Author Archives: cmenzies

09/21/24

Boas & Morley – left & right

There is no inherent theoretical or political tendency within any discipline. More relevant are the wider social forces at play and the particularities of history. While many anthropologists in North America consider themselves liberal in social values and progressive in economic terms, this has not always been the case.  The earlier version, especially that segment link to physical and archaeological anthropology, tended toward the more conservative and flirted with ideas of eugenics and notions of biological racial differences that are today discredited. Politically such early anthropologists maintained strong connections with economic elites that funded many of the prominent private universities.

One of the earliest political conflicts within the discipline of anthropology involved Franz Boas and Sylvanus G. Morley. Morely was a fourth generation white American whose middle class family had ties to New England’s political elites. At the center of the controversy was Morley’s work in central American during World War I on behalf of the U.S. Naval Intelligence agency. At the same time Morley was presenting himself as a practicing archaeologist of Mayan society.

Franz Boas, a German émigré, is widely identified as one of the founding figures of American anthropology.  Boas was very much opposed to so-called scientific racism – the ideology that different races of humans have different inherent attributes like intelligence, physical capacity, etc.   Boas used detailed empirical methods to document decisively that there were no inherent biological differences between putative races, rather all of humanity shared the same capacities. He took his scientific discoveries into the realm of politics where he advocated for racial equality, democratic practices, and the right of all people for equity and autonomy.  Boas’ principles of honesty and fairness brought him into conflict with Morley’s deceptive use of archaeology as a cover for espionage. Boas publicly repudiated the action Morley and others connected to him and for his pains the American Anthropological Association censured him.

Both men continued their careers in anthropology, Morley working at the School for American Archaeology (known today as the School for Advanced Research) in Santa Fe. The school was, for much of the 20th century a center that attracted a host of conservative thinkers and was funded by heirs of major publishing empire who toyed with the politics of fascism.  Boas was a professor at Columbia University were the students he trained went on to found most of the major departments of American anthropology in the 20th century.

The underlying conflict between individuals who value social justice and equality versus those that admire a more conservative and Tory future continues, as in society in general, within the worlds of anthropology today.

09/10/24

Quiz Writing [updated]

Here’s the deal -it takes work to answer a quiz or an exam.  However, it’s not simply how much time you put in, it’s really about learning how to study smart. Sometimes we can find ourselves spending lots and lots of time  preparing for something but not get anything accomplished.  To be able to manage a full load of university courses, a life beyond class, maybe a job, etc, means being able to studying effectively and not waste your time.

Smart Study means listening to what is said in class (remember the blog on ‘what’s the prof want anyway?).  The lecture gives you the ROAD MAP to a satisfactory grade (for the mark inclined -that’s a C+/B-).  Read more, participate in tutorial discussions, ask questions in lecture, talk to your prof and TAs (we can be found fairly easily), generate questions as you read.  If you engage in smart study you will do okay.

The Quiz. the quizzes will draw from lecture and readings.

Format: Each quiz will have two basic sections.  The first will involve short, fill in the blank and/or matching type questions.  The second will involve answering a number of paragraph type questions.  For this section there will typically be a set of three or four possible questions from which students will select two or three to answer in the space provided.

One of the hard things about a first time experience with university examination is it is unlike highschool exams.  The structure and content of the test isn’t laid out for you ; you won’t be told what exactly is on the quiz or exam.  You will have to work at it, but the signs are fairly clear.

  1. Course outlines have headings and assigned readings under those headings.  Read the heading. For our first unit the main heading is:  “What is Anthropology.”  This should give a student a really clear indicator of the primary learning goal of the unit -that is, you are learning about what makes something anthropology.  In class we have been talking  about how it is that anthropologists do what ever it is we do.  It would seem that this involves research (called fieldwork in anthropology), key concepts (i.e. conceptual tools used in doing anthropology), and some basic understanding that there are several types of anthropology.
  2. Lectures have structure -take notes following the lecture structure. Sometimes it might seem hard to figure out what to take notes on -everything?  or, just the important things?  (but then ‘what is important’?).  When a prof uses powerpoint or overheads it makes your job as a student a little bit easier.  Normally we (ie profs) select key words or phrases that highlight what we have decided are the most important of critical issues.  Thus, your job of figuring out what is ‘important’ is made easier.
  3. Now put readings and lectures together. Compare your notes of lecture with your notes from the readings.  If you are a habitual highlighter -consider locking your highlight pen away and opening up a notebook in which you write into it the key ideas from the things you read; don’t waste your time highlighting  everything in the assigned readings.  By the time you’ve finished highlighting your book will likely look like a rainbow.
  4. Finally, if you haven’t been reading along as per the course outline you will find it harder to speed read and catch the wave in time for your quiz.  Of course, there are those among us who can read the textbook the night before and do okay (or even great).  But for the majority of us doing well on a quiz, a term paper, or an exam is the product of smart study and hard work.

More info on exams and exam writing can be found under the ‘good question’ post.

Edited and updated. Originally published October, 2010.

09/9/24

Where is ‘The Field?’

Anthropologists do their research in ‘the field.’ This is to set it apart from where we write up our research results.  That is we make a distinction between where and when we conduct our research and the place and time within which we write up our findings.  In recent decades this fairly simplistic distinction between field and home has become complicated by critique (Geertz 1988), advances in information technology, and changes in research practices.  Nonetheless, practicing anthropologists still refer to their place of research as the ‘field’ and what we do in the field as ‘fieldwork.’

My impressions and observations of many years of research in the Bigoudennie (an area within Brittany, France) are recorded in notebooks, files and in the photos I took during my time in there.  Glancing through my family photo albums I see the passage of many years in Brittany recorded from the perspective of the everyday life of a family.  These photos mark the events, trips, birthdays, guests, anniversaries and other everyday moments of parenthood and family.  The place, that is to say the “field-site,” enters this record as glimpses of landscape and blurred backgrounds against which the normal life of a family progresses.  Later photos, taken on return visits, tend to capture reunions with friends in their homes.

My experience being in the Bigoudennie is overwritten by my experience as a father and as a partner to my spouse.  We attended the public-school festival like the other parents.  Some sunny afternoons we might pile into our car and take a picnic on the beach, along some nearby lakeshore or in a neighboring wood.  On my way home from the daily commercial fish auction I often stopped to pick up a few things at the supermarket or bakery.  These are not earth-shattering events.  They are part of a family life, which continues irrespective of whether or not one is in France, Canada, the United States, or elsewhere.

One of our early arrivals in Brittany is captured in a series of pictures of my sons, playing on a beach near our first temporary lodgings.  It is late in the afternoon and the setting sun colors the landscape.  In one picture, the boys are standing behind an inscription etched in the sand: “Jarek and Tristan, Oct. 16, 1994, Brittany.”   This photo masks the anxiety of navigating along highways and county lanes, searching out what is for us, strangers here, difficult and incomprehensible.  Now, having finished with the necessities of shopping, signing leases, and cleaning up, we have retreated to this beach to relax and take stock of the place we shall call home for the next year or more.

In one of the few photos of which I am in the picture I am standing on the edge of a quay in the Port of Lesconil.  One boy is perched near the edge of the dock.  I am holding the other on the seat of an adult’s bike.  Off to the side, an old-style dragger is coming alongside the dock.  The white-washed sides of stone houses are just visible across the harbor. While my presence is clearly expressed, the skipper of the dragger is barely a silhouette framed in the window of his wheelhouse.  The clues to his identity are locked within the silhouette of the boat and in its registration number. Much can be learned from a reading of the boat: age, rigging, gear-type, crew size, port of registry, etc….  However, these faceless and objective data push the skipper and his crew even further into the shadows.

My field work experience in Brittany mirrors the classic demarcation between away and home, the field and the place where one writes up one’s work.  Before and along side my Breton research I did work in my home community on the north coast of BC. My master’s degree focussed on industrial fisherfolk I grew up among. This work continued to work with family and community from my home First Nation, Gitxaała (see People of the Saltwater).

‘The field’ of my north coast research intersects with my family, friend, and life networks. Here, even when I stop writing I remain enmeshed in ways that I am not in my Breton work. For many decades the discipline of anthropology down-ranked research at home. I ended up doing my doctoral research in Brittany, not BC, based on the strong advice of my mentors (and they were right for a doctoral student at that moment of time). My professional research since being hired at UBC has, however, mainly focussed on work about my home (First Nation and non-Indigenous), the intersection between First Nations and the nation state, and on the people who study First Nations. So my field has become the university itself, not simply a place some distance away.