Theory as a Source of Stress

Following on the heels of Kerim’s post, here is a true story from my grad school experience (as in “no kidding true” — I was told it by the person it happened to).

A graduate student in anthropology is feeling extremely stressed out and decides to go visit the school counselor. The counselor is very sympathetic to her and asks what her problem is.

“I’m just feeling very stressed out about graduate school — like I’m falling behind and can’t cope.”

“Is there anything in particular that really sets you off that you’d like to talk about?”

“Well I know where I want to do fieldwork, I have a decent project. Its just that the department keeps on pushing me to ‘do theory’, and I have such a hard time figuring out these theorists — it makes me feel helpless and stupid.”

“You mean theorists like, for instance, Bakhtin?” asks the therapist.

“Yes,” says the student, nonplussed, “are you familiar with Bakhtin?”

“Pretty familiar,” says the therapist.

“I had no idea,” says the student, “do you have to read him in psychology, or for your certification as a counselor or something?”

“No,” says the therapist calmly, “I just get a lot of anthropology grad students in here.”

True story.

Rex

Alex Golub is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His book Leviathans at The Gold Mine has been published by Duke University Press. You can contact him at rex@savageminds.org

23 thoughts on “Theory as a Source of Stress

  1. Some of us are just theory-challenged. Rather than stressing out about the fact that I can’t understand Bakhtin or Bourdieu, I prefer to work on the level that sociologists call middle-range theory — explanatory concepts with more empirical content, and less generality, than high-level social theory. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of interest in middle-range theory in anthropology, where Theory is usually capitalized for its esoteric and ethereal nature (or maybe I have just missed it, but for my work on middle-range theory in archaeology I had to turn for comparative methodological/theoretical insights to sociology, not cultural anthropology).

    But of course as a tenured professor (and as an archaeologist) I have the luxury to wallow in my ignorance of fashionable social theory, a luxury that grad students in some programs certainly lack. Is theory-stress useful for the discipline?

  2. Ha! That one’s gold. (And contrasts with a friend of mine who was once heard to utter words to the effect of, “I know I’m not stupid and this [whacking index finger against his copy of The Dialogic Imagination] didn’t make a bit of sense to me” after a seminar meeting.)

  3. “There doesn’t seem to be a lot of interest in middle-range theory in anthropology, where Theory is usually capitalized for its esoteric and ethereal nature”

    I would never denigrate those who are less theoretically challenged, but I would say that someone like you who does the hard day to day work of anthropology can be more of an asset to the discipline depending on whom one could compare you to.
    I know that I when I was in grad. school and finishing up my first solo project to graduate and doing my write up, I was a little disheartened. During the last 6 months of my write up and preparing for my defense I gained 12 pounds, because I was always in front of a computer. I thought to myself that this is not the Indiana Jones life I had spent so much time to learn to do. Then I realized that it’s the same for every professional. Doctors spend much more time doing paperwork than healing, soldiers at higher ranks spend most of their time also doing paperwork.
    The hardest part of my write-up was having to write an academic version for my committee and another for my client (applied program). I had to learn to not put all the jargon in and still make the point. In the end, it’s all the same.

    There’s also been a lot of talk about hanging out with your cohort, but who had time? It seems like the cohort before me always partied together, and the one after me was the same. My cohort was older and we had jobs and kids.

  4. Of course, some of us are the opposite, where every day of fieldwork was a kind of social hell we endured to get evidence to go back and “do theory” with. 🙂

  5. I like the idea of middle range theory – which is generally how theory is approached in my department. I recall freaking out in the graduate lounge when I was trying to develop a reading list for a course, “I need to figure out Bourdieu, Benjamin, Baudrillard, Barth… and that’s just the B’s!” To which a more advanced grad student calmly replied, “No, we’re not a philosophy program, we’re anthropologists. Just take what conceptual tools from them that help you with your work and use them, you don’t need to master everything that they’ve written.”
    I’m not totally averse to theory – I’ve been banging my head against Lacan for the past week and find it very useful for understanding capitalism. But overall I don’t see the value of getting overly obscure. Twice this year I’ve been in seminars that read Bil Maurer – one in an anthro department and the other in a cultural theory/philosophy focused department. In neither could everyone understand most of what he’s saying – professors included. I do find some of his insights to be brilliant, and some of his ethnographic descriptions are beautifully written. But that only makes his wanderings into obscurity all the more frustrating. And if a room full of grad students who obsessively think about the subject of your book can’t understand you, what’s the audience that you’re writing for?

  6. Just take what conceptual tools from them that help you with your work and use them, you don’t need to master everything that they’ve written.”
    I’m not totally averse to theory – I’ve been banging my head against Lacan for the past week and find it very useful for understanding capitalism.

    Bad news, justaguy. Once you’ve grasped Lacan, you’ve have to turn that around and see how Deluze attacks the basic assumptions of Lacan. So if you think Lacan will allow for a sociological interpretation of capitalism, think again. It’s a sad realization to arrive at that theory is always in contention internally. This is one of the things never told to students while learning various theoretical positions–there is no unifiying principle to all these theorists; they are in a stage of conflict and siege with one another. That makes it so much harder and so much more difficult to learn theory.

    Most often when profs teach theory, it is taught in modular form. The sort of if this is the second week of classes, we must be on Bakhtin this week. Sadly that is not the case, and I think it would help if theoretical courses were taught reflecting the debates issuing between various theoretical positions. Using a literary example, consider the simple concept of trope. Usually most students are told this is a metaphor (more advanced students are given the definition “subsitituion of meaning” in contrast to figure which is a syntactic shift). Yet between Paul de Man and Harold Bloom the trope becomes a point of contention not only in terms of what it means, but what it does. Effectively teaching theorists like Deluze and Lacan does not end with definitional explanations of theoretical terms or explications of their models of capitalism, but must include the debates between these figures. It goes a long way to realize the rivalry between Lacan and Deluze who deliberately scheduled seminars at the same time forcing students to choose.

    I wish my classes in theory had considered more the underlying debates that gave rise to the theories which we now read in their completed form. such an approach might also go a long way with the difficulties Dr. Smith, above, has noted and the tendency of students (and profs) to gravitate therefore to middle theory. Theory taught properly, with a pinch of the debates and historical underpinnings, can be liberating (and certainly less stressful).

  7. “Bad news, justaguy. Once you’ve grasped Lacan, you’ve have to turn that around and see how Deluze attacks the basic assumptions of Lacan. So if you think Lacan will allow for a sociological interpretation of capitalism, think again. It’s a sad realization to arrive at that theory is always in contention internally.”

    I would disagree. The entire Western philosophical tradition is a long conversation, and you can always say that in order to truly understand author X you really need to read A, B and C who either inform or critique them. And in order to understand authors A, B and C you really need to read a dozen other folks as well. And if I was getting a PhD in philosophy that might be a worthy pursuit. But I’m not a philosopher, I’m an anthropologist and I’m interested in theory only to the extent to which it can help my ethnography. Even if I wanted to master the Western intellectual tradition, I don’t see how I could do so in grad school while doing a year or so of fieldwork and writing up a dissertation – to say nothing of learning about, you know, anthropology. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSdHoNJu5fU&feature=youtube_gdata)

    I’m about to go into the field, and while I don’t worry that I haven’t read Deleuze, Hegel, Kant or Baidou, I do wish that I had taken a class on kinship – which might give me some concrete conceptual tools to go into a group of people and figure out how they view themselves as related to and different from each other.

    I do, however, definitely agree with you that putting authors into context of the broader conversation that they’re participating in, and the historical moment in which they write, is essential to making them accessible.

  8. I don’t know why anyone should have a problem with Bakhtin. But you have to have more of an interest in literature than the theory of literature and in people rather than the theory of them. He’s very much the justification for a preference for the “social hell” as someone called it above, that library geeks hate so much. Social life operates on performance with all of us observing and judging one another and he sees the theater for what it is.

    It’s a bit harder to see if everyone in a group is trying to master the same subject, since you have sense of group identity and the gaps between individuals seem to fade, But they’re always there: one person is not another. [Do academic husbands still tend to forget that their wives are not extensions of themselves? Just curious if anything’s changed]

    There is an expression in my family: “communication is two people looking at the same object.” That could be two musicians playing together according to a shared structure, or an author writing a novel using a very sophisticated understanding of a particular language, for an audience of others with a similarly sophisticated understanding of the same. Or two teammates who work well together, And you’ll never understand what you’re a part of unless you’re outside it, at which point you won’t understand it because you’re not inside. etc etc. As far Bakhtin and fieldwork go, he more than anyone would tell you to take Rabelais or Philip Roth with you in the field and read them for fun. Bourdieu was the opposite, preaching the superiority of the academic pedant. From the habitus of the ivory tower, looking down. Bordieu was a vulgarian. Bakhtin enjoyed the vulgar.

    If you’re not really tempted to put down your books and go native, you probably shouldn’t be an anthropologist. I don’t claim to have the right to say that, but I will anyway. I’m tired of academics who study art or literature or people so that they can find ways to feel superior to them. That wasn’t Bakhtin’s problem.

  9. s.e. I agree with you about Bakhtin. But

    Bourdieu was the opposite, preaching the superiority of the academic pedant.

    is, in my view a misreading. I could be wrong since what I’m about to say is based primarily on The Logic of Practice, but Bourdieu’s starting point is the observation that the scholar who sits in his study carefully weighing alternatives before making a rational choice occupies a highly unnatural position. Daily life for those without the leisure scholarship requires is more like a football (soccer) game in which players must react instantly to events in which both players and ball are constantly in motion. Habitus and structuring structures may not be the most felicitous way to describe how dispositions built up through training and previous games are brought into play, but the attitude of the author is far from pedantry.

  10. “Most often when profs teach theory, it is taught in modular form.”

    Really, at the schools I went to everything was taught in a lineage, connected form. So for every subfield like environmental anth, you learn about early geographic determinism (people, concepts, culture theory), then White and Julian Steward’s debate with multilineal evolution, then we go one with Rappaport, Netting, et al. It’s done in a chronology, so that in each subfield you can see the evolution, borrowing, arguments, revivals, etc…
    Because, this was done for each course the names were used over and over, and the specific names for the subfields were learned, so that in the end you could read an article and see how it fits within a long line of theoretical development, see when it’s using old or new ideas, arguments against it, etc… I was taught that this is important to know in order to avoid reviving an older concept that has largely been settled, or not even realize you were doing it.
    Some professors did it with people (paradigms were connected to them), taught the evolution of paradigms (relativism, S.F., structuralism, materialism…) with people connected.

  11. “I could be wrong since what I’m about to say is based primarily on The Logic of Practice, but Bourdieu’s starting point is the observation that the scholar who sits in his study carefully weighing alternatives before making a rational choice occupies a highly unnatural position.”

    Right, but then he also argues for the superiority of the “scholastic” way of thinking, and that many social problems could be solved by spreading this worldview. You really have to into his departure from Foucault. Really, it’s the French theorists the over complicate more than anyone.

    If we look at Foucault’s concept of how “discipline” shapes subjects, we are drawn to “total institutions” of control rather than the everyday structures that we live in beyond such institutions. Bourdieu and Agrawal help to free Foucault’s “gaze” into what they would likely call ‘practice and imagination’. While Bourdieu criticizes these formal systems for the fact that, “though they account for practice, in no way [do they] provide the raison d’ etre of practices, their true explanatory principle,” such questions lead us to an infinite regress of causation. Ultimate truth is the business of philosophers and poets, not anthropologists.

    Its Bourdieu’s analysis that one cannot separate a particular us/other dichotomy from the field in which it exists. His exploration into the how such dichotomies are formed and reformed through the practice of exchange is one way to bridge such a gap. I also agree with the explanation of a “scholastic world view” in order to continuously break down such dichotomies as they are continuously produced. I do not, however, see how he proposes to do this. Perhaps, this is where the French free university system plays a role.

  12. It is possible to learn and teach theory in an accessible way. I have spent ten years teaching the International Baccalaureate Social and Cultural Anthropology curriculum to senior high school students. While it is more simplified than grad school, the students competently discuss Bourdieu, Barth, Wolf, Appadurai, Malinowski, Geertz, Levi-Strauss and so on, in relation to ethnography they are studying. The curriculum is organized in such a way that instead of memorizing theorists, the students learn through an emphasis on perspectives or issues such as agency, structure, universalist views, particularist views, synchronic and diachronic approaches, as well as the material and ideal. We try to place a focus on understanding how and why ethnographers take the perspectives they do.

    I currently write a blog for other educators teaching the IB course (http://blogs.triplealearning.com/category/diploma/dp_socanth/). I have yet to include many posts on theory. This has motivated me – by the fall, I will have few up there to give some idea as to how students can be introduced to complex theory! Hopefully, if they are introduced to it in a gentle way, they will not be so stressed in grad school when they need to learn it in greater depth.

  13. Laura,

    As a graduate of UNIS where I took IB Anthropology in the eighties, I applaud your efforts and look forward to reading your blog posts!

  14. (3 + 8) So much better than an illegible captcha. Love it.

    What exactly is “theory”? I find myself re-reading Lowie and marvel at exactly how disorganized anthropology has become. How is one to teach this chaotic discipline? I’m a diehard anthropologist, but I get anxious about focus. I think there is very little. Is this just a free for all? And how does one teach that?

    Best,

    Fred

  15. I should add, what “theory” does Geertz stand for (may he rest in peace). Interpretive anthropology? Hermeneutics? I hate to get all Paul Feyeraband, but I think there must be a stock-taking.

    Teaching various categories of “theory”–Bourdieu, Geertz, Parsons, Levi-Strauss, etc.–is not helpful to students in my opinion. Structuralism matters less to me, as a “theoretical” whole, than Levi-Strauss’ intricate attention to kinship detail in The Elementary Structures. This should be taught

    Best,

    Fred

  16. What I find irksome about many theorists–the revered Pierre Bourdieu tops my list, here–is that it so typically takes another theorist to interpret, summarize and clarify in an introduction or other explanatory text what the original theorist means. If the original theorist is so blindingly insightful as to be made required reading across disciplines, should not clarity and organization of thought be fundamental to that insight? While I know that slippage and obfuscation enters into the very production of theory with the French deconstructionists, Bourdieu is a neo-Marxist, neo-liberalist who has no such cause to write as if he were called upon to fit a billion angels upon the head of a pin. Nothing is particularly difficult about coming to terms with habitus, field, ilusio and his other theoretical concepts. It’s his purposefully hostile writing style that puts off the reader. Unnecessarily interminable spaghetti noodle sentences of 100 or more words bury us in so many levels of embedded syntax that the reader wonders, “Do I not understand Bourdieu, or does Bourdieu not understand Bourdieu?” This choice writing style enacts, to my mind, nothing short of the symbolic violence against which he so loves to rail. It’s exclusionist, purposefully esoteric, and needlessly tedious and gluey. Really–who wants to have to perform syntactic autopsies as they read?

  17. I’m sorry but I find Bourdieu unreadable. I just never got past his first chapter in Outline of a Theory of Practice. Utterly horriby written. Nuhuh. couldn’t do it. Maybe it was a translation problem. I think it is rather an idea problem.

    Best,

    Fred

  18. “I hate to get all Paul Feyeraband, but I think there must be a stock-taking. ”

    Bringing in Feyeraband is absolutely perfect for this. I don’t have a problem with Bourdieu, but Latour in “Reinventing the Social,” or Foucault in the “Archaeology of Knowledge,” WTF?
    The problem is especially in the fact that you understand what they are trying to say, it’s just hard to actually interpret them as saying it. I was taught if you can say something in 5 words to not use 10. I think the French are taught to use 20 if you only need 10.

  19. I should add, what “theory” does Geertz stand for (may he rest in peace). Interpretive anthropology? Hermeneutics?

    I suppose you can call it what you want, but I think of Geertz as being a masterful translator. He attempted to figure out what the world was like for groups that were not like his own and then he tried to communicate that understanding back to his own group.

    I personally have never thought of Geertz as doing something particularly heavy. I rather tend to think of him as doing something basic—but very difficult—extremely well. YMMV, of course.

  20. Rick and MTBradley: I think we are on the same page. Geertz was an unparelleled ethnographer and historian–a translator of cultures. He seems to be recalled in curricula and in summary for his “interpretive” approach. He is better known for the package deal that is The Interpretation of Cultures than Negara. I’m still confused as to what theory really means in anthropology, which is why I sway to the grab bag that is philosophical anthropology. Now I won’t be able to sleep tonight!

  21. Believe it or not, it’s exactly this difficulty with theory that is mostly responsible for me not being in a grad program right now, so I can definitely connect with this. I suppose it’s a bit of a consolation that I’m not the only one!

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