Having written a post that denigrates a strawman version of cultural studies I thought it time to write a post to infuriate members of my own discipline.
Let’s try this hypothesis: cultural studies is to now what anthropology was twenty or thirty years ago.
It seems to me that starting in that period — and continuing now into the present — anthropology has always been willing to take on board people whose backgrounds are varied and often nonacademics. Peace corp wouldn’t let you re-up? Bicycled across Africa after getting your degree in literature from Oberlin? Maybe anthropology is for you. This is — to steal a trope from Eric Overmeyer’s play On The Verge — the “I’ve been to Burma!” trope in anthropology.
An adjunct to this is that it seems to me that many anthropologists emphasize ‘field methods’ as a superior method of understanding the human, but when pushed what this amounts to is a tremendous faith in the importance of ‘hanging out’ or — this is apparently an improvement — ‘deep hanging out’. Usually this is accompanied by a critique of the false objectivity of quantitative methods. Or, in some cases, of ‘methods’ altogether.
Finally, it seems to me that some anthropologists consider the ultimate end of anthropology to be 1) the constant, on-going criticism of the race concept (preferably that version of it that existed between 1900 and 1930) and 2) repeatedly telling people that other ways of life are Ok and we should just all relax about it.
Compare this now to the ‘cultural studies’ strawman we discussed in my last post on this topic. Where do cultural studies Ph.D.s come from? I do not know, but I doubt that graduate programs in cultural studies worry that they are getting applicants who lack rigorous training in social science at the undergraduate level. I have this vague idea many are artists or musicians or former ravers or activists whose out of control connoisseurship of their topics drove them into the arms of the academy.
Equally, as we have all already established, the biggest beef that people have with ‘cultural studies’ is the lack of rigor in fieldwork. And not in particular we have also mentioned a general impatience amongst cultural studies types with concerns with ‘objecitivity’ and ‘rigor’ and so forth since these seemed, to them, to be illusions of objectivity that needed to be deconstructed, not adhered to.
Finally, we have also noticed that cultural studies (or our strawman of it) tends to have a political reflex — to valorize under-valorized forms (typically of popular culture) and deconstruct authority.
So in terms of the pool that it draws its students from, its preferred (lack of) method, and its semi-politicized agenda it seems to me that anthropology and cultural studies actually have quite a lot in common. Sure, we prefer ‘hanging out’ to reading fashion mags as our anti-scientistic qualitative method. And anthropologists feel far more comfortable denouncing racism in the name of science and truth in away that may make some cultural studies people cringe. But when it comes to cultural studies and anthropology I believe, with Walt Disney, that what we have in common far outweighs what separates us.
I reckon that anthropologists feel a bit uneasy about cultural studies because they are beating us at our own game — thriving now bright young things from indie film festivals and the world music diaspora, in many ways cultural studies offers a politicized, hip, and not-too-demanding discipline which accepts with open arms all interesting people. When this infuriates anthropologists, I’d like to claim here, it is not because cultural studies is some sort of nightmare inversion of what we do. It is because they are out-competing us.
How does that sound as a hypothesis?
Ouch. But, since we’re offering up straw men, let me point readers to another (brilliant) demolishing of a straw man version of “Cult Studs,” from Thomas Frank (the entire PDF is available free at Prickly-Paradigm Press here: http://www.prickly-paradigm.com/paradigm5.pdf).
Here’s Frank:
“As the ‘90s unfolded, it soon became clear that the
signature scholarly gesture of our time was not some
warmed over aestheticism, but a populist celebration
of the power and “agency” of audiences and fans, of
their ability to evade the grasp of the makers of mass
culture, and of their talent for transforming just
about any bit of cultural detritus into an implement
of rebellion. Although cultural populism appeared
everywhere in academia, its best known and loudest
proponents were the various celebrities of the rapidly
growing discipline known as cultural studies—the
“cult studs,” to use the phrase of one canny reviewer.
Like Gans, the cult studs tended to be unremittingly
hostile to the elitism and hierarchy that older ways of
understanding popular culture seemed to imply; they
tended to see audience “agency” lurking in every
consumer decision. They were able to find seeds of
rebellion and resistance in almost any of the cultureproducts once scoffed at as “lowbrow,” and accordingly they turned their attention from the narrow
canon of “highbrow” texts to the vast prairies of
popular culture. British academic Jim McGuigan has
described this central article of the cult-stud’s faith as a formulaic “populist reflex,” a tendency to judge any thought, proposal, or text by this overarching standard:
What does this imply about the power of the
people? Accounts of popular culture in which shoppers
twit shopkeepers, say, or sitcom viewers think
subversive thoughts, or fans of boy bands grow suspicious
of patriarchy are to be celebrated and affirmed
for their democratic implications. On the other
hand, accounts of popular culture in which audiences
are tricked, manipulated, or otherwise made to act
against their best interests are automatically
“‘elitist,’” as the distinguished cult stud Lawrence
Grossberg once put it (in a line echoed in almost
every cultural studies essay or book I have ever read),
because they assume that audiences are “necessarily
silent, passive, political and cultural dopes.””
Of course, some anthropology can be criticized for this same style of cultural populism, that- despite a self-styled radicalism- is more-or-less congenial to a reduction of politics to consumerism or, at best, to creative art or music appreciation.
But this remains a straw man. Plenty of good work goes on both as cultural studies and as anthropology. Like many contributers to the last post, I have rarely found cultural studies as revealing of surprising things about humans as I find good and rigorous ethnography, but it’s obvious that there’s good work to be read in both disciplines.
So, onto the actual content of Rex’s post:
1) I think the general suggestion that the (clearly mutual) antagonism between sociocultural anthro and cult studs has more to do with disciplinary similarities than differences is right. We compete for many of the same very limited sources of prestige, funds, students, institutional support, etc.
2) I think that it’s absolutely wrong that they are beating us at our own game. While they may have greater hip-creds in some circles, I think that their institutional position is generally more precarious, they are more likely to get dismissed as producing postmodern mumbo-jumbo, etc.
I was sitting next to… a girl the other day in one of my anthropology lectures – and I’ve seen her before in one of the courses – and as we chat she goes “yeah, I’m doing my degree in Cult. Studies – Anthropology is too difficult.” “Hmmm, really?” I ask. “Yes.” She says. “Well…” (studying in Scotland)
You’ve almost convinced me – it’s a wonderful thing that we have cultural studies to soak up these (entirely hypothetical) eejits so that we never have to deal with them ourselves!
Instead of a straw man, I’d like to offer a serious alternative. Last week I attended my first Sunbelt conference, the annual meeting of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA). My late-60s graduate school training left me with the assumption that quantitative is to qualitative research as hypothesis testing is to exploratory research. Here I found people using quantitative methods as tools for exploring social realities in a way highly complementary, in my view, to ethnographic research. This meeting was both intellectually and socially exhilarating. Why? Here is what I wrote on anthro-L.
——–
First, the participants were an incredibly diverse group from multiple
countries and disciplines. That diversity, I have since learned, has
been a feature of the group since its inception. In an article titled
“Networking Network Analysts: How INSNA (the International Network for
Social Network Analysis Came to Be”: Connections 23(1):20-31 (c)2000
INSNA, founder Barry Wellman writes,
“I asked many of my North American and European connections to form a
legitimating, recruiting Advisory Board, with a balance between
American and nonAmerican scholars and between disciplines. (In
practice, this meant that American sociologists were proportionately
under represented in comparison to their membership numbers.)”
Second, what Wellman wrote in 2000 was still very much in evidence in
2008: “Expectancy was in the air: a feeling that we were onto
something new and important, and that our time had come.” The
diversity that could very easily have shattered the meeting’s session
along national or disciplinary lines was offset by a shared vision,
that explicit, mathematical, modeling of networks of social (also
natural and semantic) relationships reveals something important about
the world neglected by conventional typological or purely narrative
theorizing. The original models were familiar to most of those
present, but little time or effort was devoted to defending them. I
saw a lot of extension and refinement instead of demoralizing,
destructive critique.
Third, these meetings were highly egalitarian in both mood and
practice. Wellman writes that, while forming the network,
“I tried to keep things loose and informal: I called it a ‘Network’
(instead of a ‘Society’ or ‘Association’), I styled myself
‘Coordinator’ rather than ‘President’ or ‘Chairman’ and _Connections_
was most definitely not a journal and much more than a newsletter.”
The focus was on “the express purpose of spreading news about research
and people.”
That spirit was still much in evidence. Graduate students, senior
scholars, government and corporate employees roamed the halls and
filled the sessions with spirited debate, notably unmarked by
deference to status. Technical discussions spilled out of sessions,
with a strong focus on “How exactly did you do that?”, how
data-collection issues were addressed, and which software was used. A
regular part of presentations were pointers to online sources for the
slides and other materials used. On the social side, there were no
private departmental or program parties restricted to those in the
know. The hospitality suite, with free booze flowing freely, was open
to all from 9:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. Special touches included the
distribution of program, abstracts, and a labeled version of the
T-shirt design (a network diagram of connections between the authors
presenting papers) on the 1-gigabyte flash memory sticks distributed
to every participant.
Diversity, shared vision, egalitarian give and take and a real sense
of community: Can anyone here point me to meetings with similar
characteristics?
Rex-
I think I agree with your basic point, which is that anthropology ultimately ought to stay an open and self-reflexive big-D discipline.
But it’s worth keeping in mind that in some other disciplines (which shall go unnamed) there has been serious and sustained resistance to the incorporation of cultural studies, as a method, and that people have had books trashed and careers ruined in the process. In short, this has happened when cultural studies really was seen as a serious political threat, for example when there was a convergence of ideological interests between funding agencies and an ‘publicly engaged’ and conservative academic establishment. This was not a matter of people just not liking squishiness, it was active policing of the discipline in order to assure that certain things could not continue to be said.
For people in that political situation, I’d like to think anthropology could be an alternative source of conceptual rigor and a place to go to.
And to be a little romantic about it, isn’t that what anthropology has been historically, a place to go to after getting kicked out? Think about the relationship of people like Robertson-Smith to theology and comparative religion, for example.
The openness of anthropology is one of its most attractive features. But to limit that openness to the cultural domain in which cultural anthropologists encounter cultural studies isn’t, to me, open enough. One of the virtues of the classic four-fields definition of the field was the way it positioned anthropology as a bridge discipline, linking the sciences and humanities, spanning both sides of Snow’s two cultures.
Now, moreover, anthropologists inhabit a world in which, as Marcus and Fischer put it, “We step into a stream of already existing representations produced by journalists, prior anthropologists, historians, creative writers, and of course the subjects of study themselves.” And, as Clifford Geertz points out in the introduction to _Islam Observed_, it is in conversation with other disciplines that what we do discovers its value.
In the case of my own current research, social network analysis provides the tools required to capture, dissect and visualize large masses of highly structured data–the credits that accompany each of the roughly 600 ads that make it into each addition of the Tokyo Copywriters Club annual. Algorithms incorporated in a program called Pajek (Slovenian for “spider”) identify key figures in the networks of creatives who developed the winning ads. Google searches (and my own growing library) reveal that many are prolific authors, in effect colleagues, whose ideas about what they do shaped the winning teams and how they went about their work. Now I must turn historian and read what they have written, taking into account their interests and axes to grind. All this is preparation for ethnography, a series of depth interviews (possibly life histories) to probe more deeply into how they are thinking and feeling now. Science, history, ethnography, each could be done by itself and be the worse for it. Together they contribute to thick description and possibly more–some deeper understanding of the world in which this anthropologist is interested.
I don’t know about “cultural studies” but the profession has long ago ceded “culture” to an nth derivative of it.
http://13c4.wordpress.com/2007/11/28/anthropology-climate-change-war-environment-1/ “In fact, there is no longer a need to go to anthropology. The new anthropology– in business, medicine, social services, and even academia– is now the derivative stakeholders and community-based participatory research (CBPR). Motorola, ATT, and IBM long-ago took over “culture change”. Even lawyers are recognized as better qualified than anthropologists–”
“I do not know, but I doubt that graduate programs in cultural studies worry that they are getting applicants who lack rigorous training in social science at the undergraduate level.” – That’s right. You do not know…
Hmm… why would call yourself “Anti-Rex” when the entire substance of your comment is that you agree with me?
BTW, my claim was just this: that whatever is politically at stake in cultural studies actually doesn’t have much to with ‘science’ and ‘discipline’ as anthropology has defined them.
What sometimes isn’t recognized in anthropology is that cultural studies has hit much more resistance when it has tried to deal with geopolitics and other forms of ‘hard power.’
I realize that this is not the common wisdom. I’ll back the claim up if anybody cares to take me up on it.
Matthew, allow me to be deliberately provocative. Anyone who can write ” ‘science’ and ‘discipline’ as anthropology has defined them” provides a vivid demonstration of what is the matter with too much of cultural studies, lack of basic historical street smarts. Debates over definitions of both science and discipline are far older and wider than anthropology–arenas in which anthropologists must confront and cope with what non-anthropologists have to say– and continue to be so live within the field that the odds of finding any two anthropologists who agree on the definitions is slim. The implicit “cultural studies” analysis turns out to be nothing more than vulgar stereotyping, self-righteous but unenlightening.
If I’m interpreting what you say correctly, you’re saying that anthropology is not well positioned to offer definitions of science and discipline because it has not constituted itself as such in the eyes of others. That may well be true. But I meant “science and discipline as anthropology has constituted them” in a rather narrow sense, as strictly the form of authority which comes out of the fieldwork encounter.
But the problem is that this kind of authority counts for less and less politically. For example, I really don’t think it would matter to a cultural essentialist such as Samuel Huntington if you claimed that his concept of culture was empirically wrong or illegitimate, because in his discipline culture is really just a defined independent variable in a model. Its extensive definition is explicitly subordinate to its intensive definition.
But say you tried to identify Samuel Huntington as a representative of a certain kind of class interest. That might be ‘vulgar stereotyping,’ but you could definitely do it plausibly. It would just depend on how robust your definition of social class was.
No, you are not interpreting what I say correctly. My intention is to say that anyone who makes the statement you did has not taken the elementary scholarly precaution of studying up a bit on the history of science and scholarly disciplines and is, thus, prone to make absurd pronouncements. I did say that I was being deliberately provocative.
OK, what am I missing about the history of science, and why is what I am saying absurd?
Anyway, in the intellectual framework with which I am comfortable, ethnography is not science. Ethnography is data gathering. Ethnology, the scientific part of cultural anthropology, produces testable generalizations about the human condition and tests them against the data that ethnography provides. Ethnography is scientific (not science per se) only when the data is collected in a way that makes it useful for ethnology.
Do note, however, that this is only a framework. I am well aware that, in practice, the actual results of ethnography may more closely resemble a midden than a spreadsheet. The ethnologist must then assemble and test her generalizations in the manner of an archeologist assembling fragments of evidence and doing the best she can with them.
If prevented by the nature of the evidence from conventional experimental or statistical hypothesis-testing, she can still (in the manner of Hercule Poirot or Columbo) attend to detail, position and sequence to refine her ideas and rule out invalid notions. To me, that’s serious scholarship.
Some cultural studies do seem serious to me; much of cultural studies doesn’t. The same is also true, of course, of a lot of anthropology. A genre I find particularly tedious is the cookie-cutter application of “theory” in a “Gee whiz, I saw it,too” mode supported by poorly told anecdote.
I’m forgiving if the tale is well told, for the pleasure of the reading and the suggestion of new insight. But will the insight stand up? Then, to me, it is time for that serious scholarship business, ideally science. A personal opinion, casually offered? The word for that is “piffle.”
Matthew, what you’re missing is that debates over the nature of science and academic disciplines take place in an arena much larger and wider than either anthropology or cultural studies or even both taken together. Concerning science, there are now huge literatures in both philosophy and history of science and a growing body of work in Science and Technology Studies. Two of my favorites, though now much dated I’m sure, are Alfred North Whitehead,_Science and the Modern World_ and E.A. Burtt _The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science_. There is also a growing literature on academic disciplines. There is a good discussion and bibliography in Immanuel Wallerstein “The Heritage of Sociology, The Promise of Social Science” (http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/iwpradfp.htm).
On reflection, my point in writing this article was two-fold:
1) to compare cultural studies today to anthropology in the late 60s and early 70s (this was the hidden agenda marked by the reference to the Peace Corp)
2) To point out that anthropology actually acts in bad faith a lot of the time, or that it wants to have it both ways when it comes to ‘science’ and ‘rigor’ — a fact that cultural studies’s radicalization of anthropology’s anti-scientific (scientistic?) impulses brings to the fore.
3) One way out of this dilemma (as mentioned in the first post) would be to seize the example of rigorous humanism (to use a phrase loosely) as a way out of the connundrum, since such approaches decouple ‘rigor’ and ‘seriousness’ from ‘science’ and ‘generalization’
As a former grad student in anthropology (Chicago) who agonized before switching to Cultural Studies, I have to point out that your genealogy is lacking. CS is a strange and undisciplined thing in the US because it was a British invention (if 2 full-time faculty can even be said to comprise a “School” of thought, i.e. Birmingham School, BCCC.) CS is less a discipline than an interdisciplinary grouping these days in the US, but some of the more appealing things about is that it is much better at adapting than anthropology and lacks the baggage anthro still carries from being the handmaiden of colonialism. Some of the folks doing CS lack method and rigor, but for anyone who bothered to attend a panel at AAA this year, certainly the same thing can be said of a large number of anthropologists as well.
My knee doesn’t jerk very much but the “handmaiden of colonialism” cliché can bring it out of me. It conjures up the notion that the earliest professional anthropologists were hell-bent on figuring out how to most efficiently steal native land and extinguish indigenous identity. Yes, early ethnographers did tend to pick up their pay checks from a government agency, but does that mean they were in collusion? By that logic any research funded by a Fulbright is suspect. Perhaps graduate study funded by federal student aid is done in the service of the US government, as well.
The historical accuracy of the phrase is an annoyance, but even more frustrating are the implications it has for contemporary work. It creates an atmosphere in which it is apparently acceptable to trash any work that took place in the dark days of pre-reflexivity, so huge bodies of literature are ignored by graduate students as they prepare for the field and as they write up. On the positive side, it does provide a space for hand-wringing mea culpas on the part of anthropologists and a ready made attack upon the discipline by self-styled progressives working from within other programs. And don’t those go a long way towards the advance of knowledge and understanding?
All of this has been said much more eloquently by Sid Mintz in his “Sows’ Ears and Silver Linings” piece in the April 2000 issue of Current Anthropology.
Well said, MT. Over on anthro-L, where I have mentioned our discussion here, a related thread has started. In my latest effusion I wrote,
“In the intellectual framework with which I am comfortable, ethnography is not science. Ethnography is data gathering. Ethnology, the scientific part of cultural anthropology, produces testable generalizations about the human condition and tests them against the data that ethnography provides. Ethnography is scientific (not science per se) only when the data is collected in a way that makes it useful for ethnology.
“Do note, however, that this is only a framework. I am well aware that, in practice, the actual results of ethnography may more closely resemble a midden than a spreadsheet. The ethnologist must then assemble and test her generalizations in the manner of an archeologist assembling fragments of evidence and doing the best she can with them.
“If prevented by the nature of the evidence from conventional experimental or statistical hypothesis-testing, she can still (in the manner of Hercule Poirot or Columbo) attend to detail, position and sequence to refine her ideas and rule out invalid notions. To me, that’s serious scholarship.
“Some cultural studies do seem serious to me; much of cultural studies doesn’t. The same is also true, of course, of a lot of anthropology. A genre I find particularly tedious is the cookie-cutter application of “theory” in a “Gee whiz, I saw it,too” mode supported by poorly told anecdote.
“I’m forgiving if the tale is well told, for the pleasure of the reading and the suggestion of new insight. But will the insight stand up? Then, to me, it is time for that serious scholarship business, ideally science. A personal opinion, casually offered? The word for that is ‘piffle.'”
Then, this morning, replying to a comment that I seemed to be equating ethnography with journalism, I replied (here slightly amended),
“Good questions, Ron. I observe that, as a linguistic anthropologist, you work in that part of the field where ethnography tends to be more scientific.
“There are bits of social anthropology of which similar claims could be made. From the parts of the world in which I work, something similar occurred in studies of Chinese villages focused on topics including ancestor worship in relation to family and lineage organization. A line of research crystallized around the issues raised by Maurice Freedman in _Lineage Organization in Southeastern China_ led to a series of studies by people who pursued a similar style of community study and collected comparable data. The irony here is that the comparable data revealed so much variability that existing models proved demonstrably inadequate, and no consensus has emerged to replace them. The good news is that these studies have contributed to substantial work in Chinese history, when historians read the anthropologists and began to do research on what they could add from materials in the historical record.
“One can, of course, argue that ethnography SHOULD BE more scientific. But this bears about as much relation to actual practice as prescriptive grammar to speech as she is spoken. Suggestions that ethnography should be more scientific have frequently been advanced, even that descriptive linguistics provides the appropriate model. These proposals enjoyed a brief fluorescence in the 60s (remember “ethnoscience”?). They have, however, largely faded into obscurity. Realistically speaking, ethnography is a liminal beast that embodies the tension between the scientific and humanistic aims of anthropology. It can be scientific. It can also be intensely personal, a vision quest or an occasion for humanistic reflection on moral and political issues. Works like Ruth Behar’s _Translated Woman_, Robert DesJarlais’ _Shelter Blues_, Aihwa Ong’s _Flexible Citizenship_, or Anna Tsing’s _Friction_ are deeply serious books and cannot be dismissed as mere journalism. They also are so idiosyncratic that ethnological comparison in pursuit of testable generalizations would be, if attempted, one hell of a coding problem.”