Category Archives: on anthropological practices

about various experiments in new ways of representing ethnographic reports and anthropological theorizing

applying anthropology

research as conversation with ancestors and peers

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This is a development on a series of blogs on what Ray McDermott once called  “reply anthropology”
For some years, I have started the required initial course in a doctoral student’s career in the Programs in Anthropology at Teachers College, by asking them what is the concern that drives them and what is the audience they wish to reach. As I have thought further about it recently, this request fits within my interest in reconstructing “culture” not only as a produced state in history (the houses we inhabit) but as a producing moment in a long sequence of statements/actions triggered by earlier ones (that may be institutionalized as a state).

In other words, as Master to apprentice doctoral students, I consider it my task to help then craft (construct, write, say, [choose your verb]) a NEXT statement in the various conversations within which they will be caught (or into which they will crash). The one statement I am particularly responsible for is the crafting of their research (in proposals or dissertations) as contributions within the decades (indeed centuries) of anthropological debates so that 1) they can be heard 2) they move the conversation forward, and, 3) they do not reproduce, unwittingly, earlier statements that we hopefully buried but sometimes re-emerge under new guises (e.g. “culture of poverty”).

To think through the implications of this stance, it makes sense to generalize what conversational analysts have taught us over the past half-century. For example, take “inequality”—a classic concern in the literature and one about all students come with. Take Rousseau on the matter who presented the concern as a universal one.  Three centuries later Graeber and Wengrow (2021) present it as a particularly “Western” (18th century and beyond European then American) one that puzzled some among the Wendat Confederacy as they started interacting, or as I would now say, conversing with the Europeans invading their lands. (See also Dumont [1961] 1980).

What is one now to do with, that is respond to, the various challenges?  An initial response is the polite, and somewhat condescending, common framing of some ancestor as “a person of their time.” Rousseau is collectively known as one of the oldest ancestor of the current social sciences (Durkheim [1918] 1960, Lévi-Strauss [1962] 1976). Durkheim stressed Rousseau taking on Hobbes on the foundations of society. Lévi-Strauss stresses Rousseau’s responding to Descartes on his centering on his own thinking, rather than taking into account the multiplicity of ways to be human that delighted Lévi-Strauss. Neither Durkheim nor Lévi-Strauss picked on the future of Rousseau in politics.
Recently, G&W  acknowledged this and attempted to re-place him as one of the many who misled the social sciences, and particularly anthropology. G&W attempt a new NEXT to stress aspects of the overall human record otherwise obscured. Rousseau’s own NEXT is, famously, summarized in the first sentence in his Discourse on the origin of inequality: “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘This is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.”W&G pick up on what they call Rousseau’s myth of the “stupid savage” (2021: 73) in which they the find a prestatement of the European 19th century justification for colonization. Arguably, this myth, rewritten many times, is behind all “development” schemes of the 20th century.

Some will see here a prefiguration of Marx against private property. I find it redolent of “culture of poverty” as it tars the other people around the first man as “simple” (naive, ignorant, primitive, underdeveloped…). Others have seen him as encouraging the worst aspects of several revolutions.

Was Rousseau (Marx, Durkheim, W&G) a “man of his time”? Of course (what other time would he be of?)! But… he was also a “man against his time.” Strictly speaking he was a man writing something in response to a question asked by the very established Académie de Dijon “whether the reestablishment of the sciences and the arts contributed to purifying morals.” Rousseau’s response displaces the topic and opens the way both to political and analytic developments. Subsequent revolutions and theories of social structure themselves transformed further responses in conversations that are continuing. Such statements are made in a certain times but those that we remember construct a new time when, as Lévi-Strauss once put it “individual works … are adopted on a collective mode” (1971: 560). Or, to translate this into a generalized form of conversational analysis, “a statement by one speaker responding to an earlier statement moves a conversation if it is picked up by another speaker.” Of all those who responded to the question asked by the Académie de Dijon only one is remembered and his discourse is now “myth” in the strongest form of the word.

So, the “time” (culture, identity, habitus) provide the material (intellectual, institutional, and material) and, to use a word I am now appropriating by generalizing it, “triggers” some NEXT statement. But the “time” does not shape the statement into itself for the statement can change, however locally, the “time.” When Rousseau died in 1778, the world of 18th century Europe was not the world of his birth in 1712, as he, and quite a few others (Hobbes, Hume, the Iroquois, various kings, dukes and princesses, etc.), had responded to the challenges other put to them. This NEXT world answered by waging various revolutions (in the Americas and Europe) and wars (Hobbes, Hume, the Iroquois, various kings, dukes and princesses, etc.) that triggered further developments, up to this day.

Let’s formalize this further by looking again at what should now be a classic ethnographic case: Goodwin series of article on “Chil,” a man with severe aphasia (2002, 2003, 2004, 2010). In summary, the series, building on Goodwin’s earlier work in conversational analysis, is ostensibly about constructing or accomplishing “sense” or “meaning” as a joint activity. This happens as “Chil’s action is deeply indexical in that it emerges within a sequential context that provides strong projections about what a move he might make there will be concerned with.” (2004: 60). The emphasis is on the sequence of turns (moves, statements) in a conversation which produces what any turn “means’ and what the whole conversation (or part of it) might be “about.” Goodwin emphasizes the complexity of maintaining a conversational order by various means, many not syntactic, to confirm that a statement (turn) has done something opening the way for a NEXT statement answering a possibility within the first. In the usual words the “meaning” of the initial statement is confirmed by the “meaning” of the next statement, this being confirmed by what happens in the third statement (which can either be a “OK, you got it” or “this is not what I meant.” In the Chil series Goodwin documents how Chil and his interlocutors accomplished various things, from telling stories, to joking, to explaining why oranges cannot be taken from California to Florida. While the last episode is from an unpublished paper, it involves the specific “doing” of something: Chil refuses the gift of an orange and explains why the gift should not be accepted. The issue here then is not just “meaning” but “action”: conversations, like speech, “act.” And by acting they may not only restore a threatened order, or make it even more ordered (“islanding”), but conversations can also lead the assembled interlocutors (even those who may not have been directly involved) onto paths not until then explored.

(Note that I am not talking here about the recent cliches that invoke “starting a national conversation about [race, gender, etc.]”—unless one considered that most of those have actually been going on for generations and may not take those caught with them some of them might want to go)

References

Dumont, Louis   1980   “Caste, Racism and ‘Stratification’.” .

Durkheim, Emile   1960   Montesquieu and Rousseau Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press.

Goodwin, Charles   2004   “A Competent Speaker Who Can’t Speak: The Social Life of Aphasia.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology. 14, 2: 151-170.

Goodwin, Charles   2010   “Constructing Meaning through Prosody in Aphasia.” In Prosody in interaction. Edited by D. Barth-Weingarten, E. Reber, and M. Selting. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. pp. 373-394.

Goodwin, Charles   2003   Conversational frameworks for the accomplishment of meaning in aphasis In Conversation and brain damage. Edited by Charles Goodwin. Oxford University Press. pp. 90-116.

Goodwin, Charles, and M. Goodwin and D. Olsher   2002   Producing sense with nonsense syllables: Turn and sequence in conversations with a man with severe aphasia In The language of turn and sequence. Edited by C. Ford, B. Fox, and S. Thompson. New York: Oxford Academic. pp. 56-80.

Graeber, David, and David Wengrow   2021   The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude   1976   Jean-Jacques Rousseau, founder of the sciences of man .

Lévi-Strauss, Claude   1981   The naked man New York: Harper & Row.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques   1997   Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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on anthropological practices

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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consciousness and knowledge, ignorance, parentings, proposing research

The ultimate ignorant school master?

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[ORIGINALLY POSTED ON FEBRUARY 17, 2024]

One of our doctoral students, Ms. Mako Miura, recently challenged me with a question I had never entertained. We were discussing Jean Lave’s model for learning through participation (1991). We were focusing on some of the examples Lave mentions that point to the asymmetry between those in the “peripheral” position and those in the “full” position. Prototypically, we have an apprentice, initially ignorant but granted the legitimacy to participate, and the master who granted this legitimacy and eventually gets the apprentice to “learn” through participation that which characterizes a particular “shop floor” (to index Garfinkel). I emphasized that Lave is building a “model” to help us through initial analyses of the “educational” (“instructional,” “learning”) aspects of the organization of any floor. And I proposed we approached the encounter between first time parents and their child as just such a floor where a very legitimate participant will be learning everything that already makes this particular “family” (to keep it simple): familial configuration, ethnic or regional particularities, language, “culture.”

As this point, Miura asked: “could we argue that, on this floor, it is the child who is at the center and the parents who are on the periphery as they will have to ‘learn’ parenting?”

I must say that, whenever I have taught Lave (& Wenger)’s book, I have never pondered whether we should also consider the possibility of a feedback learning whereas the apparently “full” person discovers what apprentices are like, how they are learning, and what these apprentices are doing with that. I do not think that Jean Lave (or Ray McDermott with whom I once participated with her in a joint seminar on “ignorance” ) ever considered such a possibility. And yet, particularly if we approach the issue after reading Rancière’s Ignorant Schoolmaster ([1987] 1999), as we did in the class, then the question is one we should take seriously.

The issue is a classic one in cultural anthropology, particularly in the Boasian traditions led by M. Mead and many others who build on what appears to be a common sense generalizations. Here is the way Geertz once put it:

One of the most significant facts about us is that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end up in the end having only lived one.” (1973, 45)

In other words related to ignorance and knowledge, one starts knowing nothing (but able to learn anything) and immediately gets taught in the language, styles, religion, etc., of one’s population, and infant on an educational floor: who is teaching what to whom and how? thereby limiting further and further what one can do with the rest of one’s life. Cultural anthropology is, also, about the ongoing restriction on possibilities (and the powerful ones reenforcing these restrictions).
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America, Gender, on language and expression, popular culture, proposing research

Barbie and their people

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[ORIGINALLY POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 3, 2023]

I would probably not have gone to see Barbie (the movie) if I had not read so much about it over the past few weeks. So, here is another take, including a take on the takes.

In brief, I was entertained by what might have been intended, by movie makers, their financiers, and above all Mattel as a little bit of fluff that would make careers and money. I knew that this was not a movie for most of my sections (the list would be long)—except perhaps for one: after all I am an anthropologist of America and this movie is an event in the history of the United States, a performance that triggered many other performances (particularly by my peers in the American intelligentsia). So, in the spirit of ethnography I will first focus on aspects of the film as object, and then ponder about what future anthropologists might do with this total social fact.

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autoethnography, community, medecine

on communities within communities

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For some reason, my anthropological imagination, these past months, has circled around renewed wonder about that reality indexed by words like “community” (polity, unum, cohort, congregation, plenum, etc.). This was first triggered as I tried to distance myself temporarily from what was bringing me to the neurological intensive care unit of a Large Urban Teaching Hospital. I knew enough to wonder what host of human beings were needed to keep my wife alive hooked to multiple machines in constant need of re-adjustment by this, but not necessarily by that, human being–with instructions by some to others to NOT do this or that.

So, I stood by the door, looking out. What struck me were the huddles of intense interaction and the spaces and silences between these. There had been the huddle who had greeted me with concerned stances, explained stuff I could barely register, asked me to sign various documents I did not read. They had introduced themselves as those who would operate on my wife—though I only found out later that their leader, the one with the ultimate authority (and responsibility) was not there. That huddle, I never saw again. But by the 2nd or 3rd day, I could identify recurring huddles. There was one I labeled “physicians” (students/residents/interns—clearly a divided community, even if they huddled together on the floor). There was one or more huddle made up of those I labeled “the nursing staff” (I discovered later that they too were divided into multiple units). There was a small one made by the police who were guarding one of the rooms. There was the janitorial staff. They were all in view of each other, often quite close physically. And yet they remained distinct. I could sense differences in the tenor of the speech each used (I was amused listening to flirting among the young cops…). But always they maintained boundaries which, I know from every research on the matter, require ongoing work to NOT acknowledge one another’s presence in the performance of their parallel duties—even when these duties required asking the other to move their bodies as happened regularly when floors had to be cleaned, or examinations done.

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autoethnography, conversing, of the body

On leaning on an absent Other

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Today [July 9, 2019]] is one of these exceptional days in Aumage with almost steady rain, interspaced with rumbling thunder and sometimes a patch of blue sky. There are always two or three of those among the many bright dry summer days that are what one expects of the region. So, this exceptional is normal.

What is missing for me this summer is the Other to whom I addressed, for 47 years, statements of the obvious: “isn’t the ray of sunshine beautiful,” “look at the sheets of rain across the valley, they are coming for us,” “well maybe it will stay over there,” “it’s raining harder now,” “I hope it’s finished by tomorrow because I have a big wash to do,” “of course it will be over! And it will be much cooler.” Nothing of this carried much information. It ranged from the obvious, to the cliche, to the repetitive. And yet this “no-thing” was most salient as some, mysterious, perhaps indicible, Thing on wich I leaned—mostly without noticing it.

What is now missing, technically, is what is called “phatic talk”—a horrible word usually associated with beginnings of communicational sequences (phone calls, e-mail messages) when two parties establish that they are indeed in communication, and that they have now made a “community” of sorts, however briefly. The phatic phase is usually presented in the literature on communication as a brief moment in the movement towards saying or doing “why” the sequence was started in the first place.

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autoethnography, Culturings, Gender, of the body

Fearing the social deconstruction of the body

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Those who follow this blog will notice that the last posting was more than a year ago. They may correctly surmise, given the pre-text for that last post (the need for a “next of kin” to make decisions for a “significant other”), that the lapse has to do with the suffering of that “other,” my wife of 47 years who died on May 26, a month before her 77th birthday.

A year ago, scared but hopeful, I wondered how to learn to ask what I kept discovering I did not know and from whom. I wondered about the ignorance revealed by having to act at a moment I had never experienced. This happened to be the theme of the book on which I had been working and which is now available (Educating in life. Routledge, 2019). My experiences in the neurological floor of Columbia Presbyterian hospital, and then the Wartbug Rehabilitation Center, White Plains Hospital, etc. could have become another ethnography of a very challenging new normal (the sub-title to the book). But the last two months pushed these concerns to the background. The then new normal has become moot. In the past two months, what became salient is the power of the body to resist all social and cultural attempts to reconstruct it as a living body. While watching the impressive efforts of the medical professionals, and the spiritual and emotional turmoil of all other bodies affected, I remembered Robert Murphy’s powerful tale of such a struggle told by an anthropologist experiencing his, and all others’, impotence as they confronted what Murphy called, in his book a “body silent” (1987). At the same time, I had to read several student papers struggling with queer and gender theory. Looking at my pile of unread books, I noticed Judith Butler’s Bodies that matter (1993) and started reading it for this blog—expecting to be provoked.

I was not disappointed. First, is the fact that “I” “am” an “anthropologist,” not a “philosopher” (the scare quotes are actually citations to linguistic forms Butler “critiques” as “ontologizing” such social categories as “being” “anthropologist” and “I”). Butler is not an anthropologist but she directly challenges what I do and what I teach anthropologists must do. And she challenges it from a reading of anthropological work she inherits and expands from one now quite traditional reading of their early work, particularly those of the Saussurian (through Lévi-Strauss) and Boasian traditions. This reading is grounded in Derrida’s interpretation of Saussure, and particularly of Saussure on the arbitrariness of the sign, and on the social conventions that link signifier to signified, and arguably (as many in this tradition have done) thereby arbitrarily (in the political sense) constitute this signified. Thus the word ‘sex’ (always surrounded by scare quotes in Butler’s writing) “functions as norms” and is “part of regulatory practices” (Butler 1993: xii). That may be true in the many political activities within which the word appears. But there is no evidence that this function exhausts what the word may also do for those who use it. When teaching this, I first mention another philosopher, Merleau-Ponty who, when facing Saussure, went in a different direction from Derrida’s. It is not that there is “nothing at the center” but that the center 1) cannot be reached and 2) all attempts to reach it must proceed through words (symbols, discourses, practices) that will, not so paradoxically, succeed in giving a glimpse of the center through the silences between the words. And then, when teaching all this to ethnographically inclined anthropologist, I invoke the act of ☞ (indexing) that I learned from Garfinkel.

That is, words like ‘sex’, the ‘body’, ‘death’ are very much “part of regulatory practices” that … fail to capture and dominate that which they do desperately attempt to control. More graphically, when a body is captured by a hospital, it immediately (as in the first seconds of approaching an emergency room) becomes an object for an immense network of practices (in laboratories, universities, state regulatory agencies, insurance companies, etc.) embodied by the highly differentiated, controlled, regulated, bodies who are the medical staff one encounters from the moment when an attendant tells you to park not here but there, to the time when a physician “pronounces” one dead (itself quite a moment of cultural hubris as if the body had waited for the pronouncement to die). This process is well summarized in what should be required reading for all anthropologists of the body, the paper by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss “Temporal aspects of dying as a non-scheduled status passage” (1965). This is powerful ethnography even if it fails to state the obvious: the ongoing re-identification of a body by the professionals, the changes in their demeanor, or the formal transfers from some professionals to other (e.g. from oncologists to hospice doctors) is occasioned by bodily processes over which the hospital has no ultimate power.

In brief that which words like ‘body’ (sex, death) index is NOT a (social) construction, even though it always is, by every evidence we have ethnographically and experientially, a trigger for constructions (such as words, norms, and regulatory practices) that are essential to human life even though they will always fail to capture it. Dismissing the struggle of all when confronting the ever mysterious and ineffable that some humans index as ‘the body’ is the ultimate act of disrespect towards the human.

References

Butler, Judith   1993     Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex”. New York: Routledge.. Publisher

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

Murphy, Robert   1987     The body silent. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

 

apprenticeships, autoethnography, community, disability, learning/teaching, medecine, of processes, of the body

What is there to learn now, here, under maximum stress? (a problem for learning theory?)

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Learning with others is, necessarily, a political matter. Thus my insistence on writing about “polities” of practice. Still, it remains that “learning” post participation risks being taken as a somewhat automatic process in the movement towards “fuller” (political) participation. Through participation one may move from apprentice to master but focusing, as we must, on movement does not tell us much about the everyday activities of the one who moves (or of the activities of those who encourage the movement—or put blocks on the way), and particularly about the activity of sorting out what to learn (what to prioritize, what to ignore, etc.).

I thought about this in the interstices of other activities I was not  able to escape these past weeks. I found myself, much against my will, and my hopes, in the position of apprentice to “next of kin” practices, first in in the neurological intensive care unit of New York/Presbyterian Hospital, and then in the regular neurological unit, and then in a rehabilitation center. At 70, it is the case that I have never been in that position, legitimately or otherwise, and that I have had much to learn even as I worried about much more than learning.

Continue reading What is there to learn now, here, under maximum stress? (a problem for learning theory?) →

applying anthropology, metaphors and conceits, of poverty

On anthropological impotence

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Experiments by Professor Shafir [Shah, Mullainathan & Shafir 2012] at Princeton and others have documented how poverty itself leads people to make self-destructive decisions, perhaps by forcing them to focus attention on satisfying immediate needs to the exclusion of other considerations. (New York Times, February 24, 2016)

The American culture of the “culture of poverty” is alive and well. New York Times journalists still quote approvingly professors who tell them: “The poor lack two things: money and cognitive freedom.” And it appears that a major State actor, “the Obama administration,” relies on such experts for designing policies aimed at changing the behavior of those who do not act according to economic rationalism (e.g. do not save more for old age).

Continue reading On anthropological impotence →

applying anthropology, movement through social structures, on schooling policy

On the (mis-)use of anthropology

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model of Ge village
(Nimuendajû 1942: 17)

Last week, I heard a most interesting paper by Oren Pizmony-Levy and Gita Steiner-Khamsi about, of all things, school reform in Denmark! It may seem strange that I resonated to such a topic.[Ftn 1] But it should not appear so: in graduate school, I also resonated to reading ethnographies of Ge people of Central Brazil! People over all the world do amazing things and “school reform” is one of them.

representation of a network
Network by Steiner-Khamsi and Pizmony-Levy
using UCINET

Last week, I particularly resonated to the methodology. Nimuendajû, the great ethnographer of the Ge, in his time, modeled Šerente villages on the basis of his local observations. Pizmony-Levy and Steiner-Khamsi have found a way to make visible networks involved in the production of “school reform,”[Ftn 2] on the way I suspect to modeling how such reforms proceed. Their work is part of a broad movement in the social sciences, and anthropology in particular (at least in the networks who attempt to build on Jean Lave’s work as transforming social structural analyses). The goal is to trace movement and change (or return to the old normal) in position, and perhaps even in the field of positions within which people move (including school organization). The current consensus, backed by much ethnography, is that these changes do not “just happen” as effect following some cause. It proceeds through deliberate action by emergent polities. Nimuendajû did not have the tools needed to trace how the Šerente came to do something that could be modeled as he did. But these tools are now available.

More on this another time.

What surprised in me most Oren Pizmony-Levy and Gita Steiner-Khamsi’s paper was that the most quoted document in the network of people and institutions who performed “school reform” in Denmark was …. an ethnography, of a school, by Danish anthropologists!

Anthropology of education, actually applied for what appears positive change!
Continue reading On the (mis-)use of anthropology →