Category Archives: study tips

02/10/11

Review: An Island Called Home

A Review by Claire Midenberger.  Written for ANTH 300 (Feb. 2011).

“How many Jews are there in Cuba?” “About a thousand.” I was surprised to be greeted with this question (and be able to provide an answer) as soon as I began describing the book An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba, because I had just read an account of the author, Ruth Behar, being asked the very same question. The very fact that it is recurrently the first question asked is particularly important. It evinces the reality that very little is known by the general public about the Jews in Cuba: how they came to be there in the first place, how they are holding on to their traditions in Castro’s Cuba, and what it means to be Jewish in Cuba today.

In 1881, Jewish immigrants were legally allowed to enter Cuba for the first time, and the new Cuban constitution in 1897 decreed freedom of religious belief and worship, but it was not until the First World War that large numbers of Jews were settling on the island. Sephardic immigrants escaped to Cuba from the Ottoman Empire beginning in 1914, and Ashkenazic immigrants, turned away by the American Emergency Quota Act of 1921, began arriving soon after. When Cuba established relations with the Soviet Union in 1960, U.S.-owned businesses were seized and a trade embargo was imposed. Ninety percent of Cuba’s Jews emigrated, and for the next 30 years, the remainder were not allowed to practice Judaism under the atheist, communist state.

In the early 90s, Cuba was declared a secular state, and Communist Party Members were allowed to practice a religion if they choose. Jewish projects originating in the U.S. and Canada supported the restoration of cultural programs and traditional practices through donations, however, hundreds of Jews still chose to emigrate; many repatriated to Israel. Those that have remained face the difficult task of rebuilding their community, redefining themselves, and adapting Jewish traditions to a novel framework.

Behar’s intensely personal ethnography of Jewish Cubans begins with her own search for closure in the death of Henry Levin, a young relative whom she had never met but who was “a trauma of such dimensions that we all carried his memory with us into our second diaspora in the United States.” Her repeated trips to the country she escaped as a child eventually evolved from a private search for long-lost memories into a shared, communal pursuit of how to adapt erstwhile Jewish traditions within even the most antithetical of contexts.

An Island Called Home is not a traditional book. Behar worked with a photographer, Humberto Mayol, to produce a photo journal in an effort to “convey visually the mesh of Jewishness and Cubanness.” The partnership is effective because Behar and Mayol are each insiders and outsiders in their own way, as a Jew and as a Cuban, respectively. Behar is in an especially fascinating position because she is an anthropologist in her native land; she is capable of making connections, both holistically and with her informants, only from in between, as an insider and as an outsider. Most of the photos are taken in the same manner: the people were asked to pose with their photos and Jewish documents. These images of “unrehearsed moments of self-awareness and reflection” powerfully impress upon the reader the sentiments of loss, hope, and pride. Behar was careful to insure that the photos did not only depict the “heroic story of the Jewish rebirth in Cuba,” but also the underlying story of loss and the Jewish identity outside of religion.

Nor is an Island Called Home a traditional ethnography. As an ethnographic text, it might be construed as a modernist interpretation, and unfortunately, this entails attracting the standard criticisms of modernist ethnographic writing; the reflexive style involves the input of the author throughout the study, and in this case, Behar makes the anthropologist-informant dialogue the primary interest of the text, which makes it difficult to generalize beyond Behar’s very personal experiences. Even though Behar’s text risks becoming too self-indulgent, she successfully conveys her message by manipulating the form of a text and remaining conscious of the research process itself. There is an immediate sense that this is her journey and not ours, but the reciprocity of perspectives and the strength of the imagery (both textual and photographic) is deeply compelling; it is the very subjective human element that draws you in and makes you reflect on the common urge to define oneself and make sense of the world.

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

Reading Eric R. Wolf -Envisioning Power (1999)

Eric R. Wolf is one of those anthropologists that I believe every aspiring (and active) anthropologist should read and be familiar with.  Wolf’s academic career spanned the last half of the 20th century into the early 21st.   He was an approachable, detailed, and caring teacher.  He was a consummate academic with an encyclopedic approach to detail.  He was also a theorist on a grand scale.

This commentary focuses on the last book he published prior to his death: Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Power.    My focus is not a review or summary, but to highlight an approach to reading this text.  One of the things that I have discovered in teaching this and related books a propensity for readers to jump to criticism before they have achieved comprehension.  Wolf is particularly helpful as he provides guidance to his readers within his text.

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There are many ways to read a text.  We can read it for entertainment, for information, for self-growth and learning, to undermine it, or to assimilate it as our own.  We can also misread a text, miss the point, or find ourselves unable to read it. Rarely, of course, do we exclusively rely on only one way of reading a text.  It is more likely that we employ some combination of all of them.  Consider the following quotes:

“For clarity’s sake, I shall refer to this group (the four tribes of Kwakiutl who inhabited the village of Tsaxis adjacent to Fort Rupert) as Kwakiult or Tsaxis Kwakiutl, and to the Kwakwala speakers in general as Kwakwaka’wakw.  Expunging ‘Kwakiutl’ from the literature altogether seems counterproductive” (Wolf 1999:69).

“Human sacrifice was in many ways central to Aztec political and ritual life, and any discussion of that life must come to grips with this phenomenon.  In engaging this issue, I intend neither to denigrate the Aztecs in order to justify their conquest by the Spaniards nor to defend them against accusations of cruelty and inhumanity. . . .  The anthropologist’s task should be neither to exalt nor to condone but to explain” (Wolf 1999:133-134).

“What the National Socialists wrought is, without doubt, a cause of moral outrage, but outrage is not enough.  It is vital that we gain an analytic purchase on what transpired, precisely because it embodied a possibility for humankind, and what was once humanly possible can happen again”  (Wolf 1999:197).

Each of the above quotes instructs you, the reader, on how to read the substantive material that follows in each of the case study chapters.  Eric Wolf recognizes that there are issues and debates that are important in each of these respective domains.  He affirms the concerns of contemporary Kwakwaka’wakw, he notes the controversy over Aztec cannibalism, and the moral outrage one should feel concerning the human genocide of the Nazis.  But, and this is important, he then asks the reader to set aside concern with these issues and instead to focus on the connections between power and ideas.

We could, for example, focus on the structure of Wolf as ‘text.’ We could highlight his use of an omniscient, authoritative voice –the voice of the expert.  We could micro analyze his source material to ferret out errors, misconceptions, oversights, or slips of minor fact or detail.  We might even identify his underlying assumptions or axiomatic principles, declare them flawed, and proceed to discount all that follows.  While this is all fair game in the contentious halls of the academe it will ultimately turn us away from the task at hand: that is, to identify the key points that the author asks us to understand.

So then what can we say about Wolf’s key points, his main concern?  What kernel of truth lies within his discussion of Kwakwaka’wakw, their understanding of the cosmos, and their social organization?

First, it is important to hold in one’s mind the following comments:

  • “. . . we must not fall into the trap of thinking of them as bearers of some primordial culture, frozen in a moment outside ordinary time” (Wolf 1999:74).
  • “To think of Kwakiutl as bearers of a changeless cultural pattern is particularly inappropriate, since their existential conditions have changed in major ways since the times of first contact on the coast in 1774, when a Spanish ship encountered Haida” (Wolf 1999:74).
  • “If Kwakwaka’wakw society and culture have varied over the course of historical time and have also shown the internal variability due to social differentiation at any one time, then it has also become less easy to speak of one cultural personality (Wolf 1999:81)

Here Wolf is reminding us that no people, no culture, no society exists either in isolation from other societies or in a static unchanging form.   By recognizing and affirming the reality of social change through time Wolf is according a form of respect to the Kwakwaka’wakw that social commentators from Boas to Levis-Straus failed to extend (see, Wolf 1999:74-81).  This is important both in terms of an implicit critique of much contemporary scholarship and as an important foundation to Wolf’s analysis later in the chapter.

Wolf also discusses two aspects of the data collected:  it’s reliance upon the chiefly class and its minimalist approach to women:

  • “Since controlling and enacting myths and rituals were largely the prerogatives of chiefs and nobles, what these texts reveal to us is primarily the discourse of chiefs and nobility, and to a minimal degree the doings of commoners”  (Wolf 1999:73).   It is important to point out, as Wolf does, that this lack was not due to neglect but rather it was due “to the difficulty of obtaining information on commoners.  When Boas urged Hunt to collect data on the names and rights of common people, because ‘they are just as important as those of people of high blood,’  Hunt replied that this was ‘hard to get for they shame to talk about themselves’”(Wolf 1999:73).
  • “The texts are also minimally informative about the lives of Kwakiutl women. . . . these texts note gender differentiation in activities but leave them unexplored. . . . But what women did and thought was not explored in their own terms, and their informal roles received no attention” (Wolf 1999:73).

One could also add to this a silence on the participation of Kwakwaka’wakw in the growing industrial economy.  Though glimpses of this life can be found in the archives of the colonial state.  Later historical anthropologists, such as Rolf Knight, have sketched out in more detail the involvement of indigenous people in the industrial economy, but for the most part this is an area that has been ignored.  The fact that Wolf attempts to place the Kwakwaka’wakw into history and explores their active participation, resistance, and  accommodation to a new economic order sets Wolf’s work apart from all but a small fraternity of social commentators.