Category Archives: key words

02/22/11

Innocent Anthropology?

Gerald Sider is well known for his critical commentary on both the failure of anthropological practice and the simultaneous possibility that an anthropological eye has for noting the potential for progressive engagement through critique. The blog, Zero Anthropology, picks up a recent article by Sider and presents a critically supportive reading of Sider’s attack on naive anthropology.

My thanks to the new magazine, AnthroNow, for placing the article by Gerald M. Sider online in its current issue (vol. 1, no. 1, April 2009), titled: “Can Anthropology Ever Be Innocent“. This turned out to be quite a valuable and relevant article for me, in helping me to reconfigure what ethnography can mean, and what it might look like, in the shadow of the national security state and the so-called “long war against extremism” (which, of course, exculpates American state extremism). My sole function below is to produce a list of the sections I extracted that strike me in particular as most important to my own work, with occasional commentary. Sider’s words are in block quotes, and all bolding is mine unless otherwise noted.

Read the full post from Zero Anthropology Blog here.

01/3/11

Writing Reflections

In many of the classes I teach students are asked to write weekly reflections on course readings and discussions. Students are instructed to:

write a short paragraph at the end of each week in which you reflect upon and critically appraise what you have learned – no longer than one page, double-spaced. Use the following questions as a reflective guideline:  What have I learned this week?  What were the key concepts presented?  How are these concepts linked to ethnographic data (or not, as the case maybe)?   Does this new information make sense to me?  And, How might I apply this knowledge in a novel/different situation?

The objective is twofold: (1) to practice observational writing (that is, to describe to some effective key events that one is participating in) and, (2) to engage in a form of self-reflection and assessment of what one has learned.  Getting starting with reflective writing is often difficult as it is not simply descriptive nor is it argumentative or purely analytical. To help with this I have posted an example of an effective reflection.

This reflection is from a graduate method’s course.  Please consider how the author moves from the class discussions and activities to an issue that caused her to reflect and evaluate her own feelings and understandings.  You will also note that the author critically reflects on the incident described in terms of its relevance to her research.  This reflection meets all three reflection objectives: to reflect on the material presented in readings and lectures each week; to develop critical insight, and; to engage in a process of self-evaluation.

Today we finished discussions on the ethnographies and also talked about the ethics stuff.  The interesting thing came out of the ethics review, I think I mentioned last time, was re-contacting the interview participants.  I should somehow get back to the participants and provide them with either some sort of venue to evaluate or criticize or confirm my interpretations.  Also, some sort of formal thanks you for their efforts.  That’s important.  I have to look into the ethics of using a list of veterinarians that I have complete access to but is not public knowledge.  I never would have dreamed that it was a problem.

We had an interesting discussion in class today about tacit versus explicit knowledge.  It’s hard to know which is which sometimes.  Sometimes you assume that people know what you are talking about.  Sometimes you assume that you know what they are talking about because of your tacit knowledge.  Confusions can easily happen – so that’s a good lesson to learn.

The most interesting thing that happened today was the discussion around a classmate’s pet dog. The dog met an untimely death by being run over by a deaf person because he was a deaf dog.  The thing that struck me the most was my reaction versus the rest of the class. I guess when you see pain and misery due to episodes like this you no longer find them humorous, no matter how ironic.  You can’t laugh any more.  Anyway the whole thing upset me quite a bit.  But it is a good lesson because I can’t let myself get in that position during an interview.  Its ridiculous really, it clouds my view of things.  So I have to remember that not everyone has my experience or my feelings for animals.  That goes for veterinarians as well.  The other thing though that affected me was a comment that was made afterwards: “people shouldn’t have pets or keep pets;” something to that effect.    My immediate reaction was defensiveness.  Although I’ve been a vet in many different fields and my project does not exclusively involve pets, my work life does include pets and there are a number of very good reasons why people have pets. My defensiveness prevented me from acting on my concern and asking him why my classmate made the comment.  She may have a very good reason for saying that people shouldn’t have pets.  In an interview situation, I will have to try to be open and receptive. If something confuses me or doesn’t make sense or sounds critical or any of the above, then I should, rather than becoming defensive, try to determine exactly what is going on.  Our viewpoints may not be that much different but if they are, I should find out why they are and ask for clarification.

12/22/10

Community -an empty term

Community is an empty term used to mobilize, manipulate or persuade people to act in a way that overlooks real differences in power and authority.  It’s power as a rhetorical device lies in its very ambiguity.  Thus we all ‘belong’ to arbitrarily defined communities such as ethnicity, occupation, sexual orientation, or even hobby.  Some people self identify in multiple communities simultaneously.   Yet, what is community? Can we define it in concrete terms?  Is there a residential or geographical aspect to community?  Is there a common set of values or beliefs that under girds one’s community?  Can we accurately define the membership of a community?  The difficulty in clearly answering these questions is what allows us all to claim to membership in a community of one sort or another.  Thus, community becomes a social act or a process.  It is not a analytic unit with clear boundaries.

It is important to separate the use of ‘community’ as a political device or social act from its analytic use.  Individuals or groups may employ a self-concept of community.  However, as social analysts it is instructive to interrogate the concept of community analytically.  We should not simply assume its existence.

As an anthropologist I am intensely interested in how people understand and give meaning to their world.  I am also aware that these understandings are located within wider fields of power, history, and social processes.  While it is not my job to ‘reveal’ the invention or falsehood of community per se, it is important that both the constructed/ideological component and the material reality of the social world within which we live is fully understood.  This is especially important for those seeking to effect or manage change.  If, for example, notions of community are inaccurate descriptions of social reality what might we conclude about models of change that are based on a notion of community as a real entity or methodologies that assume without question that communities exist?  This leads to the following question:  how are different conceptions of community used, for what purpose, and by whom?

Some of the explanation might lie in the way that community has been used (‘operationalized’) in social science research.  Some, such as the conservative educational theorist Mark Holmes, invoke a notion of community that reverberates with nostalgia and loss (‘we live in an age of weakened community,’ a la Durkheim: see also, Talcott Parsons a 1950s Durkheimian social theorist).  Beyond this sort of rhetorical invocation an entire school of social research emerged in the US called ‘community studies.’  Here the assumption was that objectively identifiable social units, called communities, could be separated from their encapsulating society and studied by the researcher.  These communities, especially as studied by the ‘Chicago School of Sociologists’ were typically comprised of recent immigrants (Whyte’s Street Corner Society is the exemplar to consider) who carried with them the vestigial structures of ‘traditional’ society (read European peasant and/or ‘primitive’).  The hallmark of these early community studies is their ahistorical presentist tone.  They assume a homogenous unchanging community structure.  When change occurs it does so as the result of external forces acting upon the community.

The anthropologist Eric R. Wolf calls this a ‘billiard ball model of society’ in which each community, culture or society might be thought of as a separate billiard ball.  Change comes through the application of some external force (the pool cue) and the balls bounce off each other and the side of the table.  Yet, as Wolf reminds us, our social world is not as neat and organized as the Billiard table.  There are no pool cues adding force.  Each community, culture, or society is not a uniformly shaped ball.

As a concept community ultimately obscures reality.  It substitutes for social forces and process that are rooted in real and consequential power differences.  From a research or methodological point of view, community is one of those concepts that can not be identified, located, or even studied unless we resort to arbitrarily defined boundaries (i.e. by defining community as all the people whose children go to school x or live within the area bounded by streets a,b,c,and d).  Yet, in arbitrarily delimiting the notion of community we lose sight of the way in which social reality is actually organized.   In an important and fundamental way there is no ‘community’ to study or observe.  Nostalgic references to something that, in reality never really existed, will leave us always bemoaning the loss of community and prevent us from finding effective solutions to important social problems.   Employing a concept of community might help in shaping and motivating change, but it will not help us make sense of the processes of change themselves.