Bill Hanks’ Annual Review essay on Bourdieu is a wonderful overview of Bourdieu’s philosophy of language and the use of Bourdieu’s work in Linguistic anthropology. It also contains something that might be well known, but was news to me: Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus was taken from the art historian Erwin Panofsky. This seems to fly in the face of the traditional genealogy I’m familiar with, which traces his use of the term to Marcel Mauss and Norbert Elias.
Hanks argues that the corporal aspects of Bourdieu’s theory – those that bear a strong resemblance to Elias – were applied later (via the work of Merleau-Ponty), and that his use of the term owes more to Panofsky:
Panofsky defined habitus in terms of “habits of mind” that lay behind Gothic architecture and scholastic philosophy, arguing in effect that cultural production is profoundly shaped by the ways of the thinking of its time… Bourdieu translated Panofsky’s book into French in 1967, and wrote a postface to the French edition, in which he comments on the importance of the art historian’s notion of habitus.
When he rejected the mentalistic notion of the habitus in the seventies, he transposed Panofsky’s language into corporal terms. Here is a chart from the article comparing the terms used by Bourdieu with those of Panofsky:
I’m inclined to accept this interpretation, if only because I’ve always thought Panofsky is an under-appreciated genius whose works should be read by more than just art historians. Hanks does acknowledge the importance of Durkheim and Mauss, as well as Elias, but doesn’t see them as being particularly important for the genealogy of the habitus as used in Bourdieu’s work.
I don’t know how long it will be up, but someone (not me) has posted the Hanks article to Scribd.
I want to point people to a couple of things related to the intersection of peer review and open access. The first is a recent round-table discussion held at the Center for Studies of Higher Education at UC Berkeley, which brought together a great group of people including Don Kennedy, the editor of Science and Mark Rose (author of Authors and Owners) among others. The minutes are available (link) and they include a number of interesting proposals and diagnoses of the main problems facing scholarly publishing today, including some sharp observations about the financial realities of publishing peer-reviewed work and creative ideas for publishing monographs.
The other, a bit late, but still ongoing is that Noah Wardrip-Fruin over at Grant Text Auto, is experimenting with blog-based, serialized, community peer review. Noah’s book, Expressive Processing (one of a increasingly large number of texts laying claim to the field of “software studies”), is serialized for commentary using comment press (hip hip hooray!) and is being conducted along side “standard” peer review with MIT Press. I think this is a great idea whose time has definitely come, for a couple of reasons. One is that I’m more and more fond of the idea that peer review is best done by communities of people who are not anonymous. Pseudonymy might be a good idea (i.e., I don’t care who “IreadBooks69” is at Amazon but I know that s/he writes great reviews). The other is that community is a just generally a good idea. If the people commenting on Noah’s book feel as though they are contributing, are part of something, and that they get credit for it, or perhaps even get an immediate response, then that beats the heck out of the anonymous, forgotten black hole I routinely send my reviews into. I only hope Noah writes some kind of white paper-ish thing highlighting what works and what doesn’t so that people can repeat the experience.
Its probably been a long time coming, but I first noticed it in my corner of the anthropology universe back in 2004 when the UNITE-Here strike dislocated many AAA sub-sections. As a result, some sections experimented with smaller, independent meetings. Everyone enjoyed these much more than the AAA and many sections resolved to continue holding these smaller meetings. Some sections had already been doing this for a while, but it seems that since 2004 every section has its own mini-conference and a lot more energy goes into organizing those mini-conferences than the section events at the AAA.
In addition to all these section meetings, there are also numerous anthropology conferences held outside of the US which many of my colleagues enjoy more than the AAA. In July I’m going to IUAES in Kunming (China), which will be my first big non-AAA anthropology conference.
While its great that there are so many options, it also makes it hard to keep up. I can barely make it to one or two anthropology conferences a year. So I have a questions for everyone: What’s your favorite general anthropology conference? I am specifically asking about general-interest anthropology conferences that any cultural/social anthropologist would be interested in. I know there are great regional and subfield conferences, but I’m thinking more about AES/SANA, SCA, IUAES and other less specialized conferences. Or perhaps you still prefer the AAA?
Who needs real life? My boyfriend and I have been working our way through the first four seasons of the U.S. television show The Wire, and I have concluded that it may be the best ethnography we have of contemporary American society. Who needs ‘real life’ when fiction, a TV show no less, does a better job of representing US culture(s) than many social science texts? Ostensibly a cop show about drugs and crime in Baltimore, the show illustrates in (sometimes puzzling) detail the culture of urban life: the language the show uses, from drug slang to white Baltimore dialect (see also Hairspray), alone is worthy of note. Exhibiting exquisite sensitivity to local culture, the show also makes an ‘argument’ about how structural inequality is reproduced. The most amazing thing about it is that it dares to be about poor people and poverty – topics which, John Edwards notwithstanding, seem to be verboten in American public culture. Class consciousness vanished from US TV sets sometime around the period when Roseanne was canceled. But The Wire shows the effects of the post-industrial transformation of the US economy in minute detail by finding connections between corner drug dealers, police officers concerned to produce promising crime stats, politicians hungry for acclaim, dock workers just trying to make it, developers moving into abandoned urban zones, and so on. In fact, I think the show is so good that one could structure a course around it. You could augment episodes with social science in a really captivating way. Potential texts/authors could include: David Harvey (naturally) on urban spaces, Carol Stack on kinship, Phillippe Bourgeois on drug dealing and masculinity, Douglas Foley on reproduction of class relations in education systems, Hortense Powdermaker on race and history, and so on. Any ideas out there on other texts that could be paired with The Wire?
The Wire in part draws its dramatic and ethnographic force from the fact that some of its most captivating characters are played by people performing versions of themselves. Here is an interview snippet with Felicia ‘Snoop’ Pearson, who plays a character named after herself:
Welcome to another installment of Around the Web. I am thinking about dedicating a future edition of this post to “Blogs in the Field,” a roundup of what people write online before they write up. People who are blogging from the field or know of someone who is should email me at anthrohomo@gmail.com. And in other news…
Shaking up the grant pool: Nature.com reports on the NIH proposals to revamp grant application process. Not without controversy, the new recommendations ostensibly help younger researchers. But some of the comments posted worry that the proposed process might lack rigor.
After completing her education in Stanford University, Cornell University and the City University of New York in the U.S., Neyzi gave up modern amenities and wealth to live in the mountains in 1984 to gather data for her dissertation . . .Severing all ties with modern life, Neyzi started to behave like a Yuruk, embracing her host family deeply and changing her eating habits, style of speech and behavior.
Don’t Try this at Home: Check out this site dedicated to Bad Archaeology.
Academicese- A nice thought piece in the Columbia Spectator on the need for translation between disciplines. I especially like the comparison of the jargon of two colleagues with the lingo using only Napoleon Dynamite references.
Future of Communication from the Field? Most people are probably already aware of Skype, the uber-popular internet service that lets users make calls to landline and cellular telephones. In this short post, Ted from Fieldnotes ponders the use of Skype for field research. Ted makes an interesting point, but isolated ethnographers might not be the only people using Skype in far-off places. As initiatives like One Laptop per Child endeavor to provide affordable computers and Internet access to rural areas and the Global South, some areas of the world might jump past telephone communications and go straight to communication via Internet video conferencing.
I’m re-reading Durkheim’s Elementary Forms* for a class I’m teaching, and this quote caught my attention:
The idea that societies are subject to necessary laws and constitute a realm of nature has deeply penetrated only a few minds. It follows that true miracles are thought possible in society. There is, for example, the accepted notion that a legislator can create an institution out of nothing and transform one social system into another, by fiat – just as the believers of so many religious accept that the divine will made the world out of nothing or can arbitrarily mutate some beings into others. As regards social things, we still have the mind-set of primitives.
While there is something quaint about the idea that there are fixed laws governing societies analogous to those which govern nature, there is simultaneously something very prescient about these words – words which anticipated both the modernist follies so well described by James Scott, as well as the imperialist follies of today’s neoconservatives. Nearly one hundred years after it was written our understanding of the institutions we live in still seems so primitive.
*I’ve not read the Karen Fields translation before, and so far I’m very happy with it. I’ve read that it is much more reliable the the previous one, but my French isn’t good enough too say one way or another.
I was lucky enough to be in Australia for the Australian Government’s historic apology to aboriginal peoples and just got done teaching it in my political anthropology class after having read Beth Povinelli’s “The State of Shame” a few weeks earlier. The similarity between Povinelli’s epigrammatic voicing of white settler guilt and Rudd’s apology is striking. I thought I’d throw it out here just by way of a fun contrast.
I know I have hurt you. But I want to make (it) up to you, repair the rupture, bridge the rift between us, heal the pain that I have caused. I want us to imagine a place where the possibility of our hurting each other does not exist. Where we can each be our different selves without shame, without fear, without alienation. True partners in peace. A world of brothers and sisters. A world of recognition and enhancement. This is the right thing to do: to heal, to move on, to found and never a New Society
versus (edited)
The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future. We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians. And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry. For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written. We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australians. A future where this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again. A future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed. A future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility. A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country, Australia.
I am not sure what to make of this overlap, except to say that Povinelli got it right?
What does it say about contemporary social science that the following Call for Abstracts is currently circulating?
Call for Abstracts
Vital Signs: Researching Real Life
An international and interdisciplinary conference
Organised by Real Life Methods, part of the ESRC National Centre for
Research Methods
9-11 September 2008
University of Manchester, UK
Keynote speakers:
Prof Les Back (Sociology, Goldsmiths)
Prof Tim Ingold (Anthropology, Aberdeen)
Prof Carolyn Steedman (History, Warwick)
‘Real life’ is complex and complicated. How can we use research methodologies and methods to produce knowledge and understandings that are ‘vital’ and that resonate with everyday life? Abstracts are invited for papers, posters or symposia around the following themes:
Methods for researching nature, culture, the material and the social
Researching visual, auditory, tactile and other sensory realms
Bridging different disciplines in understanding real life
Mixing methods in real life research
Accessing, measuring, and representing real life. What counts as ‘evidence’?
Authenticity, rigour and rhetoric in real life research
Researching intersubjectivity, memory, emotions, and humour
Communicating and disseminating real life research
Challenges in analysing real life data
Real life research in policy and politics
Participatory real life research
Real life research ethics and moralities
What is real life? Theorising real life
The deadline for abstracts is Friday 7 March 2008.
Full details and submission guidelines at:
http://www.reallifemethods.ac.uk/events/vitalsigns/
And is there anything funny about this sentence, ”’Real life’ is complex and complicated”?
Now that I am a few years into being a faculty member and I begin to compare it to the other small group work that I have done—acting, singing, raiding—the following thing strikes me:
Academics are very good at doing community. We all know we need it—feedback on our work, colleagues who work on shared areas of specialties, the cash bar at conferences. We extol virtues like collegiality, time donated for peer review and so forth.
At the same time, most academics (or maybe just those without labs) are not very familiar with teamwork. Working together, in a small group, over a prolonged period to solve a problem is not something we are used to. Like some sort of Durkheimian fantasy of aborigines, we wander amongst our classes and our students, coming together only for the occasional effervescent conference. But we rarely spend that much time in the same room with each other. And the one institution which does mandate problem solving together—the faculty meeting—is also notorious as the time when professors Behave Badly.
I don’t know if I’m right that professors are good at teamwork and bad at community, or if it would matter one way or the other, but it does seem to me that there is a noticeable difference between the work required to teach a class versus that required to, say, run a rehearsal.
Partially in response to a comment on Rex’s last post, and also because I believe this should go up on every anthropologist’s door (alongside that Far Side cartoon):
Disclaimer: I don’t actually have any cartoons on my office door. I was speaking metaphorically.
I just got back from a week-long trip to Australia to attend the annual Association for the Social Anthropology of Oceania meetings. ASAO has always been my favorite annual conference to go to, with a great atmosphere, an international crowd, and an extremely focused set of ethnographic issues. This year it also provided me an opportunity to think further through the issues of rigor and quality in research that I have been exploring on this blog through the distinction between ‘cultural studies’ and ‘anthropology.’ So far we have discussed these issues as though the problem with cultural studies is that it is not ‘empirical’ enough, but I think it is time to take the scare quotes off this term and begin to address Actually Existing cultural studies.
One of my discoveries surfing across Sydney bookstores was Will Booker’s volume Using The Force: Creativity, Community, and Star Wars Fans. This book was perfect for me as an author of Star Wars fan fiction and an adviser of a student working on fan communities. It is a good book and makes me excited to read more of Booker’s other work, but at the same time it is also palpably ‘not anthropology’ to me. Obviously, being ‘not anthropology’ is ‘not a bad thing’—in fact in some circles I’m sure such a judgment might be considered a compliment! But what struck me about the book was not that it had too much ‘theory’ but that it had ‘too little’
(more…)
As a former Bolivia Fulbrighter, I have paid particular attention to the story of Alexander van Schaick, a Fulbright Scholar in Bolivia who spoke out against the U.S. embassy and their alleged attempts to recruit him to report the movements of Cubans and Venezuelans in Bolivia. Below are a few articles and commentaries by other former Bolivia Fulbright scholars, who have had mixed reactions to this story and its treatment in the press.
Clare’s post at TamboGringo has garnered some mixed comments by former Bolivia Fulbrighters. Clare has also posted an update with more links to press coverage of the story.
Listen to an interview with van Schaick at Democracy Now.
The Letter of Recommendation: Tony from ethnography.com demystifies the all-important rec, both for those soliciting them as well as for those writing them.
Rex told us about the new Indiana Jones movie a month ago, but now there is a trailer out, and it ends with what gets my vote for “best tag line in an action movie trailer” ... ever:
You don’t need to be a fan of the series 24 to get the joke here.
I watched it and it immediately made me think that there is a kind of ethnographic method here, perhaps a class assignment: take a familiar case from the contemporary setting and explore it by setting it back 15 years. Change everything you can think of, what stays the same and what makes a difference? Could be a useful way to pick apart the difference technology makes. Or perhaps not, since as EB White says: “Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog; nobody learns anything and the frog dies of it.”
Rex’s recent post about the recent set of articles in Anthropology News raises a question I’ve started to take more seriously: switch or fight? By which I mean: the more I deal with the AAA, especially the component dealing with publications, promotion and public policy, the more I am disheartened by the state of affairs. I agreed to write a piece for this month’s Anthropology News because Stacy Lathrop, who has done yeoman’s (yeowoman’s?) work trying to change things at AN, and Jason Cross urged me to express in AN some of the things that have been a constant topic here on Savage Minds. I think this is a worthy goal, because AN serves a different audience than the blogosphere, and despite the remarkable reach this blog has managed to attain, there are still lots and lots of working anthropologists who have no effing clue about these issues, and the only way it might penetrate is to go through the official organ (sorry, valentines day brings out the worst in me).
The relationship started really well. The idea was to release the pieces under a Creative Commons license, along with the launch of the new AAA site. Jason and I urged the AAA publications staff to release the articles with fanfare and openly so as to instigate a discussion. We thought it would be great to use something like the Institute for the Future of the Book’sComment Press software to allow people to do what Rex did… respond in detail to the arguments of the authors. I offered to set it up, I offered to host it, I offered to maintain it, I offered to eat any costs. In the end, we got neither the license nor the discussion. To be fair, the “negotiations” did result in a promise to keep the articles openly available after March 1, and there is a link at the bottom that says: “What are your thoughts? Share your comments here.” February 14th, and there are three comments, one of them from Jason Cross and one a trackback, two if you count this one.
So this is not only a failure of Open Access, its a profound failure of leadership and a failure to create dialogue. I still believe that publishing in AN reached a larger audience. And I still believe that we need to rescue the AAA from itself, and I’ve agreed to try to do that by serving on committees and even running for a position in the Spring (w00t. vote for me.). But more and more I’m hearing people say something like: do we really need the AAA? Can’t we start something ourselves? Can’t we secede from the AAA? Granted, no one is saying this in public, but I’m hearing it. A lot. So if this special focus on OA was a safety valve, someone turned it the wrong direction in my case.
So I’m not sure where to go in this relationship. The AAA does a lot for me. It puts a roof over my head once a year, and it gives me a line on my cv. Sometimes I even think it loves me… but I really can’t be sure anymore… what should I do?
