And I can confirm from my own experiences that once you know what you need for example statistic methods for, they suddenly changes. From some kind of boring punishment into highly prized tools for gold-digging.

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I work with students at all levels – students doing “minor” theses as part of coursework programs, students doing honours theses for their undergraduate degree, and PhD students – so I can’t necessarily assume that all of my students will continue in academic work, or have an opportunity eventually to pursue other stages of their project. But I still remind them that they can address their work as a contribution to something much larger – even if that something is ultimately pursued by a broader academic community.

So we focus a lot of what inspired them – what makes them curious. And then we talk about the differences between intellectual curiosity and a research question – but also about how you link these two things together. We spend some time workshopping how to break a large project down so that, if you are doing something very small and narrow, you have a clear connection in your own mind about how that small, narrow thing contributes to an overarching intellectual project. We read and discuss examples of work from different fields where “bounded” forms of research – including single anecdotes – have been used to contribute meaningfully to “big” questions. And we spend a lot of time workshopping research questions and methodologies collectively, with these issues in mind…

I’m not sure it’s the best way to approach this, or that I do it particularly well. And it has its drawbacks: students doing “methods” with me get a lot of work on the logical connection between their research questions, their methodology, and some larger theoretical or empirical concern, but they’re left to pursue more “mechanical” aspects of methods on their own – in the assumption (which might be very problematic) that, once they have a clear question and a good understanding of why they want to use a particular methodology, they are then adequately motivated to teach themselves the mechanics or to seek out the technical training they require… (I should note that my university does provide separate “intensive” programs dedicated to research mechanics, although I suspect most students would like more…)

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I (and many others) have also found that stories are very efficient for communicating complex and “holistic” knowledge. Concept- or mindmaps is another way to represent complex relations. I know too little about anthropology to know if “thick descriptions” would be the third candidate for a “thinking tool for holistic knowledge”. What do you think?

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That’s a great way of putting it. What graduate students seem to learn now are one-sentance dismissals of each theoretical paradigm. It isn’t clear to me how that trains us deal with complexity either.

I sometimes think that “The Crying of Lot 49″ is a perfect model for anthropology – each book should build up its own grand theory – and deconstruct it at the same time.

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Weber’s view is fairly commonly expressed in advice to graduate students, in my experience – often accompanied with a kind of historical just-so story about how it used to be possible to theorise large issues, but the world has now sadly become too complex… I’ve always felt it contradictory, at best, for academics to say things like this, while continuing to assign classic theory to graduate students: if the world is now too complex for us to develop our own grand theories, surely the ones from the 19th century should now appear hopelessly naive…

I’ve also personally always questioned the notion that students should be apprenticed to narrow specialisation in the theory that, at some later point, they can “branch out”: surely it is more common for us to develop into deeper and more refined versions of what we actually practice, so that an exclusive focus on narrow specialisation will predictably generate experienced and practiced specialists – not big picture theorists… If the “big questions” aren’t somehow there from the beginning, I’m not sure how a lifetime of attention to small questions is supposed to generate them…

What I’ve been trying to work on recently with my methods students is how to explore large questions – yes, in their entirety (I like the phrase too) – through the window of small stories. If done successfully, this would create a constant productive tension between the smaller, “digestible”, project-length frames, and larger questions that motivate the smaller studies. This enables a level of rigour – keeping claims commensurate with evidence – while not requiring students to shelve their interest in large questions until they’ve forgotten how to ask them…

I’m not claiming to be successful at this – in my own work, or with my students. But I’d agree that keeping open a space for work devoted to large questions (as well, of course, as keeping open a space for the exploration of specialised topics) is an extremely important goal.

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