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
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 the importance of reading footnotes
Those who know my work know that I am a great admirer of the historian Lawrence Cremin whom I happily coopt not only as an anthropologist, but also as an anthropologist ahead of his time even as he channeled the Boasian tradition he was taught at Columbia while a graduate student.
What I found this morning is a wonderfully clear critique not only of most definitions of education, including common ones from anthropologists, but, most impressively, of most definitions of “culture.”
This is the footnote:
Bailyn advances a definition of education as “the entire process by which culture transmits itself across the generations.” Yet, as Werner Jaeger made clear in the introduction to Paideia, until the word “culture” is clarified, such a definition remains obscure. “We are accustomed to use the word culture,” Jaeger noted, “not to describe the ideal which only the Hellenocentric world possesses, but in a much more trivial and general sense, to denote something inherent in every nation of the world, even the most primitive.” He was referring, of course, to the concept as developed by the social scientists-a usage he saw associated with “the positivist passion for reducing everything to the same terms.” By Bailyn’s definition, “education” is ultimately synonymous with “enculturation,” as that term is used by the anthropologists, notably Melville Herskovits. I myself am sympathetic to Jaeger’s insistence that true education implies the deliberate, self-conscious pursuit of certain intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic ideals, though I am perfectly ready to grant that nondeliberate influences are often, if not always, more powerful and pervasive and that the educational historian must be concerned with both. For a statement of a similar problem of definition that has long bedeviled literary historians, see Howard Mumford Jones, The Theory of American Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1948), pp. 59-61 and passim. My reference to “the architecture of contemporary education” is taken from the lectures of my colleague Martin S. Dworkin in his course at Teachers College on “Education, Ideology, and Mass Communication.” (Cremin 1965: 75)
Note the attack on reductionism and enculturation; note “granting nondeliberate influences” as a kind of exception to “deliberate, self-conscious, pursuit” (aka, in my current vocabulary: practical meta-discursive work).
Note also Cremin approving of a metaphor not be taken as “constructivist” but rather as a prefiguration of Latour’s ANT: the ‘architecture’ of education. I am not sure what Cremin would have done of my added comment that the building, as an assemblage of rooms and corridors assembled on the basis of competing blue-prints with much cracks papered over would look more like the buildings that delighted Lévi-Strauss ([1962] 1966: 17): Cheval’s villa,
or Mr. Wilmmick’s suburban villa as imagined by Charles Dickens (who must have seen versions of it!). And, among many others, a Texas version…
Not to mention, from the ridiculous to the sublime, the
Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.
On thriving children and the hegemony of psychology
I always wonder about the way research on interaction gets reported in the media only (or about always) when it is conducted by psychologists. Easy to chalk to “American individualism,” as institutionalized, and to its sub-forms like “culture of poverty,” or “child development.”
This time, my antennas were agitated by an interview in the University of Chicago glossy publication for alumni. It is titled “Little scientists” with the descriptive subtitle “Think of children as pint-sized psychologists, says parenting expert Erica Reischer, AM’96, PhD’00.”
Not too surprisingly, the editors of the magazine chose, to illustrate, a picture of a child, writing in a notebook. Many will notice that the child is a boy, white, with auburn hair, wearing a blue t-shirt. I notice that he is by himself. If there were a caption, it might be “the scientist at work”…
Irony aside, the underlying work is one I wish I could use when writing about family education. The story starts with a common place: obedience class for dogs is really about training humans. Having just been working on Jennifer Van Tiem’s chapter on horses and human (for our When is education), I know now how extensive the anthropological literature on animal/human interaction has become. But, of course, the editor quotes Reischer for saying something about “teaching us how to think like a dog … so that [the dog] would learn positive behaviors.”
Note the emphasis on thinking for the human, behavior for the dog, and a causal link between separate entities.
On to children, analogically.
“What we really need … is pay attention to our children’s behavior” (as if any human being could NOT pay attention) …. “[then] we can make choices about what we are going to do about [it]” (as if NEXT acts, in an improvised sequence, could ever be matters of choice under separate control).
Most interesting is the metaphor of the scientist (a conceit, really) Reischer proposes and the editor uses as title for the piece: “Kids are doing experiments because they have to figure out how the people in their lives work. I sometimes say, ‘Pretend your kids are wearing little white lab coats, and carrying little lab notebooks, and making notes all day long about what works and what doesn’t work with you’.” Now that could have developed into something Rancière or Garfinkel might have written as instructions to researchers (and parents): notice intelligence at work; notice the noticings and the improvisations on suggested themes given tools and affordances.
Except, of course, that the editor goes back to the atomistic, individualistic, narrative and the “secret sauce” [sic] to happy parenting: Learn how to manipulate your child like a trainer manipulates dogs.
Pavlov? Skinner?
I have not read Reischer’s book. So I am not sure how close the magazine story comes to what she wrote, what she “believes,” or what she could be shown to do when face to face with her own children if we had videotapes of the interaction. My experience with the editors of such magazines is that their priorities are not mine, and may not have been Reischer’s. Public relation editors must translate for their audience: alumni who are mostly not scholars, but may be imagined to be most comfortable with stories about human interaction written in terms of causation between separately acting (free) individuals.
And yet, one might go back and rewrite the story, the book, and maybe even the research (though there many not have been any in this case) to show how the child is indeed, a “scientist” with (ethno-)methods for figuring out what happened in collaboration with (and thus in struggle with) parents as consociates as, together, they improvise the family that will have been. One cannot be a scientist by oneself. And researchers who specialize in individuals will never understand humanity (or why psychology is hegemonic in America).
High tech creationism?
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.” Continue reading High tech creationism?
Anthropology and the feral: some further considerations about sequentiality and transformation
My last post was triggered by Michael Scroggins’ mention of feral cats in Australia. It made me think of Lévi-Strauss’s culinary triangle as a way to escape simple dualisms. But they may not be sufficient if they induce readers to classify (some animals would be wild, others domesticates, and still other feral). It may be closer to Lévi-Strauss’s goal to imagine that any “thing” (food, animal, marriage, blog posts) is always, as produced through humanity, wild and domesticated and feral (or imaginative/conventional/confusing).
But the power of the triangles is best revealed when we lay the three poles on a temporal frame and imagine them as a sequence involving minimally three persons (Arensberg 1981, 1982).
imagination -> convention -> confusion
Let’s stay with any blog post (as I started in my last one). Like any other form of asynchronous expression, a post develops over a period of time, in the privacy of a writer’s room, one character at the time of a computer screen. ‘I’ am currently doing this (a post), and do not quite know what I will write next (at this very momentary moment, ‘I’ am often suspended, wondering whether to open a new parenthesis, or not).
But all this is not accessible to anyone but ‘me’ as, a few seconds later, I discover what ‘I’ wrote and may now edit. This next step may be taken hours, if not days, later. [note: this sentence was written on December 14, 2016; this note was written on January 9, 2017.] In other words, ‘I’ am conversing with ‘my self’, struggling with the words I must borrow, but without having to deal with anyone else who, at some future time, might tell I/me what I wrote.
And then, at some point, ‘I’ will press “Publish” and the post will escape into ‘my’ past, an uncertain future, and any reader’s present and then past.
All this, of course, is a common sense developed by American Pragmatists, most clearly perhaps by George Herbert Mead (1913, 1934), and later formalized in conversational analysis and related fields. I paraphrase this sense in this way:
‘I’ (in the radical present) becomes ‘me’ (as remembered in a system of identifications) and is then identified for all future purposes in a third move, possibly performed by some more or less significant other, alive or dead.
As Mead put it:
It is not necessary, in attempting to solve the problem of meaning, to have recourse to psychical states, for the nature of meaning, as we have seen, is found to be implicit in the structure of the social act, implicit in the relations among its three basic individual components: namely in the triadic relation of
1) a gesture of one individual
[and then]2) a response to that gesture by a second individual
[and then]3) completion of the given social act initiated
by the gesture of the first individual.
(Mead 1934: 78. I reformatted to emphasize sequentiality and added the italicized text)
Had Geertz built on Mead rather than Weber, he might have seen that his concern with “interpreting” twitches/winks is moot: the “meaning” is in a completion that is an act of power rather than of interpretation. That is, neither the gesture nor the response determine the completion. Rather the completion determines what happened before in that completion identifies the muscle spasm as this (rather than that): In culture causality is reversed.
Most anthropologists, of course, follow Geertz, following Weber. Few follow Arensberg (or Mead, or Garfinkel) in his insistence on sequencing and temporality (by contrast to the more common insistence on history). Those who did, say in the anthropology of schooling, or of science and technology, may, however, have fallen into another trap that thinking about the feral makes glaring. This trap involves assuming that the completing act as necessarily an act of identification back into the “normal-for-the-time” (culture as organization of political power producing particular forms of suffering). I’d now say that most of my work with McDermott could be criticized for assuming that completion silences possibilities opened by the gesture or the response to the gesture. We complained about Bourdieu, Foucault, et al., but more for their understanding of the processes of reproduction rather than for taking reproduction as inevitable—even though, as anthropologists, we should have known better. Even the most incessant work at reproduction will always fail. Even the most pampered of kittens can go feral.
Why this should be so should be the anthropological problem, to the extent that we follow our roots to Boas and Saussure (as historical linguist). I have written about “education” is this vain, but thinking about the feral as a moment rather than a category could sharpen the argument. One should wonder: what if “completion” is more akin to an apparently ‘domesticated’ cat escaping into the streets, hills and back-country? To the very extent that the completing act may surprise those who gestured and responded, then even an enforcement of the normal can become something to fight. That is every “third” (identifying “completion”) in temporality, is also a “second” (suitable “response”), and then or course a “first” (“gesture” wildly open to all sorts of responses).
In brief, the classical case borrowed from Hugh Mehan on classroom lessons (1979) is generally summarized as a sequence:
1) Question (gesture): “What time is it?”
2) Answer (response): “It’s 10:06″
3) Evaluation (completion): “Good! ‘A’ on finding the time on your computer screen!”
When I teach this sequence, I then note that the evaluation places the sequence into the world of meritocratic schooling and its attendant production of sanctioned inequalities.
I do not know of anyone noticing that teaching this sequence is actually a statement in a temporal sequence. That is, “teaching about schooling” (reporting, telling, …) is a new, altogether feral (from the point of view of about everyone involved in schooling), completing “third”:
1) Gesture: “It’s 10:06″
2) Response: “Good! ‘A’ on finding the time on your computer screen!”
3) Completion: “This is a terrible way of doing education!”
No wonder so many dismiss anthropology, or even try to silence it — like the government of Australia trying to rid the continent of feral cats!
References
Arensberg, Conrad. 1981 “Cultural holism through interactional systems.” American Anthropologist. 83:562-581
Arensberg, Conrad. 1982 “Generalizing anthropology: the recovery of holism,” in Crisis in anthropology. Edited by E. A. Hoebel, et al.. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.. pp. 109-130.
Mead, G. H. 1934 Mind, self and society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mehan, Hugh 1979 Learning lessons: Social organization in the classroom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wondering about the feral
Michael Scroggins, in one of drafts of the dissertation he will soon defend, brought out something I do not remember any anthropologist ever mentioned: we all easily use the distinction wild/domesticated. But we do not write about the feral.
(I count on Scroggins to tell me more about his sources…).
Since he brought the ‘feral’ up, I have been playing with him on how to present something with which we now can make at least three distinctions:
- wild/domesticated
- domesticated/feral
- feral/wild
We started, of course, with something most powerfully developed by Lévi-Strauss. Famously Lévi-Strauss works through oppositions:
- good to eat/good to think (in Totemism)
- wild/domesticated (implicit in the title to Pensée Sauvage)
- bricolage/engineering (in Chapter 1 of Pensée Sauvage)
- raw/cooked (volume 1 of Mythologiques)
and, perhaps, nature/culture though this is not quite so evident since he repeatedly pointed out that we cannot possibly reach the “natural.”
What would he have done with the “feral”?
Now, it is not often noticed that, while Lévi-Strauss, starts with straw distinctions, he regularly moves to triangular models. The most famous is a short paper about a “culinary triangle” that still has a small life inspiring scholars of human eating (D’Onofrio 2004: Chapter 5). Like for his paper on Santa Claus (and similar ones on mushrooms, or totemism, etc.), Lévi-Strauss starts with references to contemporary life (Italians imposing crudités as edibles, America soldiers destroying Camembert as in-edible), then gallops through historical and geographical whirlwinds, and ends with the most general of statements: “Thus we can hope to discover for each specific case how the cooking of a society is a language in which it unconsciously translates its structure or else resigns itself, still unconsciously, to revealing its contradictions.” (2008 [1965]: 43).
I am not going to complain about the use of the “unconscious.” One of these days, I may translate this statement into something I could now live with. For today, I will leave this aside and concentrate on the preceding step: taking the mundane (eating and drinking) seriously.
In that vein, one of my fondest memories of my field work in Michigan was the meal when four glasses of drinkables were set for me (water, milk, wine, coffee), all at the same time, to be drunk in any order, as I saw fit. On that day, I was also offered soup after dessert. All my expectations about sequencing of foods and associations between food and drink were challenged, and I loved it: this is why I was glad for anthropology! And so it became part of what I wrote about “America”: individualism, loving attention to individual whims when together, and the careful display of all this in words and actions.
Coming back to Lévi-Strauss and his “culinary triangle”:
Let’s translate this into the world of animals (say cats in Australia), and transform the original triangle (as Boon did when modeling Balinese marriage into a strategic/sacred/romantic triangle (1977)).
The error here, and Lévi-Strauss sometimes allows for it, would be to imagine the model as a collection of states of being (cats could ‘be’ either wild, or domesticated, or feral). The model, as per Lévi-Strauss, is an analytic tool about, in this case, possibilities in any setting, at any time, when human beings get together to do anything (cooking, marrying, doing science). Any statement (act) must be seen as “wild” AND “cultured” AND “feral.” That is, what I am writing here is:
- Wild (to the extent that it is an act of pensée sauvage);
- Cultivated (to the extent that it is written in English, building on a long history of anthropological thinking);
- Feral (to the extent that it may not be what anyone building on the same history is expecting, and may even be disturbing)
One open question, among many, concerns temporality, and I will write about it some other time.
References
Boon, James. 1977 The anthropological romance of Bali: Dynamic perspectives in marriage and caste, politics and religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
D’Onofrio, F Salvatore. 2004 L’esprit de la parenté : Europe et horizon chrétien.. Nouvelle édition [en ligne]. Paris : Éditions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2004. Available at: https://books.openedition.org/editionsmsh/723: .
Lévi-Strauss, Claude 2008 [1965] “The Culinary Triangle.” In Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik Food and Culture: A Reader. New York: Routledge. pp. 36–43
On educating a democratic public, democratically
Soon after Lawrence Cremin published Public education (1976), I gushed about the book to a senior colleague. He did not like any aspect of the book because, as I remember he put it, Cremin made of education a form of “brain-washing.” My colleague claimed Paulo Freire and, I guess, an alternate view of what it means to educate, democratically.
I must say I was astonished. My take then, and I have not changed my mind, was that Cremin asks something surprising from us who are given the task to design education for the public. He asks us to pay attention to what people are doing, in the streets and alleys of the world, far from the halls where pedagogy and curriculum are discussed.
I was astonished that my colleague had not noticed that Cremin was asking us to look at the crowds around us and was criticizing the John Dewey of Democracy and education ([1916] 1966) for not imagining any other educational institution than than the State sponsored school. I could see how a very unsympathetic critic might notice that Dewey, as a philosopher who also read the psychologies and social sciences of his time, was quite sure as to what to teach the masses settling in the United States that they should learn to participate in an American democracy. By Chapter 7, Dewey, unapologetically, claims an aim, a “Good Aim.” In brief, in language Teachers College still uses (though we might wonder about mention of a “social ideal” and the measurement of “the worth of a form of social life”):
Continue reading On educating a democratic public, democratically
What might Chomsky make of Halloween and Santa Claus?
A few times over the past week, I had to face the reality that Lévi-Strauss is mostly summarized as being concerned with Man rather than human beings, with deep Human Nature rather than the messiness of culture (Geertz 1967). Lévi-Strauss, it would seem, is just another Cartesian.
I must acknowledge that he has written much that justifies what used to be a called a “reading” of his work, and can now be called a “translation.” Other translations are possible.
Continue reading What might Chomsky make of Halloween and Santa Claus?
Culture: Inheritance vs. islanding?
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of one of many field defining papers by Clifford Geertz: “Religion as a cultural system” ([1996] 1973).
Last week, I asked students to read it. As I prepared the class, I saw again a quote I had marked but saw in a slightly different light as I also read the final draft of something I am writing with Michael Scroggins currently titled “Does (a) culture recapitulate itself?”. It is actually about the Phoenix like nature of the “culture of poverty” argument. The paper starts with a complaint I have made elsewhere against the move among the leaders of anthropology to distance themselves from “culture” (concept? ideal-type?). I had not noticed that Geertz was already complaining about what may then have been the beginning of the distancing:
The term “culture” has by now acquired a certain aura of ill-repute in social anthropological circles because of the multiplicity of its referents and the studied vagueness with which it has all too often been invoked. (Though why it should suffer more for these reasons than “social structure” or “personality” is something I do not entirely understand.). ([1996] 1973: 89) Continue reading Culture: Inheritance vs. islanding?