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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[more on all this in a future post]

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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of Gender, on America, on language and expression, 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.

The movie, it turns out, is not just fluff, It can also be “read” (watched and then written about) very seriously (if not ponderously). So, in an initial step, in the theater, and given all I had already read, I listened for all explicit tropes for “feminism” including mentions of  “patriarchy,” put downs of Ken and all other men, etc. These are hard to miss and yet I noticed, as a few of the commentators did, that many of the enactments of the tropes are so heavily drawn to make one wonder whether they were designed as caricatures. I’d say that only the speech by the one “real” woman in the movie is straight faced 21st century official feminism. Everything else could serve as opening the way to a critique of said “feminism.”

advertisement for Barbie's house with young girlThe movie opens with an hyperbolic animation of a young girl’s play fantasy (and/or a Mattel commercial) as it might be remembered, nostalgically, by adult women—unless it is a an animation of the critique of Mattel’s designs for and unto little girls. Barbie Land appears as a pink Eden (Shangri-La) as the designers imagined, with a lot of supporting evidence, little girls imagine as they play with dolls their parents/grand parents paid for. This is land from which boys (as well as parents) are banned, a land without pain … or sex (we are explicitly told that neither Barbie nor Ken have genitalia), or digestive tracks (Barbie Land would not have to worry about sewers!).

That is the setting. And then something happens: A thought startles Barbie (little girls turning into adult women?): death. This may be (or could have been a point) when light comedy entered drama. I  suspect that, in many conversations about the movie, in cars driving home in various suburbs, this came up (ethnography needed!). In the movie, death was lightened by adding cellulite and flat feet as the triggers for Barbie’s exploration of the “real” world that ends with her first trip to a gynecologist (treated as a celebration!). In other words, this may be less a movie about feminism than about growing up female (person with female genitalia): it is about a young girl’s shift from a massively gendered fantasy into the material world—including the material world of mothers with boring jobs, unpleasant bosses, and another of the “big eastern syndicates” which ruin Christmas (as per Lucy in Peanuts)—not to mention sex (which is actually quite absent from the movie). It may be part of Mattel’s capitalistic genius, as a 21st century corporation that it lets itself be represented by buffoons while racking in the dollars. I’d bet there will be a Marxicist take on this movie…

And then setting and adventure (getting arrested in Los Angeles, crashing Mattel) turn into myth. The movie includes a set of scenes with the Creator (not only of Barbie, but also of Mattel–though we are not told that). These culminate with a vision in which She who Is gives Barbie glimpses of what it might be like to live in a world in which one dies—and with the punch line Jews, Christians and Muslims, not to mention Americans, will recognize: it’s your choice (free will). In that world there are many happy children smiling at you (I need to watch the movie again to see this altogether brief sequence). And no mention that, as another story of a woman’s move out from Eden put it, “in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” (Genesis 3:16). In other word, Barbie is very much an
American movie in the evolving liberal humanist ideology that imagines a future world of pleasure and community where every individual can be all they want to be.

But all this is not to be taken as implying I argue that the movie is a product of America (feminism, post-Christianity, capitalistic exploitation, or what have you), or that it is part of a grand systemic plot to “enculture” (“socialize”) young girls, or their mothers (not to mention boys and men).

Rather, and from the point of view of my kind of anthropology, such movies, like all works of imagination (even when greatly enriching stock holders), are statements within ongoing and ever evolving conversations that triggers further statements—particularly statements made by those who cannot be directly controlled at the time when they are discussing the original statements. I
imagine that most people who went to see the movie then talked about it not only with other who saw it, but also with peers, family members, friends, etc. who did not. And this makes me wonder what little girls do/did when playing with Barbie: do they wish they had breasts like hers? notice that these breasts have fascinated all critics of the doll? “criticize” (the way many older girls and women eventually do)? What do they tell each other they are doing? their parents? What do their parents tell them? I hope some anthropologist will take these questions as triggers for investigation. I am sure that one would find many cases (in notes, letters, social media posts) of something I just found out a young girl who would become very famous wrote for her siblings’ enjoyment: For 6 years, from the time she was 12, Jane Austen sketched 21 novels (2017) before composing the famous 6 for which she is famous. These “teenage writings” (like the Bronte sisters’) may have survived because of the eventual fame of their authors, but they could also be taken as evidence for what young people do with the stuff of their every day life in their social conditions, and particularly what they mock (implying that they already knew what these were, and how to mock them). Such texts (performances) should be the sources of any ethnography of the Barbie phenomenon in the United States and beyond.

References

Austen, Jane   2017     Teenage writings. Oxford University Press

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Culturings, on 'culture', on America

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

References

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

 

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

While crossing Manhattan on 14th Street

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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on America, parentings

High tech creationism?

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One of the many after effects of Trump’s election has been an altogether astonishing flowering of high fallutin exercises in cultural analysis.  I particular enjoy those who play with popularized (populist?) deconstructionism.  So, let’s join the (deep?) play.

Most of my own intellectual education has been plagued by the fundamental mis-readings of Saussure and Lévi-Strauss led by Derrida ([1967] 1978) and others.  In various ways if have tried to write against deconstructionism, sometimes specifically (1994),
and mostly by implication.  And yet, I have also felt party to many of these debates, particularly when they involve plays with “facts” and fiction, truth and relativism, history and narratives, and indeed the nature of reality (ontology?).

So, when the New York Times, as it regularly does, plays with “truth … that is always changing” (NYT, “How to fix the Met,” 3/1/2107) I could not resist tweeting and playing with the Times nemesis (and vice versa)—the author of the wonderfully truthy “truthful hyperbole.”

Sam AltmanWhat I then found out in another exercise in cultural analysis was worth more than a chuckle. It involves an extended metaphor on Silicon Valley idealistic and nihilistic ontology (as reflection on the nature of being, existence, and reality).  This one comes from one of these mythical young white men that can claim, as does his Wikipedia page, that “the total valuation of Y Combinator companies has surpassed $65 billions”(read on March 2017). This young man is Sam Altman and the piece was written by Tad Friend of the New Yorker (October 2016 issue).

A few sentences from this piece were picked up by multiple media outlet under such titles as “Tech billionaires think we live in the Matrix and have asked scientists to get us out” (CNBC, 10/7/2016) or “Many of the world’s richest and most powerful people, including Elon Musk and Bank of America, think that we live in a simulation of the real world” (Independent, 10/6/2016)

I found this thread after coming to a not clearly authored page where the writer wonders about such “bizarre events” as the mistake at the Oscars, this year’s Super Bowl, and, of course, Trump’s election.  So, he (I will caricature him as male, but I am not sure) wonders whether:

“we are living in the Matrix, and something has gone wrong with the controllers. This idea was, I’m told, put forward first and most forcibly by the N.Y.U. philosopher David Chalmers: What is happening lately, he says, is support for the hypothesis that we are living in a computer simulation and that something has recently gone haywire within it. The people or machines or aliens who are supposed to be running our lives are having some kind of breakdown. There’s a glitch, and we are in it. [Such events] makes no sense at all in the ‘real world’.

There may be not merely a glitch in the Matrix. There may be a Loki, a prankster, suddenly running it. After all, the same kind of thing seemed to happen on Election Day: the program was all set, and then some mischievous overlord – whether alien or artificial intelligence doesn’t matter – said, “Well, what if he did win? How would they react?” “You can’t do that to them,” the wiser, older Architect said. “Oh, c’mon,” the kid said. “It’ll be funny. Let’s see what they do!” And then it happened. We seem to be living within a kind of adolescent rebellion on the part of the controllers of the video game we’re trapped in, who are doing this for their strange idea of fun. (crystalinks.com 2/26/17)

As written by Ted Friend, the statement attributed to Sam Altman on “two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation” is a paraphrase rather than a quote, and is not the main point of the piece.  But it is the sentence that caught the eye of many journalists in the United States and England.  I guess, it is “fun news” (somewhere on the continuum towards “fake news”).

Actually, it may be “fake news” that Sam Altman, or any of the other billionaires mentioned, actually “believe,” in the strong sense of the verb, that we are living in a Matrix-like simulation, whether run by wise aliens or trickster adolescents.  No sane person would believe that, would they?  Maybe Altman was just burnishing his image as not only a monument to successful greed but also as Silicon Valley seer and (pop) philosopher.  America has produced many such billionaire seers.  Altman will not be the last.

What is more interesting to me is that Altman is channeling a long and very real strain in Western philosophy: the idealism most extremely stated by Bishop George Berkeley in the early 18th century.  Most analysis of the Matrix movies prefer to mention Descartes (Plato, etc.) but Cartesian doubt was about epistemology (how to we know?) rather than ontology (how is ‘is’?).  In the 20th century, the early Derrida proposed a new version of classical ontological idealism when he wrote that, and I paraphrase, “there is no center that can escape the play of discourses” (1967: 411).  All is discourse (language).  There are no “hors-textes” (outside text) that might take us away from language.  Popularized, this late 20th century idealism can be developed in further texts affirming that we cannot be sure that an experience of snow falling outside a writer’s window has not been “written” by some very clever programmer and fed directly into some imperceptible artificial reality goggle: the Matrix.  Reality IS a text, written in mysterious algorithms.

There is of course no way to, rationally, disprove this hypothesis since the very arguments against it could have been written by the clever programmer.  The hypothesis seems to me equivalent to the biblical creationism that estimates the age of the universe at something like 6000 years: all the evidence that it is older (dinosaurs, echos of the Big Bang) could easily have been written by God into what only looks like a record of earlier events.

Now, of course, there are other ontologies that are well captured by Saussure’s wonderful, and easy to mistranslate, diagram about the segmentation of continuums ([1915] 1966: 112). Saussure on the segmentation of thoughtThere, the wavy lines are an attempt to capture the mystery that language imperfectly reveals as it works at representing this mystery using the vagaries of human affordances (vocal box, faces and arms, etc. Not to mention a peculiar brain).  If any of this was “designed” it was not by an efficiency expert.  As Merleau-Ponty once said, and I paraphrase and expand, “meaning is in the silence between the words” ([1969] 1973: 43).  Mystery is not empty.  Stuff (good and bad) happens.  Or, as another wise man put it:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Hamlet to Horatio Hamlet (1.5.167-8) ).

References

References

Derrida, Jacques   1967 [1978]    Writing and difference. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice   1973 [1969]     The prose of the world. Tr. by J. O’Neil. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Saussure, Ferdinand de   1966 [1915]     Course in General Linguistics. Tr. by W. Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill.

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Communication & Culture, on America, on the popular

Dreaming of diverging

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Movie posterFor any number of reasons, my wife Susan and I went to see Divergent last Friday.  We were, by far, the oldest people in the theater.  I was, about, the only male (except for a few fathers perhaps).  Everybody else was a 12(+-2)-year-old girl.

If you have no idea what I am talking about, then you are not into Hollywood generated mass popular culture, or middle-brow cultures concerned with “gender” either.  If “divergent” means to you something that it did not mean a few weeks ago then, as an intellectual adult (one of my readers, as I imagine them), I assume you also know that it is, among other things, the second (after The Hunger Games) of Hollywood responses to the accusation that there were no big budget, action adventure movies with girls as heroines.  So, in the kind of brief synopsis that start this kind of commentary, Divergent is about a 16-year-old girl who violently restores a threatened order and then moves on into the wilderness—and 12-year-old girls know about that.

But, of course, the movie is about much else and this is a response to Andrew O’Hehir who wrote about the movies as “capitalist agitprop” (March 22, 2014).  His thesis:

To begin with, if we accept the maxim that all fictional works about the imagined future are really about the present, what do these works have to say? They contain no intelligible level of social critique or social satire, as “1984” or “The Matrix” do, since the worlds they depict bear no relationship to any real or proposed society. Where, in the contemporary West, do we encounter the overtly fascistic forces of lockstep conformity, social segregation and workplace regimentation seen in these stories? I’m not asking whether these things exist, or could exist, I’m asking where we encounter them as ideology, as positive models for living.

Later, O’Hehir writes “Divergent is basically a high school drama.”
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