On the subject of methodological sharpening raised by Rex a few days back, I’ve been meaning to hunt down a copy of this new book: Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic Fieldwork by Liisa Malkki and Allaine Cerwonka. I’m usually violently opposed to books that are collections of correspondence and proposals (i.e. unfinished and unpolished), but this turns out be the very reason why I think it will be interesting. If, as the flap copy suggests, it demonstrates how anthropologists deal with the fact that “ethnographic theorization is essentially improvisatory in nature, conducted in real time and in necessarily unpredictable social situations” then it could be very valuable. Rex’s conclusion that there is a difference between “armchair” sharpening of methodological tools and “field” sharpening is a nice place to start from (though a set up for an easy deconstruction) if one wants to think about where the field ends and concept work begins. I for one, teach my grad students that fieldwork continues well into the writing of a dissertation, article or book– just as we are happy to insist that we take theory into the field with us. If that be the case, then whatever it was we do/did in the field isn’t so different from what we do in the writing, unless one insists on adopting a radical break in state of mind, which is necessary for some students to get on with it (i.e. now I have my data, I just have to organize it into a text).
Indeed, I don’t think I even need to read the book (though I will, hopefully) to confirm my own sense of how fieldwork methods are improvised, especially nowadays, when students are blogging and constantly emailing and in some cases, never “coming back” to finish in that conventional manner. If this is the case, then the “methodological sharpening” of fieldwork concerns not so much shared technologies or shared concepts, but shared pedagogy– both that of the mentors and that of the students. Shared pedagogy is what allows students to figure out what they are doing before and during fieldwork, what questions seem to provoke interest and response, and which texts remain “open” for working through. Similarly faculty bring their own pedagogical experience (i.e. what did I do, and what did my mentors do, and what worked/didn’t work?) to start making demands on students to go further than they did. I do this with every single graduate student I work with and I find it exhausting but exhilarating work. It certainly means that every project is bespoke–but it does not mean that they each happen in a vacuum, or that they are somehow “doing whatever they want to.”
The down side of this is that it used to be that the discipline was a stable repository and boundary to the diversity of pedagogical experience– journals and jobs and conferences limited what would count as quality work, and served a gate-keeping function. Today this is much less the case. Most of my students have mentors from disciplines I know nothing about, and it would be a short not-so-surprising step in many cases to invite their informants on as committee members! I myself am dealing with a burden of advice from anthropologists, philosophers, historians, and engineers when I try to direct my students how to conduct their projects. It would be foolish for anyone to assume that there is, in Cultural Anthropology, one best way. And if someone tells you that, then call me immediately about my bridge, which is still for sale.
In terms of this issue of improvising, I find myself repeatedly citing a wonderful passage from Marilyn Strathern’s book “Commons and Borderlands: Working Papers on Interdisciplinarity, Accountability, and the Flow of Knowledge.” She’s talking about a “routine crisis in the pursuit of knowledge, which is how to deal with the unforeseen-normal in the life of social systems, a ‘crisis’ for those who claim to know how to know about them” (Strathern 2004:5). And then on pages 5-6 goes on to say:
“What research strategy could possibly collect information on unpredictable outcomes? Social anthropology has one trick up its sleeve: the deliberate attempt to generate more data than the investigator is aware of at the time of collection. Anthropologists deploy open-ended, non-linear methods of data collection which they call ethnography; I refer particularly to the nature of ethnography entailed in anthropology’s version of fieldwork. Rather than devising research protocols that will purify the data in advance of analysis, the anthropologist embarks on a participatory exercise which yields materials for which analytical protocols are often devised after the fact. In the field the ethnographer may work by indirection, creating tangents from which the principal subject can be observed (through ‘the wider social context’). But what is tangent at one stage may become central at next.”
This has nothing to do with anything, but has anyone else noticed an uptick in ‘bespoke’ usage lately? Is it just me? Is ‘bespoke’ a fashionable word?
I blame Thom Browne.
Chris,
You sound like a great teacher. My mentors at Cornell were more in the “Jump in and see what happens. See you in a couple of years, hope you have something interesting to say” vein. Or perhaps it was me, wanting to do my own thing and insufficiently aware that some things might be more salable in the academic job market.
But, enough of trips down memory lane. I agree pretty much absolutely with what Marilyn Strathern says about improvisation in the field and also with your conclusion that there is no one best way to do anthropology.
That, however, leaves us with a puzzle much like that confronts critics and connoisseurs of art. How do you discriminate between the genuine breakthroughs, the good but merely competent, and schlock?
If I understand you correctly, you are constantly pushing your students toward the frontiers where the current conversation seems most interesting, where breakthroughs seem most possible. That’s a process I think I understand. It is characteristic of all the good creative directors I’ve worked with in the advertising business. Their focus is always on push-the-envelope innovation.
That raises a second question. If anthropology has no room for good but merely competent work, have we ruled out a priori the steady accumulation of knowledge? So that, at the end of the day, anthropology becomes yet another fashion industry, endlessly pursuing what’s “in” this season, with occasional bouts of nostalgia resurrecting ideas from the past?
john, thanks… i like to think i am at least an engaged teacher, since I too had plenty of the “just do it” school of method… and there are some times when I have to tell students to take the wheel and drive, but those are much rarer than the ones where i feel like I have to check up.
As for “good but merely competent work”… I don’t mean to sound obnoxious here, but I have absolutely no worries that there is plenty of it out there. Some days it feels like I review most of it for various journals. Check any cutting edge monograph and the bibliography will be filled with things that the author is citing merely because it appears to be about the same subject– even if there is nothing gleaned from it. This hardly counts as “accumulation of knowledge” but by contrast it doesn’t mean that the only thing out there is cutting edge work. It has shaped that cutting edge monograph in subtle and important ways… indeed I wish there was less anxiety about citing everything that has ever been done on a subject and more risk-taking in terms of only using the things that help form a work. quite frankly the same is true in science and engineering. There are tons and tons of papers out there that are compentent, but do not represent breakthroughs… how do scientists know which is which? culture my boy, culture 🙂