All posts by Herve Varenne

on America, pattern, structure, system, production of culture

“Factions” AND their critique as an American total social fact

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I concluded my earlier post (April 28, 2025) with a challenge: Should anthropologists continue to report all evidence of class (what I refer to here as “factions” based on race, genders, orientations, etc.) in the United States as an “American Dilemma” (Myrdal 1944), or as a conflict between “Dream and Reality” (Warner 1953; and passim in the literature), or, as I would suggest, constitutive of each other? Any answer is so heavily loaded in, precisely, America that anthropologists should maybe walk away from the questions and simply (!) provide the detailed, and theoretically well grounded, descriptive accounts that only they can produce. How the work may then be used for political purposes should remain a separate issue.

I had started by noting how Francis Hsu (1972) interpreted the emphasis on dilemmas and tensions as evidence of the unquestioned grounding of American social science in the core American ideological apparatus. Actually, Louis Dumont had made an even more radical point starting with his “Caste, Racism and ‘Stratification'” ([1961] 1980) and continuing in his exploration of the rise of individualistic discourses in Europe and then across the Atlantic ([1983] 1986). Both made the fundamental anthropological point that comparative evidence suggests that the emphasis on (in-)equality is a very American (Western?) thing.

Is this “bias”? Or can we do something more interesting with the dual ubiquity of class and the negative evaluation of the classes in the ethnography of the United States (as well as in the popular imagination)? Might it make sense to treat the ever renewed performances as “total social facts”?

Until now, the perennial way to deal with the apparent contradiction between “reality’ (class, etc.) and “ideology” (individualism) has been some version of the Parsonian attempt to distinguish the “social” (reality, behavior) from the “cultural” (values, mis-knowings) (Parsons and Shils 1951). This led David Schneider (1968) to insist that his analysis of “American kinship” was solely a “cultural” account thereby implying that when he wrote about “blood” or “love” as organizing symbols, he was not talking about behavior in the households of the United States.

Of course, the distinction does not work: “love” is not only an idea or a symbol. Love is also a complex discursive performance that brings together a crowd of more or less willing participants and can even change the laws and practices of the United States (Oh 2022). It may be, in current vocabulary, “systemic.”

So, let’s explore an alternative. In accordance with my own methodology of not separating the social from the cultural, I start with an item in the real life of the second decade of the 21st century. It was an object made by a large American corporation who assembled a huge set of producing participants (from a director to the drivers of the stars—as are listed in the final credits of all movies), and made visible on the screen of movie theaters around the world, a set of actors animating a story about some dystopian future. This extremely concrete human construction “grossed” close to $300 million dollars and was followed by two more. All this is extremely “real” (social, behavioral) leading to a fantasy that is also a myth, and a moment in what Drummond called “the American dreamtime” (1996): the movie Divergent (2014).

What did the many who paid to watch the movie see? In my blog at the time (“Dreaming of diverging” March 25, 2014) I wrote that this was, in great part a high school movie with a strong critique of contemporary high school life and of the forces that organize it. I quipped that the movie “is, and I stretch, Bourdieu for 12-year-olds.” Check the extract from a scene now available on YouTube. In this scene the heroine is entering the cafeteria for the first time, looks for a table, sits down at one and starts small talk, eventually asking a question to a student who responds “Who told you that you could speak to me?” I leave aside for now what I just noticed watching the scene again: it could be seen as a rescripting of Elizabeth and Darcy’s first meeting in Pride and Prejudice. Even though the heroine and the student will eventually escape the city together (no marriage mentioned, just loving sex), this is actually a subplot. The main plot is about discovering the horrors of a class system tightly organized by a caricature of the American system of aptitude testing—and then fighting against it by “trust[ing] yourself” even when (particularly when?) one is somehow “divergent.”

The success of the movie (and of similar movies and fiction going back perhaps to Dreiser’s novel  American tragedy  (based on a true crime) would suggest that what it depicts if very familiar. Many of those who have been the consumers of such works of imagination must have experienced something that they might tell in very similar terms, if given the opportunity. And indeed, if one is to trust about all ethnographic reports by anthropologists, it is not a stretch to say that many students and teachers would agree with those who wrote the script for Divergent  1) that there is much “faction”-based activity in their school and 2) that this is bad. After a half century of asking students who went through American high schools whether there are cliques in their school, I am yet to find one that would disagree about this telling of their their overall experiences.

On the basis of such evidence most social scientists will do what Bourdieu did when he considered it as an evidence of the “reproduction” of an older social order founded on habits “learned early in life” and from which one could not escape. Bourdieu did write about structuring forces that would, I imagine he meant, organize an improvised performance (such as entering one’s high school cafeteria for the first time).  But never provided a good way to account for the actual production of what would then become observable and reportable.

Concretely, when 15 year olds enter a high school cafeteria for the first time, what do they do? There are many accounts and reminiscences of the attendant anxiety. But I more concerned here with the reality that most of these adolescents do not quite know what to do next, concretely, as they look left and right, The first words in the Divergent cafeteria scene are “Shall we sit [here]” from the heroine to her friend.
perhaps searching for signs from others about where they should sit and, by implication, with whom they should sit. They probably, and accurately, expect to be corrected if not sanctioned by other students, as they find their way to a table that may become the one table at which they will sit for the next four years thereby justifying their identification by all others (including observing anthropologists) as a clique, if not a “faction”—even when they would refuse this identification, as they are also taught they should, for what is just “a loose group of friends” brought together by a joint interest in some activity, from football to theatre.

So, to develop more concretely what Dumont suggested, what if factions (cliques, classes, races, genders, etc.) in schools (and beyond) started with the schools offering a set of very diverse activities?  These have various easily identified properties and they are also somehow limited by some aspects of the activity: there can only be one quarterback, or one or two leads in some school play. The more activities in a school, the more the student body will be divided, AND the more the division will be deplored as consequences emerge. Margaret Mead introduced this point in Coming of age in Samoa when she drew implications of her work for the lives of American adolescents as she emphasized a “dazzling world of choices” (1928 200).  But, of course, she did not conduct the ethnographies that would prove her possibly quite right.The multiplication of ethnic/racial/gender identities and their respective performative activities will produce further, sometimes cross-cutting divisions. The further twist of course is that one will also be told that gaining membership in any of the factions is a combination of impersonal biological ability, and personal psychological fortitude, willingness, or identification.

As it is summarized by all actors “be true to yourself”! America!

References

Dumont, Louis   [1961] 1980     “Caste, racism and ‘stratification’: Reflections of a social anthropologist.” in his Home hierarchicus. Rev. ed. tr. by M. Sainsbury. Chicago: The University of Chicago.
[1983] 1986 Essays on individualism: Modern ideology in anthropological perspective.. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Oh, Reginald   2022     “Love is Love: The Fundamental Right to Love, Marriage, and Obergefell v. Hodges.” TitleLaw Faculty Articles and Essays .: 1237. https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/fac_articles/1237

Parsons, Talcott and Edward Shils   1951     Toward a general theory of action. New York: Harper and Row.

Schneider, David   1968     American kinship: A cultural account. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hsu, Francis   1972 “American core value and national character,” in Psychological anthropology. Edited by F. Hsu. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company. pp. 201-240.

Myrdal, Gunnar   1944 An American dilemma: The Negro problem and modern democracy. New York: Harper and Row.

Warner, W. Lloyd
1953 American life: Dream and reality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

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on America, on anthropological theorizing, pattern, structure, system

Class, culture & America (or Culture, class & America, or America: Culture and class): Ethnography and interpretation(s)

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The earliest anthropologists were certain that they could use their methods and theories to understand “America.” Some (M. Mead, L. Warner) did, directly, and then soon many more have been certain that they could contribute to some understanding of the United States (its problems, futures, etc.). In this century-old and ongoing conversation some things have remain surprisingly stable. Over the generations ethnographers have reported observing, or hearing, very similar things. Not surprisingly, they have greatly differed in their interpretation of what they observed. I muse today about the implications of the tension between the perennity of observations and the shifting of the interpretations.  Where might anthropologists go from here?

Take, as one instance of ethnographic stability, students in the high schools America builds for them (Varenne & McDermott 1998). For at least a century, about any observer (including “participant” ones) have noticed how, under the distant control of their teachers, the students organize how they sit in their cafetaria, how they walk in the corridors, how they recruit other students into their activities—or cancel these other students. They do this in complex ways and with complex, sometimes dramatic if not tragic (or comic), consequences that are remain a perennial theme in the American imagination, in novels, films, etc. And they can also produce extensive critiques of all this.

As early as 1929, the Lynds reported that “one of the keenest and most popular girl in the school” told them about eligibility for a “leading high school club”:

The chief thing is if the boys like and you can them for the dances… Then, if your mother belongs to a graduate chapter that’s pretty sure to get you in. Good looks and clothes don’t necessarily get you in, and being good in your studies doesn’t necessarily keep you out unless you’re a ‘grind.’ Same way for the boys—the big thing there is being good on the basket-ball or football team. A fellow who’s just a good student rates pretty low. Being good-looking, a good dancer, and your family owning a car all help. ([1930] 1956: 216)

Since then, about all anthropologists of American high schools have collected very similar accounts.  They have also reported that such accounts by student participants correspond closely to what they observed. Warner’s work in Jonesville (1949), or Hollingshead in Elmtown (1949), suggest that not even the Great Drepression or WWII had made a difference. One thing that Warner and Hollingshead did notice that is not included in the Lynds’ report is the ambivalence, if not critique, of the students’ structuring their interaction. As one girl told Warner:

There are a group of girls there who think they’re higher than us [Florence, Carol and I]. They’re a group of girls from the wealthier families. They look down on us. They have a club that’s supposed to be outside the school, but it’s really in the school. They can do things we can’t afford, and they just go from one club to another and hog all the offices, and are in all the activities. (1949: 91)

three high school student couples, before the prom, in 1960Note the we(named friends)/they(anonymous members of a club) dichotomy.  Note also the telling of a psychological price about which Jules Henry made much (1963). A generation later, as the “liberations” of the 1960s hit suburban New Jersey, I also could not miss the “cliques” even in a town that appeared to many as quite homogeneous in terms of class (Varenne 1982).

There is no evidence that one would not observe similar organizing in the high schools of early 21st century America. four high school student couples, before the prom, in 2025There are probably shifts in vocabulary, or the symbols around which the students organize. From 1960 to 2025: Differences: women’s hair (up vs. down), men’s jackets (colorful vs. black); Similarities: sex pairing and heavy gendering of (extra-ordinary) clothes.
There is no evidence either (or rather perhaps the reverse) that one would not also continue to observe various forms of discursive critiques of this organization—including performative ones. After all, about everyone, participants as well as observers, would agree, classes/cliques are not what “American is all about” and one may wish to distance oneself from those who are somehow wrong.

I was reminded of all this when, for various contingent reasons, I looked again, after a very long time, at Francis Hsu’s work on what he did not question labeling “America.” To this date, Hsu remains the only president of AAA with a Chinese last name. He was born in Manchuria in 1909. He was schooled in China, experienced serious difficulties in the wars and invasions of the 1920s and 1930s in China. Eventually, in 1937, he was accepted as a doctoral student at the London School of Economics, worked with Malinowski, received his PhD in 1941. He briefly returned to China and soon left. By 1944 he had started an academic career in the United States, culminating with his three decades at Northwestern University.

I will leave aside wondering whether Hsu was a “Chinese” or “American” anthropologist, or whether his early enculturation (habitus?) made him a more sensitive observer of America. He did write extensively comparing and contrasting “the Americans” against “the Chinese” (1963, 1972, 1981). Phrasing his observations and interpretations that way may be the reason so many dismissed his work and it has been all but forgotten—or at least dropped from the canon of work on the United States. My reasons for not making him part of my personal canon had more to do with his overly grounding his work in the kind of late Boasian psychological anthropological then deprecated at the University of Chicago. That is, in bad graduate student fashion, I focused on Hsu’s interpretation of his observations, rather than on the ethnography on which he relied.

Today, I take Hsu seriously. I focus on his contribution the still ongoing debate about the place of “class” in America, and particularly on what anthropologists can contribute to the debate. I start with a few sentence by Hsu criticizing Lloyd Warner. Hsu starts with a summary of Warner’s observations:

He finds the Jonesville grade school children’s evaluation of one another to be so strongly reflective of social-class values as to blind them to the actual reality. For example, children from the top classes were rated 22 times cleaner than those from the bottom, but in fact, the latter as a whole came to school cleaner and neater than the former. However, he also finds that the Jonesville high school students, though following a similar pattern, do not make such categorical and rigid judgments by class values. (1972: 247)

And then he quotes Warner’s interpretation of something Warner also observed, that high school students are “less open and more careful about what they say and how they feel on the tabooed subject of status.” Warner interpreted this as the students having “learned to use American values of individualism and are able to make clearer distinction about the worth of an individual than are younger children.” (1953: 1982-183). Hsu objected that this was a common error among American social scientists “due to the fact that many … American scholars have been too emotionally immersed in the absolute goodness of their own form of society, ethic, thought, and religion that it is hard for them to question them… They cannot see anything but the eventual triumph of their cultural ideals … over realities such as racism and religious intolerance” (1972: 245).

Complaining about the more or less unconscious biases of other social scientists is, of course, a staple of anthropological debates. What interests me here is that Hsu criticizes Warner’s interpretation, but not necessarily his observations. In my own work, I certainly observed extensive performances of what the students talked about as “cliques.” There were the sitting patterns in the cafetaria, the clothing and other bodily displays (e.g. hair styles) in the corridors and classrooms, the sorting and segregating of para-educational activities (sports, cheer leading, pushing video carts). I talked extensively with both teachers and students about all this, and they were more than willing to answer at great length to explain and teach. I also noted the greater ease that the younger students had in talking about cliques as things. In contrast the older students said things like “last year cliques were bad, but not so much this year,” “some people think of us [football players] as a clique but we are really only a loose group of friends.” It would seem that the seniors had indeed “learned” how to talk to observing adults asking questions about the obvious and needing, perhaps, to be corrected about what they suspected would my interpretations. Not only had the seniors learned about the “taboo” (in Warner’s words) on class talk, but also how observing social scientists might blame them for not observing it.

Like Warner, I emphasized this evolution and was later critiqued on grounds similar to Hsu’s: I would have de-emphasized the “reality” of the cliques (Lesko 1988: 74). Whether I (or Warner) did by bringing out the anti-class/cliques discourses a matter of interpretation about the nature (ontology?) of such things as “classes” (and the other matters social scientists deplore like racism, genderism, etc.). What should not be a matter of dispute is the (total social) fact that anthropologists observe both class (race, gender) segmentation and the discourses critiquing those, and that one can observe all this not only among the professional observers but also among the participants, whether high school students, politicians, or artists. Whether anthropologists should then report this as an “American Dilemma” (Myrdal ) or a conflict between “Dream and Reality” (Warner 1953; and passim in the literature), or, as I would suggest, constitutive of each other (as I would say), should now be a matter of dispute.

[more on all this in a future post]

References

Henry, Jules   1963 Culture against man. New York: Random House.

Hollingshead, B.   1949 Elmtown’s Youth: The Impact of Social Class on Adolescents. New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Hsu, Francis   1972 “American core value and national character,” in Psychological anthropology. Edited by F. Hsu. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publishing Company. pp. 201-240.

Lesko,   Nancy   1988 Symbolizing society: Stories, rites and structure in a Catholic high school. New York: The Falmer Press.

Lynd, Robert and Helen Lynd   [1930] 1956 Middletown: A study in modern American culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.

Myrdal, Gunnar   1944 An American dilemma: The Negro problem and modern democracy. New York: Harper and Row.

Varenne, Hervé   1983 American school language: Culturally patterned conflicts in a suburban high school. New York: Irvington Publishers

Varenne, Hervé and Ray McDermott  1998 Successful failure: The school America builds.” Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Warner, W. Lloyd   1949 Democracy in Jonesville. New York: Harper and Row.
1953 American life: Dream and reality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

 

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comprehensive, parentings

Teachers College and “Family”

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From Arts (practical), to Life (psychological), to Education (social) in the attempts to understand and analyze, in order to educate about, perennial concerns with the settings in which men, women, and children meet most intimately and extensively over the course of their lives—in a word “in families.” For a new re-integration.

This post was triggered by my hearing that the administration of the College is considering closing the Center on the Family as Educator. The creation of this Center was, as I see it, one of Lawrence Cremin’s signal academic achievements, I was moved to wonder wherefrom what moved much of my career at TC came from, dialogically. I may transform this into a fuller article.

In 1972, I joined the College into the Department of Home and Family Life, later to become the Department of Family and Community Education. I published much on matters of family and education. I did not necessarily think much about what was sustaining these concerns, institutionally. And so, now, I wonder what TC has been doing with “family” over the past century since it appears it has done much, or little. I wonder what has been included, or indexed. And I wonder whether it should continue to do something about “it” and, if so, what now. This question is partially historical, and partially programmatic.

In my beginning (Fall 1972):
My first introduction to the informal history of Teachers College came when I was shown the closet within which, I was told, were kept the teaching tools of what I did not yet know as “the Table Service Lab.” This closet contained a full set of china and silverware that, by all evidence had not been used for many decades. The department I was joining, “Home and Family Life,” for a reason I did not immediately understand, was the inheritors by default of this closet and its content. young women learning how to serve formal dinnersI was also shown, and often used, the “Tudor Room” which, I was also told at some point was a copy of Miss Grace Dodge’s dining room. I was delighted when, decades later, I found out that this Tudor Room had been the Table Service Lab!

In TC’s beginning(s) (1880, 1884, 1889):
Once upon a time, in those days (1880), some philanthropists in New York, led by Miss Grace Dodge, created the “Kitchen Garden Association” for the “promotion of the domestic industrial arts among the laboring classes … the better to qualify them for domestic service” (Russell 1937: 4-5). Four years later this became the “Industrial Education Association” “to include ‘special training of both sexes in any of those industries which affect house and home directly or indirectly’” (Russell 1937: 9). And then, in 1889, the same principals “incorporated” a subsequent institution “under the name of Teachers College” (Russell 1937: 7). All versions of the history of this institution emphasize the shift to the education of teachers as the best route to helping the “laboring classes” (and particularly the arriving crowds from the poorest, most rural parts of Europe) succeed (survive?) in the United States. Much of the details in this post come from the Cremin, Shannon and Townsend history of Teachers College (1954) but this history does not go in much details about what must have extended and difficult conversations.

Histories of TC then most often jump to Dewey writing about “democracy and education” (in a book that should have been titled Democracy and Public Schooling), to Dewey’s debate with Thorndike, to difficult conversations with Columbia University, etc.

What becomes veiled in these accounts is the fact that some early concerns had not been discarded. It is significant that, among of the first buildings at the Morningside Campus were the building for the Industrial Arts (Macy), and, my focus here, Grace Dodge Hall erected so “that the ennobling arts of the home [would be] taught to coming generations” (from the plaque in the entrance to the building). dedication plaque for Grace Dodge HallWhat is also often veiled is the continued inclusion in the curriculum of matters related to these “ennobling arts.” As late as 1935, the TC catalogue listed in its fields of specialization “Household Arts and Household Arts Education” with courses in “Household economics,” “Cookery,” “Clothing,” “Teaching of Home Economics in schools.”

By 1937 the list of courses included courses in nutrition, health, child development and, most significantly given future history, a course in “family social relations.” Some of these were offered through different departments even as the old department was reorganized into a department of “Home Economics.” This department brought together most of the earlier matters but developed what became its full focus: psychological development and emotional life within a nuclear family. This transformation could probably be traced directly to the concomitant development of both Freudian therapeutic psychology (in its many transformations), and concerns with child development—as well as sociology. Ernest Osborne, who had earned a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology, was appointed in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching in the specialization in early childhood education. He started teaching a course in the “Psychology of Family Relations” (still taught as “Dynamics of Family Interaction”), and then became the prime mover of the new version of the venerable department which became, by 1953, the “Department of Home and Family Life” (Hey 1965: 134-5) . As Osborne put it in 1939:

It was once believed that parent education was a relatively simple thing limited to the instruction of parents in the proper ways of feeding, clothing, and training children . … Today .. . an increasing realization of the effects of relationship between family members on behavior is evident. (Quoted in Hay 1965: 134)

Over in Harvard, Talcott Parsons wrote a soon to become extremely controversial article on the family where women were to hold the “expressive role” in order to socialize children and stabilize adult personalities (1955: 16). Teachers College was again at the cutting edge in the transformation of an academic consensus into an educational program to apply this knowledge.

And then, as more time passed and Teachers College became my world:
I am not exactly sure what happened in the mid-1960s. I was told in my first years at TC, that, after Osborne died, the faculty of the programs in clinical psychology took umbrage at a program which appeared to give doctorate to people who would then engage in (family) therapy away from their own controls. At the same time, Lawrence Cremin got convinced that, as he put it, “education proceeds from many institutions” and particularly from families. He recruited Hope Leichter, a sociologist from the Harvard Department of Social Relations, whom he promoted, made chair of what was still “Home and Family Life” with the goal of transforming it into a department of “Family and Community Education.” This transformation was completed in 1976. Paul Vahanian, the last professor with a family therapy background, was not replaced when he retired. Rather, Leichter, Cremin and the others concerned with the matter invited anthropologists to join the evolving department (me from Chicago, and Ray McDermott from Stanford).

And then, in 1990, Teachers College, that is its administration on the basis of a recommendation by a faculty committee, closed the department and the faculty scattered.

I tell this story to make a point that keeps being obscured or, at best, side-lined: some at Teachers College always insisted that a school of education must pay attention to whatever one might want to call the institutions that take care of children when the children are not in school, or are the resting places of adults when they leave their salaried jobs.

A few at TC, I am sure, may still be willing to argue for what may have moved Grace Dodge even as she accepted that the institution she was fostering would focus on school teaching. It remains that, even in the 21st century, educators should not ignore the people who prepare the children for school, pick them up in the afternoon, clothe them, feed them, put them to bed, manage their health, and control, or not, what they read, what they watch, what they have access to in the social media of their times, etc. There is no point in rehearsing tired controversies about defining “family,” “home,” the “domestic,” etc. The reality is that, after two centuries of reformers proposing a world where children would be raised by the State, none of these utopias have survived long. Everywhere, children escape the State and yet, since the Coleman report at least (1966), and fully confirmed since, their familial experiences can challenge the State. One cannot understand “systemic privilege” without understanding the educative work of families, including their work educating themselves about schooling. This has been one of Ed Gordon (Varenne, Gordon and Lin 2009; Lin, Gordon and Varenne 2010) major contributions as he has been asking us to pay attention to what he has called “supplementary education.” It remains essential that it not be ignored.

In (temporary) conclusion, I wonder: how might we now integrate what is most easily told as a linear history: the joint concerns with the Arts of the domestic (economics, ecology, sustainability), Life with the most significant others (emotions, disabilities, cognition, development), and Education about all this (privilege, resistance, imagination).

 

Coleman, James et al. 1966 Equality of educational opportunity. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office. (with et al.)

Cremin, Lawrence 1974 “The family as educator: Some comments on the recent historiography.”  Teachers College Record 76, 2: 250-265.

Cremin, Lawrence, David Shannon, and Mary Townsend 1954 A history of Teachers College, Columbia University. Columbia University Press.

Hey, Richard 1965 “Ernest G. Osborne Family Life Educator.” Journal of Marriage and Family , 27, 2: 134-138.

Lin, Linda, Hervé Varenne, and Edmund Gordon, eds. 2010 Educating Comprehensively: Varieties of Educational Experiences. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press,

Osborne, Ernest 1939 “Widening Horizons in Parent Education,” Teachers College Record, 41 p, 28.

Parsons, Talcott 1955 Family, socialization and interaction process. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press.

Russell, James 1937 Founding Teachers College. Bureau of Publications: Teachers College, Columbia University

Varenne, Hervé, Edmund Gordon and Linda Lin, eds. 2009 Theoretical Perspectives on Comprehensive Education: The Way Forward. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press.

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on anthropological representation

about ethnoethnography

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I am always viscerally skeptical of fads in anthropology. Often, they disappear after only a few years, or move back into obscurity (“ontology”?) and I can ignore them. Others, like “identity” become mainstream and take over the discipline—as I discovered while playing “session roulette” at the AAA meetings over the past decades. So, often, I resist, though, sometimes, I attempt to appropriate some of what triggered me (to use a recent, and possibly useful, cliche). This is what I do today with what I would probably classify as the first kind of possibly obscure fad: autoethnography.

Autoethnography had been in my peripheral vision for a while and I found it easy to dismiss until I stumbled on the possibility that, after all, autoethnography was something I had always been doing, particularly in this blog. At that moment of course, the scholar in me noticed that I actually knew very little about the “official,” if not canonical, or at least most often cited, literature on the topic. So, I did what I suggest all doctoral students do when they shape bibliographies about topics that might be relevant to what they want to do, I explored the literature. Given that that we are well into the 21st century, I postponed going to the library and started by questioning ChatGpt.

I asked: “what is autoethnography?” On January 23, 2025 ChatGpt responded:

“Autoethnography is a qualitative research method that combines personal narrative with cultural analysis and interpretation. It allows researchers to use their own experiences as a lens through which to explore broader cultural, social, or organizational phenomena.”

I then asked: “Who are the 4 most cited authors using autoethnography?” ChatGpt responded:

Carolyn Ellis: A distinguished professor emerita … Her notable publications include … [Wikipedia]

Arthur P. Bochner: A distinguished university professor … has made significant contributions to narrative inquiry and autoethnography. His infuential works include … [Wikipedia]

Leon Anderson: Known for his seminal article “Analytic Autoethnography” (2006), Anderson…
[Oxford Research Encyclopedia]

H.L. (Bud) Goodall Jr.: A pioneer in autoethnography and narrative ethnography, Goodall authored … [Wikipedia]

I noted with some professorial satisfaction that ChatGpt now cites its sources which, of course, I double checked. I confirmed to my equal satisfaction that ChatGpt knows how to read and can be useful as a starting point, but it will not do much if you are wondering about the archaeological underpinning of autoethnography, its history within anthropology, or what to do next with it, if anything.

I dug further and looked at a 2017 paper by Susanne Gannon that was linked by the Oxford Research Encyclopedia.   This paper is titled “Autoethnography” and is summarized as follows:

Autoethnography is an increasingly popular form of postpositivist narrative inquiry that has recently begun to appear in educational contexts. The multiple lineages of autoethnography include the insider accounts of early anthropologists, literary approaches to life history and autobiography, responses to the ontological/epistemological challenges of postmodern philosophies, feminist and postcolonial insistence on including narratives of the marginalized, performance and communication scholarship, and the interest in personal stories of contemporary therapeutic and trauma cultures.

Ah Ah! As I suspected: ontology… postmodern… feminist… narrative…. marginalized… performance… trauma … educational contexts.

I was reminded of a mostly negative review I wrote (Varenne 1990) about two books published in the late 1980s. Both could be claimed by “authoethnography” (though they did not label themselves that way, or did not make into the current canon–as far as I can tell now). Both strongly emphasized that they were written by a particular individual with particular experiences. They were written by “’I’, an ex-hippie-estranged- graduate student, a man with a battered car, who (does not) get arrested by ‘Police Commissioner Rizzo’s dreaded Highway Patrol’” (Rose 1989: 1-19; Dorst 1989: 209-210). Rose is most extreme as a third of the book is dedicated to an “oneric flight through America” (1989: 78), a collage of extracts from letters “to his mother,” “to his advisor,” and fieldnotes that were actually specifically written for the book and could thus be considered “fictional”—though Rose probably would argue that this would have been true even if they had been written while he was in the field.

If what Gannon indexes, and what authors like Dorst or Rose did, is  indeed “authoethnography” then I would not do much with it and would warn students against it. But, if one looks beyond the box ChatGpt and Wikipedia summaries construct, then one finds that many anthropologists did write about their personal experiences in the field, often in quite personal ways.  So there may even be something to appropriate here.

Some examples from my personal canon:

The most classical of those, in my generation, was Lévi-Strauss’ Tristes Tropiques ([1955] 1963). More fun, and quite powerful as a teaching tool, is Laura Bohannan’s novel about her times with the Tiv of West Africa ([1954] 1964). She published it under the pseudonym Eleanor Bowen given her fears for her academic career. But it does everything an autoethnography should do: tell us much about the people and the challenges of learning about them so that she could report her experiences back to us. All of this is magnificently summarized in her most famous article: “”Shakespeare in the bush” (Bohannan 1966) where she tells, now under her own name, of what she was taught telling the story of Hamlet to the Tiv.  Another powerful ethnography is that of Robert Murphy chronicling the silencing of his body (1987).

One can go further outside the box to notice that it is quite common in recent ethnography for the author to reveal how they actually triggered what they then report. Tobin did something like this when he showed video sequences from one place to people from another place and made them comment (2011). Gilmore writes powerfully about her son and his friend constructing a language only them could understand (2016). Kalmar’s reports on farm workers from Mexico teaching each other English build on the ways the workers taught him how he, and his co-teachers, were actually ignorant so that they could notice a local knowledge usual methods might have not seen (2001). At some extreme one could say that all these are instances of the kinds of experiments Garfinkel devised as he challenged people to respond to the unknown or surprising.

One can go even further by making oneself the “subject” (“object”? depending on your ontological predilections) of the ethnography.  Take for example three tellings of my experiences in a large hospital in the large urban center of a galaxy far far away (Columbia Presbyterian in New York City) (Varenne 2018, 2019, 2021). In each case I place myself at the center, directly experiencing what the “natives” (as they would have been called a century ago) or “interlocutors” (as they may be referred to now) experience at such moments. As next of kin, or patient, I very much belonged in the set of natives/interlocutors of analytic concern in the literature on American medicine, from the least (say Glaser and Strauss on dying 1965) to the most (Foucault [1963] 1973) critical . At those times, I was not a (participant-)observer but rather a participant(-observer). I placed myself at the center.  I  hinted how these experiences triggered powerful emotional responses but those were not what I was concerned to publish.

Some therapists may have diagnosed me as in some sort of “denial” as I watched young policemen flirt while standing guard over a room next to the one where my wife laid unconscious after a severe stroke.  That I was in denial, or trying to defend myself emotionally, may be interesting but dwelling on it does not contribute to anthropology. What I have hoped may contribute, and is the rationale for much in this blog, is that the sketch of such a case may tell anthropologists more about moments in life that may be difficult of access. In this case (2019) I got to wonder about a classic problem with Lave’s model of the “community of practice” concerning the implicit boundary between the non-apprentice and the apprentice (or between the legitimate and illegitimate apprentice) that was highlighted as I, a non-apprentice in all the communities watched apprentices moving toward fuller participating into different communities (say physicians, nurses, policemen) while in continual contact across the “communities” thereby re-opening very classic issues in social systems where labor is divided. In another case (2021), I traced the movement through a social field which, at every stage, re-identified me into the kind of person they could deal with legitimately (e.g. the movement from the parking lot of the hospital into an operating room for heart surgery). In both cases, and in others, I used myself as a way to bypass the kind of IRB strictures that would make it very difficult, if not impossible, to follow a patient into an operating room so that we could understand in greater analytic detail how exactly bodies get disciplined (in Foucault’s terms).

Most classical ethnographies were specifically written to hide the author as a person.  The more recent include a “positionality” statement that is all too often only mentions a few traits (mostly gender and race, very rarely if ever religion, political ideology, age) without specifying how exactly these might have made a difference.  I would argue for example that this blog is “authorized” more by my status as a Full Professor in a Research One Institution than by my status as “white.”  This argument would then be developed into matters of theory and ethnography.

This would be good and leads to my conclusion today that  expanding the box to include all this will make anthropologists accept that all anthropology already is based in “autoethnography” and that those who discipline themselves to anthropology should just develop further how to make it useful for research and teaching purposes.

References

Bohannan, Laura   1966 Natural History 75:28-33.

Dorst John   1989     The written suburb. University of Pennsylvania Press

Gilmore, Perry   2016     Kisisi (our language). Wiley Blackwell

Glaser, Barney and Anselm Strauss   1965     “Temporal aspects of dying as a non-scheduled status passage.”  American Journal of Sociology 71:48-59.

Foucault, Michel   [1963] 1973 The birth of the clinic: An archaeology of medical perception. Pantheon Books.

Kalmar, Tomas   2014     2001 Illegal alphabets and adult literacy: Latino migrants crossing the linguistic border. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude   2014     Tristes tropiques. Publisher

Murphy, Robert   1987     The body silent. Henry Hold & Co.

Rose, Dan   1989 Patterns of American culture: Ethnography and estrangement. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Tobin, Joseph and M. Karasawa   2011 Preschool in three cultures revisited: China, Japan, and the United States.  University of Chicago Press.

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Culturings, on the popular

powerful representations of a culture

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[this was drafted in August 2024 but could not be posted at the time]

« Un spectacle extraordinaire, unique au monde et dans l’histoire des Jeux qui, je crois, a rendu nos compatriotes extrêmement fiers. » Emmanuel Macron ne tarit pas d’éloges sur la cérémonie d’ouverture des Jeux olympiques de Paris 2024, qui s’est déroulée sur la Seine vendredi 26 juillet. Ce samedi, le président de la République s’est réjoui du « formidable spectacle […] que les artistes et les athlètes ont donné ».
(published in various French newspapers in late July 2024)

As many noticed, the opening ceremonies to the Olympic games in Paris have been the occasion for much commentary. They will probably remain one of the most remembered ceremonies. I did not notice any cultural anthropologist weighing in and so, as I prepare to teach my first introductory course in the discipline, I thought I would write something and, given some of my critics who say I am not concerned enough with “power,” I will start with the paradoxes of governmentality.

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Culturings, on 'culture', on America

Race Consciousness, Racism (and race?): Contradictions with consequences (culture!)

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From the time when I played “les coboilles et les indiens,” 70 years ago, in the streets of small Southern village, I have experienced something, that is, precisely, a “thing” that stood in my way, that I could play with, or fear. This was called “America” by French politicians (etc) as well as five year old boys. “It” (its armies, myths, festivals) was awe-inspiring and also mysterious. After many years establishing myself as an anthropologists of ‘America,’ I would now say that that which still fascinates me is not exactly the kind of object archaeologist might find in some jungle. America, as any other culture I’d say, is more of a set of dilemmas and contradictions that move conversations-with-practical-consequences—and thus, through their consequences do make things that trigger more conversations and things.

Case in point: The recent conversations about what to do (“ask applicants,” “take into consideration,” and other speech acts) when involved in evaluating students for admission into elite colleges.

Like many in these colleges, I have been reading several documents all written by people born, raised, and schooled in the United States (natives?). I read the “Opinion” (certainly not a description of the actual speech act!) by that most bizarre (cross-culturally) of institutions: the Supreme Court of the United States. I read the Opinion, some of the concurring statements, some of the dissenting statements, and many editorials and such summarizing the Opinion and telling what it “really” meant. And so I am left contemplating the ongoing production/construction of a culture (America) that continues to fascinate me as an emergent, and now someone jaded, Franco-European(-American?).

These documents are ostensibly about, “race,” “race consciousness,” or “racism.” But I am never always sure which.  My own opinion (interpretation with no authority or general consequence), is that all “justices” agree that racism is bad and that something, that is some thing (act with consequences) needs be (not) done. They are all, in the very evidence of their writing, very much “conscious” or “race” but they do not agree on what kind of “race consciousness” is a good or bad thing.  Surprisingly to some observers, they do not seem to care much about “race,” as a concept, category or thing of any sort. And so, most people in the United States, particularly actors in the elite universities, are left to their own devices figuring out what do to next in their various responsibilities as faculty, minor administrator, etc., in one of these universities.

The justices and commentators do agree that racism is bad, but the issue, as argued, is not about philosophy, ideology, genetics and other sciences of the human body. It is about institutional consequences that have direct life-long consequences on people. It is about slavery, segregation and Jim Crow laws, separate but equal schooling, limitations on voting, and such matters of state mandates. It is about what the State may allow or require of institutions and people in general. In that sense, it is about facts that constrain people (Durkheim), things with their separate agency (Latour), inevitable objects. That all these facts, things, objects, are man-made (human productions) do not make them less real. I will sometimes say that such constructions may in fact be more immediately real (to be lived and experienced) than matters like gravity or air-pressure, even if, or particularly if, they are so threatened as to continually need reconstructing.

And “race” is now something to be reconstructed in general and in the particularities of admission offices.

In very brief, the ongoing conversations start with a general agreement that America, in its State and mandates, constructed many very bad institutions in the past. It should continue to deconstruct these and construct some new ones. This is, and has been, an ongoing process. To appropriate something Lévi-Strauss once said in his usual pithy way: [America] tends to be dismantled like a palace swept away upon the flood, whose parts, through the effect of currents and stagnant waters, obstacles and straits, come[s] to be combined in a manner other than that intended by the architect” ([1962] 1966: 233). What Lévi-Strauss might have added was that this palace is continually being reconstructed—as everyone in the United States was reminded a few weeks ago.

But this reconstruction is not guided by any architect. The significant speakers/actors (the six justices of the Supreme Court who made a difference) just told any architect what NOT to build. All architects of future admission procedures will have to construct things in ongoing uncertainty without relying on any specific consensus, common sense, or tradition. The justices themselves, spectacularly, do not agree with what is exactly at stake. All use the word “race.” But only some wonder about what exactly, for this or any other purposes, is to be meant by the word. All, in their more consequential pro or con moments, appear to take it for granted. I suspect all of them might agree that the word is about a social construct of some sort, and not a thing of nature or a property of people (as it might have been in the 19th century and still lingering). The conversation is about what is to be constructed that is somehow related to race.  It will involve wondering about materials, institutional places, ecological impact on other constructions, and the imagined future use of the constructed things. On one side, six of justices agree that constructing anything with “race” is a bad thing, as it was in the past. On the other side, three justices agree that, when acting with institutional life-long consequences, those with authority may, or indeed must, make themselves “conscious” of race, using whatever definition they wish. All nine then tar each other, more or less explicitly, with “racism.”

So, what is racism at this moment in United States time: being institutionally “conscious” of race or being deliberately and institutionally NOT conscious of race? Is there anything that anthropology, through ethnography, can offer as part of an answer?

I’d say first that the very ongoing conversations demonstrate that about everyone in the United States is, practically, in their everyday life, “conscious of race.” What is less clear is what, in this everyday life of people with very different responsibilities (university presidents, interns helping sort applications), does this consciousness make happen? I suspect, given “America” that many will transform this into questions of states of mind, identity, or the like. But the Court, most interestingly for an observer, is not actually concerned with states of mind. It is concerned with the State and its statutes and mandates in the minute details of its work as it might be experienced in the everyday life of the people affected. In my own academic world, preliminary local conversations have raised such practical issues as: may an institution still ask applicants for admission to check any kind of box about race (in all its variants)? How can people be given preferential treatment on matters like financial aid? How might this preference be phrased and practically implemented by subsidiary administrators? All these are extremely concrete matters that are continually referred to “legal” since the institution does not want to be sued. All  the actors will remain “conscious of race” but that will remain a private matter. My kind of anthropologist will always look, after a cursory glance at the text of a mandate, at what the people will then do with the mandate. This anthropologist will expect that people will resist, play or, as one commentator said, actively “game the system.” As I like to say, it is by looking at such moments that one eventually discovers what is most consequential for a people—that is, for me, not so much “their” culture as the culture they cannot escape.

 

References

Lévi-Strauss, Claude   [1962] 1966/2021     The savage mind/Wild thought. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

 

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of Corona

The end of Corona

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I first mused about the end of the Corona epoch (a.k.a “COVID-19″) two years ago. I did it again a year ago. In both cases I took into account both my (lived?) experience in the various polities I usually and more or less regularly inhabit (family, church, shops, university), as well as what I found out about the evolution of governors’ mandates, including both those I had to live by in New York City or France, and those I read about. My usual examples involved restaurants, their closure, their re-opening, the mandates about masks while sitting or moving in restaurants, etc.

First, some ethnography:
At Teachers College, one could trace various endings over the past two years. The building was reopened to selected personnel, then to all. There shifts in vaccination reporting and checking, etc. And then, on April 20, 2023 we were told that, among related matters:

COVID-19 requirements and campus access:
TC will no longer link any COVID-19 vaccination or testing requirements to campus access.

This was justified as [resulting] “from the ending of the COVID-19 Federal Health Emergency declaration and decreasing COVID-19 cases among TC community members and across New York City.”

All this is to happen on May 12, 2023, thereby closing the epoch that started sometimes in early March 2020 (the actual starting point could be considered either the first message about the “coronavirus” [it had not yet been named “COVID-19], or the actual physical closing of the buildings when “do not enter” signs were pasted over the doors).

The TC announcement went to every one in the “community” (faculty, staff, students, etc.) and did not cause much of a ripple. When I mentioned it in class someone retorted that she got the message on the same day one of our her friend tested positive. To persist on my theme, governors can re-open restaurants, the virus continues its life career—if viruses are “alive.” something that appears to be controversial among the authoritative scientific experts. As these same experts do tell us: whether alive or not, the virus is with us for the foreseeable future.

So “SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the Covid-19 disease” was noticed by human beings in the Fall 2019 and remains with us while “Corona” (as culture epoch) started in February or March 2020 and has been ending to the point when many now use the past tense when talking about “COVID-19,” the current, common, and apparently uncontroversial, label.

And now, to play at anthropology:
• Given that Corona has obviously been a (social) construction (by and for about the whole 9 billion human beings).
• And given that Corona will continue to evolve in narratives and other forms of discourse (art, policy, science, etc.).
Can we also say that the virus was constructed?

Both current speculations about the origin of the virus involve human activity and complex, though quite different, actor-networks. As some tell it, perhaps a worker in the local lab did not clean up quite well and carried the virus out of the lab. This leads to question about why the lab was making viruses, why it was located where it was, who funded it, etc…. Alternatively, perhaps a merchant bought an infected animal from some hunter and then sold it to some customer. This hypothesis would then lead to investigations into the traditions (cultures) that make some wild animals edibles “there and then” (though they might not be “elsewhere and elsewhen”). And then, in either case, the spread of the virus depended on much that is human (airplanes, policies, etc.).

And yet … the virus itself is not human. Humans cannot talk to it, threaten it, regulate it, teach it—or any of the other acts that human can perform on each other. At most humans can attempt to control each other in the hope that, in that fashion, they might control the virus. And this brings us back to governors issuing mandates on partially resistant populations.

In other words, human beings, when confronted to the dangerous “thing-ness” of an object in their experience will do something (culture) but the thing remains, possibly hidden but always susceptible to re-emergence … as the next virus will do.

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on 'culture', on America, on community, on identity

While crossing Manhattan on 14th Street

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Half a century ago, when I searched for a catchy title for the book building on my dissertation (1972), I came up up with Americans Together (1978). I am not sure what I then meant by “Americans”—though I am sure that, from the time when I proposed the research (in 1970), I had been looking for a “pattern” or “structure” as I interpreted Benedict, Lévi-Strauss, or Dumont, to have done. But I may also have accepted that the plural “AmericanS” somewhat referred to a plurality of individuals. And thus I fell to American (patterned) common sense.

As far as I can check, I never used the plural noun again, though I continued to use “American” as an adjective and “America” as a proper, always singular, noun—and I persist. And, now, after many years teaching Garfinkel, Latour, Lave, and those inspired by them, it came to me that I should have titled the book “Together in America” which would in fact had fit better the subtitle to the book: “Structured diversity in a Midwestern town.”

This subtitle directly stated the main ethnographic point of the book that, while Paw Paw, Michigan, (“Appleton” in the book) may appear indistinguishable from thousand of such towns, it was internally (as I am sure all other such towns are) extremely varied religiously, ideologically, generationally (and probably also by all the most commonly invoked 21st century categories of race, gender, ethnicity that also appeared in my fieldnotes). But, to me then and now, the more interesting internal variability was in the organization of settings where people came together and manipulated identity symbols (as we would currently say in anthropology). One example that made it into the book is the moment when “ethnic background” briefly emerged during a round of introductions when I first partied with a group of friends of my age (1978: Chapter 4). When narrating (!) my (lived?) experiences in Paw Paw, I like to embroider my travels through the town, on a Sunday, when I started (dressed in a suit and tie) at a Sunday School then service at the Methodist or Presbyterian church (where/when all men wore suits and tie), before driving to the apartment of friends (where I was told to take off my tie), and ending the day at a Catholic mass (where the congregation was dressed in everything from dirty blue jeans to fur coats). Depending on I am not sure what, I was sometime positioned as a high school exchange student, an awkward young male with a funny accent, a doctoral students at the University of Chicago, etc. (including other things I may not have been directly told, though I remember several attempts to test my “orientation”). Eventually I was also struck by the diversity of politico/economic interests as I explored the many governing board regulating this or that aspect of everyday. This was most salient perhaps in the school board when town’s people and farmers clashed over taxation, curriculum, etc. only apparently coming together for ritual performances (football games, graduation ceremonies, etc.).

All this came back to me as I day dreamed walking across Manhattan on 14th street. From 8th Avenue to Avenue C, I crossed what some sociologists of the Chicago school called, a century ago, “ecological zones” (a concept for understanding cities it might be worth resurrecting). Each of these zones stood out to me mostly because of variation in density of human occupation, presentation of self in dress and demeanor, not to mention phenotype and age. A very much not exhaustive list might include:

– prosperous and/or glitzy stores and businesses (particularly between 8th and Park Avenues)

– crowds of young adults probably related to the nearby universities (particularly around Union Square)

– starting on 3rd avenue street, a sharp drop in human density and then vendors spreading their miscellaneous used wares (“junk” the young adults would probably label them) on blankets laid out on the pavement in front of no longer glitzy stores. The vendors appeared mostly black and from China, as well as older.

It is certainly the case that detailed ethnographic work on that street would correct some of these initial very superficial characterizations. The only point I want to make at this moment is that, as I walked, I came close to many many “different” polities (“communities”) (re-)producing themselves in some contact with others. Whether I also came close to various “cultures” or whether I remained in “America” throughout is the question.

I finally reached my ostensible goal where a small band of musicians performed for a small audience in an East Village park. There, I was a very peripheral participant in this polity as the guest of one of the musician. As the anthropologist always fascinated with symbolic displays (identity markers?), I noted musical styles (“misc jazz/brass and Mambembé” as I was told), dress (“informal” in, to simplify, the “East Village” styles), phenotype, age, sex (actually easier to “see” than gender) and other such matters easily accessible to a casual observer. More on this in a future post, and the human complaint that artificial humans (AI) often find it difficult to identify a (wo)man as (wo)man.
I was also struck about how well organized it all was. The performances were complex and obviously well rehearsed even in their improvisational moments. And then, as I moved with my friend to another park for another performance with another set of fuller participants, In that park, various polities of performers and their audiences performed in ways that were both internally organized and externally coordinated with each other within a more encompassing polity (“HONK NYC!”) separate but dependent to the administration of New York City through its “Department of Parks and Recreation.”

Also, and most probably NOT organized by any of these polities, but still delicately coordinated with all other people together in the park, were two almost caricaturely tall blond young men throwing a football in long arcs next to and sometimes over the other assemblies.

The question that started this is: what is a cultural anthropologist to do with all this? Many (most/) anthropologists might tell me to drop “culture” (and “America”). My answer is that, as I walked and day dreamed about the multiplicities (and I only sketched a tiny number) I got close to, I remained convinced that all the people who found themselves together on that day were doing so at a particular time, in a particular way (both internally and in relation to each other), with particular affordances that both constrained them (and disabled them) and opened possibilities (both for reproduction and transformation), and that these particularities can be modeled and so that any science of humanity (anthropo-logy) needs a concept that might just as well be labeled “culture.”

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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.

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consciousness and knowledge, Governing power, on ignorance, on language and expression

on the grounds of instruction into grammaticality

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… scholars and other shamans might be as puzzled as two senior professors when they read the title of an edited volume by de Oliveira et al.  It goes: Multiliteracies in English as an additional language classrooms (2021).  As members of the audience addressed by this volume, they wondered whether there was a typo someplace, whether the title was ungrammatical or proof of bad editing, whether it was an attempt to Joycean play or a form of Jabberwocky.

Then a less senior professor pointed out that “English as an additional language” is to be treated as a package as it is the current proper way to say what used to be said as “English as a second language.” Thus the title should be parsed as “Multiliteracies in EAL classrooms” and is thus fully grammatical. It is also indexes that the authors are up to date in expected academic education research writing about the topic. The whole thing is normal and orderly and it allows for two senior professors to be shown ignorant and in need of an EAL teacher. And it also allows for a suspicion that they were being somewhat disorderly and in need of instruction into the appropriate.

Given that the two professors pride themselves on their work on literacy, language, culture, power, etc., they could not just stand corrected. They also had to wonder what exactly is grammatical in English and how it is established. If, as someone quipped a long time ago, a “language” is a dialect with an army—as well as schools of education, school teachers and other institutions in charge of publicizing the proper or normal (orthography, word order, pronominal usage, etc.), then one may wonder how this army exactly does its work of ordering the normal when so many keep disordering it. If, as another great man once said “here comes everybody,” what will they do when they arrive?

So, I write:
“Ignorant education research one university faculty member blog writer says…” that he expects this string of nouns to be taken as acceptable, proper, normal (as well as pedantic) and does convey that “one writer of blogs who is member of the faculty of a university famous for its research is also ignorant …” I keep seeing such strings in the titles of articles in the New York Times, as well as in scholarly publications. Stringing nouns for titles must thus be considered “grammatical” in English. However, it is essential to note that it is not grammatical in the other “language” I “know” well: in French where, for example, “faculty member” must be rendered as “membre de la faculté” (and NOT as “faculté membre”). It is also essential to note that people with decades of speaking English (one who got to it as an “additional” language, and one for whom it has been the only one) can be puzzled by such strings.
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