(this entry is CC’d. If anyone wants to download some pictures, do a voice over, and throw this up on our Khan Academy for Anthropology, be my guest)
Anthropology is, in many ways, the art of taking implicit, taken-for-granted meanings and making them explicit. This is important because human beings cram a tremendous amount of meaning into everything we do, and yet much of the time we are only vaguely conscious of the meanings we surround ourselves with — and if you are a cultural outsider, you may miss them entirely. Just as learning the grammar of a language will help you understand it and write clearly in it, learning to make cultural meanings explicit helps us understand and express ourselves to others. Take, for instance, the thinking woman’s crumpet.
The other night I was watching a documentary about Shakespeare written and presented by the historian Michael Wood. As the documentary went on and I spent more and more time watching Michael Wood describe the Tudor police state with great enthusiasm, it occurred to me that he might be physically attractive. So I turned to my wife and asked: “is he attractive?” She thought for a minute and said she didn’t think so. But since she is a professor, just to be sure, she looked him up on wikipedia. “Apparently,” she said, “he’s the thinking woman’s crumpet.”
If you are British, or an anglophile American, it is not too hard to understand what it means to say “Michael Wood is the thinking woman’s crumpet”. Implicitly, you might understand that educated middle-class women find Michael Wood attractive even though he is not conventionally attractive. But as an anthropologist, I want to move beyond this implicit awareness to a richer, more explicit understanding of this phrase, an understanding of it that explains what it means even if you don’t even know what a crumpet is, much less what it symbolizes to the British. I’ll begin by talking about what it means to be a ‘thinking woman’ and then I’ll move on to the ‘crumpet’.
The noun phrase “thinking women” seems at first cut to describe women who think, but this is not exactly right. I’m not British and not an anthropologist of Britain, so I may not have all the details right (anthropologists are, like everyone else, fallible). But the UK is a class-conscious place and I think that the term is meant to invoke a certain socioeconomic position and the entire set of habits and dispositions that come along with it: affluent and educated, refined enough to be attracted to someone’s personality as well as their looks, etc. ‘Thinking woman’ is just two words but for those with the cultural knowledge necessary to decode them it summons up an entire way of classifying people which is more or less systematic. In particular, it implicitly defines large swaths of the population as people who ‘don’t think’. These people are usually less wealthy, less educated, and less powerful than ‘thinking people’. Anthropology as a discipline often finds these kinds of systems of inequality hiding within our implicit meanings, and as a result we’ve grown to be very mindful of the way that power and inequality are omnipresent in human life.
In addition to class, the phrase “thinking woman’s crumpet” has a lot of implicit things about gender relations in the UK within it, things which can be (as we anthropologists like to say) ‘unpacked’ or made explicit. The term is actually a transformation of the pre-existing phrase ‘thinking man’s crumpet’. The phrase was (according to Wikipedia and Google) originally used to describe Joan Bakewell, a TV presenter in the sixties. The comedian who invented it did so as a joke but, like most labels that stick, it made explicit a set of ideas and desires that were at work implicitly. Bakewell was intelligent, articulate, and chic and object of desire for male viewers of a certain social position.
Something happens when you turn the phrase around so that women, rather than men, want ‘crumpet’. The idea that ‘thinking women’ can want ‘crumpet’ has a certain empowering air about it — if thinking men can find articulate and intelligent women attractive, why can’t thinking women find Michael Wood attractive? I would say that the phrase has a whiff of feminism about it (sensing cultural meaning, like smelling a scent, has a certain indomitability that comes from being deeply embodied, and yet is also intangible and ephemeral). But ‘feminism’ is the wrong word to use here, since the term invokes a cultural move that is opposed to the sexual objectification of women and other people. That ‘thinking woman’ can have ‘crumpet’ is an ’empowering appropriation of the male gaze’. Or, in plainer english, women assert their equality with men by adopting male ways of looking at and finding people attractive, ways which in themselves might seem sexist. Or, as the British say in another culinary metaphor that I don’t have time to unpack here, ‘what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander’.
So that was ‘thinking woman’. Let’s turn now to ‘crumpet’, the second part of the phrase I’ve been examining. As we’ve seen, there are people like Michael Wood, who is “thinking woman’s crumpet” and Joan Bakewell, who is “thinking man’s crumpet”. But what is plain, unmodified crumpet?
At a certain level, the answer can be easily found on wikipedia: crumpet is a griddle cake, one of the large number of foods Europeans (and the people in their settler colonies) cook by heating flour, water, a fat (typically butter) and a bit of salt and/or sugar on a griddle or pan and leavened with yeast and/or baking powder. If you can read this blog entry in the original English I wrote it in you will already be familiar with pancakes, biscuits, waffles, crepes, and similar foods which are the cousins of crumpets. Americans may even be familiar with “English muffins” which are something like crumpets.
Now we face the very common anthropological problem of people’s use of metaphor. Michael Wood, on the face of it, has almost nothing in common with crumpet. Crumpets are seven centimeters in diameter and Michael Wood is around six feet tall. Crumpets are inanimate, while Michael Wood moves under his own power and enthusiastically describes the Tudor police state. Crumpets are eaten by British people, but British people would consider completely disgusting the idea of killing and eating Michael Wood or Joan Bakewell or any other human.
Or would they? Like many peoples, the British often draw metaphors between people and food, and in the metaphor hunger for the food is equated with sexual desire (an anthropologist would describe both of these as ‘appetitive longing’). Thus, for instance, a pastry shell filled with fruit called a ‘tart’ is often used as a metaphor for a sexually promiscuous woman.
And in fact ‘crumpet’ is a term used to describe a certain kind of sexually attractive woman. My knowledge of this topic is extremely limited, but according to the youtube documentary “Crumpet – A Very British Sex Symbol” the term originated in the 1930s with the rise of mass media such as the television and film. It denoted scantily clad, voluptuous women whose appearance in movies and television was inappropriate but not actually pornographic. The pieces they appeared in were low-brow and down-market — vulgar and working class. Apparently men of the thinking class weren’t supposed to like that sort of crumpet. They preferred Joan Blakewell. At times there’s a strong feel of class warfare to the youtube documentary — for instance where the narrator accuses Monty Python of objectifying Carol Cleveland while other films (not made by Oxbridge grads) present crumpets as empowered in their sexuality.
It’s hard for me to say as a cultural outsider and non-expert, but I think that calling a woman ‘crumpet’ evokes a wide range of associations: just as a crumpet is not a proper, nutritious meal, crumpets are not properly modest women; watching a crumpet on TV, like eating a crumpet, is a sort of cheap fullfilment — perhaps a guilt pleasure? Do working class people eat crumpet while upper class people eat some other sort of griddle cake? Its hard to say.
All I wanted to establish here is that even simple phrases like “thinking woman’s crumpet” contain within themselves incredible depth. Because they are part of a tightly interwoven and rich cultural system, understanding them requires that they be placed in their cultural context. In this case, this involves everything from British food to the class system to the history of mass media. At the same time, making the meanings of ‘thinking woman’s crumpet’ explicit makes cultural insiders see their own culture in a new way because it forces them to rethink what they used to take for granted — indeed, it may actually prompt some of them to learn about television shows and movies that have shaped their culture in ways they didn’t previously understand. Above all, unpacking the term ‘thinking woman’s crumpet’ allows us to take a look at how anthropologists interpret cultural materials.
Nice. But while identifying potential meanings in terms or symbols is one essential component in the anthropologist’s art, another is determining which are relevant to individuals who stand in particular relations to each other as well as to the term or symbol in question. A long time ago, I published an article on this topic in _Medical Anthropology_ titled “Potential and Effective Meaning in Therapeutic Ritual.” That article was based on ethnographic data related to two performances of a Taiwanese ritual called Placating Parents from a Previous Life. The underlying idea was the same. Colicky babies who cry at night may be haunted by grieving parents from a previous incarnation. The purpose of the rite is to get them to leave the baby alone, a goal said to be achieved in the usual manner of such rituals, inviting the ghosts to eat offerings of food that establish a moral connection with them, asking for a favor (here, leave the baby alone), and then sending them on their way with offerings of spirit money that sever the connection and restore a proper distance between the ghosts and the living. However, one version of the ritual was a simple, cobbled together affair said to be performed by women who understood such things. The other was a more elaborately staged version performed by my Daoist master. The elaborations included, for example, the inclusion of a god to act as guarantor of the transaction, the use of paper charms representing divine commands to the ghosts to cease and desist their haunting, and presentation of the spirit money in buckets, where presenting the money in bulk symbolized the infinite sum needed to sever the bond between the child and its former parents. After considering these two examples, I also noted that any well-trained Sinologist could could go on forever tracing connections between the symbols deployed in the more elaborate version of the rite and possible allusions in Chinese cosmology and Daoist history. That left open the question how much of the potential meaning that the Sinologist discovered was recognized, let alone effective for, those for whom the rite was performed. After all, the reasons why people consult Daoist healers resemble those for which they may, in other circumstances, consult lawyers. They have problems and are turning to someone who claims to know more than they do about how to solve them. There is no more reason to assume that they understand the full range of possible meanings in what a Daoist healer does than to assume that they understand the full legal implications of what the laser says and does.
A crumpet may be a bit of all right, as my British friends say, or a pancake-like confection to eat with jam and tea. Which meaning is relevant in particular circumstances is not determined by the term itself.
Rex, very interesting use of the term ‘unpack’ in this post, especially in relation to a discussion of class in Britain (and, both implicitly and explicitly, in the US). Especially given how the term ‘thinking man/woman’ is used as to make a claim about how ‘thinking people’ could find individuals attractive because of intellect and personality, even if those individuals are not considered conventionally attractive, I am thinking about how the racial implications of the terms you put forth haven’t been ‘unpacked’.
One, the upper classes in Britain (as in the US) tend to be white, and this social fact also needs to be unpacked. Two, one can’t discuss media representations–and (the production of) televisual desires–without engaging race, at least not if one wants to be deeply rigorous in her anthropological analysis. Case in point, this article, which I read minutes before reading your post: http://jezebel.com/5914173/tv-makes-girls-feel-like-crap-about-themselves-but-does-wonders-for-white-boys. As such, Peggy McIntosh’s ‘Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack’ and Cynthia Feliciano’s work on gendered racial exclusion among whites (http://paa2008.princeton.edu/download.aspx?submissionId=80046) are spectral presences haunting this post, for me. There are definitely racial dimensions to the calculus of attractiveness, and anthropologists need to acknowledge this: there are racial dimensions both to the social calculus of attractiveness (and attraction), and to the calculus of social attractiveness. And in ‘unpacking’ this racial structuring, one sees that there are ways in which the ‘crumpets’ of those who are purported ‘to think’ and those who are purported not to think largely overlap and converge.
Maybe we should think about the ways in which crumpets are another type of ‘white bread’, no?
As a Briton, and an Oxbridge graduate for that matter, I find this a strange post. The term “crumpet” is an archaism; I think that’s part of the point of using it. It’s not a word used to describe anyone except “thinking people’s” sex icons anymore. It might be used in The Sun to describe the page 3 girls now and then, but I don’t know – and even if so, that’s also playing on the archaic character of the term as applied to sexy people. It’s arguable if crumpets are even popular as foodstuffs anymore. I quite like them slathered in butter, but I haven’t had one for at least a year. They aren’t all that popular – and, importantly, today they aren’t seen as a food of any particular group of people. They have no class associations.
Anthropologists are often accused of reading too much into things, and you’ve gone and done exactly that. I think the problem lies in two words: “system” and “meaning”. Here there isn’t really a system of meaning surrounding the use of the term “thinking woman’s crumpet”. Instead of a system, where all the parts interrelate such that a change in any of them results in a change in all the others, we’ve got a lot of caked on historical residue. All the facets of the “system” you’ve referred to are about forty years old at the latest. They’re still current in that they’re still referred to, and in that the term “thinking woman’s crumpet” derives from them, but it’s quite a self-conscious thing playing slightly on the archaism of the term and its particular application to people like Michael Wood.
As John McCreery points out, “meaning” is a troubling word because so-called cultural meanings are not like the meanings of words (the real meaning of “meaning”, so to speak) at all. They’re about knowledge, often remembered in episodic and not semantic memory – or when encoded in semantic memory, they change into something quite different. IIRC, that’s the point of Sperber’s Rethinking Symbolism.
“Knowledge” seems to me the better word to use; there’s a lot of knowledge contained in particular uses of words, and much of it may be common knowledge (as the game theorists label it), such that the speaker believes that the people hearing it will know it, and they will know that the speaker knows it and therefore intends to convey that knowledge, and that the speaker will know that they know, and so on [ad infinitum]. Common knowledge is the part of cultural “meaning” that closest resembles semantic meaning, but it’s still a kind of fallible knowledge, not an immediate understanding on the basis of a broader socio-cultural system. “Knowledge” also implies that one could partially understand something, instead of drawing a more or less absolute line between those “inside the culture” and those “outside” it.
Either way, imagine if I wrote a post about Sarah Palin, and said:
“Her use of the term ‘mama grizzly’ doesn’t imply that she and others like her will literally rip off your jaw and feed you to their young.
“Or does it? Americans frequently compare their beloved symbols and people to animals, as do many groups, possibly showing an underlying animalistic tendency at the heart of their cultural system. America is a class-conscious nation (as we can tell from all the ‘Heartland’ vs ‘East Coast’ discourse) – is it possible that some animals are considered lower class and not fit to be compared to high-ranking figures? Does the grizzly image imply that Palin will ascend Capitol Hill and literally murder liberal members of the government with her powerful paws?”
Al, an ethnographic question if I may, related to DWP’s comment, would “crumpet” ever be used in British English to refer to a non-white woman?
Hmm, not sure. I’m assuming that it wouldn’t have been when it was used without self-conscious reference to the past – up to the sixties and seventies. But nowadays I expect so. I don’t know of any examples, but then it’s not a very commonly used phrase. It wouldn’t strike me as odd if someone called Moira Stuart a “thinking man’s crumpet”, or from a completely different generation, Konnie Huq. I could also see Gus Casely-Hayford described as a thinking woman’s crumpet. Probably. I don’t know. All three of those people are conventionally attractive, so it seems ambiguous, but only because it’s used for people who aren’t necessarily gorgeous on their own. I think.
Thanks for this post — interesting, but ultimately I agree with John and Al’s comments above. Like the ethnography of the Nacirema, it’s quite salutary (especially as a Brit) to see common anthropological techniques (‘unpacking’) turned on familiar contexts, as it shows up some easy fallacies about meaning and culture.
Crumpet is not something you would hear these days except with a sense of irony – there are other words for women like this, such as ‘totty’, and more pejoratively, ‘bint’ – it’s normally clear that they’re used ironically precisely because they are archaic. If one was unaware or insensitive to the accusations of sexism that such words will call down, one would use more up-to-date words.
I’m not sure about the class thing — we academics like to think that thinking=high-status and the only way one can think is to be a professional (preferably a professional academic), but that view is not universal, and many people who are not in professional jobs would be quite put out at the idea that ‘thinking man/woman’ = ‘middle class’. I think that at least as acceptable interpretation of ‘thinking man’s X’ is ‘the X preferred by a connoisseur of Xs’. And contra Bourdieu, being working class and being a connoisseur is not a contradiction.
In a weird coincidence, I just read an article on crumpet on line — annoyingly I can’t remember where and I can’t find it — but it suggested that foody metaphors notwithstanding, the origin of crumpet in the sexy sense lies in obsolete rhyming slang from ‘strumpet’, which means prostitute.
And a final interesting crumpet fact: crumpet in the buttery sense is countable (‘I ate two crumpets for breakfast’), but in the sexy sense is uncountable, that is, it is a ‘mass noun’. So you wouldn’t say, Connie Huq is ‘a crumpet’ (but she definitely is crumpet!).
PS – on a more serious note, this problem of tracing meaning is, I think, the central problem in the anthropology of religion. The situation that John describes in his comment — in which people act in self-conscious relation to the knowledge and practice of experts, sometimes in the distant past — is really the norm. Relating that expert knowledge back to the people we meet in the field is a huge problem.
@Joathan Mair Thanks.
this problem of tracing meaning is, I think, the central problem in the anthropology of religion
I would go further and say that it is the central problem in all forms of interpretive anthropology. Anthropologists are forever inferring meanings from what they say and hear. Not surprising, to do so is the most human of responses. But whether they mean the same thing to different people in different situations? We have not been nearly as sophisticated as, say, people who run message testing services for advertising agencies. To someone like me, who has worked in the ad industry, the questions seem obvious. The surprise is how rarely anthropologists raise them.
1. Are the people to whom a message is addressed aware of its existence? — They often haven’t seen the ad or missed what the preacher or teacher was saying.
2. Do they understand it? —Or, more practically speaking, do they understand it in the way that the sender of the message hopes that they do?
3. Is it news to them? — Does it offer new information or a fresh angle on what they believe that they already know?
4. Do they like what it says? — That we like it doesn’t imply that they do.
5. Is it memorable? — So much that we hear goes in one ear and out the other.
6. Does it move them to act in the way that we want them to? — They may be amused, irritated, angry or indifferent.
I vividly recall working on a campaign for BMW. The Japanese creative team had come up with what they thought was a fresh angle and some clever ways to present it. The brand manager in Tokyo, a Polish-German with a background in advertising, liked the ideas. But to sell them to Munich, we needed to run some focus groups. We did, and both the BMW and Mercedes owners who participated absolutely hated what they were shown. Once again we had demonstrated that what creative hot shots in their twenties and thirties think is insanely great and what businessmen, lawyers and doctors in their fifties looking for a luxury car want in their automobiles are totally different things.
Having had this experience I go back and read anthropological interpretations like those which Lévi-Strauss, for example, offers in “A Sorcerer and His Magic” and can’t help wondering, “How in the hell did he know that it actually worked like that?”
Sounds like you’re right – it’s not a word I’ve ever really used, so I’m not entirely au fait with its deployment. “A bit of crumpet” – that seems to be a standard usage from when it was actually used without irony or self-reference.
Checked the wikipedia page on “thinking man’s crumpet” (is such a page really necessary?): all the women are middle aged or approaching middle age, they’re well-educated (public school then Oxbridge seems common), and yep, they’re white. The thinking seems to be that women never become too old to be “thinking man’s crumpet”, so Joan Bakewell, 79 years of age, is still the archetype somehow. It seems to be less about a type of person (although there is that) and more a label that one achieves and then retains in perpetuity.
Also, my original intuition appears to be wrong, and conventionally attractive people might easily be “thinking man’s crumpet”, or so it seems. What an silly phrase it is.
John,
Your points are very useful, and I agree entirely that this problem is at the centre of interpretive anthropology. It would be nice if there were a textbook for anthropology students that covered material like that.
And what an silly sentence that was.
Just a few points here:
whiteness: the British upper class is white? I had no idea!! But seriously, it true that all the crumpet discussed in the crumpet documentary is not only white but actually quite pale. I was going to suggest there was some connection between the puffy paleness of both forms of crumpet, but I decided that was a bridge too far. These are not tan, thin white women.
reading too much meaning into things: there is a whole cottage industry in anthropology that worries over interpretive excesses, but frankly I’ve never thought this was a problem related to cultural data or to anthropology’s method of interpreting it. Bench scientists get results from experiments back and are always tempted to read too much into it. Field scientists get small samples of populations and are tempted to extrapolate in unwise ways. There’s no way around the necessity of prudence, disinterestednes, and good judgment regardless of your field, or your longings for ‘objective’ measures of knowledge.
As for the pushback from the Brits — I’m at a loss to understand what the issue is, since you seem to agree in all points with my analysis but just claim that it is ‘old’. All of the terms as I’ve used them are intelligible to you, which indicates that I’ve got it right.
Al West objects that the system is ‘caked with history’. Why is that a problem? Systems are historical, and history is systematic. If you don’t believe me go back and read Islands of History. That was what the 80s were all about, dude.
Al’s Sarah Palin example is also totally wrong. It confuses America’s class system with a system of regional ethnicity (and it even gets this regional system wrong — I’d suggest you read “American Nations” by Woodard) but it also gets my example wrong. Sarah Palin is not going to literally rip Liberal senators apart, and in my example I did not suggest that women were _literally_ griddle cakes. But Sarah Palin _is_ assimilating the qualities of a grizzly bear to herself — and these include nurturing protectiveness, physical power, and determination. Ditto with her famous pit bull example. This metaphorical realignment of femininity away from defenseless animals like kittens and puppies has not only made her politically efficacious, but it has galvanized an entirely new class of female politicians who now have a way to empowered with out being ‘feminists’ and thus on the left. It’s brilliant and powerful — and deeply cultural. So yes, if you do the example properly, then I would agree with it.
Your racist abuse masquerading as ‘sarcasm’ is just that: racist and abusive. My points were quite valid, yet you couldn’t even be bothered to think critically about them, or engag them. Telling.
And to make clear who my previous comment addresses, it is Rex. Your response to my comment is a race fail.
That was the part to which I was referring with my hyperbole. It wasn’t intended to be serious – only a parody of an ill-informed post. It’s okay to be ill-informed about something you’re not professionally interested in. All I intended to show was that your summary of Britain through the crumpet lens was about as well-informed as my drivel about Sarah Palin. It was also an unserious take on a series of old tropes, distorted. The fact that you critiqued it for accuracy is interesting.
I wonder, do you take this attitude with your informants? You really don’t seem to know much about Britain – you admitted as much! And that’s fine, as it really isn’t all that interesting. But you could have tried asking instead of pontificating about how our society really is and how the different bits of it connect together.
Systems may be historical – of course they are – but what we’ve got here is not a system. Systems operate by laws; they are systematic. What affects one part of a system necessarily affects all others parts, or else it isn’t a system. And with “crumpets”, we’ve got a few scattered references and a general tendency towards pale-ish white women with Oxbridge degrees on telly being called “thinking man’s crumpet” by some sections of the public and/or media. It’s not systematic at all.
Does culture operate by laws other than the laws of physics? I don’t think so. It’s not a system. My circulatory system is a system; if my heart fails then the whole thing stops, and if my arm gets lopped off then there will be a systematic drop in blood pressure as I lose blood. That’s a system. Systems are inevitable, but people have very complex brains susceptible to an enormous number of variables. If there is a system there, it isn’t obvious or “unpackable” by some freewheeling anthropology method. Of course there are connections between different things in human societies, and they are in some sense inevitable (discussions of free will aside), but there aren’t any systems of the kind you described in your post.
And the very thing that piqued your interest, the comment about Michael Wood being the “thinking woman’s crumpet”, was a deliberate anachronism, playing on the familiar (because old) description of certain women in the 1960s and 70s for effect. It has no systematic relationship to anything very much, let alone the complex “system” you described. My comment wasn’t that the system is “caked in history”. It was intended to convey the fact that the “system” you have elucidated was nothing more than historical residue, playing on familiar, out-dated tropes for humourous effect.
I hope you can read this paragraph and see why Brits might have a problem with your post.
Al: your description of Sarah Palin as metaphorically (rather than literally) is completely correct in the same way that my description of crumpet as crumpet was. So I don’t see it as hypberole, parody, or drivel at all — you (like me) got it right! Although your understanding of American regional ethnicity was, as I say, off-target.
Your comments on my notion of ‘system’ are interesting and bring up a long-standing problem cultural anthropology: we see systems, patterns, assemblages (whatever the noun of the decade is) but also recognize that unless members of a lifeworld reflexively codify their culture and then use those codifications to regiment behavior, a lot of time we don’t see a super-tight ‘system’ of categories like the one you describe. Its for this reason that some of the typologizing excesses of the Goodenough/Frake era were replaced in the eighties (as I said above) by work by authors like Sahlins and Bourdieu.
In fact, culture is less like a computer program than it is like your circulatory system: “a set of connected things or parts forming a complex whole” (this is literally the definition of ‘system’). This doesn’t mean that the parts are clearly, neatly structured according to some plan. Your circulatory system is a result of history, extremely untidy, branches out in all sorts of directions, and works surprisingly poorly. Often the wiring is simply wrong: 8 out of every 1,000 children are born with malformed hearts (!) and contemporary medical imaging is so good that it reveals that no one has a ‘normal’ circulatory system the way you learn in medical books. In sum, I think it is wrong to assume that all systems are as perfect in their functioning as you require them to be. Most systems are messy.
You say that the line “thinking woman’s crumpet” is a deliberate anachronism which is used ‘for effect’. To me, this is clear that it is part of the cultural system you are discussing — if it wasn’t, then it wouldn’t have that effect. There is a reason that no one describes Michael Wood as “the squatting woman’s camera”.
At any rate, your fellow Brits have already demonstrated that your dynamic cultural system continues to transform: In the most interesting comments on this post, it turns out Moira Stuart and Konnie Huq _are_ crumpet.
@Rex
I’ve never thought this was a problem related to cultural data or to anthropology’s method of interpreting it.
In this respect you are, I suspect, typical. You are quite correct to point to a
a whole cottage industry in anthropology that worries over interpretive excesses
but can you say that its worries have been taken seriously? My impression that they haven’t been is admittedly based on personal impressions, not systematically collected data. But since our conclusions can be no stronger than the data on which we base them, I’d like to see some if you have it.
Meanwhile, let me offer a few frankly speculative conjectures, based on my reading of classic and later, mostly British, social anthropology.
(1) Malinowski and other authors of classic monographs were acutely aware of the difficulties of interpretation. Their standard critique of Tylor and Frazer, et al, was that they imposed conjecture on fragmentary data torn out of interpretive contrast, resulting in what Evans-Pritchard labeled “If I were a horse” stories.
(2) The structural-functionalist embrace of Durkheim’s “social facts” was, in a way with important implications for fieldwork practice, a way of distinguishing the social, what everyone seemed to say and do and the visible structuring of spaces (homes, palaces, temples, villages, cities) within which they said and did it, from the personal (the private feelings of the unformed child, the village idiot, the women, or others), discovered in behavior or comments that appeared to be idiosyncratic. The social was defined as the domain of anthropology; that other stuff left to the psychologists and psychoanalysts.
(3) The result was a practice in which cross-checking with multiple informants and sifting through data to separate the essential from the accident were standard procedures. All perfectly consistent with humanistic scholarship articulated and argued in terms of Aristotlean/Thomistic logic.
(4) The world changes. The grand stereotypes embodied in classic theory are challenged on both moral and empirical grounds. Morally because it is no longer seen as proper to exclude the voices of the children, the women and others regarded as minors and dependents and lacking the authority to make definitive pronouncements, empirically because growing concern for subjectivity and agency shift the focus of analysis from social facts (the stuff that everyone is supposed to take for granted) to individual opinions and choices shifts the analytic focus from generic similarities to the range and distribution of individual variation.
(5) Here, however, anthropology confronts a problem shared with other humanistic disciplines. A solid majority of its practitioners hated math in school, have found all sorts of snarky reasons for denigrating statistics good excuses for their ignorance, and, thus, lack the technical know-how to address individual variation in anything but an impressionistic and moralistic manner in which what informant X happened to tell me on a day I was paying attention is conflated with an interpretation of “CULTURE,” of which informant X, for no demonstrated reason, is taken to be typical.
(6) The result can sometimes be the production of deeply moving stories. Take, for example, Ruth Behar’s Translated Woman. The writing is gripping and thought-provoking. But in what sense is Behar’s Mexican friend typical of any category to which we might assign her? To see her as typical of women oppressed by poverty and the macho habits of the men in her life is probably not wrong. But her toughness? The initiative she demonstrates in forming and maintaining a relationship with Behar? Are these generic features of her type or exemplary features of a response to a rare and idiosyncratic response to the hardships that shape her life? We shall never know until someone does a study of a population of individuals like her to see if she lies close to the mean or represents an outlier in the distributions of the qualities we think that we see in her.
In sum, the breakdown of the classic division between social fact and personal idiosyncrasy that enabled anthropologists of earlier generations to sort through their data and focus their attention only on the common features of “society” or “culture” breaks down when subjectivity and agency are concerns. It’s time to stop whinging and moaning or simply asserting the superiority of our trained intuitions and develop methods appropriate for addressing our new concerns in a serious manner.
That’s my take on where we are. Others closer to the game should be able to show me where I’m wrong. In a scientific spirit of openness to falsification, I await your comments.
Once again, I find myself wishing that SM provided a grace period in which comments could be edited. I am particularly ashamed of the jumble in item (4).
Rex: And the pattern of your racist-sexist dismissal of my initial comment continues. While you directly addressed the substance of the two white male commenters’ responses, you could not–and continue not to–address the *substance* of mine. Instead, you just continue to fall back on the common racist and sexist pattern of dismissal and mockery that makes it clear to all, including the students you teach as a professor, that when one sees a person as a subordinate because of race and gender one does not have to bother to listen to or seriously consider anything the woman/person of color has to say, can summarily dismiss it, can should feel free to treat the person with contempt and respect. You have pretty much done the ‘polite’ white male anthropologist version of what Naomi Schaefer-Reilly did when she attacked black female scholars and Black Studies in her now infamous Brainstorm post. As I am nothing but a silly little black girl droning on about race, I should be ‘put in my place’ so as to make clear I have nothing intelligent to say and of possible academic/intellectual/scholarly imput. So why even bother to address the actual substance of my comment, querying the racial dimensions of whose does and does not get to be a thinking man or woman’s crumpet?
In dismissing my comment–and racistly and sexistly mocking me–you have made clear why anthropology is and continues to be ‘white public space’, and missed an opportunity to engage Al West on ‘the *systematicity* of (racial-sexual) preferences in relations of power’. Do you really think I am so stupid that I would post a comment so facile and fatuous that the entirety of its analytic impetus is “crumpets are a kind of white bread, and the English upper classes are white”? Of course you do, and that is the problem. What low regard you hold black women–and our intellectual capacities in. Because your sarcastic dismissal was certainly not just about dismissing me as one annoying woman of color. Yes, systematicity.
To say that the existence of a few non-white women means that my query on the racial dimensions of sexual attraction/attractiveness in general, and ‘thinking people’s crumpets’ in particular, is baseless is a ridiculous assertion: and it is not very anthropological. It is also the height of hypocrisy in a post claiming to ‘unpack’ taken-for-granted cultural assumptions. Would you also say that the existence of Barack Obama means that racism no longer exists in the US.
What kind of substantive anthropological analysis (i.e. unpacking) is one actually engaged in when one can’t even do something as simple as (respectfully) acknowledge that there are facial dimensions to who gets to be a ‘thinking person’s crumpet’, that whiteness itself (or a non-white simulacrum thereof) might factor into who will and will not be perceived as a crumpet/strumpet/ thinking person’s crumpet? How hard is it to acknowledge that part of a man’s being a ‘thinking woman’s crumpet’ might in fact be the ways in which forms of white male status are factored into this determination (especially when pulchritude alone is not the deciding factor for attractiveness; and is it ever?; and how can one ever deprecate race and racial/racist logics from determinations of physical attractiveness?). The physical bar for being a ‘thinking person’s crumpet’ will just not be the same for all racial groups. So of course whiteness matters.
Your (non)response to and dismissiveness of my comment was racist and sexist and disrespectful. It was also a de facto form of white male bullying that should be called out for what it is. The point was to publicly mock me and to let me know that you do not regard me as an equal because of my race and gender. Your intention was to demeanme. Not acceptable. And a terrible example for an anthropology professor–a teacher–to set. You owe me an apology, though I will not be holding my breath for it to come. http://m.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/05/when-the-apology-makes-it-worse/257820/
Please substitute this corrected version. Thank you.
Rex: the pattern of your racist-sexist dismissal of my initial comment continues. While you directly addressed the substance of the two white male commenters’ responses, you could not–and continue not to–address the *substance* of mine. Instead, you just continue to fall back on the common racist and sexist pattern of dismissal and mockery that makes it clear to all, including the students you teach as a professor, that when one sees a person as a subordinate because of race and gender one does not have to bother to listen to or seriously consider anything the woman/person of color has to say, can summarily dismiss it, and should feel free to treat the person with contempt and disrespect. You have pretty much done the ‘polite’ white male anthropologist version of what Naomi Schaefer-Reilly did when she attacked black female scholars and Black Studies in her now-infamous Brainstorm post. As I am nothing but a silly little black girl droning on about race, I should be ‘put in my place’ so as to make clear I have nothing intelligent to say and nothing of possible academic/intellectual/scholarly imput. So why even bother to address the actual substance of my comment, querying the racial dimensions of whose does and does not get to be a thinking man or woman’s crumpet?
In dismissing my comment–and racistly and sexistly mocking me–you have made clear why anthropology is and continues to be ‘white public space’, and missed an opportunity to engage Al West on ‘the *systematicity* of (racial-sexual) preferences in relations of power’. Do you really think I am so stupid that I would post a comment so facile and fatuous that the entirety of its analytic impetus is ‘crumpets are a kind of white bread, and the English upper classes are white’? Of course you do, and that is the problem. What low regard you hold black women–and our intellectual capacities–in. Because your sarcastic dismissal was certainly not just about dismissing me as one annoying woman of color. Yes, systematicity.
To say that the existence of a few non-white women means that my query on the racial dimensions of sexual attraction/attractiveness in general, and ‘thinking people’s crumpets’ in particular, is baseless is a ridiculous assertion: and it is not very anthropological. It is also the height of hypocrisy in a post claiming to ‘unpack’ taken-for-granted cultural assumptions. Would you also say that the existence of Barack Obama means that racism no longer exists in the US?
What kind of substantive anthropological analysis (i.e. unpacking) is one actually engaged in when one can’t even do something as simple as (respectfully) acknowledge that there are racial dimensions to who gets to be a ‘thinking person’s crumpet’, that whiteness itself (or a non-white simulacrum thereof) might factor into who will and will not be perceived as a crumpet/strumpet/ thinking person’s crumpet? How hard is it to acknowledge that part of a white man’s being a ‘thinking woman’s crumpet’ might in fact be the ways in which forms of white male status are factored into this determination (especially when pulchritude alone is not the deciding factor for attractiveness; and is it ever?; and how can one ever separate race and racial/racist logics from determinations of physical attractiveness?). The physical bar for being a ‘thinking person’s crumpet’ will just not be the same for all racial groups. So of course whiteness matters.
Your (non)response to and dismissiveness of my comment was racist and sexist and disrespectful. It was also a de facto form of white male bullying that should be called out for what it is. The point was to publicly mock me and to let me know that you do not regard me as an equal because of my race and gender. Your intention was to demean me. Not acceptable. And a terrible example for an anthropology professor–a teacher–to set. You owe me an apology, though I will not be holding my breath for it to come.http://m.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/05/when-the-apology-makes-it-worse/257820/
For those who may find what I wrote in a previous message of interest but horribly muddled in the writing, an edited version has been posted at http://openanthcoop.ning.com/profiles/blogs/theory-and-method-in-anthropology-an-historical-speculation
My circulatory system may be “messy”, but it is pretty systematic. Like I said, if you cut off my arm with a machete, then blood pressure will drop in a systematic relationship with the amount of blood lost. It operates according to a mathematical formula, in fact. Now, it’s not actually a perfect system, but not for the reasons you consider. That it’s wiring is weirdly arranged has little to do with it. It’s not a perfect system because there are other variables involved; if you cut off my arm, I will lose blood, but an immediate blood transfusion and an attempt to stop blood loss from the stump will negate the influence on blood pressure. Likewise if my heart failed and was replaced in function by an artificial pump.
The “whole”, or the “system”, actually reduces to a set of even more basic principles – fluid mechanics, in this case. It may be conveniently modelled as a system, however, knowing a small number of the variables allows you to make testable predictions about other parts of it.
The definition you’ve provided for “system” is quite accurate, but I honestly think you’re confused about it. The word “whole” isn’t a fuzzy word. It doesn’t mean “a bunch of stuff all in one place with some kind of connections”. The “whole” in the definition of systems is the same one we find in the definition of holism. And the onus is always on the believer in holism to show that the thing they describe cannot be reduced to its component parts. What you described in your post was nothing like a system, and if you see a real whole in there it’s because you’re imposing it on the data.
All this shows to me is that you don’t really know what the word “system” means. You’re trying to say that cultural “systems” aren’t systematic, but they are systems, which is a contradiction. If it’s sort of like a system, but the components aren’t systematically related, then it’s not a system. Why not give up this word? It doesn’t do anything at all. I’m pretty sure all this “system”-related talk in the social sciences is an attempt to get away from that scary word, reductionism, but as I don’t find reductionism all that scary, and as it is a much better view to take and is naturalistic in contrast to holism, I see no reason to embrace the systems-talk. Everything you described in your post reduced to the actions of a number of people.
But it’s not a system. It reduces. And what it reduces to is a journalist getting the idea, after watching an early Michael Wood documentary and seeing that he’s quite handsome and well-dressed, that readers would find it funny to see this phrase applied to him. It reduces to the beliefs of a few people about the beliefs of other people, and those beliefs can be wrong. Wiki informs me that Kate Winslet was described by one newspaper as “sinking man’s crumpet”, after Titanic came out. Only one other paper used this comment afterwards. It failed to catch on. The beliefs of the journalist and their editors about the beliefs of others with regard to the humour of the phrase “sinking man’s crumpet” turned out to be incorrect.
It isn’t a system because it reduces to the individuals that make it up and their mental states. Those mental states are very often about what other people’s mental states are about, and people consider their beliefs about other people’s beliefs in their actions. That is what allows for us to make abstractions about “social facts” and “culture”. But make no mistake: “culture” is a useful abstraction, not a system. And what you have abstracted in your post is wrong, and about as reflective of modern British culture as Keanu Reeves’ accent in Bram Stoker’s Dracula is of British English.
Discuss White Privilege,
Your point about the “systematicity” of racism seems to rest on a different meaning of the word “system”, essentially a synonym of “inevitability”. In that sense, you may be right.
Absolutely. And in trying to find out more about the phrase on the internet, I came across some comments about Moira Stuart’s appearance that were a little stunning – not explicitly racist, but simply implying that she’s not attractive, or never was. But she’s a good-looking, classy, intelligent woman with a lovely voice – there’s no reason she shouldn’t be considered “thinking man’s crumpet” if Anna Ford is, except for race.
Thank you, Al, for actually engaging the substance of my comment. Much appreciated.
Al: This is going to be an orthogonal response to your comments above on systems and my own deployment of the concept of systematicity. It could also be titled as follows: Why I–or a black woman like me–would never be Rex’s ‘thinking man’s crumpet’, and how this realization helps to ‘unpack’ this Savage Minds crumpet post. Given the orthogonal take on your comments about systems, I hope you will able to find the connections.
What follows below was inspired in large part by thinking about the nervous system (especially in relation to visual perception and racial identification: including the Freudian concept of identification with; and the role appearance plays in determinations of attraction and attractiveness) and comments on the Neuroanthropology Blog about what that blog is about (i.e. its aims, mission, inspiration and purpose). Aapropos of your comments on the circulatory system I have also been thinking about how systems interface, relate, work together (or don’t); how do the circulatory and nervous systems interact and interface, for example; how do all the body’s ‘systems’ (as understood in ‘Western’ allopathic medicine) inter-relate and come to form one uniform whole (i.e. an individual body) that senses and perceives and acts in the social world so as to arrive at an understanding and determination of who is and is not ‘crumpet’, ‘thinking person’s’ and otherwise? So the question of how bodily systems relate to the systematicity I wrote about above. And the question of (racial) phenomenology and embodiment and neuroanthropology and Catherine Lutz’s emotion as an index of social relation; the question of how preferences–*perceived* racial similarity and difference, racial desirability and revulsion–are learned, perceived (yes, this word again, and a recursive return to the nervous system), sensed, felt, understood, habituated, embodied; how (corporeal) systems relate to (socio-cultural) systematicities.
Neuroanthropology.
There is a Neuroanthropology post, or posts, lurking in this Savage Minds post and its comment stream. Ushering forth from Rex’s clear pattern of profound, *visceral* contempt and disgust for me such that his abusive/dismissive response to me above is only the latest in a long pattern of him ignoring and shutting down my comments and making a point of not engaging substantively any of what I’ve written in response to his posts: in short, no anthropogical empathy for me, even in response to his empathy post. If his past behavior is any indication, I should not be surprised if he closes comments on this post after I post this, deeming my comments ‘off topic’. A common tactic, along with just ignoring what I have to say altogether, of racist/sexist abuse and the quotidian deployment of white supremacy and male privilege: the ‘microaggressions’ that constitute ‘the violence of everyday life’ and become the embodied experience of ‘social suffering’. Yes, neuroanthropology. Corporeal systems and socio-cultural systematicities.
Rex’s disgust and anger with me–demonstrated by his deep investment in exerting his Official White Male Power so as to keep ignoring me and showing me racist-sexist disrespect to which he is commited to not apologizing–is visceral and deeply embodied. Being ‘pissed off’ is an embodied response. Being pissed off because an ‘annoying black woman’ who won’t shut up and ‘know her place’ and keeps insisting on ‘discussing white privilege’, is an embodied response. A white anthropogist being pissed off–or ‘put off’–by simply seeing a comment posted under the screen name Discuss White Privilege is an embodied response (and anthropologists should be more honest and forthcoming about what kind of embodied response it is, and why, given that I am legitimately making points about where whiteness needs to be drawn out of an analysis, and these same people would not have the same embodied response if i posted as Discuss Political Economy and constantly made points about political economy not having been part of the anthropological analysis at hand though it was relevant to the analysis being made). Yes, neuroanthropology. Corporeal systems and socio-cultural systematicities.
As I considered–anthropologically–the familiar pattern occurring in the comment stream of this SM post, I couldn’t help but think not only about Rex’s embodied responses to my comments, but mine to his, especially in relation to the work of Paula Braverman, whose work certainly falls under the rubric of neuroanthropogy (and SM indeed as I continue to return to this hostile and abusive site where I can always count on getting crapped on or ignored for ‘discussing white privilege’, though not because I ‘enjoy’ the abuse per se–it is a ‘necessary evil’ (for lack of a better term) to be endured–but because I truly believe all that stuff AAA says about how anthropology should be an *antiracist* discipline; though the longer I am on this site being used as the black whipping girl for legitimately ‘discussing white privilege’ I have to wonder what the real point–and goal–of these AAA antiracist statements is when so many anthropologists see the kind of racist-sexist abuse and disrespect Rex and many others feel entitled to treat me with as entirely normal and not even worth speaking out against; the other SM bloggers are certainly not speaking up to defend me in this comment stream after all).
I’ll end this very long post with two links, one to a discussion of Paula Braverman’s work that makes clear why I made relating corporeal systems to socio-cultural systematicies, and neuroanthropology, the theme of this orthogonal response to thinking about who does and does not get to be a ‘thinking person’s crumpet’; the other link address the racist and sexist stereotypes of black women informing Rex’s and others) ‘distaste’ for me and my comments (no, I clearly stand no chance of being Rex’s ‘thinking man’s crumpet’ as one of the racial dimensions for being such a ‘crumpet’ is not being perceived as an ‘uppity Negro’ cum ‘loud Angry Black Woman’ who ‘thinks too much’ about race/gender inequalities: not hot, not sexy, NOT ‘thinking man’s crumpet’). On corporeal systems and socio-cultural systematicities, neuroanthropology, and why I choose to post as and ‘discuss white privilege’:
(1) http://bitchmagazine.org/article/no-disrespect
(2) http://www.issues.org/24.2/p_braveman.html
“Could experiences of racism account for the counterintuitive finding of a greater racial disparity in birth outcomes among more affluent and educated women? One can only speculate, but unmeasured differences in socioeconomic factors during life appear to be a possibility, along with experiences related to racial discrimination. Unmeasured socioeconomic exposures (for example, in childhood and/or at the neighborhood level) could influence birth outcomes through pathways involving nutritional effects, exposure to toxins, and other adverse exposures related to low socioeconomic status, as well as stress. Paradoxically, a more educated black woman may, on a chronic basis, experience more discrimination and more constant awareness and fears of it, because she is far more likely than her less educated black counterpart to be working, playing, shopping, and traveling in a predominantly white world.”
In short, Rex chooses to use his white/male/anthropology professor privilege to mock, ridicule, and silence me for posting comments rooted in a neuroanthropological and medical anthropological understanding of embodied experience and embodied suffering that asks anthropologists to discuss white privilege so that they have empathy–genuine, substantive anthropological empathy–for ALL people, including black woman. If Rex can advocate having anthropological empathy for Nazis, why can’t he have anthropological empathy for me so as not to keep treating me with racist-sexist contempt and disrespect? A rhetorical question at this point. But the larger question of racialized perceptions (including of crumpets), and embodied responses to them, most certainly needs to be addressed (neuro)anthropologically.
DWP, as you talk about neuroanthropology, I think it’s safe to say that if Rex felt the need to try and ridicule your first comment, and not just outright ignore it, it is because you just hit some nerve.
I do not feel competent to discuss some of the difficult issues raised in the comments to this post, however I do have a few words regarding systems and how we talk about them.
To recapitulate the discussion so far, Al West objects that the sort of mish-mash Rex describes as a system in his post isn’t really a system at all: “there isn’t really a system of meaning surrounding the use of the term ‘thinking woman’s crumpet’. Instead of a system, where all the parts interrelate such that a change in any of them results in a change in all the others, we’ve got a lot of caked on historical residue.” Following up in a second comment, Al West elaborates upon the notion of system West has in mind: “Systems operate by laws; they are systematic. What affects one part of a system necessarily affects all others parts, or else it isn’t a system.” In reply, Rex recalls the standard definition of system as a “a set of connected things or parts forming a complex whole” and argues that merely being a system doesn’t mean that its parts are “clearly, neatly structured according to some plan.” Rex supplies us with an example of a messy system: the circulatory system. Conceding Rex’s definition of system and its applicability to the circulatory system, West responds that a “The word ‘whole’ isn’t a fuzzy word. It doesn’t mean ‘a bunch of stuff all in one place with some kind of connections’. The ‘whole’ in the definition of systems is the same one we find in the definition of holism. And the onus is always on the believer in holism to show that the thing they describe cannot be reduced to its component parts.”
How to provide a decision procedure which given some input outputs YES it is a system or NO it is not? West and Rex have noted a number of properties that might go into defining such a procedure, but at this point I would like to stop and recall a point hammered home by George Lakoff in Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, that many (most?) of our cognitive categories exhibit various sorts of prototype effects: while many things may be instances of a category, only some of them are prototypical exemplars of the category.
In my view,’system’ is a fairly indiscriminate category, much like the category ‘thing’. In general it seems easier to find reasons to call something a system than it is to call something definitively not a system. But unlike the category ‘thing’, in deciding on a case by case basis whether something is an example of a system, one is inclined to rebel against having to give definitive Yes and No’s. Instead, one would prefer to arrange each example along a continuum of some sort.
What I am suggesting is that a ‘system’ is a ‘thing’ with ‘parts’ and admitting a measure, namely a measure of its systematicity, related in some way to the organization of those parts, and in particular to how that organization arises out of the dependencies or constraints operative between those parts. Systems may be loosely constrained, or more tightly constrained.
Free floating volumes of gas are loosely coupled systems, automobiles and simple computer programs on the other hand are tightly constrained systems. It is, I think, no accident that many (or perhaps even most) of our prototypical examples of systems are either biological or highly engineered objects, both of which are relatively tightly constrained.
I would go further and argue that things with very little or no systematicity can be called systems without problem, in the same way that mathematicians call the empty function a function, the trivial group a group, the empty graph a graph, and so on. Indeed, to drive this point home, these special cases (the empty function, etc.) belong to these categories of mathematical object (functions, groups, graphs, etc.), but are not seen as prototypical of them.
Perhaps I should discount this argument Rex and West are having as semantic quibbling: differences without much difference. But why waste time arguing about whether something is a system when what really matters to us is the degree of systematicity it exhibits? West’s complaint shouldn’t be that Rex’s system isn’t a system, but that it is a system too unconstrained to do the work Rex says it does. And isn’t that the complaint levied against interpretive approaches generally, that they rely too strongly upon the notion of cultures as integrated wholes as a precondition for their validity? But absent that deep integration, that one can produce associations between disparate cultural productions may say more about the productivity of the representations people use than about the people who use them.
Thanks for that Jacob.
No, the complaint is that what Rex described isn’t a system. “System” isn’t a poorly defined word. It’s well-defined, and Rex provided a very suitable definition.
Systems aren’t abstractions; they’re supposed to be wholes, which means that they exhibit properties that are more than the sum of their parts. You can talk about how humans define words and produce categories as much as you like, and it is very interesting – and Lakoff is a fine starting point indeed – but that doesn’t change the fact that (a) systems are well-defined, (b) what Rex pointed to as evidence of a British cultural system didn’t live up to the name “system”, even by the definition he provided, and (c) cultural “systems” are unlikely to ever live up to the name “system” due to the fact that the abstractions labelled as “systems” reduce to a changing set of individuals with unique causal properties. The “systematic” nature of culture is entirely supervenient on the actions of those individuals and entirely reduces to them – and calling these actions a system fails to account for anomalies and individual actions that aren’t part of the “system”, which happen all the time (see “sinking man’s crumpet”). “Culture” isn’t a thing greater than the sum of its parts. Yes, there are of course some commonalities and emergent properties present in what people do, but the essential point is that expecting to find systematic relationships between things people do, as Rex did in his initial post, is mistaken.
Metaphysically speaking, I don’t think there are any true systems. All things reduce in causal properties to the causal properties of the elementary particles that make them up. That’s an ontological point, but it’s still an important one. It’s why computers may be accurately described as systems while accounting for the fact that the computer fails for reasons not accounted for by a systematic account. It’s also why talking about whether something is a constrained system or a less constrained system seems a little pointless.
There’s also a point to be made that an account described as an abstraction and an account described as loosely systematic would probably be nearly identical. There’s no reason to describe what people as a system, and there are plenty of good reasons for avoiding the word.
Discuss White Privilege,
I’m afraid I don’t understand very much of what you wrote.
Al — I think we just mean different things by ‘system’, as Jacob said above. So I don’t feel that we have much more to say that is productive on this subject, especially since we’ve wandered so far from your original set of objections about a simple term and moved on to the nature of the universe. Since we are here, however, and its a place I don’t know very much about, I’d be interested in hearing your opinion about the work of Keith Swayer and others on culture as an emergent phenomenon? I haven’t looked into this approach too much, but it seems to be a principled, realist account of culture which I’m sympathetic too, and which would seem to run contrary to much of what you’ve said here. But I can’t really endorse it because I haven’t read it. Any thoughts?
A discussion of how humans use categories is not irrelevant to this discussion precisely because this discussion did not proceed from an explicit and well-defined and arbitrary definition of a ‘system’ to an argument about whether a bit of cultural mash potatoes constitutes a system; we can do like a mathmetician and define ‘systemP’ to be the kind of thingie West is talking about.
The notion of being more than the sum of its parts isn’t particularly well defined. Does it mean, for example, that you can’t just sum up the properties of the parts and come up with all the properties of whatever ‘whole’ you come up with? Well…duh. You have to take into account the relations between the parts (however you have decided to individuate them). A flash light is not just a bulb, switch, and battery, etc. It is a particular configuration of those things, and that configuration of things has properties all its own. But acknowledging this doesn’t lead one into some kind of radical holism (here I’d point to Daniel Little’s post on emergence). Is there something more?
Are systems real things? Here is my quick and dirty: if a system has parts, its because we saw them there. There is the world out there, true, and it is the way it is, regularities and all, and although it is a continuous field, it is fairly lumpy in terms of its properties, and so it is really convenient to individuate it into parts with relatively stable identities. And hopefully those parts, once individuated, hold fairly regular relationships to each other, and are composable into larger parts in useful ways But that individuation is something we do. A system, in as much as it is a collection of parts with relationships to one another, is a function of a particular scheme of individuation applied to the world. Not all schemes yield equally useful or sensible systems (views, perspectives); they will differ in their informational properties and reliability. ‘System’ is, as I argued, an indiscriminate category, one which we use as a means of drawing attention to the fact that a thing can be individuated into parts and that those parts relate to each other in ways that are important to us. Hence, in my view, being a system doesn’t explain anything. It is the properties of the system being described that do the explaining, and those are variable.
I think it does. A flashlight just is the sum of the causal properties of all the elementary particles that constitute it; it has no others in addition. There are several proponents of this view, not least of whom was Democritus (probably!). Contemporary philosophers with this view include Trenton Merricks (his Objects and Persons is probably the best and most accessible work on the topic) and Peter van Inwagen, although both exclude humans from this analysis (consciousness and intentionality are often held to be causal properties that are not simply the sum of the causal properties of the elementary particles that allow for their existence; I don’t feel comfortable with that but I don’t have an argument against it). A kind of folk reductionism is at the heart of science.
“Acknowledging” that the causal properties of the flashlight are different to the sum of the causal properties of the bits that make it up is a very radical position, because what it is saying is essentially magical – to express it cutely, it is saying that something is going on other than what is actually going on. It may be modeled as a system and individuated as a “flashlight” for certain purposes, but the entirety reduces to constituent particles.
As for things being “individuated”: it is a matter of fact and entirely ontologically objective that elementary particles are individual, despite being identical in causal properties to other elementary particles of their type. They are indivisible parts with causal properties, that constitute everything else. Other objects may simply be more or less arbitrary agglomerations of these particles according to their properties, and that is where individuation is only epistemically objective, not ontologically (in case that language sounds obscure, it comes from Searle).
Systems can’t be matters of opinion when there are fundamentally indivisible constitutional parts of everything that exists. It is not a subjective matter, but an entirely objective one.
Rex,
I agree that we’re getting further away from the main topic, and that isn’t necessarily a great thing. But while talking about the fundamental nature of the universe can be pretty absurd, these are precisely the questions that concern us, and there’s no sense in confusing systems with sets of historical causal relationships.
I haven’t read any of Keith Sawyer’s work, in all honesty. But what I have read of it, it appears unnaturalistic and unrealistic – asserting again the holist premise, that what is going on in a certain scenario is more than what is actually going on. But that’s based on a very cursory background reading. It may be that the best way to understand or make predictive models of certain phenomena – like the behaviour of certain sizes of human groups – is to model them as systems of parts interrelated by invariable laws rather than in terms of the mental states of the individuals that constitute them.
But that isn’t what is actually going on, and there is a point at which such an analysis becomes impossible to sustain because people’s other mental states get in the way. “Crowds” behave in a certain way; crowds of hungry people behave in another; crowds of hungry Jewish people in November in Odessa behave in yet another; and the things that are doing the behaving are always the people that make up the crowd, who each have different mental states.
Predictive capabilities aside, this is what is actually happening, and so-called “emergent” properties are epistemically, but not ontologically, objective properties of things that reduce to the properties of their constituent parts and can be derived from them – like the epistemically objective behaviour of a crowd of people “emerging” from the mental states and calculations each person in the crowd is performing about the mental states, calculations, and actions of all of the others. Or to use an example Dennett likes, the actions of a glider gun in Conway’s Game of Life emerging from the rules of the computer programme. This is different to the usage espoused in the blogpost Jacob posted.
It would take a great deal to show that anything in the universe has causal properties that don’t reduce to its constituent parts. I don’t know if Sawyer has shown this with regard to human society. I doubt it. My belief is that the more realistic view is to attempt to understand the mental mechanisms that allow for so-called “social” phenomena.
My apologies for the long post – series of long posts, in fact. But these are interesting questions, and important to get right.
It is entirely possible that we are merely talking past each other here, but my point was rather elementary. If I were to disassemble a flashlight into three pieces corresponding roughly to a switch, its battery, and the light-bulb, I would still have all the matter I did before, and they would individually roughly have the same properties as before. Or, perhaps I remove the battery and insert it backwards. It is evident that the sorts of regularities that were observed before will no longer be observed. It is not mysterious: the connections between the parts have been interrupted, so that, for example, flipping the switch no longer has the effect of lighting the bulb because the bulb and switch are no longer connected to a source of current.
The point is: structure matters, and this is not mysterious, and no more than what a bridge-building nine year old knows about her legos. If the individual legos are not in the position to transfer force one to the other, then they’re not going to do so. Does this commit one to radical forms of holism? I surely hope not.
Bravo, Jacob.
Perhaps a bit more modesty about the relation of ideas, whether scientific or interpretive, to the scale of the world is in order. Here is the way I tackle the problem in the introduction to a book I am writing.
——-
The late 1960s were an exciting time to be a novice anthropologist. All sorts of new ideas were in the air. I was excited by Claude Lévi-Strauss’ advice in the “Overture” to The Raw and the Cooked to look for the logic in tangible qualities (that later would help the adman a lot when it came to talking with art directors). Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger epitomized a renewed focus on social and cosmological categories and, in particular, on people and things that fall in the cracks between them (which later resonated a lot with my advertising colleague’s rule-breaking habits and endless search for something new). I was persuaded by Clifford Geertz that ethnographers should strive to produce “thick descriptions”(1973:3-30). I was particularly impressed by the opening paragraph of Geertz’s essay “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man.”
Toward the end of his recent study of the ideas used by tribal peoples, La Pensée Sauvage, the French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss remarks that scientific explanation does not consist, as we have been led to imagine, in the reduction of the complex to the simple. Rather, it consists, he says, in a substitution of a complexity more intelligible for one which is less. So far as the study of man is concerned, one may go even further, I think, and argue that explanation often consists of substituting complex pictures for simple ones while striving somehow to retain the persuasive clarity that went with the simple ones. (1973:33).
Geertz’s amendment of Lévi-Strauss is a fair description of what this book strives to be. It substitutes complex pictures of Japan’s advertising industry for the simple ones with which it begins. The research it describes begins with a simple visual image of a range of mountains that captures a bit of commonsense knowledge about the industry’s overall shape. The research uses scientific tools to analyze the structures that underly the topography and the processes that have led to their formation. It also employs interpretive, historical and ethnographic methods to explore what the history revealed by the scientific analysis means to some of the key figures involved in making that history.
But reader be warned: neither science nor interpretation can claim to be a complete account. Japan’s advertising industry is a very large and complex business. An active trade press, government and private researchers have been generating data about the industry ever since the 1950s. This data stream is a river flowing into an ocean where it mingles with other political, economic, and cultural information. The picture presented here will be complex but it remains at best a cartoon. Those who wish to learn more or to challenge its depictions will have plenty of opportunity to do so.
Al & Jacob,
The ‘magic’ that Al mentions is the necessarily extra-systemic addition of the intention of the person that transforms causal properties into ‘flashlight’. Or, ‘torch’. Like how yeast and flour become not a ‘biscuit’ but a ‘crumpet’, which is not quite the same as but certainly connected via idiom to handsome newscasters who live in a culture with a concept called ‘race’ that is a component of their relations of power, which is how a discussion of pastries can get so off the rails in several directions. Without ever really getting off the rails. (This has almost nothing to do with trains.)
Says the Daodejing:
We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel;
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends.
One could say that it is the things that are not ‘actually’ part of the system that are the most important
No, you’re right – it doesn’t. Thank you for the clarification! The blogpost you linked to seemed to hold different ideas, however, and lauded the holist notion that some properties don’t derive from properties of component parts, and I thought that that was what you were discussing.
I’d agree as far as to say that “structure” matters, but electrical circuits can be defined in terms of constituent physical elements that always exhibit the same properties. Structure matters in the sense that how matter is arranged determines what happens due to the interactions of the causal properties of the constituent particles. With electrical circuits, there are classes of things, like resistors and bulbs, that have identical properties due to consisting of particles with identical properties.
But that isn’t the case with the people. In a social situation, the relevant arrangements of matter are brain states inside the heads of individual humans and subject to the incredible number of variables to which such things are invariably subject. That we can generalise about them points to some regularities in mental reactions to stimuli, but those aren’t perfectly regular, and they cannot easily be verified. Culture and society are not like electrical circuitry in that sense. The emergent properties of human societies derive directly from human mental states rather than being novel properties that exist only on some “social” plane. That leads to problems when causation between human actions is held to be systematic, because there are always other intrusive variables and no regular causation.
Rex, I think, made the mistake of assuming otherwise.
I hereby christen a new term: “The Crumpet Effect”, the tendency of SM posts to degrade into long discussions of the fundamental nature of the universe and human knowing in complete disregard to the actual content of the post. It happens often here, but only now we have a name for it.
Nice! And so, does that make us crumpeteers?
This digression isn’t completely unrelated to the original post. It’s arguable whether it’s a digression at all, especially when the original problem in the post was an ontological one, rooted in mistaken assumptions. You called British culture a system and appeared to believe that there were systematic relationships between different parts of British society, even going so far as to offer up the possibility of crumpets, a food you had only become aware of through the internet, being a particularly working class food on the basis of a belief, or an expectation, of such systematic relationships.
Those are both quite mistaken; the crumpets-being-working-class thing was a simple empirical problem, easily resolved, but the “system” idea was a conceptual problem whose resolution rested on a more nuanced discussion. Like it or not, everything in this thread has been related, bar your final comment.
This is the only blog I know of where going off-topic is even noticed, let alone commented on or banned. All blogs have “crumpeteers”. They’re the people who read and regularly comment on the blog and have an intellectual community that goes beyond railroaded discussions of items brought up on the blog.
Al West:
“The emergent properties of human societies derive directly from human mental states rather than being novel properties that exist only on some “social” plane. That leads to problems when causation between human actions is held to be systematic, because there are always other intrusive variables and no regular causation.”
What does this mean? The first part seems to be just wrong. According to your own reasoning, human societies are not reducible to human “mental states” (which I am guessing you are implying are the equivalent to brain states?) because other matter has causal properties that are important to how those societies work. In fact, there is no plausible way that mental states, or even brain states, (of different individuals) could be in actual direct contact with each other–strictly speaking, these mental states would have to be mediated through the matter of bodies, which would then have to be mediated through the matter of environments, both of which introduce different physical and causal properties. Since, though, you want to ignore this fact and focus entirely on “mental states” you suddenly stop pushing your dogged reductionism and instead hand-wave about causation and “variables”. This directly translates into the next sentence, which seems to have little to do with reductionism and rather seems to state that a human society cannot be a system because, you claim, human action is indeterminate. But, as far as I can tell, this is the first time that indeterminism has arisen in all your posts in this thread. In fact, your general attitude would seemed to have been that such indeterminism does not exist at all and is just the muddied thinking of an anthropologist. Perhaps, in this case, you are more right than you know, but you have mistaken the nexus of this muddied thinking?
You end up, I think, on less solid ground than if you had just stuck to specific empirical critiques about the crumpet (which I actually tend to agree with). If you accept that a flash light, taken as an object, has structural properties which depend on but are not the same as the properties of its parts, then you would seem to also accept that human societies have a bunch of humans, who have properties, and these humans, in the way they are structured in relation to each other, give rise to similar concrete “emergence” that is not magic but is quite understandable. That would be because”mental states” influence (ie have causal properties) on other “mental states” (ignoring even for the moment that this is just an abstraction to talk about what actually happens with physical matter, and that mental states cannot interact with each other in such a direct manner). Such “causation” is usually known abstracted as “learning” and the entire “object” of such matter is called the “society” or “culture” (or system of meaning, or social system, or whatever). None of this is magical: two humans in a room is different matter than one human in a room. In this way it is a system in the same way as the flash-light, no? Isn’t this all laid out well by Ed Hutchins (been a while since I read his work)?
Re: Rex, isn’t this post a kind of ironic endorsement of serious anthropological method? Like the notion you have to spend a lot of time to understand what everything means and why it means that, rather than just looking stuff up on wikipedia and coming up with your own elaborate, clever but not necessarily accurate, pet theory?
Re: DWP. I don’t understand your point so perhaps you could elaborate on why you think this is an issue of race specifically, rather than an issue that “could” be about race. Your posts seem consistent with most anthropology seminars though, where the questions devolve into each person stating their own idiosyncratic bone to pick: “What about race? What about Christianity and religion? What about women and gender? What about material culture and materiality? What about psychology and cognition? What about the political economy? What about the State? What about globalization?” etc…
Yes, I’m implying that brain states = mental states. There are of course other bits of the universe that are important to how societies work – like needing oxygen and energy and a magnetic field. And you’re quite right; mental states don’t come into direct contact with one another, and they are in themselves abstractions. “Beliefs” and “desires” are problematic in themselves.
You claim that I ignore the fact that mental states cannot contact each other directly, and that all of it has to be mediated through bodies, etc, and that I’m doggedly focused on reductionism. This is absurd. I have spelled out the fact that I endorse mereological nihilism – atomism, really. And the idea that mental states abstractly cause events would be in direct contravention of that. Mental states – abstractions of events going on in the brain – cause things in the same way that other things cause things: by elementary particles operating on one another. So of course it goes through bodies, the air, radio, etc, and relies on various forms of energy.
I never said that human action is indeterminate, either. I think it’s wholly determined by what is going on in the brain, which is susceptible to an enormous number of variables, including what you ate for breakfast, what colour clothing you’re wearing, what time of the month it is, and which species of bacteria are dwelling in your body. How that works at the level of subatomic particles nobody knows exactly, but in principle that’s the way it works.
It’s all determined; it’s just not determined by an easily identifiable range of social things, such that human societies cannot be systematic. And Rex focused on the least systematic of all things: the use of language tropes in the media.
It is the “structured in relation to each other” bit that is problematic, because the whole notion of people being structured in relation to one another is the result of individual human mental states. Unless you mean that people are physically structured in a pyramid or something. Such a notion depends on people recognising each other as “king” or “superior” or “peasant”, which is a coordination problem (but not a very hard one). And there are plenty of good reasons to think that the phenomena we call “social structure” reduce to certain kinds of human brain states instead of having new properties all of their own that don’t derive naturalistically from anything else.
This is yet another coordination problem, and as written here the solution makes no sense whatsoever.
I hope you see how odd this line of reasoning is, by the way. Change it slightly, and say “a flashlight and a grain of sand, taken as an object”, and your reasoning holds true: the flashlight+grain taken as an object has the property of having the mass of a grain of sand and a flashlight. The grain doesn’t have the mass of a flashlight, but together they have a particular mass which no single part of it has. This is a property that depends on the properties of the parts but isn’t the same as a property of any one of them.
And hey presto, any things arbitrarily put together are systems!
As you say, two people in a room isn’t the same as one person in a room. I have no idea what point you were trying to prove, but it’s certainly true.
This article from beginning to end is really about interpretation. So, I ask: isn’t interpretation an anthropological method? If it is, then it should not be the goal of anthropology to just come up with one interpretation of anything. The process of interpretation varies from person to person.
If it is not an anthropological method, I don’t think it is possible for anthropology to exist without interpretation we consciously or subconsciously employ in our study of culture. The very first thing an anthropologist does in the field is to interpret. Are the smiling faces, the open arms, the hands that shake warm and welcoming?
I work as a chef (since my diploma in anthropology is just that), and my interpretation of “thinking woman’s crumpet” is sexual as it is about food and eating. “Crumpet”, according to your culinary definition, is plain but comforting a food. With that, Wood’s looks is irrelevant. What matters here is whether he is a “comfort food” to the “thinking woman.”
What is this “thinking woman”? I’ll use my preconceived notion about thinkers. Thinkers are actually busy people. Even a jobless poet may not have time for watching TV, taking a bath, or shopping. She has little time for anything else but her poetry. Even when it comes to sex, I presume her time is limited, so being picky is a waste of time. Sleeping with a plain-looking man but comforting (maybe he knows how to woo an angsty poet) is her best alternative.
It is not that easy and quick to find a hottie, unless she is a dumb blond who sits in a cafe all day watching men and collecting phone numbers.
Is my interpretation wrong? I don’t think you can fault an interpreter who interprets according to her cultural, economic, educational, social background. I don’t believe there is an anthropologist out there who can perform purely as an anthropologist in his study of culture. One can be an anthropologist, but she can also be a chef, a hyper-sexual person, an individual who believes thinkers are too preoccupied.
Yeah. Yeah, you can. Because there is an actual thing actually going on. There is a reality outside of your head. “Interpretation” isn’t free, and you don’t get to say whatever you like about things.
If you believe otherwise, then allow me to “interpret” your comment as a call to arms for Australian Wiccans or a recipe for baba ghanoush.
“If you believe otherwise, then allow me to “interpret” your comment as a call to arms for Australian Wiccans or a recipe for baba ghanoush.”
That’s okay if you have your bases to think that I am Australian, a witch, and a proponent of a cause and that interpretation is a cause or that you can actually cook baba ghanoush after reading my comment and that “recipe” is a comment about interpretation. Come back to Earth please.
A tree. And a poet, a forestry student, a lumberjack—who may or may not be the same person. Or maybe it’s that see with the vinyl leaves, the one they have in Disneyland. What do we learn by insisting that there is something we call “tree” there?
A flashlight and a grain of sand. They could be on opposite sides of the world, or different planets, so loosely coupled that their interaction is minimal. Or the grain of sand could be jammed in the flashlight’s switch, leaving someone trapped in the dark in an emergency, or the source of the silicon transformed into glass for the flashlight’s lens. The significance lies in the relationship, as much or more than it does in the flashlight and the grain of sand themselves. The relationships are where we find evidence of degrees of systematicity, not the flashlight and sand by themselves.
“that tree with vinyl leaves”[sic]
Right. In answer to your question in your previous comment, yes, your interpretation is quite wrong, and it’s also quite offensive to poets, thinkers, intelligent women, and above all, blonds. I assume that you’re a Filipina/o on the basis of your name and flag (apologies if my interpretation is wrong), and I’m slightly concerned about your comment about blond women. Dumb, are they? How would you have reacted if similar stereotypes had been employed by a white person about Filipinas?
Anyway, my absurd “interpretations” of your comment were about as wrong as your interpretation of “thinking woman’s crumpet” was. You can be wrong about interpretations of words and actions, and whether that’s because of some cultural background, racist predilection, plain stupidity, or a desire to make a point about interpretations being constrained is moot. You can be wrong about interpretations, and you were with yours.
Those “relationships” are solely about where the matter is. Of course that affects how things happen. Now, extrapolate that point: where is the stuff that directly causes human action? It’s in brains, not in some kind of social ether, and belief in any other kind of direct causation would require some extraordinary evidence of which there is none. Of course people react to the world around them, but a blind/deaf person will not even be aware of the phrase “thinking man’s crumpet”. A person with severe autism will find it incredibly difficult to parse the meaning, and might use it in a particular way that others find intriguing or even funny, and emulate in certain situations. Those are extreme cases, but we’re all susceptible to huge numbers of influences that affect whether we use a phrase like “thinking woman’s crumpet” or not. And, importantly, class and gastronomy in the UK are not systematically related to the use of the phrase “thinking woman’s crumpet”.
I purposely put “a dumb blond” in my comment to prove my point. A person who finds it offensive uses his own preconception about the expression “dumb blond” in his interpretation. Don’t forget the article “a”. I can use “a dumb brunette” or “a dumb asian”, and it does not mean all brunettes or Asians are dumb.
You are forgetting that we are talking about interpretation not misinterpretation.
Extrapolate? The stuff that causes human action is physical matter arranged in ie bodies and enviroments. Not brain states as such. Like you said the relationships are where the matter is. Why brain states? Why not hydrogen? Maybe hydrogen causes the thinking women’s crumpet.