Author: Herve Varenne

Seth McCall, a student in my seminar on the production of culture, commented on Garfinkel by bringing in something Charles Sanders Peirce wrote about doubt.  It sounded as it could neatly balance Garfinkel on trust (1963).  One could argue that the very need to trust has to be related to the (ethno-)methodological suspicion that one should always doubt, even if one does not mention, at the time of the interaction, the doubt given the competing need not to stop the development of an interaction.  In brief, trust allows for the pragmatic (“let’s do this!”) without a call to the meta-pragmatic (who is “we” here? What is “this”?) even as this call is always ready to be activated as another form of “screwing around” (as all those who have tried to perform one of Garfinkel’s “experiments” have experienced).

So I went looking for Peirce paper. To my disappointment, but not necessarily surprise (given my prejudice regarding the implicit psychology of the pragmatists I have read), in this 1905 paper, Pierce has more to say about habit than about doubt:

There are versions of these comments in John Dewey’s Chapter 1 of Democracy and education (1966 [1916]), or in many of G. H. Mead’s lectures in Mind, self and society (1934).  Peirce echoes the overwhelming successful idea that “we” (each and everyone human being since the beginning of human times a few hundred thousand years ago) are “molded” by “life” “to a degree that is little suspected.”  This is the foundation of “culture and personality” in all forms of anthropology, including much that is critical of the specific sub-tradition known by this phrase.  It is the foundation of that Parsonian grand attempt for a “general theory of action” that grounds the social order in socialization. And, of course, it is the foundation of Bourdieu’s  habitus (and possibly also of Foucault depending on how one reads the passages on the panopticon in Discipline and Punish).

The problem, as I now see it, is starting with the socialized adult (man…) as “he” conduct “his” everyday life.  I always contrast this to Durkheim writing about the “constraints” (but not the determinants) of their life as the people find them.  Durkheim (Garfinkel, etc.) starts with people at work given an order that requires them to keep working. This starting point remains agnostic as to the role, if any, of previous experiences.  People working out any order may look “habituated” to foreigners (e.g. anthropologists of the most other) or critics (adolescents, revolutionaries, artists, professional skeptics) but there is no reason to assume that they have, as a infrastructural property of their selves, determinant personalities, identities, or what have you.

As I pondered Peirce on habit, I came to to wonder whether Ray McDermott and I should rephrase our conclusion in Successful Failure.  We wrote: “we [social scientists] must above all accept that to make it a better day for [any human being], the first and perhaps only step is to turn away from [them] and to trust [them] to work with us while we examine what all others, including ourselves, are doing around him.” (1998: 217)

We could now write that 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 this body suffer (and, in some happy cases, have fun or profit).

What has made Rancière so appealing to me (and McDermott, and many others) is that he does start with the puzzled body.  He asks us to notice what he calls the “intelligence” of the people, what Boas and those among his students who did not fall into the “culture and personality” trap wrote as “making sense.”  And this is what some of us planning a book currently titled “when is education?” want to explore further.

And then, to my delight and but not necessarily surprise (given what I also know of the pragmatists as one of the sources of what is most powerful in anthropology these days), I found something else from Peirce that will now be one of my favorite epigraphs.  It’s about, precisely, surprise:

A Google search suggests this is a famous quote and I am surprised (!) I had not seen it until a few days ago.  It will now be part of my personal canon as another way to introduce education as the deliberate work of dealing with surprises (“when  is education?” “all the time!”).

And it will also developed my wonderings about the centrality of ‘play’ in life–both fun play, deep play, and the many cruel jokes of our experiences.

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.  As I mentioned before (December 16, 2015), I play “session roulette”: I open a door to a session room without checking printed title, sit down at the back, and listen.  I continue to recommend this to students as a way to, one hopes, making serendipity work.  Sometimes I stay.  but, mostly, I leave as it sounds all too familiar, including phrases and jargon that would surely appear strange to perhaps every human being on the planet—except perhaps professional anthropologists (“this post-neo-liberal moment”?!?!!).  “Ontology” has replaced “post-modernism” which had replaced. … and …., but pretentious obfuscation of limited ethnography remains.  The tribal order remains even as name tags get bigger (they are now the size of small bibs!), last name are obscured and American communal individualism gets reproduced in symbolic practices even as the multiple hierarchies that move people in and out of anthropology remain (as any one concerned with job applications well knows).

So, it is all very familiar, though it is not difficult for a cultural anthropologist to feel, see, and tell how all this is strange, wild, wonderfully extravagant and altogether awful—as well as thoroughly organized through our collective work.  It should take but a fast blink for any of “us” to see this as powerfully as anyone of our many “them’s” may also see it.

This bring me to my puzzle for November 2015: how do “we” maintain this particular order over so many years in a physical space that felt to me not particularly suited to the work of maintaining the order?  This year in Denver, like they were in Montreal, two or three years ago, the Meetings were held in a large convention hall.  The usual space the Meetings occupy have been “too small” leading to a sense of crowding.  This year the space was enormous and the people so spread out that, despite some effort, the people remained spread out and the space appeared, mostly empty, with large areas of empty spaces, deserts, at peripheries that were anything but distant.

In other words, in a much safer way than so many millions have had to do over the past year, we, anthropologists, also attempted to produce a familiar order in an altogether strange-so-far physical (if not administrative, economic, and political) setting not necessarily convenient for this production.

The latest of the dissertations I recommend on such matters is Sunonda Samaddar’s (2015) on people from Sylhet, Bangladesh in Hamtrack (an enclave within the boundaries of Detroit).  There, as everywhere, children grow up, go to school, dream of love, marry, buy and sell property around the globe … and face the many impossibilities of matrilateral cross-cousin marriage!  I mention the last matter to lead a reader to what is not familiar about the evolving life-histories of the Sylhettis in Hamtrack.  For me, this is not simply about a “sub-culture” but rather about the not so impossible, though often difficult, efforts to make the strange (Detroit) familiar (somewhat like Sylhet), though perhaps in ways that could not be achieved in Sylhet.  For Hamtrack can actually be more rather than less Sylthetti than Sylhet!  Like Michele Verma earlier (2008), Samaddar traces moments in the present that are the “next” (in a conversational analysis sense) in a long conversation about making Sylhet familiar (including in Sylhet itself as it own place in the Indian subcontinent keeps changing).  In that conversation, among other things, the people from Sylhet and their children reveal, also, the (im-)possibilities of America in the United States (for example the use of multi-cultural education in school to enforce Muslim religiosity on reluctant children).

As for the anthropologists in Denver, they may have been most successful at producing their strange order during the debate about the boycott of Israeli universitities.  The act may be “mostly symbolic” (as I was told while being lobbied), it may be (non-)violent; it may have been a mask for darker possibilities (from which some supporters specifically shied away–thereby making them accountable).  But it was also an orderly organization of more than 1,500 bodies, together, speaking against and, mostly, for the resolution to boycott.  The total (social) fact was anything but “symbolic”: it was what anthropologists, as a collectivity of consociates do—even in the midst of (post-neo-liberal-mass society [choose your qualifier]) space.  It was altogether very familiar (for someone who started his participation during the various debates about the Vietnam War).

For the professional anthropologist: This is a problem in the relationship of ecology to culture as ongoing interactional pattern of bodies interacting and symbolizing this pattern (to add my jargon).

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 David Schneider as he was elaborating his most famous book, A critique of the study of kinship (1984).  He taught us that Lévi-Strauss’ book, ostensibly about “kinship,” was actually about NO THING that could be studied cross-culturally.  Schneider’s book, as a version of the history of the near present often say, marked the end of the study of kinship in anthropology and the disappearance of the field as foundational to the discipline.

I thought about all this recently because I had to review an interesting paper for possible publication.  It discussed Schneider’s legacy but it also appeared to search for an alternate definition of kinship.  And so it tickled my dissatisfaction with anything that smacks of definitions, ideal-types, and other attempts to capture a “thing” that is also an abstraction, and to do so deductively.  The paper did make the point that the disappearance of “kinship” did not mark the end of anthropological work on marriage, sex and gender, relationships.  But it may be that, as the author argued, we do not quite know anymore how to classify this work if it is not “kinship.”

So, what are we to do?  I propose that we do not seek a definition or elaborate an ideal-type.

Schneider was no historian of anthropological ideas and his polemical characterizations of many ancestral figures do not always point at what made them interesting.  He does not note, for example, that Lévi-Strauss, when writing about kinship or family (1956), did not write about essences but about “models” that are analytic products rather than representations, and only useful for purposes of experimentation on the analysis and validation of the analysis (1962 [1952]).  Models are built out of 1) recorded observational experience among a particular group (people and the field anthropologist co-participating with them) in order 2) to produce another form of practical experience among another group (the field anthropologist back at home among other anthropologists).

The best example of a model is that drawn by Jean Lave about learning as movement through a “community” on the basis of her experiences with tailors and in supermarkets.  This model opens all sorts of investigations into boundaries, gravity wells (under what conditions might one consider becoming a legitimate peripheral participants, e.g. apply to graduate school at the University of Chicago), chutes and ladders (blockages and bypasses in the movement out of peripheral positions), the ever receding “full” position, etc.

[A CAUTIONARY NOTE: neither Lévi-Strauss nor Lave wrote exactly in the terms I used o summarize what they taught me]

So what might we try to model when observing people “at home”?

Retrospectively, I think I was lucky to start my career in a department of “Home and Family Life” later to be renamed “Family and Community Education.”  It was embarrassing when mentioned at the American Anthropological Association meetings.  But it kept reminding me that, while kinship was NO THING, home and family, hearth and crib, kitchen and school, dating, divorce, menstruation and menopause, illness and death, all were issues for all human beings to face, as transformed in the myriad ways their ancestors frame for them.  As I started reading Bourdieu and many others on the reproduction of birth privilege in democracies famously organized to eradicate it, then I was more convinced than ever that “family” had to remain an irreducible concern, and all the more so as sociobiologists gained the favor they now have among journalists writing, for example, about why hypergamy remains a favored (guiltily preferred?) form of marriage for women.

Anthropologists of everyday life have no choice but to face home and family (hearth and lineage, residence and descent) in about all the very large scale political entities bringing together under their “governmentalities” billions of human beings (from Japan to the Americas, around the globe)—not to use the word “culture” and to emphasize issues of power that I have sometimes been accused, surprisingly for me, to ignore.  But facing home and family is not the same thing as defining “kinship.”  In the field one can start anywhere, e.g. with a woman in her late pregnancy, and trace with whom, where, sometimes when, how she will actually give birth, and with what consequences (to her child, other significant others, and perhaps others, far away, who may suffer because of the child’s privileges accruing with his birth here and then).

Latour has been telling anthropologists that their task is to trace what may also be a “viper’s tangle” to quote François Mauriac most famous novel  (rather than Geertz on webs of meaning).  I have been sympathetic to this call because it brings us back to the anthropological task of uncovering constraints and openings.  Most importantly, as I understand it (or at least as I teach it), this call is not for new definitions, and it discourages debates about essences.  A home is not a thing, but entering one’s kitchen is an experience to be modeled.