The dust storm kicked up over the dropping of the word “science” from the introduction to an internal long-range planning document reminded us that there are still a lot of anthropologists who still call themselves scientists. But how many anthropologists still call themselves “poets”? Rereading Recapturing Anthropology I came across a reference to this Pat Caplan article where she says
it is perhaps not insignificant that quite a number of American anthropologists are poets.
Is that still true? I asked on Twitter and was told that the Society for Humanistic Anthropology has poetry readings at the AAA (or at least used to) and that they still publish poems in their journal. So at least there are still some poets in anthropology, but were they a much bigger presence in the eighties than they are now?
Perhaps we need to write poetry into the long-range plan?
“Perhaps we need to write poetry into the long-range plan?”
I have a reasonable solution:
Just rewrite the long-range plan AS a poem, and be sure to include the words “science” and “humanities.” Extra points for getting “truth”, “reflexivity,” and “replicability” all in there.
Something simple like Haiku would be preferable over Beowolf-esque length. Hmmm. Or maybe it SHOULD be an epic poem, just to reflect all of the recent anthro-drama. I’ll have to think about that.
Absolutely! Its often pointed out that Gary Snyder was an anthropology major, but in terms of professional anthropologists we could come up with a decent list from over the last century of anthropologists who also wrote and/or published poetry. I teach Tibetan poetry in my Anthropology of Tibet classes and recommend Renato Rosaldo’s annual Ethnographic Poetry workshop at the AAAs to everyone. There was an SHA literature/poetry reading Thursday night at the AAAs in New Orleans. I don’t think this was an 80s thing either, but something–i.e., more humanistic writing–that has been a part of the discipline for a long time. Anthropology and Humanism (the SHA journal) not only publishes ethnographic poetry and fiction, but also gives annual awards for each. Cultural Anthropology (the SCA journal) also published a selection from a long epic poem titled “The Coolie” by E. Valentine Daniel in their May 2008 issue. The bigger question might be one posed by Ruth Behar in Anthropology Off the Shelf: not how many anthropologists are poets (vs. scientists), but how many anthropologists are now thinking of themselves as writers, not just scholars, and thinking of anthropology as literature.
Do I remember correctly that Rex writes fiction?
Wesleyan University anthropology professor and Haitian scholar Gina Ulysse has been performing spoken word ethnography since her grad school days at Michigan. Her AAA performances are always stunning, especially since they are usually dropped into panels with people presenting regular papers (i.e., 15 minutes of someone reading standard academic prose). In New Orleans, she presented a piece on a tribute panel for Michel-Rolph Trouillot that included voodoo chanting, Kreyol passages from Trouillot’s first book, gorgeous singing, and spoken-word theory.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jennifer-edwards/haiti-is-wailing-gina-ath_b_794576.html
A previous science::not science battle shook the association during the AA editorship of Dennis Tedlock (a noted scholar of ethnopoetics) whose inclusion of poetry in the pages of the journal was the catalyst for the previous moment that was, in my reading of the situation, most like what has recently transpired and been discussed here and elsewhere as #aaafail.
Dell Hymes always spoke up for poetry in/as anthropology and cited all the Boasians who were also poets. This is the lineage that is important, I think, in the SHA community.
I appreciate the real costs of doing something like publishing poetry in AA. I am describing more than advocating.
Interesting thread, because an anthro I know just happened to write a poem about it on a listserve from my former university (they are on the science side of the debate as far as I know). They posted it just like this:
deepening a rift
thrown into turmoil
long-simmering tension
bitter tribal warfare
dismayed
undermine
wounds of this conflict
clawing up the furniture
the non-fluff-head cultural anthropologists
utterly beleaguered
denigrates
fraught
critical anthropologists
done away with
flames have been fueled
attack
worry
disapproval
excised
critique
rejection
downgrading
rejects
marginalization
never
terrifies
Strong: http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/andrew-huff-and-the-pool-of-lost-souls/188852
I checked, and it’s not April 1st, and I can’t see any other signs of this being a Poe. So I suppose it deserves a serious answer.
You know, physicists write poetry, too. They also listen to music, eat bagels, and watch football. Should all of these things be written into a long-range plan for physics?
No. That would be utterly moronic. Those things, while they may be related to doing physics (writing poetry about it, especially), are not actually physics.
It’s the same with anthropology. The aim is to try to understand and explain human cultural diversity. Yes, it’s helpful when the attempts to do this are well-written (ie, clear and concise, not poetic), and there’s absolutely no reason not to write poetry about anthropology in your spare time (just as physicists, biologists, and all kinds of people generally write about their subjects in their spare time). Putting poetry into a journal, however, except as a neat little aside, is not really all that productive or useful in the pursuit of the aims of anthropology. I feel a bit ridiculous even having to point this out.
From the HuffPo article:
I call this linguistic butchery. It’s certainly visceral – you can see the viscera of the words all over the page.
This kind of thought comes from the same school that believes that seeing images of black men unchained will end racism. No wonder it’s on the same site that gives Deepak Chopra a regular column.
The OAC Press will soon be publishing Roy Wagner’s book-length Mayan Sonnets and Achirri Ishmael regularly posts poems on the main OAC site.
When I taught a methods course a few years ago, I had students read Adrie Kusserow’s poem “Thick Stories – Dharmsala, India.” from a 2006 issue of Anthropology and Humanism. It was very useful given the week’s theme and other readings, and it was a pleasure to read. And I was struck by how surprised the students were that a poem could clearly be more than “a neat little aside.”
I believe that the controversy over science/humanities in anthropology long predated the Tedlocks’ editorship – and for the record, it was a joint editorship, Barbara and Dennis, not simply Dennis. In their first issue they wrote:
“There are terrific tensions in anthropology, and we want the Anthropologist to be a place where they can be worked out in a constructive fashion, not in a shoot-out. As A. L. Kroeber pointed out long ago, anthropology has a dual rather than a unilineal ancestry, with the natural sciences on one side and the humanities on the other. More recently, Eric Wolf called anthropology “the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanist of the sciences.” It is no coincidence that anthropologists get grants from both the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, sometimes for different aspects of the same larger project. But while we have been fighting with one another about what kind of discipline anthropology really is, our neighbors in other disciplines, whether scientific or humanistic, have reached new levels of sophistication in theory and method and have begun to make claims in areas that were once ours to research and teach. It is time we stopped fighting and got on with the work of showing our neighbors on both sides that they haven’t even begun to deal with the full range of human diversity and that no one knows how to do that better than anthropologists.”
In a later issue they noted that the publication of poetry in part fulfilled “our pledge not to privilege any particular form of discourse as the sole means of legitimate anthropological communication.” And they referred to poetry published by earlier editors of the AA.
There is no doubt that the Tedlocks had a reputation for being ‘anti-science’, and this reputation led many biological anthropologists and archaeologists not to submit to the AA while they were editors. Ironically, the relative absence of “science” articles in the AA under their editorship was then taken as evidence that the editors were anti-science, when it was simply the self-fulfilling prophecy of those who never submitted. Subsequent analysis of submission/acceptance data by the AAA showed that the Tedlocks accepted biological anthropology and archaeology submissions at a higher rate than they accepted cultural anthropology submissions, and though they welcomed ‘science’ articles, they could never quite overcome the demonization directed at them by some in the discipline. The backlash, to appoint Robert Sussman as editor when the Tedlocks’ term was up, proved a minor fiasco.
And I’m sure they learnt something from it. Which was…what?
Poetry is by its nature diffuse, metaphorical, emotive, and subjectively interpreted. It’s not exactly the ideal platform for expressing ideas about human social structure, say, clearly and cogently. I’m afraid I follow the Chomsky line here: far better to be a boring speaker or writer than to be incomprehensible or wrongly interpreted. If you’re interested in the topic and the ideas are good, then literary merit is secondary. Or tertiary. Or not even on the cards at all.
@Conan the Pseudonymous Does your anonymity breed negativity or is it vice versa? If your corner of anthropology does not have room for poetry, fine. Great for you. But your opinion that poetry is an impoverished or inappropriate way to get at human cultural diversity does not invalidate the fact that many other anthropologists write and teach poetry not as a side hobby, but as a genre within the discipline. This is not something new; in cultural anthropology, at least, multiple genres have existed for decades. As for the visceral in the structural, seems like you’ve given us a good example of exactly what Ulysse is talking about.
I’d like to also point out that a major of what Newton wrote about was metaphysics and alchemy, which according to the logic of a lot of the cult. anths. proposing that poetry has anything to do with the practice of anthropology, means that physics should include metaphysics as a sub-discipline.
It seems like we’re getting more emotion than logic here. Can poetry be used to explain the prevalence and mutability of descent in group formation, or the logic behind cross-cousin marriage preference, or the importance of hierarchical binary oppositon in human thought? Or maybe it could destroy these notions entirely, and show how the entire of kinship theory is misguided, right down to the House and the new genetics stuff. Can it, in the end, show something that we don’t already know?
More importantly, can it do this better than concise, comprehensive prose?
If it can’t do these things, what can it do?
That is my point. I apologise if it is brusquely stated, I really do. Anonymity certainly does help (topical, isn’t it?) in allowing leeway to be negative and contrary, but I will protest that it doesn’t make the point less cogent. If poetry is genuinely useful, then could someone demonstrate how? It just seems ‘inappropriate and impoverished’ indeed, due to its reliance on subjectivity, metaphor, analogy, and emotion. Since when have those things led to truthful assessments of real problems?
This is a logical fallacy. Just because it’s old(ish) doesn’t mean that it’s correct, as I’m sure you appreciate.
Well, if nothing else, poetry — read attentively — is an excellent way to understand the phenomenology of your study… the inner world. Because you, as a social researcher, are studying something highly reactive and proactive — something that is agentive in a way that particles are not — then understanding metaphor, emotion and so forth are a necessary part of the analysis.
How can someone who refuses to listen to metaphor and emotional responses be expected to produce a rigorous analysis of a system in which metaphor and emotion are often primary organizing principles?
If you would like some examples, you could try Anna Tsing’s Friction, which includes poetry, or Joao Biehl’s Vita, which is in part a “mystery story” where an informant’s poetry contains the clues to a very real social process.
I absolutely agree that analysing emotion, metaphor, &c, is essential. But there is a difference between analysing these things with poetry that you have written as an anthropologist (in which case your attempt is just as imposed as any prose exegesis, and much less precise) and poetry that the informant has provided. If you write poetry about what you think is someone’s viewpoint, then you have the same methodological difficulties as writing prose ethnography, as well as additional problems created by the nature of poetry – notably, increased subjectivity, the possibility of misunderstanding the true feelings of the subject (who does have ‘true’ feelings that no amount or kind of writing will be fully able to describe) by categorising them in the language of academe or poesy, and so on. It seems like a dead end.
It would surely make much more sense to just write about a person’s feelings, noting where categories don’t line up with the English-language ones, correcting for assumptions on the part of the reader, and so on, like anthropologists normally do. That would be much harder to do with poetry and still be creative and artistic, and if you can’t be the latter as well then the poetic aspect is muted and pointless.
I think we’re talking at cross purposes. The point is not the avoidance of analysing the informant’s poetry, but the avoidance of using poetry in place of prose in anthropological work. It’s not a refusal to listen to metaphor and emotional reponses – that would make ethnography impossible, for one. It’s a refusal to accept that metaphor and emotion are equal to rigour, objectivity, and logic in analysis. I think that’s more than reasonable.
So, hey, I’ve got nothing against poetry written by the informant, or discussed by the informant but written by someone else, being analysed. But writing poetry as if it is the equivalent of prose in writing up anthropological articles – no way jose. That just seems utterly bizarre, frankly.
Having said this, Lucretius wrote in verse, and his arguments are perfectly understandable. Although, it might be a waste of time and grant money to try to formulate your article as an epic poem.
I do think the ability of poetry to illuminate anthropological questions depends on what kind of questions one is asking. For mid-century structural-functionalist and structuralist anthropology (i.e., “the prevalence and mutability of descent in group formation, or the logic behind cross-cousin marriage preference, or the importance of hierarchical binary opposition in human thought”), perhaps poetry is not the best fitting genre. But for scholarship of and after the interpretive turn, or the last four decades, these are not the grounding questions. Instead, in terms of trying to get at the subjective, at meaning, and at everyday experience, poetry might very well make sense. I do think that poetry can show us things we do not already know. And/or shed new light on things we thought we knew well.
Beyond genre, though, poetry appears repeatedly as a topic that does provide great ethnographic insight. Think of Lila Abu-Lughod’s work on poetry in Egypt or Steve Caton’s in Peaks of Yemen, I Summon, or Flagg Miller’s on poetry and politics in the contemporary Middle East.
As for age not making something correct, I agree. My point instead was simply that a history of poetic or humanistic writing exists in the discipline and is a long-standing part of anthropology.
If anthropologists can profitably analyse the poetry of informants, then anthropologists can probably also profitably analyse the poetry of other anthropologists. I don’t think anyone is suggesting that all prose work be replaced with poetry, or the two be treated as interchangeable.
The prevalence of descent is not actually a structural-functionalist or structuralist notion. It’s a discoverable principle, and so it’s a problem for any attempt to discuss human affairs cross-culturally. Even a sociobiologist (hardly a structural-functionalist or a structuralist!) would have to account for the principle of descent. If you go to, say, Kedang, on Lomblen in eastern Indonesia, and you don’t find named patrilineal descent groups, then there’s a problem with your ethnography. The same is true if you went to New Zealand before the Europeans conquered the place and didn’t find named cognatically-based clans.
The existence of these kinds of groups is not in dispute; they are as real as the University of Cambridge. The principles forming them – patrilineality, matrilineality, cognation, with residence as a mitigating factor – are just as real as Cambridge entrance exams, to take an example from our society, and they are only a few of the potential logical possibilities of kin group formation and inheritance (others, such as alternating and parallel descent, to use Rodney Needham’s naming, have been shown not to exist, and the ethnographies that might have shown them – Mead among the Mundugumor and Nimuendaju the adventurer among the Apinaye – were flawed or just outright wrong). And you can find groups like these the world over – in Africa, in India, in South America, in the Pacific, in Europe, in China, both historically and to a lesser extent now.
Even Geertz’s analyses of Bali, at least in the early days, recognised the objective existence of the dadia, a cognatic kin group, at all levels of society. These were frequently named, and residence, shared economic ties, and other things of that nature, were mitigating factors.
So the existence and prevalence of certain types of groups based on certain kinds of descent is not really in dispute, even if other factors are involved. You can ignore it – most anthropologists today seem to – but it’s still a real problem in understanding human society cross-culturally. Even an interpretative approach needs some understanding of the existence of descent groups – how would you interpret the feelings of a Yako man avenging the death of a patrilineal groupmate if you didn’t acknowledge the existence of the group in the first place?
Well, this is all desperately unfashionable, I realise. But these are the problems I’m interested in. I think it’s also a shame that since Schneider’s (good, interesting) criticisms of traditional kinship theory, the whole thing has just been left by the wayside, with the exception of studies of genetics and IVF (interesting stuff, too) and the House, Levi-Strauss’ concept (actually, like many things LS came up with, it had been anticipated much earlier by Dutch anthropologists, and others, mostly working in Indonesia, although his precise, flawed formulation was not) that has been developed in several directions, with little unifying thread between them, I might add.
It’s not just a problem for a certain kind of anthropologist stuck in the middle of the 20th century, but a problem for all kinds. Structural-functionalism in particular was left aside primarily due to its inability to actually explain descent – struc-func types wanted to categorise societies by the type of descent (singular) they had, when actually it’s more complicated than that. And thinking of interpretative anthropology as a theoretical approach comparable to struc-func or something along those lines seems strange – it’s conflating anthropology with ethnography, which I don’t think is all that useful or true. Archaeologists and theorists generally would disagree – Dan Sperber and Tim Ingold do, to take two prominent examples.
So, apologies for this long kudzu-spiel. I have tried to show something positive here, and unfortunately that requires a little exegesis. Of course, I’m hoping it’s familiar terrain for most. Forgive me, in any case!
How does that follow? Informants can, through their poetry, tell us about their feelings and their society. What can the poetry of the anthropologist do? Tell us about their society (ie, usually our own)? And is it really a substitute for prose explanation, or is it, as I said above, just a neat little aside?
To put it bluntly.
I largely agree with Conan on poetry in anthropology. For many scientifically-oriented anthropologists, poetry is one of those phenomena that seems quite peripheral to research in anthropology. I’m not saying that it doesn’t have value to individual anthropologists (as authors or readers or teachers), but it is hard to see how it contributes to pursuing research and building anthropological knowledge. Poetry is great, but should it be part of the discipline of anthropology?
Politics is another of those things that seems peripheral to building anthropological knowledge, yet many anthropologists insist in incorporating modern national and international politics into anthropology. I’m not making the naive argument that science is value-free, that bias and political factors are irrelevant, etc. But think of all the blatantly political resolutions that the AAA passes. Just how do those contribute to anthropological knowledge? I have come close to resigning from the AAA over these resolutions several times. The fact that I tend to agree with the politics of most of them is irrelevant – I just think they have no place in a professional scholarly organization.
Can you imagine the AAA or anthropologists adhering to the third governing principle of the American Economics Association:
The purposes of the Association are:
— The encouragement of economic research, especially the historical and statistical study of the actual conditions of industrial life.
— The issue of publications on economic subjects.
— The encouragement of perfect freedom of economic discussion. The Association as such will take no partisan attitude, nor will it commit its members to any position on practical economic questions.
I think this is another fault line of the science vs. nonscience debates in anthropology: those of us who want to limit the domain of anthropological research and discourse in order to build a body of stable knowledge, and those who want to broaden it to include all sorts of things (from politics to poetry) that serve more to “problematize” anthropological knowledge than to build it.
How sad that a post inquiring about the state of poetry within the discipline, which elicited some thoughtful replies, has been hijacked by the bitterness and misunderstanding we’ve seen lately. Clearly “Conan” didn’t comprehend Carole McGranahan’s comment, which did not call into question the merit of kinship studies or the existence of various forms of relatedness, but pointed to sets of questions which were much more central to the discipline in decades past. Clearly “Conan” has not sampled the poetry published in Anthropology and Humanism which he dismisses. If he had, he might find some of it both descriptive and analytical, advancing the reader’s understanding of the topic at hand. (This last part is what surprised my students – that poetry could do ethnographic work. They had never before considered the possibility.)
On top of it all, this thread has been assimilated to the recent “science” debacle, which would seem to draw attention to the role of aesthetics in this mess given that ethnographic poetry (and ethnographic studies of poetry) can be grounded in rigorous empirical research (that may also be reported in seemingly more conventional genres as well). Why do diverse forms of anthropological research and writing (and even peformance art) inspire such bile? Could they be indicative, rather, of a thriving (if sometimes overwhelming) diversity of scholarly activity?
Conan, “How does that follow? Informants can, through their poetry, tell us about their feelings and their society. What can the poetry of the anthropologist do?”
For the level and degree of logical fallacies abounding in this debate, that anyone that would ever propose any kind of poetry in anthropology serious need to prove that they can first do anthropology. If you wanna be a world-class jazz player, you have to learn to be a world-class musician first, and show you know all the rules and how to break them.
Poets are interested in Truth (capital T, ultimate stuff), scientists are not after Truth (rather relative, falsifiable stuff). Love, for example, can be understood as being real in 4-quadrants. The measure of neuro bloodflow change measured on an MRI is just as much what love is, as love described in a poem, or love actually felt personally, or love manifesting through socio-cultural norms and rites in marriage. All of these things are love, however, anthropology doesn’t try to describe what love actually feels like, or the ultimate truth of love and compassion, because our unit of analysis doesn’t begin until N > 2. We do the MRI stuff, the chemistry stuff, and the marriage/sex stuff, otherwise we are no longer doing the anthropology stuff. We should do what we do really well, rather than trying to be like a smart phone that does everything badly.
I regret forgetting that the AA was then co-edited by Barbara Tedlock, also a major scholar in our field.
Bile? My criticisms have been a bit blunt and not surrounded by a mass of polite words and restatements, but they haven’t been bile, “Chris” (putting someone’s name in scare-quotes is the latest informal fallacy, it seems).
And why are they not the questions that are central to the discipline now? Saying that they are the problems of interpretative anthropology is incorrect. I’m afraid – terribly, terribly afraid – that the reason kinship studies and the issue of descent and social structure are not at the centre of the discipline is because of ignorance and the decision to pursue easier, less scientific forms. That is my qualm with the entire thing we are discussing, and that is why I tried to assert the continued importance of descent as a problem.
Here is what I would like to see to assuage my doubts over poetry as a means of communication in the study of humans. If anyone can produce a poem accurately explaining the Aranda section-subsection system of kinship and marriage so that a student can understand it, then I will bow down to it. It’s hard enough to do with diagrams and lots of exegesis. If poetry really is valid, if it really is as good at elucidating problems as prose and diagrams, then surely it can handle this, especially as it is something we already know.
I’m willing to wait. I’m sure it will take a long time. And even if it’s done, I probably won’t accept that it would have a place in a journal. Tom Lehrer sang about the periodic table, but that’s not worthy of going into a chemistry journal except as a humourous adjunct. Still, it would be worth a try, and it might have some pedagogical merit.
But, as I said, poetry is emotive, metaphorical, and subjective. It’s inappropriate because it advances aesthetics instead of, or at the expense of, trying to understand the problems involved in the study of humans, ie, the purpose of the discipline in the first place. And it has precisely the problem Rick noted: it doesn’t do anthropology, by its nature. Poetry does poetry.
I’m with Rick and Michael E. Smith on this, I’m afraid. I’m also not trying to create negativity and “bile”. Not intentionally. So I apologise, again, if it comes across that way.
Saying that they are the problems of interpretative anthropology is incorrect.
Correction: *Saying that they are not the problems of interpretative anthropology is incorrect.
There are more things in anthropology and ethnography, Conan,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
Where I come from, that’s called the ‘flim-flammer’s retort’.
And I would put it like this: there are more things to which people have for little reason given the name ‘anthropology’ than I would like to see in my philosophy.
The poetry is lacking, but it’s more precise. But then, precision has always been far from the mind of poetry. Poetry is about looking smart, sensitive, educated, and witty, not about advancing knowledge.
“And why are they not the questions that are central to the discipline now? Saying that they are the problems of interpretative anthropology is incorrect. I’m afraid – terribly, terribly afraid – that the reason kinship studies and the issue of descent and social structure are not at the centre of the discipline is because of ignorance and the decision to pursue easier, less scientific forms. That is my qualm with the entire thing we are discussing, and that is why I tried to assert the continued importance of descent as a problem.”
And another thing too, why don’t we do racial phrenology anymore? Political correctness, that’s what! It certainly couldn’t have been because further work shot holes not only in our theories but in their relevance for the epiphenomena we were trying to explain.
“for the epiphenomena we were trying to explain.”
And what were those?
I don’t know about you, but I’m interested in understanding social structure. The mere fact that there are consistencies and regularities in social structures is important in understanding humans. ‘Social structure’, just like ‘language’, is an abstraction, and just as a transformational grammar doesn’t describe the idiolect of every speaker, so ‘social structure’ doesn’t describe the practice of every dweller. But just as linguists can explain many facets of the structure of language as well as how it is used in practice (due to the different specialisations that the science of linguistics has, like syntax, pragmatics, and so on), so anthropologists should be able to speak just as well on social structure – what it is, how it changes, and so on.
That, to me, is interesting. And frankly, there are some things we can talk about in the field. The reason we don’t do phrenology anymore is because it has no explanatory value for anything. But social structures do exist. They vary in certain ways and are consistent in others. Understanding them means understanding human relations generally. You might not find that interesting, but then I have to ask: what are you interested in explaining?
And how can you use poetry to do it?
As an anthro student, Conan the I-Have-a-Lot-of-Free-Time is useful to me for demonstrating that dinosaurs like himself are not yet extinct. That’s about as much use this blog has for being an “alternative” outlet.
Me? I dunno, these days I’m mostly interested in waiting rooms, queues for services, and their effect on post-migration identity. I don’t use poetry to try to explain it, but I have resorted to vignette, ie, creative renderings of ethnographic incident.
I have a friend who does kinship study, actually, so it’s not like it has disappeared. I don’t want to speak for her, but I don’t know if you’d be particularly satisfied since she treats kinship relations as strategic articulations within fields of custom and then colonial/liberal law, not as an independently existing abstract attached to a fixed ethnic identity, as you seem to. Still, I mean, people are still interested.
And you’ve got it, more or less. People don’t write 600 page tracts of kinship charts for the same reason they no longer measure lines of skulls.
“There are more things in anthropology and ethnography, Conan,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
I have yet to see anyone give any evidence, or even a strong argument, beyond something like this. Let’s make it clear than, just because someone who has studied anthropology does something, it doesn’t ipso facto become anthropology. Just because it’s been done for a while, also doesn’t make it so. We measured skulls looking for racial differences for decades, so what? If there’s one thing we’ve learned in science is that we can be wrong for a very long time, and that people really love a good narrative, regardless of it’s validity.
I just don’t trust the narratives we develop, especially my own, which is why I feel a more scientific anthropology is in order. In fact it’s the basic premise that none of us gets to be special enough to not be fallible, that science was developed. For example, Misia Landau outlined exactly how physical anthropology developed a narrative of human evolution divorced from any data, and based more on a good narrative makes my point. http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=TrGM_Qekc70C&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=evolution+propp+narrative+anthropology&ots=QDVp223BSJ&sig=y7fHVchR9iNExlBsH0Bi8VgLNtI#v=onepage&q&f=false
It’s interesting that she did this using humanistic methods, which kind of tells me that others are better at it than we are, and that a division of intellectual labor is called for. I think this should be required reading for undergrad, which it was for me, to help inoculate us. Behind all of this is the belief that there are those of us who are better. Those of us who can intuit what’s actually going on, and that it was all those idiots that couldn’t get by on discursive induction alone that science was developed. This leads back to the fact that this is about power. The power of who gets to ‘get it’, and those that just can’t. It’s my contention that no just power or right exists for any of us.
Will someone please answer Conan’s only point, “Here is what I would like to see to assuage my doubts over poetry as a means of communication in the study of humans. If anyone can produce a poem accurately explaining the Aranda section-subsection system of kinship and marriage so that a student can understand it, then I will bow down to it.”
If you cannot do this, then where is your argument coming from? Wanting the world to be different than it is, and acting from that need is magical thinking. I’d like to restate Conan here as well in saying that the reason for poetry being used, and the rest of this stuff, is not because of any validity, or internal logic, or any utility at all other than the fact that, “is because of ignorance and the decision to pursue easier, less scientific forms.” That’s it. I think it’s simply easier and more fun to do it the other way. Let’s call a spade a spade, and let’s not pretend that post facto rationalizations are anything other than just wanting to get paid to do something more fun and easier for the individual doing it. It’s also materially based, because it wouldn’t be done if someone could get others to pay for their hobby, and the anger developed out of this is largely a fear of this special right maybe being taken away. If ya’ll can’t explain the value of it, which you have yet to do, then why do it?
Who here went to school with a student or peer that did this stuff, or advocated it, that was just brilliant at the harder, traditional stuff?
Rick, Conan, there is, I fear, one glaring error in your analysis, i.e., the assumption that writing poetry is easier than doing science. In making this claim, you do what many do, mistake undergraduate course work for professional competence. The math-phobic will find basic science courses harder than literature courses in which they deal only with words, instead of words and numbers, and the looseness of interpretation makes the sweet spot for achieving high grades a fatter target. After graduation, however, the journeyman scientist has many opportunities to contribute to the advance of knowledge using established methods. The poet wannabe is in a winner-take-all competition in which only extraordinary talents survive and the clues to what will work and what won’t are not easy to find. The true conclusion for anthropology is not that the discipline has no room for poetry. It is, instead, that, judging by the writing in our journals and plain common sense, very few who wish to be poets will produce anything memorable.
Indeed, John. There is no need to go out of the way to marginalize something that, by its difficulty, is not exactly a threat to the more common forms of analytic writing. It is not that I am a great advocate of scholastic poetry. I just think the intensity directed at it is evidence of privileging the appearance of a thing over the thing itself. Just as James Scott discusses the appearance vs. the reality of order in urban planning, so too are we talking about a fetishism for the appearance of intellectual rigor as, well, looking-like-physics.
Or, in Rick’s case, castigating us for not being unbiased enough to notice the Great Welfare Conspiracy Against America.
“It is, instead, that, judging by the writing in our journals and plain common sense, very few who wish to be poets will produce anything memorable.”
Brilliant! Funny cause it’s true. You truly injected some class into the joint. And, on that note I will bow out, because I don’t think there’s anything else to say unless someone decides to utilize anything other than ad hominem attacks, and talking about how great the use of poetry to convey in a clear and parsimonious way to present analysis. Perhaps even a link of it being successfully implemented, or a clear argument as to why from someone that’s found it to be better than prose, after successfully doing it in prose.
Andrew, “Or, in Rick’s case, castigating us for not being unbiased enough to notice the Great Welfare Conspiracy Against America.”
What are you talking about? Conspiracy? There are some very interesting facts, which I can cite through a lot of primary and secondary research conducted in actual low-income areas in the US, and some of those interesting facts pertain to the welfare system. If you’d like I could send you some of my research, which could elucidate the effectiveness of using prose to present facts and information. Or, I could write you a poem. Which would you prefer? I know that I’d appreciate it if you put your response in the form of a Haiku.
It is depressing how, these days, fundamentalist purification is allowed to stand for argument, and absolutists rule everywhere. Anthropology is either hard core Science or it is nothing but wishy washy quivering in the face of truth claims! Poetry in anthropology can only be used if it is able to perform complex kinship analysis!(witchfinder’s logic that one).
You guys do know that you don’t have to perform the most extreme caricature of the side you favour right? I mean, maybe you like formal Debate rather than Dialogue, but still, would it really hurt to countenance a view other than your own defend-to-the-death immediate gut reaction? Are Bones and Booth our only possible role models? Black and White forever!
Maybe next we can debate photography (if it can’t properly distinguish cross cousins from parallel cousins then, well …).
“It is depressing how, these days, fundamentalist purification is allowed to stand for argument, and absolutists rule everywhere.”
Is this anything more than the pot calling the kettle black? There seems to be plenty of fundamentalism on both extremes of this debate. At one pole are those who may think that only science tells us anything worth knowing about humanity. At the other are those who insist that science has nothing worth knowing to tell us about humanity. The problem in most cases is, as C.S. Snow pointed out a long time ago, that while scientists are literate and often deeply engaged in the arts, humanists tend to be math-phobic and terrified that the numerate are out to force them to think in ways that they find terribly stressful. It is when they pretend that numbers don’t matter at all that the scientists get annoyed.
Do you really think the Renaissance Man is any less an endangered species than the four field anthropologist? All of my evidence is anecdotal, but here goes. The small liberal arts school at which my significant other labors includes a sophomore seminar that covers a number of late 19th century–early 20th century canonical authors (including Darwin, Marx, and Woolf). The sections are taught entirely by social science and humanities faculty who would certainly love some help with the heavy lifting. I can’t say whether the math and hard science faculty are judged incapable of handling the material by the administrators or if they self-select out of the program but they do not take part as instructors.
Second piece of anecdotal evidence is all the love so many self-identified scientists have for Richard Dawkins. I would think that a literate lover of the arts would see that the guy has very little sociological imagination.
Snow was not asserting that every scientist is a Renaissance man. He was simply pointing to the fact that, given the normal routines of higher education, the scientist is more likely to have learned enough to take an intelligent interest in the arts than the humanist is to have learned enough to take an intelligent interest in science. And why, after all, should a scientist want to participate in a sophomore seminar whose texts include Darwin, Marx and Woolf but not Humboldt, Mach or Einstein?
Allow me to recommend, in a self-serving sort of way, a thread I started at OAC called Taxonomies, Topographies and Baseless Fears of Failure.
I agree with you in principle John, but I just haven’t seen any evidence of the science phobic humanists here. I fear the CP Snow thing is just another cliche. I advocate moving beyond such glib characterisations.
Damn, I thought HTML was allowed. The link just mentioned is
http://openanthcoop.ning.com/forum/topics/taxonomies-topographies-and
Well, you know, the humanists were not the folks whose ox was gored in the event that started this fracas. But, what the hell, I think that we are as close to agreement as we are likely to get here.
Just let me note, in passing, that I alluded to C.S. Snow precisely because the model is a cliché and thus likely to be understood by a wide range of readers. In real life, I am a fan of the science popularizers that John Brockman, the founder of Edge, labeled the third culture: folks like John McPhee, Stephen Gould, Carl Sagan, Michiko Kakutani, or Albert-László Barabási, who make science accessible and appealing without dumbing it down. If you want to read a beautifully written book that will take you close to the cutting edge of stuff that anthropologists should be interested in, allow me to recommend John H. Miller and Scott E. Page (2007) Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. A very smart book, indeed, in every sense of the term.
I am largely sympathetic to Conan’s interests in kinship, and to scientific methodologies in general, and am skeptical about some alternative, and more creative, approaches to anthropology. But Conan does not give poetry its due and too narrowly interprets the the aims of anthropology.
Conan asks whether poetry can be used to “accurately explain[] the Aranda section-subsection system of kinship” and then goes on to say that it cannot because “poetry is emotive, metaphorical, and subjective.” The answer to Conan’s question is that, yes, poetry can explain complicated things like kinship systems. Don’t believe me? You can read the poem Moduli Spaces of Riemann Surfaces by Frances Kirwan. http://www.uz.ac.zw/science/maths/zimaths/73/topology.html
Personally I don’t think its good poetry, but that’s not really the point.
I have more sympathy when Conan argues that poetry is “inappropriate because it advances aesthetics instead of, or at the expense of, trying to understand the problems involved in the study of humans” for the simple fact that the aesthetic demands of poetry, and other forms of creative writing, may place demands that are counter to the goal of clear explanation.
That said, there is another problem with the whole argument: namely that if poetry is not terribly good at describing such things as kinship systems, which are highly structured systems, then it can’t be good for any other legitimate purpose anthropologists might have. But this is wrong in a few ways. For example, any purely linguistic description of how to tie complicated knots is doomed to be inadequate. Does that mean that linguistic descriptions are inadequate for other things we might like to describe? of course not.
What might poetry be good for? I am sure that anthropologist poets are better positioned to say, but I cannot help but think of Thomas Nagel’s argument that purely physicalist descriptions of what goes on in the brain of a bat (mouse, human, cow, etc.) is insufficient to answer the question of what it is *like* to be a bat (mouse, human, cow, etc.)
If anthropology sees at least part of its mission as answering the question, “What is it *like* to be X (in situations Y) when etc. etc. etc.” then one might have legitimate doubts about more conventional approaches. And if the aim of a piece of anthropological writing is to induce in the reader emotional mental states empathetic to their objects, then maybe (and just maybe) an approach that is at its core about aesthetics is the right course to take. Of course that it is the right course is perhaps a question better left to scientists to evaluate, rather than to the poets.
I will end with a quote attributed to Socrates. “I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean.”
Jacob, bravo.
I’ve always thought Audre Lorde’s essay “Poetry is not a luxury” is a important anthropological lens on how poetry can be understood. Worth a read.
http://is.gd/jbCia
“I am sure that anthropologist poets are better positioned to say, but I cannot help but think of Thomas Nagel’s argument that purely physicalist descriptions of what goes on in the brain of a bat (mouse, human, cow, etc.) is insufficient to answer the question of what it is *like* to be a bat (mouse, human, cow, etc.) ”
Since I already made that argument using the 4-quadrant description of how love can be understood in various ways, it seem that this argument is circling the drain of ignoring each other. Basically, the answer to this is, no shit. No one is denying that, but so what? When did anthropology expand to encompass all sciences, humanities and philosophies? We could take this to infinite regression. Are we to operationalize and explain what it is to eat a taco on Saturday morning with a hang over from Friday night in Austin, Texas? The only way to “know” that is to experience it, and that’s not our job. This is what is called “confusing the map for the territory.”
A biologist can classify the genus, family, phylum, etc… of an apple. They can lay out in detail the chemical process that unfold in sequence to bring out the apple, and a chemist can tell me the exact chemical make up of the apple, but the only way to actually know an apple in human terms is to eat one. Poetry at best only half murders direct experience. We could go on to easily show that the apple cannot be separated from the sun, and then we could talk about Nagarjuna’s (2nd century Indian philosopher) Tetralemma, of showing how a thing is neither what it is, what it isn’t, what it is and isn’t, or what it is and isn’t.
This debate is merely based on a category mistake. Ultimate truth cannot be spoken about or written about, which is why Zen Koans make no sense to the rational mind. The only thing that’s helped us understand how a cat or bat experience the world is through science. It wasn’t poetry or anything other than scientist that understood the reality of echo location. The only other way is to be a cat or a bat, and good luck with that. Understanding that nothing one can say will every express actual experience, Katagiri Roshi famously said, “you have to say something,” anyway. I only advocate for a more scientific anthropology, because I actually understand science, and I get all the other shit everyone’s talking about. I think what’s not being understood is that understanding all that in no way negates my point. We barely understand much of the science that we do on a daily basis, which itself is based on unproven primal axioms; so what? You flip the switch and the light comes on. If you wanna wait until we know exactly everything there is to know about why the light comes on, or what light is, or how the switch does what it does, then you’ve condemned yourself to sit in the dark.
@Rick. Apples & oranges, which is one reason why this thread has been so frustrating. Not to say that your characterizations of science and of our discipline are adequate, but you’re confusing method and genre.
I’ve never really understood the desire or, I guess, the stakes that people seem to put on defining anthropology in an either/or sort of way. While I fall more on the humanities/interpretive/descriptive side for my own research, I certainly read and appreciate more scientific stuff, and I think the discipline would suffer from the loss of either, and has space for both.
I haven’t read much in the way of ethnographic poetry myself, but there are places in my own writing that I can see a potential benefit to using poetry, or perhaps some other more metaphorical/symbolic writing. I study matrilineal inheritance, kinship, and law among the Asante of Kumasi (the site of Fortes’ Ashanti Social Survey). My descriptions of inheritance law and the history surrounding its development, for example, are certainly straight-ahead prose. But there are elements of performance that are central to kinship that I think would be hard to convey in simple academic prose. I have struggled with how to describe the influence of drumming at a funeral, or the impact of the colour scheme.
“Oneness” has emerged for me as an important organizing principle for kinship, one which is apparent in the decent-structures described by Fortes, but also in the more fluid, metaphorical, and spontaneous organizations of belonging that are part of the broader experiences and meanings of kinship in Kumasi. I have wondered how to convey this sort of “oneness” to an audience who associates oneness with conformity and whose metaphors for it include things like the Borg and synchronized swimming. How do you convey the impact of a group of people who are displaying oneness without synchronicity and who exhibit plenty of spontaneous individuality within broad boundaries of conformity? I don’t think poetry is the only way, but I refuse to dismiss the idea that it might have value for this type of problem in at least some contexts for at least some audiences. I fail to see the harm that could come from using poetry to convey the experience of performance, and indeed, I think potentially a greater understanding of the drier aspects of law and inheritance might be possible as a result. I don’t see why there couldn’t be a valued place for such ruminations alongside a variety of other ethnographic and descriptive writing which is suited to what the author is trying to describe.