But what I find really interesting in Strong’s post (Rex if you want meta blog comments take a look at this) is the way in which he slides between physical and intellectual “posessions.” The books we own are possessions in many ways: physical objects, cultrual capital, and also ideas which shape our very sense of identity.

Reading about the early/late periods of various scholars I sometimes wonder to what extent it makes sense to impose a single stable identity on to them. I know I myself am often overly influenced by the last (good) book I read …

To fully embrace rejection of the omniscient observer implicit in what Geertz, speaking of Evans-Pritchard, called his “African transparencies” does not, however, imply that all perspectives are equal. And, speaking personally, I have never found a satisfactory substitute for the basics of scientific method, a collective and on-going conversation in which participants systematically compare hypotheses and data and make a point of going out of their way to search for falsifying evidence.

I have learned through my own experience that the circumstances of fieldwork may make it impossible to collect data that admit of hypothesis testing in a rigorous statistical sense; also that working hypotheses may take the form of stories instead of mathematical formulas. But if, in the field or in writing up, I cannot be Isaac Newton or even Charles Darwin, I can still try to be at least Columbo or Hercule Poirot, reserving judgment and asking what the evidence tells me.

I’m deeply skeptical of the possibility of projects which correct the biases of subjected situadeness in order to arrive at objective truth — as if we aren’t god but could triangulate her True Location with the proper calibration, and that enough reflexivity will allow us to work through the distortions introduced by our subjectivity such that we might find her. Possible or not, I’m skeptical about the value of the exercise at all, even if its couched in a ‘we may not reach the destination, but it’s the journey that matters’ sort of idiom.

Strong’s sense of being, as Marx (or was it Bob Marley?) put it, possessed by his possessions actually points towards a different problematic that I find more interesting — not of overcoming the biases inherent in our personal identity, but the terrifying sense that we don’t have a personal identity, that it is an accomplishment tenuously kept in place by things as trivial as tshirts and tchotckes. And _that_ sense of the vulnerability and changeability — rather than the strength — of identity is born of the experience of dislocation that comes from fieldwork rather than the introspection that comes from a clinical encounter. I think this is particularly true of working, as we both did, in Papua New Guinea, where people very much have a sense of being composed of other things and people.

The implication for fieldwork is, for me, nicely expressed in Mikhail Bakhtin’s Comment in Response to a Query from Novy Mir, where Bakhtin remarks that all cultural understanding involves dialogue between individuals who speak from different positions and perspectives. Or, to use more everyday terms, none of us sees ourselves as others see us. None of us is God, whose perspective reveals us as we truly are, in total, precise detail. Thus, ethnographic understanding emerges, like all human understanding, from conversation, in which multiple perspectives are required to even approach the truth.

The serious questions of ethnographic method all, then, have to do with what we, as individual anthropologists, bring to the conversations that constitute our fieldwork. One of those questions surely concerns the biases generated by the issues and experiences that have shaped our own lives, as well as those generated by the theories and methods we use in the field. In this regard, I agree with the psychoanalysts, who demand rigorous self-analysis as a prelude and complement to the practice of their profession.

But that is enough of how this anthropologist would answer Orange’s question. What do others have to say?

I wonder how is with the others: Has the anthropologist become kind of “natural observer” or has “the natural observer” (or “the observer by nature”) become the anthropologist?

Again, you are misreading me. I do not regard living life as an intellectual as an addiction. Au contraire, I find it a great and largely healthy pleasure. I use “addiction” only to refer to certain conversational habits, which, while they may be perfectly fine in conversation with other anthropologists, may be dysfunctional in the classroom or in trying to communicate anthropological insights to people unfamiliar with the names we drop or the theories to which we allude. I am simply responding to Strong’s remark,

These pop up in our everyday speech in odd ways, sometimes amusing, sometimes surreal. They recreate (and test) academic habitus.

and noting that the habitus in question may sometimes be a barrier to communication with those outside our academic tribe.

Why do I care? I don’t think I’m mistaken to believe that our ability to do the research we want to do, reflect on what we have learned, and pass it on in classrooms depends, however much we may hate it, on the largess of legislators and corporate patrons who need good stories to persuade them that what we do is valuable. Speaking to a larger public in terms that public can appreciate is no longer an option to be despised but an urgent necessity on which our survival as a field may depend.

That said, could we perhaps shift our attention to the latter half of Strong’s post and that vivid account of stripping away the detritus that once seemed so important to self-definition and moving to that ultraclean, modernist space in which Strong is now living? What to you make of that?

John

If Strong were complaining about being a bad teacher, a poor copywriter, or unable to get a popular book published then I can see where he would be coming from. There’s nothing ironic about him not being interested (in this post) in doing the sort of stuff _you_ care about.

I say this not because I feel the need to defend Strong (he can do that himself) but because of this assumption that actively living life as an intellectual is an ‘addiction’ that can, thankfully, be ‘overcome’ and that I or anyone else must automatically be a bad teacher because they are wrapped up in what they do, as you imply. How does the fact that people are not good at teaching when they try it for the first time come to be labeled a problem with ‘academic habitus’ rather than ‘inexperience’ and why is it that Strong’s biography is being figured here as a recapitulation of yours?

Slow down a bit. I’ve got nothing against name-dropping while boozing with fellow anthropologists, nor against passion for the discipline. I enjoy both. Still, as a field, we now tend, I believe, to communicate less well than we could–in part because of the habitus Strong describes.

The good news is that the habit(us) can be overcome. My first year I sucked as a teacher. My second year I was better. By the third I was getting to be pretty good.

Still, it wasn’t until Kazuhiko Kimoto, the senior creative director who hired me as a copywriter, beat me over the head a few times that I truly became conscious of the need to get out of my own head and speak to my audience, offering new ideas but starting with language they understand.

So, while I’ve got no problem with the proposition that jargon and in-group references are ways in which members of groups distinguish themselves from others (one of those “No, duh” things you learn in Sociology 101), I can’t help seeing the irony when people too addicted to this habitus turn around and complain because others don’t listen to them.

John

Whether this habit is obsessively reflexive and irritatingly self-referential, or interestingly enlightened and productively analytical, we tend to live our lives amidst an invisible but ever present series of citations. These pop up in our everyday speech in odd ways, sometimes amusing, sometimes surreal. They recreate (and test) academic habitus.

To what extent do they also isolate us from students and others, outside our professional tribe, that we aspire to influence?

My own mental midden includes the memory of my first year of college teaching, and how I filled my lectures with allusions to names and theories that, in retrospect, meant nothing to the students I was trying to interest in anthropology. It wasn’t that the names weren’t deserving of respect or the theories lacking in relevance to my students’ personal concerns….but my fresh out of grad school self was still unaware that mentioning something “we all know” may be a semantically null act unless we take the time to establish the relevance for the particular set of others with whom we are trying to communicate.