On applying anthropology to faculty governance in a school of education

What I am arguing here is that, in the political life of any polity (whether small town or corporation), the consequences of an accomplishment are never reliably fixed for good. As time passes, the consequences of each event can change as new interpretants [in Peirce’s sense] assert themselves.

[This was triggered by ongoing controversies at Teachers College regarding various decisions made by top administrators, responses by various people including students and faculty.  What can current anthropological analyses contribute to the recurrent calls for shared governance?  What can faculty govern?  How?  For those in the know, I will be mixing Weberian via Geertz, Foucauldian, and Latourian metaphors, along with others inspired by de Certau and Garfinkel]

One of the first thing I heard when I started graduate school in 1968, and associated with “America,” was that “government is best which governs least” and that “the government does not concern me much, and I shall bestow the fewest possible thoughts on it. It is not many moments that I live under a government, even in this world” (Thoreau, Civil disobedience).  And yet, if democracy is government “by the people,” then there is no democracy without work by this people who must be concerned with it and bestow at least some thoughts to it.  And yet …, around and around.

Now, it is possible to argue that Teachers College, for many of us, is the small town of most daily consequence.  It is the location of much of our daily work, it is where we may know most of the people and they know us.  It is the space where we meet the most specific of governmental regulations.  Outside, we are citizens, among hundreds of millions, of various nations and states; inside, we are caught with a few hundred people, in a locality altogether unique, deliberating very particular interests with which few “outside” would be concerned.

So, if Teachers College is treated as a small locality with its own political system, one could say, with Thoreau, that the best “governance” is governance that allows most of the citizens (employees) to devote the least amount of time to the production and products of government.  After all, most of us are not here to govern (administer) though we have to check governors (administrators) when they forget the goals of governance.  And yet, without active service by at least some, it is probably that, at not infrequent times, many of us will be obliged to give more time to the products of governance than we might wish.

But, of course, Teachers College is a corporation, not a town.  We are employees, not citizens.  Our administrators are not elected.  Financial resources flow from Teachers College to us, rather than the reverse.  We are not taxed; we sell services.  All of this commercial activity is tightly controlled by a web of laws and regulations, some enforced by various actual governments (from the IRS to IRBs, not to mention credit hours and Integrative Projects).  Other regulations are enforced contractually by other corporations, from Columbia University to insurance companies, etc.  I suspect that no one at TC knows the full extent of this web, and this is OK as long as one person knows her position on the network of entangling connections (including both descending and ascending positions), acts so that the controlling regulating agencies will acknowledge that what it requires done has been done, and then reports this acknowledgment to the proper persons who will then report it further, all the way to the president and Board of Trustees, not to mention faculty, etc., when needed (remember the many e-mails some of us received from Janice Robinson regarding the “On-Line Harassment Prevention Course”).

If Teachers College, as corporation, could be the well-oiled machine some expert in bureaucratic efficiency might imagine, then everything would be OK.  If the actual corporation was powerful enough to have become a panopticon, everything might be well also–though perhaps only as far as the performance of the required is concerned.

But, of course, Teachers College is neither machine nor panopticon.  It is a live “polity” (a word I prefer to “community” for reasons I explain elsewhere) that is also a network and web.  At every nodes there is fundamental uncertainty as to the exact shape of the cog one must fit into, as well as who is warden and who is inmate.  Everyone who is caught here must wonder whether the appointed task was indeed accomplished, or whether an accomplishment has been reported to the right person(s).  It is not only that the feedback channels are not well oiled, but that the feedback for the same event keeps changing.

For example, a brief case study:

There appears to have been two of triggering events to the Spring 2013 controversies: the(bonuses paid to some administrators in 2010/2011; and Susan Furhman’s association with Pearson.  I focus on the latter and particularly on the transformations in the effects it has had in the TC polity.  I personally learned about the association three or four years ago, and talked about my “discovery” to a few of our colleagues, none of them knew about it.  I did not anything more about it.  I assumed that “everybody (but a few at the periphery) knew—including our Executive Committee—and that it was OK with them.  I retreated to my pond (metaphorically, to build on Thoreau) and forgot about the matter.  Actually, as “all” (?) know, Furhman’s association dates from before she started as president.  Quite a few people did know about it, including the trustees who must have been convinced that it would be good for Teachers College to have one of ours as, actually, the sole voice from the world of “education” on the board of a company that self-describes as “the world’s leading education company, providing educational materials, technologies, assessments and related services to teachers and students of all ages” (retrieved from the Pearson web site “About us” and “Board of directors”  on June 6, 2013).  And then, suddenly, many, with Dianne Ravitch, are now saying that the association may be a conflict of interest—a major charge indeed.

Whether there is anything wrong or conflictual about Furhman’s association with Pearson will continue to be debated.  What I am arguing here is that, in the political life of any polity, the consequences of an accomplishment are never reliably fixed for good.  As time passes, the consequences of each event can change as new interpretants [in Peirce’s sense] assert themselves.  The process is not mechanical, and final outcomes cannot be predicted.  We cannot stop moving and the need to govern is ever renewed.

This is a fundamental process that neither the tightening of procedures or controls can abolish.  It is a process well documented by significant research and theory, particularly from the parts of the sciences with which cultural anthropology is most comfortably associated.  As faculty members discuss what we mean, practically, about “shared governance” understanding our contexts and their constraints is essential.

I will suggest some of what I think might be done, practically, in a later post.

On parents and school success, again

We need research into the process that make some people fail schools (and much less research on why some other people are failed by schools).

Nothing new for many of us in this summary of sociological research:

“Family income is now nearly as strong as parental education in predicting children’s achievement.” (Reardon 2011: 5)

Note the “now” for a study that essentially tells us that not much has changed since the Coleman report.  This rhetorical move may be what attracted the New York Times who highlighted the study at least twice since it was published.

I missed Reardon’s study when it was published, as well as the first editorial essay published in the Times about it.  The April 27th “Opinionator” piece by Reardon is thus not quite “news” but it does confirm the trend about what is to count as “fit to print” knowledge.  Reardon himself, as an academic sociologist on the faculty of the School of Education at Stanford, of course knows that what he is observing is not a new phenomenon and his paper is a good source for a brief history of the sociological research on family and school performance.  I will use the paper the next time I teach my course on family and education.

His contribution, as he summarizes it in the original paper, is:

As the income gap between high- and low-income families has widened, has the achievement gap between children in high- and low-income families also widened? The answer, in brief, is yes. The achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families is roughly 30 to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born twenty-five years earlier (2011: 4)

In the paper he summarizes four possible reasons in more than ten pages of text.  In the Opinionator piece, this is summarized into a few paragraphs Reardon summarizes as follows:

It boils down to this: The academic gap is widening because rich students are increasingly entering kindergarten much better prepared to succeed in school than middle-class students. This difference in preparation persists through elementary and high school. … One part of the explanation for this is rising income inequality. … Money helps families provide cognitively stimulating experiences for their young children because it provides more stable home environments, more time for parents to read to their children, … High-income families are increasingly focusing their resources … on their children’s cognitive development … They are doing this because educational success is much more important than it used to be, even for the rich. (Reardon http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/27/no-rich-child-left-behind/

I am not sure of the “much more important” part of the explanation.  When I teach all this, I then ask the students to read Jack Goody (Production and reproduction on bilateral devolution, 1976) and/or Bourdieu on marriage strategies (1977 [1972]: 30-71) while making the point that in each epoch/historical moment/culture the rich and powerful have to adapt their strategies to the local conditions they find themselves in–just as the poor must do.  Thus, in Euro-America at least, marriage strategies have become obsolete.  Production and reproduction of wealth and privilege know require schooling strategies.

So, the question is figuring out in more exact details what it is that the rich do in a world where sanction by schooling is essential.  Would-be reformers attempting to counter the strategies of the rich must develop analytic understandings of school sanctioning that is at least as good as the practical understandings of the rich.  It is on this point, as McDermott and I have argued in many different ways, that social scientific writing has failed.  Reardon, like generations of sociologists before him (since, at least, Moynihan), places “cognitive development” (of the individual child) as the mediation between strategies (stable homes, reading to the child, etc.) and material success.  The school is treated as an altogether impartial umpire in the race to the top.  Given a fair umpire, then it is only training before that will distinguish the talented who wins the race from the talented who does not.  Thus Reardon’s policy suggestions: “improve preschools and child care,… improve the quality of our parenting [so that] parents become better teachers themselves.”

These, of course, were the suggestions that were made to Lindon Johnson and led to a plethora of Great Society programs in the 1960s.  The failure of these programs in closing achievement gaps may be that they were badly designed or under funded.  It may also be that cognitive development is not the key.  What if the key is in manipulating the umpire? (e.g. distracting him at the beginning of the race, blinding her to a move that should have penalized the racer, etc.).  We are well aware of the moves the rich and powerful make to gain advantage in college admissions.  We suspect these moves can also “help” a child enter a prestigious pre-school.  But there may be other mechanisms that are much less direct and yet effective in making large scale policies in favor of greater cognitive development altogether irrelevant if the goal is closing the gap (the policies may have other positive effects).  We need research into the process that make some people fail schools (and much less research on why some other people are failed by schools).

Reardon makes the point that the problem is not with schools that are failing.  It may be that it has to be with schools that are failed…

Another voice for transforming universities into vocational schools

What happens if potential students, their parents, and employers, discover that there are cheaper and more efficient ways of producing “human capital” than colleges?

Are universities mostly sorting devices to separate smart and hard-working high school students from their less-able fellows so that employers can more easily identify them? Are universities factories for the dissemination of job skills? Are universities mostly boot camps for adulthood, where young people learn how to drink moderately, fornicate meaningfully and hand things in on time?

My own stab at an answer would be that universities are places where young people acquire two sorts of knowledge, what the philosopher Michael Oakeshott called technical knowledge and practical knowledge. Technical knowledge is the sort of knowledge you need to understand a task — the statistical knowledge you need to understand what market researchers do, the biological knowledge you need to grasp the basics of what nurses do. Technical knowledge is like the recipes in a cookbook. It is formulas telling you roughly what is to be done. It is reducible to rules and directions. It’s the sort of knowledge that can be captured in lectures and bullet points and memorized by rote.    (Brooks 4/4/2013 The Practical University)

I have written about such comments before (December 12, 2012). But there is too much in that vein from the featured New York Times columnists for me to flag them all.  I’ll just note again that this may signal the beginning of the end of the incredible streak of expansion colleges and universities around the world have had since the WWII, the G.I. bill and equivalent programs around the world that transformed universities into institutions for the masses.  The question universities, and those who make their lives in their ecosystems (particularly for faculty in most of the disciplines) has to be: what happens if potential students, their parents, and employers, discover that there are cheaper and more efficient ways of producing “human capital” than colleges?

Further preliminary notes on re-presenting anthropology

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?

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.

Taking on (socio-)biologists

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.

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.

Islanding assemblages of haecceities

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).

I am finishing a draft of a paper with Juliette de Wolfe on conceits and autism.  It ends with my current favorite Garfinkelian conceit: driving down the highway of life with an immortal cohort.  In the paper where he talks about immortality and highways, he writes that “immortal is a metaphor for … an “assemblage of haecceities” (2002: 92).  Ray McDermott to whom I had sent an earlier draft underlined the last word and wrote “explain?”.   It made me acknowledge to myself that I could not quite explain the word though I knew it had to do with the latin for ‘this’ and was related to everything Garfinkel has written about indexicality.  So I searched Wikipedia (no shame!).  The first indexes in the entry are to Duns Scotus and Peirce.  Then comes the references to Garfinkel with a quote from Rawls “Haecceities is one of the many words that Garfinkel has adopted over the years to indicate the importance of the infinite contingencies in both situations and practices” (2003).  So, simply (?) put, changing the clothes of a tantruming child in a public park is, always and necessarily, a unique act that has never occurred and will never recur.  There will never be another time when this child will be changed by this mother in this park in front of these onlookers.  There will never be another time when this Rosa will say “I could read it!” in this reading group (McDermott passim).  There will never be another time when some Mexican migrants develop this glossary (Kalmar 2001).

So what is the point of reporting this?  As Kalmar reminded us when he lectured at Teachers College in the Spring 2012, the Camden glossaries are unique, but they are also an instance of what many other people (missionaries, linguists, etc.) did when faced with another language they had to learn as they attempted to survive in that moment.

So, this is another musing about ethnographic methodology and its usefulness in, precisely, this political moment in the history of anthropology and its relationship to the State.

But, as I half day dreamed about the quote (which I may initially have chosen because it included the work ‘metaphor’ which was then the key word in the evolving paper), I noticed that Garfinkel wrote about “assemblage” and wondered whether this is the recently famous word.  Did he get it from Latour? from Rawls (who would have gotten it from Deleuze)?  Anyway, it fits.  This event is made up of these matters (people, things, etc.) immortalized into “??????.”

What exactly is the word to be used?  (Suspense!)

I was working on the paper when, last week, I taught one of my favorite pieces from one of our disciplinary grandmothers: Ruth Benedict’s “Configurations of culture in North America” (1932).  Note that ‘configuration’ is pluralized, not ‘culture’ (Benedict is a Boasian, not a Geertzian).  What struck me this time is her use of the unusual gerund “islanding” to evoke the historical reality that differentiation (say in death rituals–her main examples) is not based on geographical isolation (see also Louis Dumont on the ideological differentiations between France and Germany in the 19th century (1994 [1991])).   Burying a close relative among the Zuñi requires different displays than it requires among the Cheyenne.  We were taught in graduate school to ridicule Benedict from tagging the first set of displays as “Apollonian” while the others would be “Dionysian” and to suggest that these ??? somehow “explained” the displays as if they were psychological causes.  I now read these labels as temporary heuristics that may have helped at the time establish the unique this-ness of a historical moment in the plains and high plateaus of a continent when human beings lived side by side, pushed and pulled each other, faced new conditions (e.g. the horse), and assembled themselves and their practices into some immortal thing (configuration, culture, pattern, epoch, system, [your word for a historically produced, powerfully enforced, differentiated and differentiating unique thing]).

Now, I have complained elsewhere that Garfinkel does not have an explicit theory of culture, unless, as I suggest, facing immortal assembling of haecceities is precisely such a theory–which is my point.

Thus, our scientific task is more akin to physicists disputing “gravity” (islanding, culture) than to medical researchers looking for the cause of autism, or the better therapy (technology, development).

[See also an earlier post on the Boasian revolt against classifications by function and causes]

Potential student to TC anthropologists: what is anthropology good for?

Today, I am trying something new–at least for me in my place [role?] as agent of a degree granting university dependent on student tuition to survive.  We are told to “involve students” in our deliberation about the future of the university, or of our niche (node?) within its network (web?).  So I am trying “crowd sourcing” the revisions we want to make to the general introduction of the anthropology programs at Teachers College, Columbia University, that are currently available on the web, and of the current description of the Masters programs .

The goal is to attract more students to our Masters programs.  Whatever my intellectual and political doubts about the wisdom of this evolution, disciplinary research based departments and programs are getting caught in a (neoliberal?) world (ecology?) where their survival is dependent on the tuition paid by people who are not apprenticed into the research communities (polities?) of their disciplines, but are still interested in that discipline as such.  In clear, the Doctoral Programs in Anthropology need more Masters students who have been admitted as students in anthropology (and not another program at Columbia).  We are not currently very successful at attracting these students.  Other programs at Teachers College are good at it.  There may be a “market” we are not “tapping” into.  One of the reasons may be the packaging.

So we are trying two things.  One is re-writing the general statements about the place of anthropology at Teachers College.  The other is advertising some of our strengths by proposing to students that they “specialize” in “Ethnographic Analysis,” “Global Education,” or “Leveraging Informal Education.”  Such specializations have been successful in attracting students to other programs as they seem to give a more concrete form to the general labels.

So I am asking for your help.  Check the current draft for a general introduction, and then following the links to the Masters Programs and then the specializations: “Ethnographic Analysis,” “Global Education,” “Leveraging Informal Education.”

And then, please, comment, make suggestions for edits, editorialize.

Actually, the whole exercise is multiply interesting.  What, after all, is anthropology good for?  The American Anthropological Association itself is aware that this is an issue that we can not discuss solely among ourselves, in ever more abstract ways.  The question is of concern when people outside anthropology ask it as a preliminary step towards possibly entering its worlds, or deciding whether to follow what it suggests be done in the policy realm, (or funding it).  So, what should faculty in small programs in anthropology located in a professional school say?  What is anthropology, in 200 words?  Compare and contrast two answers from the American Anthropological Association: 1) the classical one as it appears on the main site for the association, and 2) a new version being tested.

So, we are trying our hand at composing 200 word statements about Anthropology And Education and Applied Anthropology that, we hope, are more sensitive to our current environment.  But, perhaps, you may be more in tune with this environment than I may be.  So try you hand also: what is the field in which you are moving towards fuller participation good for? It is not quite an exam question, but it is one you may be asked by representatives of the institutions where you are trying to be employed (or one you may have to answer when applying for research funding).

[and I hope you enjoy the mixed metaphors, and the implied conceit (more on that later)]

Let Business, School & Government collaborate? (!)

What we need to ask is why should colleges be given the task of producing workers? Is there any evidence that they are good at it? Why shouldn’t Business be asked to provide the training that it may be best at imagining is needed?

The answer to that challenge will require a new level of political imagination — a combination of educational reforms and unprecedented collaboration between business, schools, universities and government to change how workers are trained and empowered to keep learning… America today desperately needs a center-right G.O.P. that is offering merit-based, market-based approaches to all these issues — and a willingness to meet the other side halfway. (Thomas L. Friedman. A version of this op-ed appeared in print on November 7, 2012, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: Hope And Change: Part Two. My emphasis)

Thomas Friedman thus concluded an opinion piece celebrating Obama’s re-election: Let Business, School & Government collaborate!

Nothing really new here.  For close to two decades, the choir keeps singing the same hymn whether the director is Republican or Democrat. If ever there is a political consensus here, in government at least, this is it.  And, as this consensus is getting translated into more and more detailed regulations down to the level of measuring the merit of individual teachers on an on-going basis, the consensus is getting less accessible to effective criticism.  “Neo-liberalism,” as many of my students like to call it, is alive and very well.  Actually it is thriving when the G.O.P. in the United States is criticized for not being open to “merit-based, market-based approaches”!

But what is this consensus all about, practically?  Provocatively (I hope) this is about a re-invention of vocational education and it leads me to think about one moment in the history of the interplay between Business and School.

In the 1880s, Business (as represented by Miss Grace Hoadley Dodge) collaborated with School (as represented by the philosopher and future president of Columbia University, Nicholas Murray Butler), to found was to become Teachers College. In the origin myth we tell, there was a disagreement between Dodge and Butler about the mission of the college, with Dodge pushing for what she imagined new workers might need in the coming 20th century.  Her eponymous building is dedicated to teaching the “enobling arts of the home” and contains a “Tudor Room” that was the “Table Service Lab” “where exercises in table setting and meal service occurred.”

Butler successfully redirected Dodge’s efforts to the training of teachers.  In effect, Butler, like most intellectuals and academicians to this day, separated the mission of schooling from the vocational training of the future work force.  I am not sure who Butler imagined would train workers into the trades, but I suspect he expected the employers to do this, whether through apprenticeships or other means.  “Education,” that is public schooling, was to be about democracy and the culturing of citizens (Dewey 1916).  Government does not appear in this origin myth though much of justification for state funding of public schools did not emphasize what is now often called the building of “human capital.”  By the end of the 19th century School had insulated itself from Business by encasing it into boards of trustees whose responsibilities were purely financial.  Miss Dodge could fund Teachers College but she could not dictate curriculum.

Business did not give up, and Government got into the act.  One hundred and thirty years after “Dodge vs. Butler” was settled in favor of Butler, a whole set of miscellaneous forces (donors, governments, students, parents) push colleges and universities to be ever more “practical” and, as Government uses its regulatory powers to enforce business requests, to demonstrate that their curricula are indeed practical in the training of workers.  And so Teachers College, which still educates some teachers, survives by (vocationally) training young women (mostly, and still) to work in the expanding bureaucracies of “education” and related administrations—though perhaps not to an extent that would satisfy Thomas Friedman.

Now, when Lawrence Cremin taught me the history of American education, he spent some time tracing the evolution of colleges from seminaries, to finishing schools for the children of the elites, to tools of the state to improve agriculture (land grant universities) to the conduit through which fundamental knowledge was developed (on the German model) (Cremin 1980, 1988).  As usually happens as cultures change, old practices do not disappear though they may get subsumed.  Harvard still has a Divinity School; to this day the University of Chicago College still requires students to take “a total of six quarters in humanities and civilization studies”—thereby preserving the “culturing” mission of the institution.  But Chicago, like Harvard, Columbia, etc. are first known as “research universities”—not as advanced vocational school providing the “skills” Business or Government imagine future workers might need.

Journalists now ask new presidents to require universities to be guided by business people to offer vocational training!  The evolution may have started in the mid-20th century when, through the G.I. Bill for example, college attendance became a mass event aided and abated by Government.  Until then, one mostly got into adult careers through forms of apprenticeships in the various professions and vocations.  But, little by little, a college degree became the essential key for entry—though the curricula that lead to a college degree did not necessarily change, nor the people who were teaching it.  Not surprisingly, starting the 1960s students who had entered college for a career started to rebel.  “Relevance” became a rallying cry.  Half-a-century later, it is Business that has been complaining to Government about the failures of colleges to produce workers with necessary “skills” and Government (through accreditating agencies in the United States) is drafting regulation that School might not be able to escape.

What we need to ask is why should colleges be given the task of producing workers?  Is there any evidence that they are good at it?  Why shouldn’t Business be asked to provide the training that it may be best at imagining is needed?

constructing the gender of human bodies, literally

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).

In the epoch of the clinic (as per Foucault, and not to challenge readers by writing about “Euro-American culture”) many human beings (we) have learned a lot about the peculiarities of sexual dimorphism (“males” without male genitalia; “females” with same; other chromosomal oddities, etc.) compounded by the mysteries concerning the origin and experiences of sexual attraction (not to mention sexual practices).  How this knowledge became facts in textbooks, the media, the law, and how it spread across miscellaneous populations, is a problem for historians.  Who knows what about all this, practically, at this particular moment in the life of a polity submitted to the regime of the clinic, is a problem for sociologists and anthropologists.  A version of the problem concerns the tracing of what is being done about it and what challenges are then faced given the possibilities that the epoch of the clinic have opened.

This brings me to the surgeons who perform “sex change” operations (search Google for “gender change” operations and find out all references are to “sex change”–another proof of Schneider’s conjecture about American kinship, 1980 [1968]).  It brings me particularly to one set of surgeons who, sometimes in the 1960s, performed the operation on “Agnes” who was made famous by Garfinkel (1967: Chapter V), and particularly on a few lines in a few notes about post-operative issues:

Immediately postoperatively, [Agnes] developed bilateral thrombophlebitis of the legs, cystitis, contracture of the urethral meatus, and despite the plastic mold which was inserted into the vagina at the time of surgery, a tendency for the vagina outlet to contract. She also required postoperatively several minor surgical procedures for modification of these complications and also to trim the former scrotal tissue to make the external labia appear more normal. Despite the plastic mold, the newly-made vagina canal had a tendency to close and heal, which required intermittent manipulations of the mold and daily dilatations. Not only were all of these conditions painful or otherwise uncomfortable but also, although minor, since they were frequent, they produced increasing worry that the surgical procedure would not end up with the desired result of a normal functioning and appearing set of female genitalia. Although these distressing conditions were carefully (and ultimately successfully) treated, at the time that she was well enough to go home these complications were still not fully resolved (Footnote 6)

 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).  Historically, sculpting the live body (including all forms of plastic and reconstructive surgery), would not be possible in the absence of a host of well-organized people in hospitals, universities, government offices, etc.  And yet, at the moment of the surgery, the body as live object or thing (in Latour’s sense) resists.  Internal mechanisms attempt to heal what any number of cells, glands, and primitive parts of the brain, might interpret as a “wound” to be “healed” by any means necessary–if cells had access to meta-communicational discourses (remember that various parts of the body communicate with each other through many different channels).  Surgeons and nurses are well aware of this and organize themselves to resist the resistance as they use the body’s affordances “against” themselves, so to speak.

At the end, a block of marble, under Michelangelo’s hammers, yields a new David and “we” humans may say that we have won against the world and built a new reality.  But the marble, in its peculiar affordances, remains: what about the missing hormones?  The marble crumbles and museums curators fret.  Wounds heal; surgeons worry; they manipulate and dilate.

So, in effect, can “we” (those who care about such matters) tell David from the marble, Agnes from her body, the raw from the cooked?

Garfinkel, Harold 1967. Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Schneider, David 1980 American kinship: A cultural account.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.  [first published in 1968]

Spontaneous masses and the consciousness of the “educated representatives of the propertied classes.”

I suspect that Bourdieu’s readers could be assumed to be so well versed in Marxist scholarship that he did not have to quote Marx or Lenin when he started writing about “méconnaissance,” and the role of the sociologist.

Last week, a discussion of Bourdieu in my doctoral seminar led me to recall something I must have learned as a spectator in the French politics of the 1960s.  I remembered rather vaguely as concerning the leadership position of the Communist Party in the struggles of the working class and, particularly the position of intellectuals in the Communist Party.  I am not much of a scholar of Marxism, but I remembers something about the “leading edge,” but could not come up with a citation or an author.  Later in the week one of the students, Laura Bunting, challenged me and I turned, as we intellectuals now do, sometimes with some shame, to Google.  In three or four steps ‘“leading edge”’, ‘communism’, ‘proletariat’ led me to a discussion of the following passage from Lenin:

“We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. In the very same way, in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of Social-Democracy arose altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the working-class movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia. In the period under discussion, the middle nineties, this doctrine not only represented the completely formulated programme of the Emancipation of Labour group, but had
already won over to its side the majority of the revolutionary youth in Russia.”
(Vladimir Ilyich Lenin What Is To Be Done? 1901)

I suspect that Bourdieu’s readers could be assumed to be so well versed in Marxist scholarship that he did not have to quote Marx or Lenin when he started writing about “méconnaissance,” and the role of the sociologist.  For another systematic critique of the stance, look at Rancière’s The philosopher and his poor (2004 [1983]).