Archive for the 'General Scholarship' Category

Anthro Quick Hits: Telos and McFate

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 31, 2008
in General Scholarship
. 1 Comment

How to make friends with an anthropologist:

DO NOT: design Pentagon-funded anthro-warrior schemes that make the anthropological establishment leery, then decide that the perfect anthropologist to present the public face of these schemes is the daughter-in-law (and former support staffer!) of a former gun-lobby double agent. (h/t Open Anthropology)

DO: Talk about Transhumanism more often. As ckelty of Savage Minds explains:

Most of the critiques of transhumanism center around its more speculative aspects, like the notion of the singularity, the emergence of artificial intelligence etc. But I think there is increasingly an opening here for thinking about what we do and what we do not have control over as humanity evolves. Most transhumanist rhetoric seems to imply that there is no control—-it’s just the next stage of evolution—-but when push comes to shove, whatever “evolution” means to them, it isn’t simply your basic genetic-species evolution, but involves culture and technology as well.

…

I think that transhumanists will increasingly come to dominate discussions about the controlability of technology and its effects on people and their potential. But more than that, I think anthropologists are already interested in transhumanism, we just don’t call it that because we’ve given up (or just studiously avoid) trying to define the human.

Of course, the closest thing to a Transhumanism expert I know once argued with me for an hour during slow traffic outside Montreal about the worth of my discipline. (The opening line was something like “So, anthropology. Totally useless. Discuss.”) So I’m not too optimistic on the prospects for dialogue here.

Yeah, I know Montgomery McFate got her doctorate from the department that’s giving me my B.A. next June. And I know that my feelings on the Human Terrain System are more complicated than I allow for here. But the spy thing is still pretty hilarious.

In Defense of a Fluke

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 18, 2008
in General Scholarship and Navel Gazing
. 5 Comments

Impressively, in the last few days I’ve been chided both for failing to recognize the divine jazz-like looseness of blogging and for failing to recognize the requisite statistical rigor of blogging. The former accusation is harmless enough; the latter is the same argument used since time immemorial to wave aside cultural criticism on the whole — indeed, any knowledge that isn’t quantitatively generated — and that’s a problem.

It’s impossible to gather enough data to meet statistical standards while understanding the context that generated each point in that data. That’s the purpose of statistics in social science: to create discrete phenomena out of messy reality in an attempt to generalize where generalization is helpful. But generalization will never get you more than a few good options for what circumstances generated that data, a few strong correlations (which, the statisticians so ceaselessly remind us, is not causation). If you want to talk about not just the what but the why, you need to venture into conjecture anyway.

And conjecture based on those same generalizations doesn’t draw from nearly as deep a knowledge base as knowledge based on more comprehensive understanding of particular situations. Maybe those situations are anomalous — though in this case, the fact that I was using personal experience to illuminate a broader statistical study whose results lined up with that experience indicates that “fluke” is putting it strongly — and they’re certainly statistically insignificant. But until we can invent statistics to explain connections we don’t yet know exist, we’ll never be able to use them to explain social forces and cultural trends, only to record them after the fact like starlight on an Earth-bound telescope. Cultural criticism is by its nature tentative and speculative and flexible, but to say you can only explain a phenomenon after you’ve zoomed out too far to really examine it is missing the point entirely.

Overstretched, or Kicked Upstairs?

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 17, 2008
in General Scholarship, Ladies, Navel Gazing and Yale
. 18 Comments

David Broockman thinks Kay Steiger’s post on women in academia could be turned into an argument against affirmative action. Maybe that’s true, but only because I think she infers too much too readily. Here’s the gist:

Once women earn tenure and arrive at the institution they immediately begin getting pulled into various “service” commitments. This includes heading committees, become program coordinators, or take other leadership roles. While this is good for women that long to go into administration at a university, it often pulls female professors away from research…I think the urge is to make sure women are represented in leadership roles but when this pulls time away from their principal mission of research, it becomes a bad thing.

On the face of it, I can see why it’s easy to read this as a simple affirmative-action narrative. But I’m surprised that Broockman didn’t pick up on the fact that the affirmative-action motive is inferred, and start thinking if there might be something else going on. Especially because he’s in the Yale Political Union, where a similar phenomenon takes place, and there is very definitely something else going on.

You see, the YPU on the whole doesn’t have anything close to gender parity, at least among active members. And at any given debate, women are much less likely to speak than men are. But the Union’s executive board has represented something pretty close to a 50/50 split during the three years I’ve been around, and the top three positions have been held by more women than men during that time.

But here’s the result, as in Steiger’s example: while women end up running the show — managing, that is — men are able to devote themselves to success in the field as the field itself defines it (for Steiger, research; for the YPU, debating prowess), and therefore continue to be labeled “leaders”. This is only progressive in the same way that, say, thanking a housewife for the hard work she does is progressive: it’s nice to have the recognition, but it’d be nicer to acknowledge that maybe she’d rather be doing something other than housework.

But even to get the acknowledgment, women have to get noticed and taken seriously, which is tricky in an environment where they’re underrepresented. And often, the way to get noticed and groomed for leadership is to get things done, and get them done well. It’s hard to mount an impressive track record in intellectualism as a freshman, because intellectualism doesn’t lend itself to track records; it’s much easier to hang posters and organize events and do other things that mark one for “management.” Like female academics, they get siphoned out early and therefore miss the chance to get everything they can out of the environment they’re in.

So I really can’t see this as a reason to oppose affirmative action, but rather to ensure that the pools from which candidates are selected are of equal size, so that women don’t feel the need to “prove themselves” in male-dominated settings. Much more importantly, though, we need to recognize that in plenty of fields (academia, sure, but what about advertising? Programming?) many of the roles that get marked as “service”, “management” or “administration” aren’t positions of authority in the least; rather, the managers are those who keep things running so that other people can do what they came to the field to do in the first place, and get all the glory in the long haul.

I’m all for specialization, but let’s be honest about it. Appointing a junior academic to the position of program coordinator, regardless of gender, isn’t a promotion but a qualitative job shift. I think many of the problems that affirmative action hasn’t fixed or has exacerbated might be addressed if we stopped thinking purely in terms of organizational flowcharts but also in terms of social capital or personal fulfillment. And I certainly think that the trends Steiger notices might begin to reverse if tenure committees et al. had it brought to their attention that their actions were the ivory-tower equivalent of telling their daughters: “Oh, no, little girls can’t be doctors. Why don’t you pretend to be the Head Nurse instead?”

Blogosphere Happy Hour

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 10, 2008
in Extemporanea and General Scholarship
. 1 Comment

Poulos has a bathtubful of good advice on tap regarding imported beers (I can publicly agree with his recommendation of Delirium Tremens because I drank it in Quebec and therefore legally), while Noah finds common cause with George Will over the beverage’s fundamentally therapeutic nature.

Personally, I bristle a bit at this paragraph of Will’s piece. Admittedly, I think he broaches the issue as delicately and critically as possible, but this is the sort of semi-scientific assertion that so usually gets presented as proven fact in the MSM that I’m not confident his readers will mirror his skepticism:

Johnson suggests, not unreasonably, that this explains why certain of the world’s population groups, such as Native Americans and Australian Aborigines, have had disproportionately high levels of alcoholism: These groups never endured the cruel culling of the genetically unfortunate that town dwellers endured. If so, the high alcoholism rates among Native Americans are not, or at least not entirely, ascribable to the humiliations and deprivations of the reservation system. Rather, the explanation is that not enough of their ancestors lived in towns.

Or maybe it has to do with the circumstances under which alcohol was introduced to those populations. If, as Will suggests — heck, asserts — earlier in the column, beer production was tied in Eurasia to the settlement of cities, it seems logical that the concurrent rise of new forms of nutrition and new social circumstances in which to consume them might have caused the two to become interwoven. Even the development of social conventions around alcohol, let alone the concept of an inherently public “drinking space” (pub culture, etc.), would have presented significant external constraints on immoderate consumption individually, and enabled the “teaching” of proper consumption intergenerationally.

When alcohol was introduced to peoples who hadn’t been exposed to it generations earlier, by contrast, it was presented as just another foodstuff or commodity and stripped of the social context that had made its consumption manageable. Without the publicity and contextualization of Eurasian alcohol consumption, of course native individuals were more likely to be harmfully immoderate in their use of the stuff. (This actually happened in the other direction as well — think about the difference between use of the peace pipe and Europe’s early-17th-century tobacco mania.)

I’m sure that in reality it’s some mix of both; I just wish the scientists would stop being so reductionistic about things, especially when such reductionism shades toward social Darwinism. It’s also an interesting cautionary tale about the introduction of alcohol to populations unfamiliar with it and who lack the proper public context to consume it moderately: such as what happens to college freshmen every year, for example.

Aren’t you a little too old for “Coming of Age in Samoa”?

Published
by
Dara Lind
on June 28, 2008
in General Scholarship and Social Theory
. 0 Comments

Confessions of an Anthro major: the concerted efforts my more established co-scholars are currently making to re-establish public anthropolology (book awards for which I am sadly ineligible, etc.) are probably more closely tied than they admit to the wish, expressed by many of the anthropologists I know, that the public would just get the heck over Margaret Mead already. (In certain cases, the wish that the public would just get the heck over Jared Diamond already is also a motivating factor.)

I’ve mentioned before that it’s bad for public image of the discipline that “the Anthropologist You Are Most Likely To Be Asked About By The Person Sitting Next To You On The Plane” (as Rex of Savage Minds puts it) comes from an era in anthropological history that most in the discipline today are uncomfortable with at best. But unfortunately, ignoring Margaret won’t get her to go away, and I’m increasingly convinced that allowing her reputation to stand prevents new public anthropologists from breaking in on their own terms, because in the public eye they can only lay claim to an identity as anthropologists insofar as they’re doing the “Margaret Mead thing” (comprehensive fieldwork in Melanesian societies that deliberately tries to ignore the effects of modernity, etc.)

Obviously, this wouldn’t be as frustrating if Mead had done her fieldwork properly; but really, she didn’t. So I’m thrilled to do my part to dismantle her legacy by urging you to read this article that examines how Mead’s preconceptions and approach shaped her eventual conclusions (again, h/t Savage Minds); to quote authors Ira Bashkow and Lise Dobrin, ” in many ways the situations that anthropologists experience in the field are ones that they themselves have played a role in shaping.” If methodological criticism isn’t what turns you on (even clear, concise, enlightening methodological criticism), read it because it uses a love triangle as an explanatory factor and comes very close to saying “Fieldwork: ur doin it wrong.”

Yes, the concept of “wrong” does exist in anthropology, though it loses much of its resonance and respectability when applied to contemporary work as opposed to that of the Benighted Past; we too are suckers for our own progressive narrative. But the continual eye-rolling and hand-wringing over Mead indicates that in the absence of being able to judge our subjects with impunity, anthropologists tie the reputation of the discipline to holding our methods to very high standards; some would say this is in the name of science, but I (loath to lean on the term “science” for credibility) think it’s really just necessary to good scholarship. And I hold out a little bit of idealistic hope that if the avatar for the anthropological profession weren’t a woman whose methods were so loosey-goosey and unrigorous, pundits et al wouldn’t be so quick to affix the word “anthropological” to any cock-eyed analysis that happened to mention the word “taboo.”

After all, real anthropologists need those jobs. We have precious few enough as it is.

When I talk about “standards,” I don’t mean a political-sciencey Scrupulous Standardization of the Gathering of Facts. That’s impossible to do in anthropology, and even if it weren’t it would certainly lead to the impossibility of any pop anthro — up to and including most of my contributions to print media thus far, and arguably some of my contributions to this blog as well. I mean a constant interrogation of the role one’s own outlook plays in filtering information, and a refusal to present one’s conclusions as uncolored by those filters.

Quick hit: A tiny concession to scientism.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on June 14, 2008
in General Scholarship
. 0 Comments

Those who remember my exchange with Will about ADD (lo these many weeks ago) might be interested in this Slate piece about a study that found ADHD to be a benefit to nomads but a hindrance for their settled cousins.

The evidence seems convincing enough to lend credence to three statements of the less-uncontroversial-than-they-sound variety:

  1. Genetic variants can have an overwhelming influence on personal behavior and role within a particular cultural setting. The genetic variation that constituted the study’s experimental variable “has been linked to greater food and drug cravings, novelty-seeking, and ADHD symptoms” — a much better description of me than I’d like to attribute to a few nucleotides.
  2. The phenotypic expression of said genetic variants is extremely culturally dependent, especially in ascertaining whether or not such behavior is advantageous or detrimental. The mere act of determining the advantage a variation confers — in another cultural context or our own — doesn’t give us license to attempt hastily to protect “natural” biochemical states, or to express indignation when individuals fail (or don’t have the mobility) to choose a lifepath best suited to their particular genetic disposition.
  3. The plural of anecdote is not data. Proper, social-scientific experimental frameworks are occasionally useful. (Note that I said “occasionally,” and don’t expect me to take this position often.)

I’d also note that I’d like to see much more research from geneticists about the consequences of globalization — a trend, after all, that seems to focus on the homogenization of lifepaths, especially as long as the mobility of capital and movement toward a “global market” continues to outstrip the mobility of human beings. Consider especially that enforcement of national borders puts nomadic peoples at a particular disadvantage (more people have heard of the much-oversentimentalized “Reindeer People” of the steppe than know that their inability to cross into Chinese territory has resulted in contamination of water sources and widespread illness, particularly among the reindeer themselves). It seems to me that, contradictory as a scientific argument for cultural relativism would be, it could be made — the fact that it hasn’t is likely a result of the fact that those attracted to science are already too much in love with teleological notions of Truth.

Tuesday Anthro Blogging: in which Dara apologizes for her hermeneutic tendencies.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on May 27, 2008
in General Scholarship, Philosophy and Social Theory
. 0 Comments

I’m not sure I have anything interesting to add on pedagogy per se, but Helen (perhaps predictably) piqued my interest in this exchange by linkdropping my favorite half-guilty-pleasure anthropological article ever, “Notes on the Balinese Cockfight”:

When Roland Barthes unpacks the symbolic meaning of everyday things, or Clifford Geertz talks about what’s really going on in a Balinese cockfight, or feminist film critics say that screwball comedy is inherently sexist, they’re not pointing out possible interpretations; they’re calling attention to messages we’ve already received without necessarily realizing it.

First of all, of course, it’s sort of important to point out that we can’t know for sure if Geertz’s interpretation of the Balinese cockfight is definitely “what’s really going on,” because we only have Geertz’s account to work with. I’m sure there are other, contradictory accounts, but I haven’t read them and I’d be surprised if Helen has. (There is at least one line of enduring criticism of the piece that I’ve encountered, however, which is that Geertz somehow neglected to mention that Indonesia was in the midst of civil war and unrest while he was doing his fieldwork. It’s certainly possible that this had little or no impact on the cockfight, but is it really the job of the hermeneutist to bet against hidden connections between social systems?)

The broader issue here is that the sphere of things that are true about a particular text/film/phenomenon — messages that one can accurately say are embedded — is, if not infinite, incredibly vast. But it’s obviously true that not every message embedded in a piece is received, as any failed artist will attest; my favorite example of this, of course, is Brecht, who in attempting to make a theatre beyond the personal and the sentimental ended up inventing characters with whom his audiences sympathized madly. Sure, there’s an obligation to point out the influential messages, but doesn’t falsely assuming that a message has been influential distort the text rather than revealing it?

It’s also often true that messages are reflected rather than created by the text — while screwball comedy may have, in its way, reinforced gender inequalities (something to which those of us who consider ourselves genre conversationalists remain susceptible). Recognizing the difference between conduit and origin is important, sure, but a reflected message is only half the battle – it’s somewhat irresponsible not to try to go back and search for the origin itself, especially if you’re attempting to point out to your students/readers/audience messages that they’ve already received.

The enduring popularity of the essay, and Geertz’s work in general, isn’t because of its theoretical insights but because of its literary ones — hermeneutics requires a faithful representation of the text being considered, and “thick description” makes ethnography much more fun to read. Geertz does a brilliant job with narrative in the piece, but narrative really does require deliberate choices, and those depend more on the hermeneutist’s own perspective than we scholars, critics and pundits usually care to admit.

I am a social theorist: do not bend, fold, generalize or marginalize.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on May 2, 2008
in Extemporanea, General Scholarship and Navel Gazing
. 2 Comments

I was just going to link to this in an amused and patronizing fashion: aw, look, everyone, Dayo Olopade discovered the smoker’s code!

But apparently she is quicker than I am and patronized me in that post before I had the chance to patronize her back. In fairness, I don’t think she knows me, but she patronized my people. And by “my people” I mean “anthropologists.” I’ve never seen anthropology referenced so nonchalantly in a blog post before, and I’m really truly grateful and hope it starts a trend. But just in case it does, there are some issues I want to nip in the bud first.

Here’s the Sedaris passage she pulls for analysis (I apologize in advance):

“Give me one of those,” he said, and he pointed to the pack I was holding. I handed him a Viceroy, and when he thanked me I smiled and thanked him back… wasn’t it beautiful that our mutual appreciation could transcend our various differences, and somehow bring us together?

(To which she adds):

I believe anthropologists call this “gifting.” And it’s an all-too undervalued part of human intercourse.

The post goes on from there. I do not. Instead I present you with…

3 Quick Tips on Blogging about Anthropology (which, Incidentally, Everyone Should Do)

1. Minimize the sweeping statements. “I believe anthropologists call this…”? I hope this is ironic, but it’s unlikely. It sounds like a parody of a midcentury ethnography: the mock humility of “I believe” and the slightly patronizing “call this.” Yes yes, I know, anthropologists have an awkward history of Othering. We’re hypersensitive about it and when we notice it in other people we’re never sure if they’re being ironic or problematic. (Quick hint: when on the internet, use “t3h,” as in “t3h gayz and t3h goyim.”)

2. Every anthropologist is a special snowflake. I’ve never heard two anthropologists agree on what to call something, ever, come to think of it. Shared definitions are just not something we do. Surf Wikipedia for a bit, pick a name to drop and run with it; if you feel the need to use anthropology in the blogosphere that’s probably because we need more anthropology in the blogosphere, and by extension people who are willing to make references to it.

3. Fact-check. No, actually, we don’t call that “gifting.” We don’t call “Give me one of those” much of anything at all except possibly impolite (or at least a bad pickup line). And there is no such thing as “gifting.” There is a system called the “gift economy,” some aspects of which exist in our own society (thank heavens), but that also has very little to do with turning a cigarette into an anecdote — it’s about establishing a lasting social relation on the continued exchange of gifts of slightly unequal value, so that you’ll have an obligation to see the other person again (whoever’s in gift debt that week can bring something for his creditor).

(Digression: I understand the desire to isolate phenomena from systems for the sake of cultural criticism. I do it all the time myself. But it’s quite another thing to turn a mechanism for a years-long friendship into a mechanism for a shared serendipitous moment. Random acts of kindness are lovely, but we already have a phrase for random acts of kindness. I’d love the concept of the gift economy to really come back in force, but we shouldn’t dilute it as if it’s inevitable that all social spheres go the way of hookup culture.)

But much more generally: please do your fieldwork homework when talking about us. There aren’t enough of us in the blogosphere to give an accurate representation of what we’re really like, which makes it easy to fall into the stereotypes that have hectored us since the days of Margaret Mead. Once there’s a critical mass of anthropologists who don’t just blog about anthropology (or blog about blogging about anthropology), we’ll be able to inspire new and improved stereotypes; until then, hang tight to your Mauss.

No, seriously, hang tight to your Mauss. Essay on the Gift is a fantastic depiction of the phenomena I’ve described above and of the rise of law, and hands down the best argument I’ve heard against the libertarians and evolutionary psychologists who insist that the market is a natural institution because man needs an outlet for his self-interest. Go read it.

In seriousness, the post is solid. If you don’t read CSB (but why wouldn’t you read CSB?) and don’t know any smokers who like talking about smoking, it’s probably quite nice. Otherwise, solid.