kwakiutl to have experienced when Benedict was with them (An-Che 1937; Codere 1956). The critics, and many others since, prefigured the debate about patterning a rapper: one might be successful at sketching a pattern, but the pattern can, and maybe always will, caricature. The sketch will overstress certain matters, mask much, and so might mislead audiences. The critique made so much sense as it was generalized in the anthropology that then developed that the word “pattern” all but disappeared, as well as the word that, for a while, replaced it: “structure.”  In 1972 Geertz could still write, quoting Bateson and Mead, of the Balinese as “away” (1972: 413)—a pattern statement. But his concern was with “interpretation” not pattern.  Soon most of those he inspired focused on local experiences, and then on local struggles with whatever powers the people have to deal with. That these struggles might be patterned (that is that a pattern might be sketched), and that the patterning, including by the people involved, all but stopped being something to investigate—though this could change if anthropologists come to wonder how to investigate “systemic” matters (about race, gender, ideology, etc.).

Actually the word “pattern” is already essential in the enormously influential field involved in “pattern recognition.” The field is not quite new as it has been more than 30 years since David Cope started training a computer to recognize patterns in the music of Mozart or Bach so that it could produce new works that untrained listeners might identify as precisely by Mozart or Bach. What is going on here is, I believe, something anthropologists should keep returning to.

To escape the politics of the moment look at the picture of the mobster taking a selfie. Why would it be that the designers, and the journalists, and me (and probably many others) recognize it as just what was requested: a 1920 mobster? Maybe it is because it looks a little bit like Al Capone. Mobsters have of course been virtually virtually represented in similar ways in many movies of the past century. As I understand the AI process, machines watch movies (and representations in other media) and build patterns from these.  The machines conduct what was known as a “formal analysis” (Propp [1927] 1968) that is checked for its success, not on its coherence, but on its ability to produce a text (musical piece, picture) that humans can accept common sensically as just that they asked (a folk tale, a symphony, the picture of a mobster). But of course, human beings do similar tasks on a routine basis. Compare the person asking DALL-E 2 to produce a 1920 mobster to the teacher who asked students to come the next day “dressed as your ethnic identity.” The virtual computer (mother, grandfather, and child) produced this picture of a French man. It satisfied the requirement as the product was recognized as an instance of “French.” Besides recognition this product elicited laughter (and some discomfort). Virtual virtual musicians (i.e. live human beings) do this routinely and, if asked to play a song, say “Happy Brithday,” in the style of Beethoven, Mozart or Bach, they can produce something which will elicit a laughter of recognition and applause—as Nicole Pesce or Nahre Sol can illustrate. Indeed DALL-E 2 performances are also fun for the humans who attempt to make sense out of its non-sense.

Let’s go back to Benedict. As far as I can tell Benedict proceeded like its programmers make DALL-E 2 do: she read many Zuni (Kwakiutl, Japanese) myths, descriptions of rituals, accounts of institutions, and, on this basis, built a representation that those who knew the people somehow recognized as Zuni (Kwakiutl, Japanese), even if they disagreed about some detail or about the dangers of representation. But the problem is more general since it must concern the very status one gives to the “pattern,” its production and reproduction. At this point I usually mention the famous (in my generation) debate between Radcliffe-Brown and Lévi-Strauss on what we might now call the “ontology” of (social) structures. But one should also check Lévi-Strauss’s discussion of Propp (1960) in the context of Latour’s Garfinkelian new explorations of that which make “immortal facts” (patterns that will die as the participants disperse). Closer to home, check Koyama’s critique (2010) of Varenne and McDermott on “the School America builds” (1998).

There is much here to inspire apprentice (virtual virtual) anthropologists to explore new routes to represent perennial issues.

References

Benedict, Ruth   1934     Patterns of culture. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Codere, Helen   1956    “The Amiable Side of Kwakiutl Life: The Potlatch and the Play Potlatch.” American Anthropologist, 58, 2: 334-351

Geertz, Clifford   1972     “Deep play: Notes on the Balinese cockfight.” in The interpretation of cultures.  New York: Basic Books. pp. 412-453.

Geertz, Clifford   1972     “Deep play: Notes on the Balinese cockfight.” in The interpretation of cultures.  New York: Basic Books. pp. 412-453.

Koyama , Jill   2010    Making failure pay: For-profit tutoring, high-stake testing, and public schools. . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Li An-Che   1937    “Zuñi: Some Observations and Queries.” American Anthropologist, 39, 1: 62-76

Propp, Vladimir   [1927] 1968     Morphology of the folktale. Tr. by L. Scott. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Again, C19 may kill you, Corona closes restaurant. (March 28, 2020)

So, what is “Corona”? In my younger days, I might have meant it as the word (Saussurian signifier) pointing to an object (Saussurian signified). This may still be common sense, even after the “ontological turn” in anthropology which, as I understand it, is meant to make us consider the “thing-ness” of a possible entity such as “Corona.” The question is actually a classical one in anthropology: when talking about something social (“social structure”) are we talking about an object or about a model built by observers to manipulate? This was the core of the debate between Radcliffe-Brown and Lévi-Strauss (1953). For Radcliffe-Brown, the matter was common sensical. He had made it simple in a foundational text:

If I visit a relatively stable community and revisit it after an interval of ten years, I shall find that many of its members have died and others have been born; the members who still survive are now ten years older and their relations to one another may have changed in many ways. Yet I may find that the kinds of relations that I can observe are very little different from those observed ten years before. The structural form had changed little. ([1940] 1965: 192-3)

We could translate it into Corona (from my experiences in Wyoming and New York City:

As I drove 2100 miles, none of the people that I met, directly or indirectly in Jackson, Wyoming moved with me. In a small Jackson grocery story, a table had been put between the cashier and the customers to increase the distance between them. In New Rochelle, another such table had been set up in a small bakery. The structural form was the same.

The problem, as Lévi-Strauss saw it, is that the “structural form,” what we might now call the product of a social construction of reality, is actually not accessible to the anthropologist’s senses. Quite before Geertz told us that what anthropologists actually do is “write,” Lévi-Strauss told us that what they must do is make a model (a form of writing) based on observations (including observations of the models participants might have themselves made of their relations). That is the anthropologist-as-scientist must do something similar to what the biologists investigating C19 are doing, that is transform what they get to see using a massively cultural machinery (electron microscope and all that they entail) into something they can manipulate (for example by coloring various parts). In other words, biologists must ‘write’ C19 to manipulate it.

Given all this, what is to be modeled by an anthropologist investigating the social response to C19 that made a total institution (in Goffman’s sense) for 6.8 billion people, and its consequences?

The simple, negative, answer is: I am not going to model a “social structure” or “system.”

Anthropologists of my generation suspected that this was the case and, to a large extent, nobody writes about “social structures” any more, though some are tempted to re-introduce the concept, for example those investigating “structural racism.” Those who know my work also know that I always resisted Geertz’s pessimism (encouraged by Derrida’s ‘deconstructionism’): it is NOT all words. If something is a “social construction,” then it is VERY real, an object that stands in the way of the human beings who bump into it. In my work with McDermott we traced what makes schooling a problem by focusing on the consequences that something made to serve all children so that “none are left behind” actually identifies 50% of all children as “below average,” in need of identification, help and remediation (Successful Failure 1998). Schools in the United States and around the world are determinedly made up (cultural, artificial, arbitrary). McDermott and I summarized all this by writing about the  “School” (capitalized) as a “thing,” made up of ongoing events of some sort, for example the School is set up to weigh human beings on all sorts of statistical scales. How could that be? McDermott and I responded that it had to do with “America” in the School that it made over the past centuries.

Ten years later, Jill Koyama (2010), quite rightly criticized Successful Failure  for not tracing the mechanisms that keep re-producing the School. Pointing at America without specifying the mechanisms is insufficient, and possibly dangerous if it leads some to assume that America is made by … encultured, habituated, Americans.

To make her point, Koyama followed a subset of another one of the major pieces of the many legislations which, over the past centuries were aimed at revitalizing the public school. She looked at the life of “Supplemental Educational Services,” a small part of an act to ensure that “No Child [is] Left Behind.” Rather than “deconstructing” the act, she followed its life for some of those who could not escape it: corporate chiefs, mayors, principals, teachers, parents for whom the act was either resource to use (particularly for the large corporations that were contracted to “deliver” the services) or obstacle to navigate. Koyama was inspired in this analysis by Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory, and particularly by that aspect of the theory that insists that a “network” is never closed. A network is not a system or a structure. A network is not even really a “thing” so much as a set of pathways through which the stuff that happens, particularly government decrees, travel though a population and activate something in them.

In that perspective, “America” is an actor-network. So is Corona in my writing. That is, when I write “Corona can close restaurants,” I am asking social scientists to look for the linkages along which a governor’s decree move, as well as all the sub-decrees that various people in the network have to enact so that this restaurant here at this time is indeed closed.

Modeling Corona (in one or another of its instances) can then allow us to compare it to other such events in human history—say the School.

More on that in another post.

References

Koyama, Jill   2010     Making failure pay: For-profit tutoring, high-stake testing, and public schools.. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude   [1952] 1963     in Structural anthropology, pp. .277-323 Tr. by C. Jacobson and B. Schoepf. New York: Basic Books.

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R.   [1940] 1965     “On Social structure.” in Structure and Function in Primitive Society, pp.188-204 . New York: The Free Press.

1963 .. (First published in 1952)

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