Category Archives: on anthropological theorizing

Discussions of various points in general anthropological theorizing

on community, on family

Family/Community as network of significance

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After the eclipse of “community” in the late 1960s anthropology, culminating with Geertz’ quip that “anthropologists do not villages study in villages, “community” came back when Lave, and particularly Wenger’s, summarized their work on learning in everyday settings as involving “‘community’ of practices.”

I have written elsewhere why I thought it was a bad idea for Lave and Wenger to have used the term. Generations of anthropologists (and many others) have been misled by this resuscitation of a way to approaching human organization that should have remained in the past. At various times, I suggested that “polity” would be a better word to capture the overall social processes involved in setting the positions (peripheral, full, etc.) and movement. The model can easily be expanded to deal with all the mechanisms that move someone into a “legitimate” peripheral position (e.g. admission committee), prevent someone from ever being acknowledged as “full” (e.g. failure at some examination), and including other matters that remain open to investigation: for example the processes that make someone aware that one might enter into some apprenticeship (move to a different country, etc.). I sometimes toy with the idea of a kind of “accretion” disk around the internal polity that might then be treated, metaphorically, as a “black hole” (e.g. “America” for many in the world).

Having been challenged by students insisting on the continuing usefulness of “community” (and perhaps for other reasons than those who let the early Chicago sociologists and anthropologists to write about “community studies”), I realized something that came even more salient because of a recent experience with a major personal loss and that classical “community of practice” research cannot quite handle. When she first wrote about it, Lave was responding (as I put it in my last post) to cognitive psychologists and their purely cerebral theories of learning. She wanted to establish that learning is always a social process that requires the one is put in the position of “learner” even before they know anything. She, and many others, did establish, empirically, that this is the case.

However, she may have downplayed another possibility somewhat implicit in the earlier theories of community. “Community” is not only about learning, it is about support and, what I would now want to investigate, the assembly of people who are doing the support. Or rather, and much more technically, about the people “affected” by something that happens to a particular person. They are the people who may then return something—in the sense that a personal tragedy is also a “gift” that requires a response by at least some. This response may involve, in the case of someone dying, bringing food, attending a wake, making a donation (in some traditions in the United States), or may other matters in other traditions (“culture”).

This opens a wide range of re-interpreted research questions. Most simply perhaps, who would be the “some” who must respond? And what should be the nature of the response? How far can an initial event resonate? As one student asked when I presented an earlier version of this: what is the place of institutions in these responses?

Possible lines of investigation: I have never read the social psychological literature that has used the phrase “significant others” but it has always allowed me to think more specifically about human relationships. First, I take “signification” here in the structural sense (see Bateson 1972: 381) where it refers to anything that makes a difference. In very brief then, a person’s significant others are those who, if something happens to the person, must respond personally in some ways that might make a difference in the future of the interaction. One should check here how this may be treated in the literature on family therapy.

A parent, a spouse, a child, are prime examples to the extent that anything that happens to anyone of them will impact on of them but not necessarily in the same way The response, and its extent within some assembly, are then a sign of who are these “others” and the weight of their significance.

That all of this is going to be observable (though perhaps difficult to do) is not problematic. What are the methods to use for the observations is the difficult thing since we need to escape imagining what is to be observed (I am here invoking Garfinkel). The danger is to define ahead of the research the boundaries of some units assumed to carry significance, of the roles and relationships that may be most significant. Much on the writing about “the family” (and the “community”) have fallen for this and must now be used with the greatest care unless we reproduce what earlier critics did successfully challenge.

The genius of ethnography is specifically that we do not have to do that. So, what do I suggest be done?

In this case I’d start with an individual at a moment of stress. For ethical reason, this stress may be minor (e.g. a tooth ache, college admission or graduation, etc.) but sufficient to trigger some response from some people. Tracing the network of the responders, and the intensity of their response becomes the ethnographic goal.

See also my post on the “end of a community”
For example, let’s say that husband has a tooth ache and mentions it to wife and they discuss what to do next. One can imagine that this will not lead to much of a response from, say, their small children. Whether it affects their adult children may depend on the their age and other matters. If the husband/wife are quite aged, a toothache might require one of the children to, for example, drive them to the dentist. At another extreme, if a president gets killed (as happened to Kennedy) then millions may be affected, but would probably lead to other responses than if this happens to a close relative.

Such an investigation might then lead to a kind of network map (à la Latour) with different weight for different linkages. Latour’s discussion of mediations, translations, etc. would probably help in tracing the tenor of the responses, particularly when the original speaker (to channel conversational analysis) is not present for correcting a response. In this interactional/conversational processes, institutions can enter as either dampeners of further transmission, or as enhancers (consider how FaceBook enhanced extended family ties that had weakened, sometimes to nothing, and then reappeared).

References

Bateson, Gregory   1972    ” A re-examination of ‘Bateson’s rule'” in his Steps to an ecology of mind. Balentine Books.

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reply 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, 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 state (the houses we inhabit) but as a moment in a long sequence of statements/actions triggered by earlier ones.

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 what 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 of 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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America, of processes, on 'culture', on identity

Change and order in American modes of address and modes of reference

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Once upon a time, during my first two decades at Teachers College (in the department of, at first, Home & Family Life later reconstituted as Family & Community Education), I was addressed as “[FIRST NAME]” by colleagues and students alike. Twenty years, as I entered the programs in anthropology, I was addressed, like all my colleagues, as “Professor [LAST NAME].” In neither case did I have much of a choice (except to use these practices, changes and stabilities, to think further about poetry and constraints, culture and power—as well as resistance (“oddity,” “ignorance,” “agency”?).

Note that I only have evidence about the generality of the practices as they concerned “modes of address” in relatively public settings I have less evidence for “modes of reference” used by colleagues and students. Most of this evidence come from my own use in mostly private settings when I kept (and keep) referring to colleagues (and students) as [LAST NAME] (no honorific). Early in my career, I was once corrected by the president of Teachers College who had heard me refer to him as “Cremin” when I should have said “Larry.” So now I “learned,” or, rather, got into the habit of referring to colleagues as [FIRST NAME] when in company with colleagues (while continuing to refer to them as [LAST NAME] in other settings.

Here is everything that led Durkheim to write about “social facts” that are also “total” (as Mauss developed it) as well as “immortal”(as Garfinkel later put it). Wondering about naming practices must lead to something like what Durkheim, Mauss, Garfinkel (and many others) proposed since what might appear as only “habit” (if not habitus, or water for the fish) is accompanied by complex discourses that are triggered at any time when some challenge the practice (or ignore it).

The recent interest in language “ideologies” that is discourses about what language to use, how to do it, write it, etc., belongs to the same concerns.

In later 20th and early 21st centuries, in “America” (and among many other populations more or less caught in its hegemony), addressing someone as [FIRST NAME], whatever one’s relationship with this person, is probably the “default” and requires the least justification (though it is a common moment in movies for a senior character to be addressed by some junior as [HONORIFIC] [LAST NAME]) to be told “Call me [FIRST NAME]!”)—thereby being corrected, if not educated. The reverse may require discursive justification. In the Programs in Anthropology, one of the senior faculty, George Clement Bond (PhD, London School of Economics, 1972) told how he remembered vividly when his uncle, Horace Mann Bond (PhD, Chicago, 1939) and President of Lincoln College, was addressed as “boy!” by police officers in the Southern States. George Bond insisted that we all be addressed as [HONORIFIC] [LAST NAME] while trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to also address students and staff member in the same manner.

At the time I added (mostly to myself until writing this blog), that using [FIRST NAME] when addressing someone with some authority over oneself hides the structural (one would now say “systemic”) asymmetry between, say professors and students. The former are part of the machinery that grants degrees (or certifies mastery if one accepts the somewhat optimistic possibility that most schooling is a form of apprenticeship). The later are using a large amount of their treasure (or their parents’ treasure) to pay tuition and other costs incurred when one is not actually producing anything tangible yet (or contributing to its production). This is a massive material reality, a total social fact, that should probably be symbolized rather than masked.

Note the existence of alternative addressing practices “in America.” For example, in the interaction between a police officer and the person they are addressing it is likely that the first will now probably say “Sir!” or “Mam!” while the response will be “Officer!”—thereby starting with honorifics indexing asymmetrical authority. Similarly in most American elementary schools with (for people children identify as women) the pair “Miss!”/“[FIRST NAME]

Whether the asymmetry professor/student should, or should not, be masked, it is certainly the case that, by the second quarter of the 21st century, many professors are not quite sure of the last name of their students as these are only used in administrative contexts (and I have even recently received lists ordered by [FIRST NAMES]. I suspect that some of my colleagues (and students) humor me when I insist on [HONORIFIC] [LAST NAME] and dismiss the oddity as having to do with age, early enculturation, etc. If I push I will get a discursive appeal to individuality, equality if not equity, democracy, informality, etc. That discourse can even devolve into calls for the dismantlement of systemic asymmetries.

Of course, there are practical, functional, issues when living within an arbitrary system of representation. In the worlds of Europe and the Mediterranean, there are relatively few first names by comparison to last names. At some point we, at TC anthropology, had to refer to several “Sara(h)s” thereby facing a confusion we cleared by mentioning their last name. But, also of course, only using first names helps with our identifying students from China where the ratio of first to last names is reversed.

But, of course, naming practices are not determined by their “functionality.” Functionally, about all human beings on the planet (and certainly all students, staff, and faculty at Teachers College) are now identified in reference by a series of number. As happens when “we” (those caught by Columbia University) have to deal with a petty administrative issue, one of the first question will be “what is UNI?” In that world of everyday practice, my effective, consequential, name is “HHV1″ (not a private matter any more than my other names since it is included in my official email address): no honorific, no first name, no last name.

But that, too, is a matter of assembling a new total social fact.

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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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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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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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America, Culturings, on 'culture'

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?). Continue reading Race Consciousness, Racism (and race?): Contradictions with consequences (culture!) →

America, on 'culture', 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.).

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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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