Category Archives: pattern, structure, system

History, critique and developments on an old, difficult, intuition about life

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

I concluded my earlier post () 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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Class, culture & America (or Culture, class & America, or America: Culture and class): Ethnography and interpretation(s)

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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on pattern recognition by humans and machines

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.

Continue reading on pattern recognition by humans and machines

on “Corona”

Again, C19 may kill you, Corona closes restaurant. (March 28, 2020)

So, what is “Corona”? In my younger days, I might have meant it as the word (Saussurian signifier) pointing to an object (Saussurian signified). This may still be common sense, even after the “ontological turn” in anthropology which, as I understand it, is meant to make us consider the “thing-ness” of a possible entity such as “Corona.” The question is actually a classical one in anthropology: when talking about something social (“social structure”) are we talking about an object or about a model built by observers to manipulate? This was the core of the debate between Radcliffe-Brown and Lévi-Strauss (1953). For Radcliffe-Brown, the matter was common sensical. He had made it simple in a foundational text:

If I visit a relatively stable community and revisit it after an interval of ten years, I shall find that many of its members have died and others have been born; the members who still survive are now ten years older and their relations to one another may have changed in many ways. Yet I may find that the kinds of relations that I can observe are very little different from those observed ten years before. The structural form had changed little. ([1940] 1965: 192-3)

We could translate it into Corona (from my experiences in Wyoming and New York City:

As I drove 2100 miles, none of the people that I met, directly or indirectly in Jackson, Wyoming moved with me. In a small Jackson grocery story, a table had been put between the cashier and the customers to increase the distance between them. In New Rochelle, another such table had been set up in a small bakery. The structural form was the same.

The problem, as Lévi-Strauss saw it, is that the “structural form,” what we might now call the product of a social construction of reality, is actually not accessible to the anthropologist’s senses. Quite before Geertz told us that what anthropologists actually do is “write,” Lévi-Strauss told us that what they must do is make a model (a form of writing) based on observations (including observations of the models participants might have themselves made of their relations). That is the anthropologist-as-scientist must do something similar to what the biologists investigating C19 are doing, that is transform what they get to see using a massively cultural machinery (electron microscope and all that they entail) into something they can manipulate (for example by coloring various parts). In other words, biologists must ‘write’ C19 to manipulate it.

Given all this, what is to be modeled by an anthropologist investigating the social response to C19 that made a total institution (in Goffman’s sense) for 6.8 billion people, and its consequences?

The simple, negative, answer is: I am not going to model a “social structure” or “system.”

Anthropologists of my generation suspected that this was the case and, to a large extent, nobody writes about “social structures” any more, though some are tempted to re-introduce the concept, for example those investigating “structural racism.” Those who know my work also know that I always resisted Geertz’s pessimism (encouraged by Derrida’s ‘deconstructionism’): it is NOT all words. If something is a “social construction,” then it is VERY real, an object that stands in the way of the human beings who bump into it. In my work with McDermott we traced what makes schooling a problem by focusing on the consequences that something made to serve all children so that “none are left behind” actually identifies 50% of all children as “below average,” in need of identification, help and remediation (Successful Failure 1998). Schools in the United States and around the world are determinedly made up (cultural, artificial, arbitrary). McDermott and I summarized all this by writing about the  “School” (capitalized) as a “thing,” made up of ongoing events of some sort, for example the School is set up to weigh human beings on all sorts of statistical scales. How could that be? McDermott and I responded that it had to do with “America” in the School that it made over the past centuries.

Ten years later, Jill Koyama (2010), quite rightly criticized Successful Failure  for not tracing the mechanisms that keep re-producing the School. Pointing at America without specifying the mechanisms is insufficient, and possibly dangerous if it leads some to assume that America is made by … encultured, habituated, Americans.

To make her point, Koyama followed a subset of another one of the major pieces of the many legislations which, over the past centuries were aimed at revitalizing the public school. She looked at the life of “Supplemental Educational Services,” a small part of an act to ensure that “No Child [is] Left Behind.” Rather than “deconstructing” the act, she followed its life for some of those who could not escape it: corporate chiefs, mayors, principals, teachers, parents for whom the act was either resource to use (particularly for the large corporations that were contracted to “deliver” the services) or obstacle to navigate. Koyama was inspired in this analysis by Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory, and particularly by that aspect of the theory that insists that a “network” is never closed. A network is not a system or a structure. A network is not even really a “thing” so much as a set of pathways through which the stuff that happens, particularly government decrees, travel though a population and activate something in them.

In that perspective, “America” is an actor-network. So is Corona in my writing. That is, when I write “Corona can close restaurants,” I am asking social scientists to look for the linkages along which a governor’s decree move, as well as all the sub-decrees that various people in the network have to enact so that this restaurant here at this time is indeed closed.

Modeling Corona (in one or another of its instances) can then allow us to compare it to other such events in human history—say the School.

More on that in another post.

References

Koyama, Jill   2010     Making failure pay: For-profit tutoring, high-stake testing, and public schools.. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude   [1952] 1963     in Structural anthropology, pp. .277-323 Tr. by C. Jacobson and B. Schoepf. New York: Basic Books.

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R.   [1940] 1965     “On Social structure.” in Structure and Function in Primitive Society, pp.188-204 . New York: The Free Press.

1963 .. (First published in 1952)

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