That’s a great quote. But I’d like to make one small point RE anthropologists or psychotherapy patients vs. colonialists and slave owners. One thing that is different about anthropologists and patients is that they are actively seeking to transform their consciousness.’

Kerim, are you sure that anthropologists and patients are actively seeking to transform their consciousness?

As for the rubbing quote, well then, what is the point if not a transformation in understanding? It also points to the colonial legacy of anthropology and the awkward stances it still maintains. Anyone familiar with the relationship between the Anthropology and Hawaiian Studies departments at the U of Hawaii are acutely aware to this.

Rubbing elbows is one thing. Rubbing it in, is another.

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First, when Kerim writes,

bq. According to that model (which is the one I was trained in as an undergraduate), we need to achieve an archimedean vantage point from which to critically examine our own bourgeois ideology, and we can only achieve that by overcoming our own natural resistance in a process very similar to Freudian psychoanalysis.

we should, I believe, assume that he knows what he is talking about. The anthropological question is whether what he is talking about applies outside the circle of those trained at particular places at a particular moment in history. I found what he said interesting precisely because I was not taught that model for anthropological research and wonder still how widely diffused it is. (You will note that this is the same issue I raised in relation to “culture shock.” It is all too easy to project one’s own experience as a generalization about “we anthropologists.”)

Second, I do wonder how often the motivation of the Native Ethnographer is a desire for more knowledge of facts on the ground — as opposed, for instance, to a deeper understanding of familiar but problematic facts, the sort of thing that qualitative sociologists do when they study drug culture or art worlds.

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I don’t think that’s true (of anthropologists, at least). This runs head-on into the supposed Problem of the Native Ethnographer, who is often motivated by a desire for more knowledge of the facts on the ground. It also begs the Does It Have to be Ethnography to be Anthropology Problem which I mentioned in my previous post.

Not that I’m against doing fieldwork as a means of transforming the consciousness of the ethnographer or anything. It does seem a bit Byronic (again, not necessarily a bad thing!).

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The story begins in Puli, a market town in the center of Taiwan. The year is 1969. An anthropologist and his newly married wife are starting two years of fieldwork. One of the first things they do is call on Fr. Clancy Engler, the priest in charge of the local Catholic parish. The back story here is that when mainland China became the PRC in 1949, the missionary apparatus that had once been scattered all over China converged on Taiwan. Thus, oddly enough, every small town in central Taiwan had its missionaries. The Catholic mission in central Taiwan was run by Maryknollers, an order whose priests were, we were told before we left Cornell, nice guys of a generally liberal disiposition, who took an interest in anthropology and would share their whiskey and old _Newsweeks_ with lonely anthropologists. Fr. Clancy fit the mold. So, especially during our first year, we dropped in for a visit once in a while.

It was on one of those visits that Fr. Clancy asked me the following question, “What can an anthropologist teach somebody like me?” He was speaking as someone who had lived in Taiwan for fifteen years and was fluent in Taiwanese. He was speaking to someone, me, who had just arrived, was just starting to learn the language, and would leave once our two years were up. I mumbled something about training and theory but didn’t sound very convincing.

A year later, though, we returned to the topic. By then I knew all sorts of things that Fr. Clancy didn’t. I asked myself why. Here is the answer I came up with (the principles I mentioned).

1. I had the _free_ time. Fr. Clancy had been in Puli a lot longer than I would ever be, but he was a busy man, a priest with a parish to run. I had the extraordinary privilege of two years in which I had nothing to do but pursue my anthropological interests.

2. I had _freedom_. It wasn’t just time. I could go places and spend a lot of time with people in ways that Fr. Clancy couldn’t. I could spend several hours each day hanging around with the Daoist master whose rituals became my dissertation, watching what he did, taking photographs, asking about what this or that meant. I could become my Daoist master’s disciple in a way that Fr. Clancy, constrained by his role as a Catholic priest, could not.

3. Everything was new to me. One advantage to bringing fresh eyes to a place where you know less than the average two year old is that you notice and get to ask questions about things that for old hands have long since faded into the background, the taken for granted of everyday life.

4. And, yes, the training and the theory pointed my eyes and ears in directions that Fr. Clancy hadn’t considered. Having, for instance, read Radcliffe-Brown’s “The Mother’s Brother in South Africa,” I looked for what mother’s brothers were up to when invited to Taiwanese weddings. Having read Victor Turner’s _The Ritual Process_, I was primed to notice how much the basic pattern of Chinese rituals isn’t a rite of passage. Having read Geertz on thick description, I was moved to ask what other layers of meaning were present besides the thin fragments provided by the usual sorts of local explanations or the bits of Daoist lore passed on by a key informant who was both very generous and also had secrets to keep.

Time, freedom, fresh eyes, and a training that gave me all sorts of interesting questions to ask — what an incredible privilege! Transformative? Perhaps. An Archimedean point from which I became an omniscient observer? Hardly. An opportunity to learn, to pursue my own questions without a living to earn or other jobs to do, to acquire a bunch of new perspectives that opened up my head? Oh,yes. Add a credential that made me a “real” anthropologist, a vision quester who had traveled to strange places and come back with some interesting stuff. Would I do it again? Oh, yes.

Now, if only I didn’t have a business to run, a busy life with a bunch of projects demanding attention….

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That’s a great quote. But I’d like to make one small point RE anthropologists or psychotherapy patients vs. colonialists and slave owners. One thing that is different about anthropologists and patients is that they are actively seeking to transform their consciousness.

It reminds me of recent literature on the use of mind-altering substances which shows that the effects are heavily influenced by cultural expectations. If you think LSD is going to open The Doors of Perception, and that’s why you are taking it, then maybe it will…

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http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/divided/

Certainly her model involved the administration of a shock, but it looks to me that the critical factor was deprivileging through the reversal of power relations, followed by a reprivileging debriefing. I suspect that if you just reverse the power without the restorative second step, what you get is resentment (Klan, Nazis).

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The problem is that like the Marxists trying to figure out how class consciousness happens, we don’t have a very good idea how these transformations actually occur, and so the tendency is to think magically. If we just throw people at the right kind of experience they will be transformed, abracadabra. ‘Education’ is the usual incantation, which makes all those Nazis with university degrees hard to swallow.

So somehow anthropologists are uniquely positioned to decenter their own cultural presuppositions because they go where people are really, really weird. But this corporate ideology does not work for at least two reasons: one, as Rex and John point out (some) sociological ethnographers, historians and tourists somehow manage to get the point of otherness without the epistemological grandstanding; and two, Euro (and Chinese, and Japanese, etc.) colonialists lived elbow-to-elbow with the Big Blue Others and managed (mostly) not to get the point, as for that matter some anthropologists haven’t.

For the latter reason I’m afraid Greg’s earlier gesture at the lamentable disconnect between white grad students and African Americans won’t actually get us far. No whites in history have been closer to African Americans than the slave owners and Jim Crow racists. You can rub people all over each other and it’s not going to automatically transform their consciousness (or may do so in undesirable ways).

Yet people do wake up from their dogmatic slumbers and become more mindful, critically responsible participants in human community. What are the conditions and moments of this process?

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It’s an umbrella term for plenty of things that aren’t very cultural at all. When people say they’ve been culture shocked they more likely have been infrastructure shocked. In any case, I was surprised the discussion took that turn because I don’t see that issue at all in Rex’s original post.

bq. But I think the bigger issue is whether or not culture shock is a transformative process which can bring about a new state of consciousness.

To stay with the therapy metaphor, culture shock for a certain type of rigid personality can end up like psychoanalysis for a narcissist (reinforcitive rather than transformative).

bq. If culture shock is a necessary condition for production of anthropological knowledge, what else is going on?

If it is then the great mass of work produced by professional anthropologists needs to be written off as non-anthropological. I think that attitude actually exists among some culture anthropologists, unfortunately.

My understanding of ethnoarchaeology is that while culture shock certainly is common for the ethnographer it isn’t really central to the why or the how. Any working archaeologists out there who can confirm or deny?

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I’d rephrase the question because it presumes that there is such a thing as “culture shock” and that is one of the issues under discussion. On that issue I personally don’t deny that there is such a thing – although I think for most people it is returning to their own culture which is hardest, not adapting to an alien one. L’s story illustrates this. But I think the bigger issue is whether or not culture shock is a transformative process which can bring about a new state of consciousness. My earlier comment was intended to raise this narrow question.

I also wanted to introduce an element of intellectual history. I think the importance given to “culture shock” in some anthropological accounts (or perhaps just in the hallways of academia) is due to the importance a previous generation of scholars gave to Freudian concepts of psychology. In psychotherapy the patient must overcome both their natural resistance to healing as well as the process of transference in order to develop the critical stance necessary to see their own illness. (Sorry if I’m a bit off, it’s been a while since I read or talked about Freud…) My point was that while some psychologists still see things in this way, today there is much more focus on behavioral modification and pharmacology. This has been paralleled in anthropology by the shift towards practice theory and away from structuralism. (viz. Ortner’s ”Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties.”)

Rex himself often blogs about ethnography as a “craft”, so I’m not surprised to see him knocking “culture shock.” But I think it is important to highlight how this is a knock against the critical theory/cultural studies tradition within anthropology. According to that model (which is the one I was trained in as an undergraduate), we need to achieve an archimedean vantage point from which to critically examine our own bourgeois ideology, and we can only achieve that by overcoming our own natural resistance in a process very similar to Freudian psychoanalysis. What I’d like to know is if Rex rejects this entire critical theory approach, or if he just believes that “culture shock” is not an essential part. That is to say, does he believe anthropologists still need to go through a transformative process by which they achieve this critical perspective, they just don’t get there via “culture shock” or does he see the entire critical theory approach as suspect?

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_“For some anthropologists, experiencing ‘a different culture’ or, to put it another way, ‘cultural difference’ is key to being an anthropologist._

Does “culture shock” add anything to “experiencing a different culture” or noticing “cultural difference”? Seems to me that these are three related but not identical topics.

An historian can notice cultural differences.
A tourist can experience a different culture.
If culture shock is a necessary condition for production of anthropological knowledge, what else is going on?

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Perhaps “academic concept” is too strong a word; a widely circulated folk-concept within academic circles might be a better way of putting it. Part of the folk-culture of anthropology. But still, the relevant community here is anthropologists.

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The use of popular terms/concepts in technically specialized ways can be a productive move. Thus, for example, when Newton took “force” and redefined it as f=ma (force = mass x acceleration) something very important happened. Now physics had its own, explicit definition of “force” that was, in important ways, quite different from the use of “force” in describing legal arguments, personalities, or military formations.

So you could be saying something important. So please, what, precisely, is this “academic concept” that we are discussing here?

I suspect that this will be difficult. I anticipate that the problem I am posing is akin to that Eagleton describes when discussing ideology. To see what I mean, simply substitute “culture shock” for “ideology” in the following passage from _Ideology, An Introduction_ (p. 1).

bq. Nobody has yet come up with a single adequate definition of ideology, and this book will be no exception. This is not because workers in the field are remarkable for their low intelligence, but because the term ‘ideology’ has a whole range of useful meanings, not all of which are compatible with each other. To try to compress this wealth of meaning into a single comprehensive definition would thus be unhelpful even if it were possible. The word ‘ideology’, one might say, is a _text_, woven of a whole tissue of different conceptual strands; it is traced through by divergent histories, and it is probably more important to assess what is valuable or can be discarded in each of these lineages than to merge them forcibly into some Grand Global Theory.

I could, of course, be wrong. There could be some generally accepted _academic_ definition of culture shock of particular use to anthropologists. The world is full of things of which I am totally ignorant.

Please enlighten me.

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