Once upon a time culture was everything, even the kitchen sink (Tylor [1871] 1958). And then culture became a “value-concept” (Weber [1897] 1994) or a “system of symbols” (Schneider 1980). And then the word all but disappeared from serious theorizing, to be replaced by words like “epoch,” “episteme,” habitus, paradigm, and now “ontology.” But few, over the decades, have approached what “culture” attempted to capture, at least in the Boasian tradition, the way Latour did when he wrote:
‘Culture’ … word used to summarize the set of elements that appear to be tied together when, and only when, we try to deny a claim or to shake an association … No one lives in a ‘culture’ … before he or she clashes with others … People map for us and for themselves the chains of associations that make-up their sociologics. The main characteristics of these chains is to be unpredictable–for the observer” (Latour, author’s italics. 1987:201-202)
I have been clear about this since, at least, 1987 and this has guided my work with McDermott.
I am very comfortable with this way of putting what I have been trying to say, throughout my career about “America.” I have always written that I am not concerned with “everything that can be found in the United States” and even less with “what individual Americans believe”
Could the hegemony of “policy” be coming to an end?
For many years state officials, “private” foundations, benevolent billionaires, academia and a certain elite media have been telling everyone else what is what in “education”. (For one sense of this set look at Brill’s 2010 story in the New York Times magazine). In the world of academia where I live, this will have been the decade of “data-driven” “policy” “studies.” We keep being told, repeatedly, such “narratives” (stories? fiction?) as:
In Rhode Island schools, a multidisciplinary effort helps teachers to quickly understand what skills their students have already grasped and which subjects need more attention. In Houston, a regional alliance has noticed signs of students going off-track on higher-level math skills and acted to intervene.What do these stories have in common? Success here derives from access to data, or big data as it’s sometimes called. The examples above come from the Data Quality Campaign, a nonprofit effort driving education outcomes through hard numbers.
(GovTech November 2014, retrieved in December 2015)
In this post, I am doing something somewhat different from the usual. I am maintaining the order I think I have established (at least as I look at it, retrospectively): this is an experiment in anthropological theorizing and teaching. But I am delving further into parts of my life that I have not brought out.
So here it goes: applied medical anthropology
A few years ago, my wife, Susan, was diagnosed with a form of cancer known as “myelofibrosis” (who may not know it under that name might be a topic for another post as the exact name can be consequential—see below). The “official” diagnosis was made, not surprisingly by an oncologist, the acknowledged, state approved, expert who can transform speech (this is myelofibrosis) into not simply an act, but a sequence of new moves a particular set of others, from the patient, to her family, to insurance companies, must now make. [This would be easy to model as a special case of entry into a particular kind of polity of practice.]
The oncologist told us, as I remember it four years later, something like: “People live with this for 15 years or more … You are likely to die of something else … It will change your everyday life as you will now have to schedule regular medical visits.” I remember she was altogether good at telling us something that we knew, and much that we did not know: we had certainly never heard of this cancer or of its treatment. Of course we went to the Internet and learned what we could, talked to her further, and settled into what I am experimenting in calling, for various theoretical reasons, a “new normal.” Actually, what we learned was not extremely bad news for people entering in their 70s. The oncologist then (and I will keep emphasizing conversational and interactional temporality) tried a drug that would alleviate the symptoms of a cancer that affects the production by the bone marrow of red blood cells: profound anemia and the attendants limits on mobility.
Susan’s body, in its thinginess and peculiarities, was leading us to various particular disabilities that can be mitigated or expanded depending (de Wolfe 2014).
So, this was actually a good time for us to adopt the car culture of suburbia. The long walks in Manhattan to which we were accustomed would not have been possible anymore. We escaped one disability.
In 1972, Geertz asked “what is it that we, anthropologists, do?”. He answered, provocatively but not quite rhetorically: “we write.” Actually, he said more in this vein which I summarize,
1) “The ethnographer ‘inscribes’ social discourse … In so doing he turns it from a passing event into an account … which can be reconsulted” (1973: 19)
2) “We inscribe … only that small part of which our informants can lead us into understanding.” (1973: 20)
I interpret this, anachronistically to everything we know about the tradition of symbolic and interpretive anthropology with which he is now associated, as an introduction to the ethno-methodology of all (educational) search to discover what is going on and what can be done with. Technically, as (ethno-)anthropologists, we transcribe carefully documented interaction, through audio or video tape if we can, through detailed field notes if we cannot. And then we pay close attention to everything we can see on this record to figure out, through the activity of the people and only through this activity, how a particular sequence might make sense in the world that the people had made (if not in ours). Geertz, famously, analogized this task to that of a literary critic. But, in one text at least he specified that he thought of the critics task to explicate what an author might have indexed that a modern reader might not get: “you [cannot] know what a catcher’s mitt is if you don’t know what baseball is” (1976: 221)
Following such leads to find out how people constitute the world they must then deal with, has been magnificently productive for our understanding of face to face interaction among small groups. From telephone conversations, to the telling of jokes (Sacks 1974), to the discovery of pulsars (Garfinkel and Livingston 1981), we have been able to move significantly further in the anthropological task.
But it has been much more difficult to follow this program with larger emerging units in which it seems evident that interactions in Setting A are somehow linked to conversations in Setting C through the interactions in Setting B.
For example, school based research can easily argue that some troubles a principal may have with teachers and students is directly related to directives from the superintendent’s office which was only passing on directives from the State or the Federal Government. In other words, the principal and the immediate significant others in a school, indicate through their speech and acts what is it that they cannot escape, what they are making locally with this, and where we, as anthropologists might go to trace where what-they-cannot-escape comes from.
In recent years, Latour has become famous for insisting that social scientists work at tracing these connections. He writes about “networks” and how his Actor-Network (non-) Theory might be useful (Latour 2005). But he does not give much guidance as to how this might get done, that is as to how we might systematically inscribe and then identify the links and then inscribe the identified links as suggested by the participants, and in such a way that our critics can identify errors or omissions.
This is why I found Jill Koyama’s dissertation most challenging. Not only did she dare make New York City her unit of analysis, she began tracing systematically the linkages on matters of providing “supplemental educational services” across many settings. The next question, for me, then became, how might we represent these linkages.
As a starting point, I am reverting to the “web” metaphor, Geertz borrows from Weber (1973 ). It is cozy metaphor about being “suspended” which I am turning more ominous by writing that we are “caught in webs of (practically consequential and enacted) meaning.”
spider web
And then I am pushing the metaphor by actually “suspending” people-in-their-moments in the hope that it can allow us to see the proposed connections and then plan further research on this basis. Here is what this might look like.
Musings about possibilities in the scholarly life of a professor of education and anthropologist
