Author Archives: cmenzies

09/3/19

Get to Know Your Colleague Through Writing

This is a project in learning about our colleagues through our writing. Each of the profiles that I write are based upon articles shared with me by colleagues.  Each participant has been asked to share one to three blog posts, journal articles or book chapters that they have written.  Participants might provide an older piece, or something more recent.  The criteria being used is that these are pieces that they feel shows the nature and scope of their work and/or focuses on some aspect of their work they you would like others to pay attention to.

I am starting this project with a selection of three of my own articles.  The first two articles that speak to the nature of my current work over the last few years. The third piece is an older one  that reflects a longstanding interest published while I was a graduate student.

  1. Putting Words into Action: Negotiating Collaborative Research in Gitxaała.  Canadian Journal of Native Education.   Volume 28, 2004, Numbers 1/2. http://www.ecoknow.ca/journal/menzies.pdf
  2. “Sea Legs: Learning to Labour on the Water.” Anthropology of Work Review. 2019. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/335400384_Sea_Legs_Learning_to_Labor_on_the_Water
  3. “Between the Stateroom and the Foc’s’cle: Everyday Forms of Class Struggle Aboard a Commercial Fishboat,” NEXUS: Vol. 8:1. 1990.  https://journals.mcmaster.ca/nexus/article/view/87 

Much of my career at UBC has focussed on Indigenous reserach, primarily collaborative project with my home community of Gitxaała. This early paper highlights methodological concerns and documents the early stages of a formal UBC/Gitxaała collaboration in research.  Subsequent papers explored indigenous labour history, traditional ecological knowledge, and whitestream society’s response to Indigenous authority and sovereignty.  Bracketing and underlying my Indigenous focused research has been a concern with labour processes, struggle, and class formation. “Sea Legs” draws on an autoethnographic method to examine how notions of masculinity are enmeshed in become a fisherman. “Between the Stateroom and the Foc’s’cle” is one of my earliest papers and it explores the micro-structures of class struggle on a commercial fishing boat drawn from my personal experience.

My writing has always involved a personal aspect where I draw from my direct experience, not simply as an ethnographer, but as a participant. By participant I mean that I do in fact draw from my own life’s experiences to guide and inform my scholarly work.  I am interested in what motivates and constrains us as people, not as a simply matter of curiosity, but becuase I very much would like to change our world to remove the inequities of class, gender, and colonialism (etc).

Anthropology has tended to study the other to understand self.  It seems to me that we would do a better job understanding ourselves if we were more often the subject of our own anthropological gaze.

 

Readers are invited to join in by sending examples of their writing to me and I will write blog post based upon them. Or, even better, send me a blog post modelled after my own above for publication here.

 

08/29/19

The Truth About Grades

Grades are a ranking system. Grades do not measure some empirical achievement; there are a relative achievement determined by a judge (with whom all judged take issue with). Grades are an imperfect measure of learning. They capture some of what one learns. They often leave out more.

Educational ideology, from the right to the left, considers assessment at some level to be a criteria referenced, neutral process. The rhetoric exhorts each and every graded one to do more. The sentiment is that with just the right combination of grit, perseverance, hard work and skill, you too can get the A.

Grades, however, do not measure excellence. They allocate resources. They divide. They are what makes this world of the student every bit as real as the world of work for pay. Grades work against cooperation; they undermine solidarity. They pit one student against the other as grades are a limited resource and one person’s gain means someone else’s loss. Immediately upon handing out a sheet of grades each honest instructor knows in their heart of heart that the honeymoon is over. We can read it in the recipients very body language.

So what’s the point of bringing it up? We all know this truth in one way or another?  Grades are a definitive statement of the underlying structural relationship that guides human interactions for at least the past two hundred years wherein market mechanisms have driven valuations of individual worth and resource allocation. The point of bring up grades us that as long as one labours under the misconception that grades measure some innate ability of something that is theoretical obtainable by everyone most of us will remain unhappy; but more importantly we will remain without the capacity to really do anything about it.

Key Lessons About Grades

  • Grades are not arbitrary, they are normative.
  • Grades are an intrinsic aspect of capitalist society.
  • Grades are an imperfect measure of learning.

What Can One Do?

  • Recognize the reality of the conditions of your work.
  • Work to adapt to it (without compromising principles) and to change it.

I once heard the Canadian singer and television host Tommy Hunter in an interview say “the mechanic down the street is a better musician than I am. The difference is I’m a better businessman.”  Similar things could be said about getting grades. Grades don’t necessarily go to the ‘best’ student, they go to the person who is (in Hunter’s words) the best business person. It’s about figuring out what one needs to do.

Some of us have innate skills.   These skills lead to nowhere without hard work and good timing. They also rely upon figuring out the optimum labour investment to output. There is a nice marxist concept, socially necessary labour time, that I suggest is relevant here.  Put simply, “socially necessary labour time is the amount of labour time performed by a worker of average skill and productivity, working with tools of the average productive potential, to produce a given commodity.” That means a student who invests a maximum effort into a paper shouldn’t expect a maximum grade.  It’s not how much effort one puts in, it is what kind of effort. For some taking more time might produce an average output. For other students a sub-average input might yield a superior output. The quality of the output then (as measured in grades) is not related to the time invested by a student.

It is important to recognize that there are many differnt paths that lead from one’s education. It is as though one is standing at the center of a garden with paths radiating out from in many directions. You are, in this moment, free to choose. Choice is power, but remember some paths are less forgiving than others. What is most important for you as a learner? mastery of a skill, learning something transformative, or accumulating a grade?

Through out my own life I have tended to focus on my learning, not the grade. This has consequences. Faced with an assignment I may not like, appreciate, or value, I would select something differnt, something that would give me a platform to contribute and allow me to exercise my voice. I would advise something similar to learners more intersted in learning than accumulating grades. Put a small piece of yourself into the work, but remember the work is not you, nor is it a measure of you. It is merely something you did one day.

Your task, no matter what you think or feel it is, is not todo a better paper next time. It is to learn, to develop, to explore. The paper is secondary. The mark will be forgotten But, what you take up as yours, what you take as your experience and knowledge will outlast any grade.

 

 

03/19/19

Masculinity, Fishermen, and Gender

Fishing narrowly understood is a masculinest occupation. Crews and skippers are overwhelmingly men, not just in my homeport of Prince Rupert, but globally. That does not deny the fact that the wider social world of fisheries is a human multi-gendered social world. Donna Lee Davis and Jane Nadel Klien were among the early cohort of researchers who documented the integral role women play in fisheries communities (1988). Much of the focus of the work that preceded Davis and Nadel Klien highlighted the crew at sea (see, for example: Orbach 1977; Zulaika 1981; Cohen 1987). Other approaches retained an anthropology of the village and wrote about peasant-like settings (see, for example: Firth 1966; Faris 1966). The turn to view fisheries within a wider gendered lens developed through the1980s; one important result of which is the normalization of an approach that assumes gender is relevant as opposed to merely something to add after the fact (Neis et al 2005; see also, Menzies 2011:99-110).

The social world of fishing communities is not a homogenous space – it is riven by class and gender just as aspects of the wider society are. While the early maritime anthropologists (such as: Orbach 1977; Zulaika 1981) focused on the crew at sea as the sum total of the fishing community as an occupational culture, this paper zeros in on how aspects of onboard work are implicated in the reproduction of gender, specifically masculinity while appreciating this occurs within a wider social field than the boat itself (Davis 1993; Yodanis 2000; Power 2004; King 2007).

In a paper explaining why women don’t fish, Carrie Yodanis argues, “women are women because they do not fish” (2000:268). She found gender to be defined in relation to the at sea practice of fishing. Yodanis’ study was based in a Maine lobster fishing community. Her observations are similar to my own among British Columbian fishermen (Menzies 1991). Yodanis goes on to say “‘Man’ is defined as one who fishes and ‘women’ is defined in opposition to that which is a fisherman” (2000:268). This echoes Nancy Chodorow’s1978 observation that gendered parenting –motherhing and fathering (as opposed to simply an androgynous parenting)- is at the root of societal gendered inequalities. In her rendering girls simply grow into women while men are made as their masculine identity is severed from their mothers as they become ‘not women’ (Chodorow 1978). There are, of course, women who fish (Wilson 2014, 2016). Yet their presence on the boat is constructed in such a way as to maintain normative hegemonic masculinity (Menzies 1991; Meyer 2015; McMullen 2018).

Julianne Meyer explores the question how women who fish are gendered and asks what does this say about masculinity on boats (2015). She does this through a study that combines active participation in two seasons as a Bristol Bay setnetter and at fisherpoet festivals in Oregon where she spoke with women about their experiences, ideas, and performances as fishermen and fisherpoets. Meyers notes that women fishermen and fisherpoets “must show they are prepared to engage in the hypermasculine culture of commercial fishing” (2015:18). While they are not explicitly excluded, “women have a difficult time breaking into and remaining in the occupation” (Meyer 2015:19). She further notes “working in a male-dominated industry, women often struggle to keep their jobs if they are not involved in a relationship. Women often find work in industry through familial or romantic relationships and those women who chose to enter the occupation without relationships face additional struggles. … Men in the occupation occasionally expect women to have sex with them, based solely on the demographics of the occupation. … In addition to this, women must also be ever vigilant in their activities in the industry because of the looming threat of sexual violence” (Meyer 2015:22).

Building off of Meyer’s work with women, Bradford McMullen explores the ways in which male fishermen who are also fisherpoets define masculinities. He too notes the overtly masculinist tone of commercial fisheries as a contemporary occupation. While observing a variety of masculinities at play among fishermen (even a variant that includes women as masculinized) he locates them all within the wider sense of hegemonic masculinity – straight, androcentric, and valuing competency and credibility. He defines these last two attributes as follows: “Competence in the context of the fishing industry is the ability to perform well succeeding as a fisherman by doing one’s job and surviving the stresses that accompany it. Credibility in fishermen speak could also be called trustworthiness: one’s credibility resides in other people’s belief that fishermen will live up to their promises and accomplish the things they are expected to do, no matter their difficulty” (McMullen 2018:17). Becoming a man, in the eyes of the fishermen’s world, is all about demonstrating one’s ability to do the job and do it reliably. That women might also do the job doesn’t necessarily take away from this masculinist conception as they either aren’t there (Yodanis 2000) or they take on the masculinist attributes (while remaining female) that reinforce the idea of the maleness of the world of fisheries (Meyer 2015).

In the early 1980s I had been part of an anti-pornography campaign to remove magazines like Hustler from the campus bookstore. Our campaign was inspired by writings in the edited collection Take Back the Night (Lederer 1980). Thinking that this might be a good way to approach the onboard pornography and sexist attitudes pervasive on many coastal fishboats of the time, I made copies of several chapters of Take Back the Night to use as educational materials during the herring season that year.

In the 1980s commercial herring seining lasted from late February into early April. There were a hundred or so boats in the fleet. We would travel from opening to opening, waiting for a week or more at remote fishing grounds for a chance to load up that might last a little as a few minutes. A season could be made or lost in ten minutes after having waiting for weeks on anchor. Aside from waiting there wasn’t much to do but socialize, do a bit of sport fishing, share food, booze, and other stuff. Pornography was a major item circulating amongst the fleet. So, I thought I might do a little bit to change things.

I had periodically been placing the copies of Take Back the Night chapters onto the galley table in the boat that I worked on. It looked like other crew members from our boat and visiting boats had been picking them up and reading them. But I was soon disabused of any positive interpretation. About three weeks into the season our boat cook sat down at the galley table across from me. He seemed to be reading one of the pamphlets. He glanced over at me, looked back at the pamphlet, then asked me:

“So, Charlie. What is this miss-ogg-ah-knee?”

“Misogyny, I corrected.”

“Hmm.” He said.

“It means women hating.”

He looked me directly in the eyes

“So, what man hates a women.”

He tossed the pamphlet onto the table and returned to his cooking. It was then I realized two things: (1) the cook was the sole person (not the crew) who was using the pamphlets (and not as I had anticipated), and; (2) I had really misunderstood my audience.

Male centered ideas of sexuality, as presented by the onboard pornography, were a physical manifestation of the definitional masculinity of the space on the ship. Unlike the more polite and public spaces ashore, the display of pornography and sexualized images of women were explicit boundary markers. These spaces were felt to be private male worlds within which women were not expected to enter or to participate in. Shoreside, when wives, girlfriends, or daughters were expected to visit the boat the skipper (or more often, the cook) would make certain the most explicit materials were swept away out of sight – though the calendars of partially glad women would almost always remain untouched. This ideology of sexuality and gender undergirds the working world and the ways that one learned the fishing trade. The inclusion of a few women in the occupation served to underscore, rather than alter, the masculinity of fishing labour and the process of becoming a fisherman (Menzies 1991, Meyer 2015, Yodanis 2000).