Getting caught (November 11, 2021) I do not remember when I started writing about people getting “caught by” when putting into words what I would have written earlier as “participating in.” When anthropologists observe some people in some setting (family dinner, school classroom, hospital recovery room), they do observe people “participating”–to the extent that all…
Wondering about “the [music] of [human beings for the last 60,000 years]” (October 14, 2021) Recently, I argued, controversially, that one type of “othering” is what distinguishes anthropology from the other sciences concerned with humanity (from neurology to sociology). Anthropology, as disciplined practice, is here to tell “us” that human beings are always potentially “other” to any generalization about them. And a subset of "us"…
Counterfactuals, alt history, and the anthropological veto (September 28, 2021) Over the past few days I discovered some things that were somewhat new for me that led me to reassemble some older stuff. One piece of this stuff is a popular (though perhaps fringe) passion for “what if...” stories. This passion is often credited to Dick’ The man in the…
Saussure, thought, bodies and expression (September 22, 2021) September 20, 2021 Last week, I introduced students to the short passage in Saussure on “linguistic value” ([1915] 1966: 111-122 ). The high point of this passage is the illustration of the segmentation of thought. I had always dismissed the easy and common critique for the apparent mentalism of the…
Modeling acting bureaucracies (August 16, 2021) Balzac was one of the first writers to make bureaucracy the subject of serious fiction, notably ..., where he takes the un-Kafkaesque delight in its lumbering procedures. As he shows in these bureaucratic dramas which are still enlightening today, the monster was not so much malevolent as driven by almost…
A coda on Corona and governmentality (July 11, 2021) A while ago I mused about the ending of the Corona epoch. Many parts of the world are now in transition towards this ending. As usual various governments, and subgovernments, are moving in different ways. Some remove various mandates, keep others, and make it necessary for the governed to figure…
Chimpanzees, culture, diffusion (and ode to joy?) (May 27, 2021) This post was triggered by something in the New York Times about “Julia,” a chimpanzee in a sanctuary in Zambia so named by the observing humans. The humans noticed her sticking blades of grass in her ears and this being adopted by other chimpanzees in the same sanctuary, and then…
Constructing the virus and the defense against it in the Corona epoch (March 10, 2021) On March 5 2020, I left New York City headed for California. I was to give a series of lectures along the way. I had recently read about a virus that was agitating the media. My university announced that “nonessential events ... would be cancelled.” Three days later I did…
On fishes, water, and consciousness (March 1, 2021) It would hardly be fish who discovered the existence of water. (Kluckhohn 1949: 11). If we describe a community as an ecological system we describe it not as the members of that community themselves think of it. They are ignorant of a science of ecology. (Redfield 1960: 32) Could it…
Motivations as causes? (September 3, 2020) Six months into Corona, I “decided” to get tested for the virus I label 'C19.' I had no symptoms but, off the top of my head, I’d say that I was “motivated” by: 1) curiosity about the various steps in the process. 2) my employer’s mandate that I be tested…
More on culturing Corona (July 23, 2020) For many weeks, I was struck by the extent to which media like the New York Times, or governors like Cuomo, justify authoritative acts through a form of what my generation of anthropologists called “functionalism.” They keep telling us that the new order or regulation is the best, and sometime…
on “Corona” (April 14, 2020) 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…
Corona as culture (April 8, 2020) Corona is neither simply juxtaposed to nor simply superposed over COVID-19. In a way, Corona substitutes itself to COVID-19, in another way Corona uses and transforms COVID-19 to realize a synthesis of a higher order. The above is a translation of the best two sentences about culture and humanity ever…
on “Hervé Varenne” as object with properties and affordances (January 25, 2020) This is going to get complex fast, and will take several posts. This is also a development on my last post (1/3/2020) and on earlier others ("On Identity"). It is also a development on matters discussed in the coda “On collaboration” to Educating in Life (2019) as well as a…
A warning to apprentice anthropologists: on “identity” in the New York Times (January 3, 2020) The New York Times is a major adult education institution in the United States. Mostly it educates implicitly but, quite regularly, it gives mini-lectures, in the style of encyclopedia entries. On December 15th, Max Fisher posed the question “What is national identity?” And then he made authoritative statements like a…
On the danger of “indigenous” as an adjective (October 29, 2019) While looking at archives from my childhood, I found what may be my first “ethnographic” text. It is a few paragraphs, written 60 years ago, when I was 11. It was a kind of school report of the type “what did you do last summer?” I had been on a…
Who imagines nations? (October 7, 2019) I remain surprised by the continuing success of Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities ([1983] 1991). When it is was first brought to my attention I thought that there was not much there since, “everybody knew, or should know” that something like “nationalism” was a cultural construction, appearing at a certain point…
on communities with communities (October 1, 2019) For some reason, my anthropological imagination, these past months, has circled around renewed wonder about that reality indexed by words like “community” (polity, unum, cohort, congregation, plenum, etc.). This was first triggered as I tried to distance myself temporarily from what was bringing me to the neurological intensive care unit…
End of community (August 26, 2019) I ended my last post with a sentence about the “body two Others-to-each-other constructed.” In parenthesis I suggested this body might be a ‘community’ or ‘polity’. Usually, I resist the word “community,” and insist on ‘polity’ for analytic reasons. But, in this case, I will start with ‘community’, first because…
On leaning on an absent Other (July 22, 2019) Today [July 9, 2019]] is one of these exceptional days in Aumage with almost steady rain, interspaced with rumbling thunder and sometimes a patch of blue sky. There are always two or three of those among the many bright dry summer days that are what one expects of the region.…
What am I to do with “”memes”“ (January 30, 2018) Should anthropologists pay attention to “memetics” and see if any of it may be useful? Have those in that field reached the point Benedict got to when she insisted that a borrowed bit would be both transformed and transformative as it got borrowed—thereby her concern with “configurations” and “culture”? Or…
on authority, arising, sequentially (November 27, 2017) I paraphrase one of my favorite Garfinkel quotes as “when you screw around, then you get instructed” (2002: 257). The implied scene is familiar: a post office, a line, someone who enters and does not get to the “end” of the line. Maybe that person is somehow handicapped, a child,…
On culture, free speech, and America (October 31, 2017) Once upon a time culture was everything, even the kitchen sink (Tylor [1871] 1958). And then culture became a “value-concept” (Weber [1897] 1994) or a “system of symbols” (Schneider 1980). And then the word all but disappeared from serious theorizing, to be replaced by words like “epoch,” “episteme,” habitus, paradigm,…
This is ‘NOT play’ (April 25, 2017) NOT play does not have rules. It is about making rules, and then not following them whether for resistance of the assertion of power. This is serious.
On the importance of reading footnotes (April 17, 2017) Those who know my work know that I am a great admirer of the historian Lawrence Cremin whom I happily coopt not only as an anthropologist, but also as an anthropologist ahead of his time even as he channeled the Boasian tradition he was taught at Columbia while a graduate…
Anthropology and the feral: some further considerations about sequentiality and transformation (January 14, 2017) McDermott and I complained about Bourdieu, Foucault, et al., but more for their understanding of the processes of reproduction rather than for taking reproduction as inevitable—even though, as anthropologists, we should have known better. Even the most incessant work at reproduction will always fail. Even the most pampered of kittens…
Wondering about the feral (December 6, 2016) Michael Scroggins, in one of drafts of the dissertation he will soon defend, brought out something I do not remember any anthropologist ever mentioned: we all easily use the distinction wild/domesticated. But we do not write about the feral. (I count on Scroggins to tell me more about his sources...).…
What might Chomsky make of Halloween and Santa Claus? (November 7, 2016) A few times over the past week, I had to face the reality that Lévi-Strauss is mostly summarized as being concerned with Man rather than human beings, with deep Human Nature rather than the messiness of culture (Geertz [1967] 1973). Lévi-Strauss, it would seem, is just another Cartesian. I must…
Culture: Inheritance vs. islanding? (October 31, 2016) This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of one of many field defining papers by Clifford Geertz: “Religion as a cultural system” ([1996] 1973). Last week, I asked students to read it. As I prepare the class, I saw again a quote I had marked but saw in…
Forms, affordances, innovation: the making of a cultural fact (August 8, 2016) To paraphrase from my favorite quote from Lévi-Strauss on culture (1969 [1947]: 4), the Sagrada Familia stands as “a synthesis of a new order,” only possible because “culture ... uses [nature].” I take this to say, of the Sagrada Familia to exemplifies, that reality is not constructed as much as…
Peirce on habit: another ancestor for normal anthropology? (April 12, 2016) One must start, not with the apparently habituated adult, but with the suffering (or playing) body amazed at what it has to endure and indexing in the here and now where we should start our investigation of what others did, nor are now doing, to make it suffer (and, in…
On anthropological impotence (March 11, 2016) Experiments by Professor Shafir at Princeton and others have documented how poverty itself leads people to make self-destructive decisions, perhaps by forcing them to focus attention on satisfying immediate needs to the exclusion of other considerations. (New York Times, February 24, 2016) The American culture of the “culture of poverty”…
On the (mis-)use of anthropology (February 22, 2016) (Nimuendajû 1942: 17)Last week, I heard a most interesting paper by Oren Pizmony-Levy and Gita Steiner-Khamsi about, of all things, school reform in Denmark! It may seem strange that I resonated to such a topic.[Ftn 1] But it should not appear so: in graduate school, I also resonated to reading…
“Contingent Configuration of Resources” (culture?) (February 11, 2016) Last Monday, Stanton Wortham gave a wonderful talk on his work in Norristown, Pennsylvania. There he got to know a first generation of Mexicans moving to the town for all sorts of wonderful, deeply human, reasons and making something new with much that was old–including, most recently, the very history…
An actor-network of consequential consociates: applying anthropology to one’s personal case (December 7, 2015) In this post, I am doing something somewhat different from the usual. I am maintaining the order I think I have established (at least as I look at it, retrospectively): this is an experiment in anthropological theorizing and teaching. But I am delving further into parts of my life that…
on maintaining order in difficult spaces (December 2, 2015) After 40+ years of American Anthropological Association meetings, I cannot pretend that they are not familiar. I registered in the same booths the association has used for many years. And as I walked I recognized sounds, topics, physical styles, rhythms. My own rhythms, by now, are anything but not familiar. …
On not defining (October 28, 2015) What is a book about when it is titled The elementary structures of kinship (Lévi-Strauss 1967 [1949])? For about thirty years, and during my graduate years at the University of Chicago, it was about “elementary structures” and we debated endlessly what that might mean. But I also took courses from…
On the limits of human rationality when confronted to human practical intelligence (September 7, 2015) Negotiating the institutionalization of robots will not be a rational process, but one more akin to driving through a four way stop, and, for a few seconds, making a uniquely adequate and multiply arbitrary immortal social fact (culture).
On the arbitrary and the contingent (June 21, 2015) I should probably say something like: any event lived with (inescapable condition arising in temporality) can be approached both as: 1) A contingency requiring repair, if not change in orderings. and as 2) An ordered step within a scripted sequence.
What about these schools in Port-au-Prince? (June 2, 2015) This may have been my second surprise after I landed in Port-au-Prince and took a walk between the Hotel Olufson and the Champs de Mars: what about all these schools? The walk down Rue Capois is about 15 blocks. There are about one school every other block. There are at…
Crossing the street in Port-au-Prince (May 28, 2015) So what do people do at major intersections when several avenue intersect with none of the external help one might expect? They proceed, with care I am sure !
Instruction, uncertainty, and meta-pragmatic repairing in medical education (April 29, 2015) At some point in their career, people who are moving towards being acknowledged as Mds enter what is known there as a “clerkship” where they will be, for the first time, authorized to care for a patient, under the gaze of doctors and nurses with various experiences and authority. So…
What some anthropologists who reply did, on a Thursday in February 2015 (April 2, 2015) In the first few minutes of the conference, Ray McDermott put it this way: “when someone says stupid or mean things about kids, I want them to know I will be at their door the next day.” This, he said, is “reply anthropology.” Replace “kid” with “mothers,” “haitian farmers,” or…
Reply anthropology (?) (March 17, 2015) After the end of the February 26, 2015 conference on “‘Applying’ anthropology,” Jean Lave wondered whether we had not “reified” applied anthropology by discussing what became, discursively, an “it” that stood against another “it” (unmarked, regular, academic, ivory tower anthropology). Reification is of course the trap all critical discourses fall…
Neo-liberal (?) discursive esthetics (February 20, 2015) Whether this job description is “neo-liberal” (as temporarily label for an epoch following “post-modernism”) or not, it will remain a product of 2015. I suspect Teachers College has never had a “Director of Enterprise Applications Service” and that it will never have another one (as classifications and procedures change).
Is this what neoliberalism is all about? (January 12, 2015) Is the apparent devolution by the “Sovereign” (people, nation, state) of some of its political controls onto alternate “non-governmental” agencies, such as Corporations instituting "Policies" over their “Employees” (rather than laws over their citizens) what “neoliberalism” is all about?
The collective conscience of ‘personality’ in anthropology: 1948-1998 (November 19, 2014) Ray McDermott and I were discussing, in our usual meandering way, the possible roots of Dorothy Holland’s work and what may or may not fairly be described as “psychological anthropology.” We wondered about d’Andrade and Romney, their relationship to the Parsonians and Boasians. As we veered into sorting out the…
Wondering about authoring one’s self (November 8, 2014) I fear that my saying anything about Daniela, as a person, might lead some in my audiences to assume that what I said about her could be used as an explanation for her fate, or justification for meting consequences that would transform her fate.
On the ongoing production of “conscience individuelle” (November 5, 2014) So, it is not so much whether the “conscience individuelle” (in its moral or cognitive sense) is full of “vested interests, infantile emotions, etc...,” nor even of habits, dispositions, etc., but that these are not the motors of human culture at work anywhere or at any time. Interpreting local knowledge…
On the collective production of “conscience collective” (October 26, 2014) Those who read this blog regularly may remember that I have been writing a paper with Juliette de Wolfe on the conceits of autism [Life endings? Or: Ends of life? and Islanding assemblages of haecceities]. I have been kind of stuck with this paper that may have grown too long…
Writing maps unto terrritories (September 27, 2014) Thanks to Michael Scroggins for telling us about the post by Izani about “Charting territories without maps.” Drawing one’s own maps to tell others how to get to one has to be related to Kalmar’s (and Velasquez’s) account of people making their own glossaries to help in getting to speak…
Anthropologies of the dangerous (?) (May 22, 2014) [my current thinking about the title and rationale for an event the Joint Program in Applied Anthropology at Teachers College, Columbia University is planning for the Fall 2014] There may be some truth to the romantic image of the anthropologist (archaeologist?) as daredevil pursuing dubious knowledge, motivated by obscure interests. …
The message “this is therapy,” with a horse (May 19, 2014) Our regretted colleague, George Bond, insisted that our doctoral students start their apprenticeship with us by struggling with Durkheim’s Rules, and particularly with the argument that, when individual human beings come together, what they do is other than what they could do by themselves, and that special tools are needed…
where bias can hide (February 4, 2014) Bias, a point of view, a starting point and an angle of attack, is essential: how else would we chose what to look at?
Generalizing to processes, general and particular (November 26, 2013) Over the past weeks, while teaching Ethnography of education, and in a discussion of research in educational linguistic, I was faced again with the perennial problem of the “generalization” of ethnographic research. As the discipline encounters critics, and particularly when the critics are friendly and knowledgeable, what do we claim…
Anthropology: NOT this kind of experimental science (October 1, 2013) One does need to imagine situations, to be shared together by the observer and the observed (i.e. ethnographic participant observation), that will reveal the kind of work, its conditions and constraints, that we cannot imagine but that we suspect, for good theoretical work, is taking place.
Anthropology IS an experimental science (September 30, 2013) One of my favorite quote from Geertz on anthropology as an experimental science: The “natural laboratory” notion has been equally pernicious ... because the analogy is false. ... The great natural variation of cultural forms is, of course, not only anthropology’s great (and wasting) resource, but the ground of its…
For a defense of cultural anthropology as science (September 6, 2013) Given any ordered social state (system, pattern, culture, ...), this state will always re-order itself into any number of new states none of them being identical to any state ever produced in human history. A scientific "law" derived from anthropological research?
Islanding assemblages of haecceities (February 26, 2013) Thus, our scientific task is more aking to physicists disputing “gravity” (islanding, culture) than to medical researchers looking for the cause of autism, or the better therapy (technology, development).
constructing the gender of human bodies, literally (October 22, 2012) Sculpting new genitalia into a human body may be the ultimate in the (social) construction of new realities, the making of cyborgs, and the radical embodiment of a cultural arbitrary (in the service, some say, of making visible the 'true nature' of the subject body).
Patterns of culture in America (June 14, 2012) I have been imagining titles for a possible book where I would bring together my papers of the last few years, though perhaps with a new twist as I continue to re-read Boas, and some of the Boasian, as if he was a precursor of ethnomethodology, and thereby reconstruct ethnography…
pathos, policy, and the culture of poverty (June 8, 2012) What strikes me now is how much the culture of poverty made sense for the most liberal of concerned sociologists and anthropologists, as it had made sense to ladies from Boston such as the “Miss E. B. Emery” (as her name is listed on the title page of her Letters…
A quote (from Boas) for another day (June 1, 2012) So, I would predict (in the Saussurian sense) that no sociologist (economist) can predict how NCLB will end and into what it will morph. Neither could they predict what new immigrants will do with public school sex education (check Bengladeshi adolescents in Detroit and single sex proms: a great time…
On studying “dynamic changes” (May 26, 2012) I am reading this quote from Boas analogically to the work we have been conducting within “societies” (e.g. the United States). I am arguing for transforming what might be called the units of critique from civilization/society to society (in the sense of hegemonic pattern of institutions) /family (in the sense…
Life endings? Or: Ends of life? (May 12, 2012) Last week, at Lisa Le Fevre’s proposal hearing, we discussed what there might to study in a small Bulgarian village, population about 160, where almost everyone is about 70, where no one is moving in, and where, for obvious actuarial reasons, one can expect that, within 30 years, the human…
Value Added Deep Play (March 3, 2012) The publishing of individual teachers scores by New York City is a research boon as it allows us to test various analytic methods that will allow for understanding more systematically the networks of authority and power in which we are all caught, and particularly the relationship of motivation to act…
On the (pre-)judicial brain (November 23, 2011) At the simplest level, the point of having a “judicial” brain is precisely to control and repair what the pre-judicial brain may attempt to do, or has done. The judicial brain might say “drive home” and then leave the pre-judicial one to do the driving. At night, in Riverside Park,…
Tequila and Mel Gibson’s brain (October 3, 2011) What Eagleman never considers is the question of what makes a response more appropriate than another. Early in the book he discusses plane spotters during the Battle of England of the Second World War. But he does not ask: What let to this war? Why should spotting planes be important…