Recently, Audrey Le successfully defended a most interesting dissertation about “hackathons.” Like me a while ago you may have no idea what those would be… Well, they are events when (very much mostly) young (mostly) men play/work over a weekend at developing some “thing” (app, process, and who knows what else) that involves some computer programming (or can be analogized to computer design). Until Le started teaching me about them, I had never heard of hackathons–like I had never heard of DoItYourself biology labs, venture capitalists, equine therapies, video badge games and so many other wonder-inspiring stuff that first appeared in the late 20th century. There is indeed much “new” here for anthropologists looking for the odd human beings they thought could only encounter up the Amazon or the Congo. An anthropologist just has to go down the corridors of Columbia (Harvard, MIT, etc.) to meet never-yet-imagined “others.”
Continue reading On hackathons, machines, and flamingos
Category Archives: resistance and play
This is ‘NOT play’
This semester I had the good fortune to accept a request from a student: “Could we have a seminar on play?” So, first, thanks to Miranda Hansen-Hunt, Andrew Wortham, Michelle Zhang.
We started with the obvious: Bateson on “this is play” (1955), Geertz (1973) on “deep play,” Boon on “extra-vagance” (1999), Bakhtin on Rabelais ([1936] 1983), Garfinkel on trust (1963). One thing became salient as we proceeded: each of these authors start with accounts of public displays, without the attending interviews that too much anthropology now comes to rely upon. Some of the authors write in terms of psychological states (having fun, learning, trusting) but they do not investigate the states as such. Rather, and however abstract the argument, they work off anecdotes more or less grounded in ethnographic or historical accounts. So we are asked to imagine:
• puppies roughing it
• men betting to the point of threatening their status (or climbing extremely dangerous mountains)
• men and women parading as kings and queens during a festival while every one is laughing.
• people responding to certain moves in tic-tac-toe
All this is great fun for a cultural anthropologist altogether optimistic about humanity. But it left this anthropologist, as the seminar ended, with the question: when is “this is serious”?
• when is a bite NOT a play bite?
• when in climbing a mountain NOT an extreme sport?
• when IS a king?
• when is a game of tic-tac-toe (greeting, explanation,…) played seriously?
Or, more precisely, when would an anthropologist recognize that this is not a game, that “this is NOT play”? What are the performative markers than might confirm to an observer that this is serious?
It ought to be well known that the anthropological thread that Bateson activated started with his noticing how interesting it should be, for general communication theory, that, when puppies bite each other, only some bites are followed, sequentially (temporally), by NOT play behaviors. Bateson assumed that his readers had seen dogs fighting and could tell the difference. He was trusting on some routine common sense. There actually is an ethnographic literature on insults that document the always possible shifts from laughter after a particularly well crafted insult to snarls if not fists, knives or guns (Labov 1972, 1974). Bourdieu’s writing on the practice of honor in Algeria also fits here (1966). One can start a climb up Mount Everest as a sportsman, as paid Sherpa, or as a professional saving a sportsman or Sherpa in mortal danger (Ortner 1999). There is deep play (paying Sherpas to…)and NOT deep play—though (Sherpas being paid to…) both can end in death.
on parents challenging schooling
Those who follow my work know that I look for evidence (empirical? evidential?) that Bourdieu’s hypothesis about habitus driving (mis-)consciousness is wrong as written. In this search, I prefer detailed ethnographic evidence (the kind sociologists dismiss as “anecdotal”). But descriptive statistics have their place as evidence opening routes for further exploration.
So, I am thankful to my colleagues Oren Pizmony-Levy and Nancy Green Saraisky for their report of a national survey they conducted on who opts out of standardized testing and why (Who opts out and why, August 2016). The media, particularly in New York State has been reporting on something that is often presented as new: parents (mostly prosperous) refusing to have their children take some high-stake tests. This may be a cultural innovation, either because more parents are doing it, because they have found out that opting out is actually possible, or because the media started paying attention, or for other political reasons. Historical research is needed. I would also relate this movement with other movements of parents organizing to do something those with official pedagogical authority (in Bourdieu’s phrase) wish they did not do. In New York City, Mayor de Blasio and others found out that their efforts to rein in charter schools would fail as parents, mostly inner city parent financially struggling, found a way to stop the reining in. At about the same time, other parents, many recent immigrants from China, many who could not speak English, appear to have stopped another movement by those with authority to change the admission requirements to the most academic public high schools. Elsewhere in New York City, other parents organize to home school their children, while others compete mercilessly to enrol their children in astronomically expensive pre-schools.
Whether all this is good for the children, for their parents, for the State, or for humanity is something else altogether. In any events, parents keep demonstrating that there are ways to resist the school-as-is, or the school-as-some-want-it, even as they participate in the evolution of schooling into un-imaginable forms.
Bourdieu and other structural-functionalists who keep Talcott Parsons alive might mark all this as a failure of early socialization into the practical acceptance of pedagogical authority. It could be that the schools have failed at reproducing whatever made Western schooling so successful for so many years and across the world. We may have a failure in maintaining homeostasis!
But it could also be that reproduction will always fail however determined the efforts to keep alive what was. It could be that (social) life will always be about constituting the heretofore unimaginable.
And so, as I like to say, we need a theory of culture that starts with the impossibility of cultural reproduction and sets aside concerns with enculturation. Instead, we need to pays close attention to the ongoing efforts both to preserve and innovate (Varenne 2007, 2011).