Research and Mesearch

Although personal transformation is a theme that has a long and deep connection with anthropology, it is also something that can be stigmatized. For me, this sense of stigmatization is encapsulated in a phrase that I have occasionally heard and even used myself in some situations: ‘mesearch’.

The general idea, as far as I can tell, is that mesearch is like research, but that it lacks the virtues of research: where as research is serious, mesearch is superficial, while research is emotionally austere, mesearch is self-indulgent. Research is virtuously other-directed, whereas mesearch is connected to the anthropologist’s self and concerns in a way that is somehow unseemly.

Of course there will always be those, inside anthropology and out, who conceive of themselves as scientists who take up objective and unsentimental relations to their subjects. For these people anything that smacks of personal transformation is mesearch. But often times accusations of ‘mesearch’ have more to do with disagreements over style in anthropological empathy rather than the proposition that there should be any at all.

I have some ideas about how accusations of ‘mesearch’ play out in particular situations but… I think I’ll stop here for now and wait for feedback before I press on to the next topic.

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

12 thoughts on “Research and Mesearch

  1. I’m a bit down on ethnography as therapy, if nothing else because I don’t want to see what precious little funding we have go to navel-gazers. Now, if the mesearch helps other people (and helps them more than non-navelgazing methodologies) or if, for some reason, a community recommended mesearch as the most efficacious way to address their issues, that’s different. I just can’t think of situations where that would happen. But I’m all into applied stuff and such outmoded things as social relevance and responsibility to one’s interlocutors. Terribly un-hip.

  2. Research vs. Mesearch? Sounds like a set-up for another round of Punch-and-Judy venting.

    Rex writes,

    bq.The general idea, as far as I can tell, is that mesearch is like research, but that it lacks the virtues of research: where as research is serious, mesearch is superficial, while research is emotionally austere, mesearch is self-indulgent. Research is virtuously other-directed, whereas mesearch is connected to the anthropologist’s self and concerns in a way that is somehow unseemly.

    LFB has already taken the bait with “ethnography as therapy” and “navel-gazers.”

    Perhaps some examples would help. Consider, for example, Ruth Behar’s The Vulnerable Observer. Behar cites the argument that self-reflection, even a course of psychoanalysis, is a valuable way of understanding the primary research tool, his or her self, that the ethnographer takes to the field. But instead of buying into this argument, she says candidly that what she is doing isn’t science. One would have to be a very superficial reader, indeed, however to imagine that all she is doing is navel-gazing. Her preferred form is that of a literary essayist, but powers of observation and control of detail rank her among the best ethnographers that I have ever read. The often brutal objectivity that she brings, not simply to describing her own feelings, but, more importantly, to her exploration of the relationships between herself, the people whose lives she examines, and the topics that concern her are a universe apart from the mere self-indulgence that “navel-gazer” suggests.

  3. Turning now to the possibility that Behar rejects, doing anthropology as science. What can this mean in practice?

    One can imagine anthropologists going into the field bearing copies of ??Notes & Queries?? (suitably updated to reflect current concerns as well as classic questions). The ethnographer’s task is to answer as many as possible of the questions found in the book, producing data that ethnologists can use to answer comparative questions. This approach has the virtue that even mediocre ethnographers can, if competent, produce work from which value can be squeezed by others.

    One can also imagine fieldwork as hypothesis-testing. Here all the usual constraints that affect hypothesis-testing apply. The hypothesis must be sufficiently well-defined to admit of experimental or statistical testing and the field site must be such that the experiments can be performed or the samples required by statistical analysis collected.

    A third, perhaps more realistic view, sees scientific tools as aids to a larger, interpretive understanding. This is the sort of thing that archeologists have been doing for decades, with tools like carbon-dating or analysis of pollens providing grist to the mill of the archeologist’s attempts to depict what life was like in the sites being investigated.

  4. I guess I’m not sold on the notion that there is some general negative reaction to personal transformation during anthropological research or anthropological empathy. I suspect a lot of readers react negatively to a work in which the author’s presence is felt so strongly that it draws attention away from the ethnographic and/or theoretical topic being treated. Talking about “me” isn’t the only way to cast that shadow, is it? Using overly clever phrasing, fawning on or badmouthing a theorist, or blatant political partisanship can do the same, right?

    —Her preferred form is that of a literary essayist, but powers of observation and control of detail rank her among the best ethnographers that I have ever read. The often brutal objectivity that she brings, not simply to describing her own feelings, but, more importantly, to her exploration of the relationships between herself, the people whose lives she examines, and the topics that concern her are a universe apart from the mere self-indulgence that “navel-gazer” suggests.—

    I think Ang Lee is an absolutely wonderful ethnographer of American life. The Ice Storm, Ride with the Devil, and Brokeback Mountain all provide good descriptions of American social structure and material culture but even more impressively they portray aspects of American emotional life with uncommon insight and clarity. That also evidences powers of observation and control of detail, but Lee manages both without sticking himself in the middle of his work. I prefer that route over Behar’s. Maybe as Alex says it just boils down to a matter of style.

  5. Let us agree that Ang Lee is a brilliant filmmaker who is also a keen observer of American life. Does that make Ang Lee an ethnographer?

    If we say “Yes,” how do we distinguish an ethnographer from any constructor of realistic fictions, in literature, cinema, performance art, whatever, that appear to offer accurate description and, perhaps, some insight into the lives and times they explore?

    It is important, I believe, to note that Behar identifies herself as an anthropologist, holds a tenured position in the Anthropology Department at the University of Michigan, and appears to be deliberately pursuing a humanistic approach to anthropology in a way that overtly participates in an ongoing debate over just what it is that anthropologists do or should be doing. None of this applies to Ang Lee.

  6. As I’ve mentioned in a couple of previous posts, I find it useful to disambiguate ‘ethnography’ and ‘anthropology’. Jay linked to a related blog post last month: http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/tim-ingold-anthropology-is-not-ethnography/

    I don’t want to make this about Ruth Behar, but if you visit her website (http://www.ruthbehar.com/ – and she doesn’t have a UM faculty page as far as I can tell) she identifies herself as an anthropologist in a fairly minimal way. Behar’s self-representation says something about the gradient nature of the ethnography/fiction distinction.

  7. Rex,

    Your post suggests that “mesearch” has to be about “personal transformation” and I would disagree that the two have to be merged. ‘Mesearch’ can have a wider referent—that is that we investigate things that have some meaning in our own lives. I mostly hear people talk about “mesearch” outside of anthropology when they explain why someone might be interested in a certain research topic. I suppose that “mesearch” does have the potential for a negative valence because it explicitly invokes subjectivity (the ‘me’ part), which is what the scientific method is trying to get away from. I don’t think that this should be a handicap in anthropology, however, where the positionality of the researcher is recognized as important to the data collected. In fact I don’t think that I have ever heard anthropologists talk about “mesearch.”

    As for anthropology as personal transformation, I think that people have nailed this discussion on the head by pegging the discomfort to disciplinary divisions. It’s probably scary for someone who wants to push anthropology away from its own demise into the post-modern abyss to talk about ethnography as “personal transformation.”

    I also agree with McCreery’s differentiation of Ruth Behar and Ang Lee to a point. While the Vulnerable Observer seemed to be directed toward the discipline of anthropology, I wonder about “Adio Querida.” Is that film entered into the corpus of anthropological work because it was made by an ethnographer and is about “real” events? Does that make a popular tongue-in cheek book like The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes From a Mud Hut into an ethnography? Whereas The Spirit Catches You…can’t be ethnography because it has a fatally flawed depiction of culture that derives from a the author’s lack of credentials as an anthropologist? In my mind, what constitutes ethnography or not can’t be so clearly delineated through a list of necessary and sufficient conditions. It seems a bit more complicated and contextually dependent.

  8. I’m not an anthropologist, but I do have an out-sized interest in the discipline. I owe that interest to one book in particular, Mary Catherine Bateson’s WILLING TO LEARN: PASSAGES OF PERSONAL DISCOVERY. I’d read and enjoyed more standard ethnographic texts prior to reading her book, but it was that manuscript that gave me an insight into the mind (and dare I say the soul) of an anthropologist. So I’d be interested in a discussion here about how ‘mesearch’ can provide a window into the methods of anthropological thinking.

  9. MTBradley mentions “the gradient nature of the ethnography/fiction distinction” and Nicole observes that ” ‘Mesearch’ can have a wider referent—that is that we investigate things that have some meaning in our own lives.” Allow me to add a few thoughts in which these themes converge.

    I have no trouble with gradients. I do note, however, that in serious scientific thinking the existence of a gradient is the starting point for further research. Question No. 1 is how to measure the gradient, Question No. 2 how to describe its slope and the area that falls under it. It will, after all, make a considerable difference whether, if we imagine a point called ethnography and another called fiction, whether one is higher than the other, how far they are apart, whether, if they each occupy a peak, there are other peaks between them.

    Re Question No. 1, I turn for scholarly wisdom to George Lakoff and the sources he cites in Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, taking from them the notion that human beings normally think not in terms of classical categories, clearly defined sets whose elements uniformly share the properties that define them, but, instead, in terms of prototypes, images such that everyone involved in a conversation agrees that the image represents a typical example. There is, then, typically a gradient of cases such that, while some are close enough to the prototype to also be seen as examples, albeit less good ones, the gradient will lead to a tipping point where the people involved the conversation will mostly say, No, that’s not a good example at all.

    I focus on the conversation because, turning for another piece of scholarly wisdom to Howard Becker in Tricks of the Trade, I note that distinctions exist as social facts only when people agree that they do, which makes it worthwhile to explore the grounds of their agreement. I recall, too, Pierre Bourdieu’s observation that most if not all distinctions are sites of struggle, making it worthwhile to explore the grounds of disagreement as well.

    What, then, can we say about ethnography and fiction. Prototypically speaking, both are attempts to portray worlds and require enough detail to make those worlds convincing. There is in the case of ethnography, however, a further assumption that the ethnographer has “been there” and is trying to describe as accurately as possible what he or she observed or was told. No such constraint applies to the prototypical author of fiction who is free to make things up, as we say, out of the whole cloth.

    Critique of ethnographic pretensions to neutral observation and faithful reporting have focused on the sorts of things to which Nicole draws our attention, the selectivity of observation and the way in which assumptions shape both the topics that ethnographers explore and the ways in which they interpret their findings.

    Approaching the matter from the other side, it is clear that authors of even the most fantastic fictions cannot be wholly unrealistic. The whole cloth is chosen from a store of possible textiles, and its pattern and weave (what literary types call genre conventions) limit the freedom with which the author can make things up.

    The question, for me, is where between our prototypes do we move from, Wow! What a neat idea! to, Yes,we should take this is given in making personal, practical or political decisions. To me the former is fiction, the latter ethnography (or at least sound journalism).

    I return, then, to Nicole’s observation and agree with her that there is no necessary contradiction between the subjectivity involved in choice of topic and scholarly or scientific rigor in how research on the topic is conducted. What is always debatable is whether a topic is interesting and whether it is addressed in a way that makes a worthwhile contribution to some ongoing scientific or scholarly conversation.

  10. Alex, I’m not much for etiquette myself but I do think it’s bad manners to start a thread and then not fail to feign interest in the replies.

  11. Sorry folks — I’m interested in replying but my day job has kept me VERY busy this past week.

    There seem to be two issues here. The first is the style with which we report the things that we have seen in the field: the rehtoric of ‘mesearch’. Overly florid, humanistic, or ‘navel-gazing’ styles seem on this account to be signs of ‘mesearch’ when viewed through this lens, at least according to some people.

    On this topic, the one serious disagreement that I have with this thread is the idea that Ang Lee is an ethnographer. I think of an ethnographer as someone who describes things that have actually happened, and I don’t see Ang Lee as doing that although he might do lots of other things that stretch our moral imaginations etc. This is not a disciplinary thing — I’d be happy to call journalists ‘ethnographers’ if they aspired to the title — its a reality sort of thing.

    In re rhetoric, while I would insist that anthropologists (or anyone else) should report on things that actually exist I don’t have an issue in exploring a wide variety of styles in order to do so. As long as they’re well done.

    Second, at issue in all of these comments is a wider issue about positionality and ‘value relevance’ — why we choose to study what we study. Unless people are willing to admit that they have dedicated their lives to studying something that is totally boring and not of interest to them, the issue here is the position that one takes to one’s topic.

    I see a couple of different possible positions on this topic: first, a highly ascetic one which totally brackets all personal involvement in the name of objectivity. Second, one which admits the researcher’s involement and positionality and the way it affects research. Third, one which admits that fieldwork has had a tranformative, personal transformation on the researcher. This last would probably qualify as ‘mesearch’ according to some people.

    None of these 3 positions are _necessarily_ antithetical to the idea of doing ‘unbiased’ work (if that is your goal) but the last two increasingly admit that producing such work requires working through some issues in a way that the first does not. I suppose in fact the last two open up a variety of ways to conceptualize research the the first, rather impoverished one does not.

  12. —I think of an ethnographer as someone who describes things that have actually happened, and I don’t see Ang Lee as doing that although he might do lots of other things that stretch our moral imaginations etc. —

    That makes sense to me (and as anthropological definitions go is unusually and refreshingly clear). Before the topic dies, I would like to throw up a last defense of my statement by saying that Ride with the Devil and The Ice Storm are at least in the neighborhood of historical ethnography (and I know that not everyone buys historical ethnography as really being ethnography), just with more emphasis on the individuals in the story than usual for the genre. Brokeback Mountain is so focused on the individuals that I think it might be a less good fit but I’ve always just been blown away by the fact that a Taiwanese director knew to put Basques in 1960’s Wyoming. (It takes a certain kind of geeky to be impressed by that, I know.)

    I was thinking of this post in conjunction with Dan Everett’s work. He has a whole passel of links to publications and interviews on his homepage at http://www.llc.ilstu.edu/dlevere/ and what I noticed is that some of the stuff is self-revelatory beyond even what you would expect from a touchy-feely cultural anthropologist, but that that material only crosses over so much into his professional publications. Compare for example, the BBC World Service interview at http://www.llc.ilstu.edu/dlevere/Audio/Outlook%2021.02.08.mp3 “about how the Pirahas affected me spiritually” with his paper on Wari’ periphrastic pronouns at http://www.llc.ilstu.edu/dlevere/docs/periphrasiswariijal.pdf set to appear in IJAL.

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