Sunflowers vs. Bougainvillea

While some individual TED talks are interesting and even useful in the classroom (I especially love that many are subtitled in numerous languages), there I totally understand what Nathan Jurgenson is talking about when he says that “TED talks fuse sales-pitch slickness with evangelical intensity” in a way which “necessarily leaves out other groups and other ways of knowing and presenting ideas.” But where Jurgenson merely points out the problem, I thought Nathan Heller’s recent New Yorker piece on the TED conference did a great job of getting at the nub of the problem in a way which highlights some of the underlying issues involved in popularizing academic ideas. Unfortunately the piece is currently hidden behind a paywall, so I’ve taken the liberty of quoting the relevant passages at length:

Two very different ways of thinking about ideas shape intellectual life today, and TED’s sentimental gestures arise from efforts to obscure the difference between them. One way is to see ideas as entities that speak for themselves, that can be harvested, that inspire and uplift people who handle them—sunflowers of the mind. Research science, technology, and business enterprises tend to perceive ideas this way, partly because their products are frequently self-contained: the software works, the vaccine finally exists, and the stalk of specialized inquiry that got us there no longer matters. (Technology demonstrations, or phrases like “One recent study found”—both key TED-isms—are essentially sunflower-picking exercises.) A sunflower, after all, is a thing that you can carry around for quite some time. Its form and beauty hold after it has lost its roots. It can be given to a friend or set in a vase to add some substance to a desultory room.

Yet not all ideas are sunflowers. Some, particularly on the softer side of the academy, are more akin to bougainvillea—thick, interlocking vines whose blooms are shaped much like their leaves. The most vibrant ideas here depend on precedent for structure: in order to understand why C is brilliant, you must be aware of A and B. Most specialists in the university today are trained to think of their fields in this way. Of course, bougainvillea flowers are hard to separate and carry with you. Try to “use” an idea from the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas quickly on a TV talk show, and you’ll confuse many people and irk those who are not confused. This isn’t because the viewers are stupid, or because Levinas’s ideas aren’t useful. It’s because their usefulness is clear in a specialized context; beyond that, the blossoms crush and wither. You cannot put a bougainvillea flower in a vase.

The sunflower people and the bougainvillea people come together well enough in universities, but outside—where most of us make our lives—their coexistence is awkward. More Americans than ever before are taught in school, by specialists, to think about “the world of ideas” in a cumulative, contingent sense. (College enrollment in the United States has more than doubled since 1970, over which period academic specialization has intensified, too.) And yet, in the realm of industry, it’s a plug-and-play model of ideas that yields rewards. What to do?

I thought the metaphor was useful in thinking about the topic, something we have discussed a lot on this blog, and which has also consumed much of the discussion on other anthropology blogs. (See “Thomas Friedman’s Lessons for Anthropologists” on Neuroanthropology.)

One of the defining features of modern anthropology is the attempt to reproduce the complexity of the ethnographic encounter in the written ethnography. Words like “assemblages” are deployed with the express purpose of emphasizing the bougainvillea-like nature of lived complexity. It is almost as if Anthropologists have it out for sunflowers. Just take a look at Roy Wagner’s HAU article on “The chess of kinship and the kinship of chess.” Not that this is all we have. David Graeber’s current fame is due in no small part to his attempt to create a sunflower, as he wrote about in his post “Can We Still Write Big Question Sorts of Books?” (Although even there I think he’s run into some difficulty with reviewers looking for sunflowers in places where he’s provided bougainvilleas.)

Perhaps anthropologists are best at providing sunflowers when we step away from our own ethnographic work and look at things historically or comparatively. I found Marshall Sahlins’ “What Kinship Is” (part one, part two) to be thoroughly enjoyable to read and rather sunflower-like under all the Sahlinsesque flourishes of his own erudition. [The Sahlins articles were available outside a paywall on the JRAI site, but I can no longer find that link, perhaps it has expired?]

In the end I am not clear why ethnographic writing is necessarily less sunflower and more bougainvillea. One would think that ethnography would be well suited towards a particular TED style, in which personal stories replace statistics. But perhaps there is a need to write against the grain, to show the “other ways of knowing” which Jurgenson felt TED left out. If so, perhaps we need to move away from a system of training in which everyone’s first book must be an ethnography. Perhaps we should encourage more junior anthropologists to write big books about big ideas without having to first go through the initiation ritual of writing an ethnography? Maybe we should be cultivating the growth of sunflowers among our bougainvillea?

[Thanks to @BiellaColeman for pointing out the NYkr article!]

14 thoughts on “Sunflowers vs. Bougainvillea

  1. Thank you for this thoughtful post. It relates very closely to a) a recent twitter feed I read about TED lectures and also to some work I am currently carrying out with my undergrads.

    As an anthropologist teaching in a non-anthropology dept. I find great joy imposing my discipline on anyone who crosses my path! Being a captive audience I have recently set up ethnography reading groups with my social work undergrads to analyse how non-anthropologist read and interpret ethnographic accounts. Ethnography needs to be not only accessible to ourselves but also ‘in the world’ in order for it survive and evolve.

    Your post and metaphors are helping me along with my thinking on this subject

  2. Perhaps we should encourage more junior anthropologists to write big books about big ideas without having to first go through the initiation ritual of writing an ethnography?

    While I approve of this, I don’t think it will ever happen. The junior anthropologists will only end up reviled by the people who did do fieldwork, and their big idea books will only end up as (unjustly) hated as Guns, Germs, and Steel.

    One would think that ethnography would be well suited towards a particular TED style, in which personal stories replace statistics.

    Hating TED is one of my hobbies, and I’d personally be disgusted if any aspect of my life were turned into a reproduction of TED’s asininity. But then, I see ethnographic fieldwork as just another kind of data collection, alongside archaeological and linguistic work – the un-sexy, un-feel-good side of scientific inquiry that TED doesn’t deal with. Ethnography after TED-ification would probably more closely resemble a humourous, uplifting culture shock story than anything else.

    Thank you for this post, in any case. I like the metaphor very much, and your nuanced discussion of it, too.

  3. Kerim, thanks for writing this.

    Like you, I’m not entirely convinced that every idea can survive TEDification (or even that it’s a good idea). But I do think our field’s hostility to simplification can very much work against us. I know Jared Diamond divides anthropologists, but we need to learn from his rhetorical strengths and offer more accessible options for our work.

    Personally, I’d love to do a TED talk on some of the key ideas or core insights from my anthropological work. But I don’t think all of my work is susceptible to this sort of treatment, nor do I think it’s the crowning achievement of analysis or public presentation. At the moment, however, we have a shortage of it in our field. There’s a few good practitioners in biological anthropology, and Graeber is a great example of what is possible (including the tightrope walk and unfair criticism involved).

    As a field, I still think we need real crossover books, books that people pick up to read who are a) not anthropologists, b) not even academics in closely allied fields, and c) not required to read our books by us in course syllabi. If we don’t manage more crossover books — and can’t get over the tendency to vilify anyone who tries (e.g., Wade Davis) — we shouldn’t be upset if no one outside our field pays us any attention.

    Daniel Lende and I have both made the point that saying ‘It’s too complicated to explain it to you,’ which anthropologists often seem to want to do, implies to the audience only two things: a) I’m not good at explaining or prioritizing key ideas, and b) I think you’re too stupid to think complexly, so I can’t be bothered to try. Fields that are waaaaaaay more complicated than anthropology manage to throw out occasional blockbuster popular accounts, why the hell can’t we in the last couple of decades?

    I think part of the problem is that anthropologists tend to trash anyone among us who has the temerity to try. I say we need more of us looking for sunflowers, but not trying to turn bougainvilleas into sunflowers.

  4. Kerim this is a great post.

    “Perhaps anthropologists are best at providing sunflowers when we step away from our own ethnographic work and look at things historically or comparatively.”

    Yes, I definitely think that making some moves toward re-incorporating a more historical and comparative perspective might be really beneficial. History matters, and a more comparative frame can help to expand upon very localized accounts. Maybe we need to keep assigning more Roseberry and Wolf–and folks like Fred Eggan. The other thing is this: Especially with cultural anthropology, we tend to gloss “ethnography” as “anthropology,” although they are not one and the same. Tim Ingold wrote a pretty good article about this: “Anthropology is not ethnography.” He makes some really important points.

    “If so, perhaps we need to move away from a system of training in which everyone’s first book must be an ethnography.”

    Yes. Or at least think about opening up the possibilities a bit. Why force everyone to go down the exact same path?

    “Perhaps we should encourage more junior anthropologists to write big books about big ideas without having to first go through the initiation ritual of writing an ethnography?”

    Agreed. Personally, while I think there is value in the whole “ethnographic initiation ritual” that we all do, I also think that it’s overemphasized and that anthros all tend to obsess about it too much. Our thinking could open up about this, and get a bit more creative. For some folks, going down the ethnography-first route might make sense. For others, maybe not. As Ingold said, anthropology is not ethnography, so why not open things up a bit for new anthros to pursue some different avenues?

    @Al West:

    “The junior anthropologists will only end up reviled by the people who did do fieldwork, and their big idea books will only end up as (unjustly) hated as Guns, Germs, and Steel.”

    You might be right. And if we don’t move past this kind of ‘gut reaction’ against anything that isn’t supposedly pure ethnography, I don’t see how we are going to break out of the current regime. I think too many folks overreact to the likes of Diamond (and others), rather than either learning from what he is doing right (as Greg Downey and Daniel Lende argue) or just responding with a solid counter argument.

    @Greg D:

    “As a field, I still think we need real crossover books, books that people pick up to read who are a) not anthropologists, b) not even academics in closely allied fields, and c) not required to read our books by us in course syllabi.”

    Yes, exactly.

    “If we don’t manage more crossover books — and can’t get over the tendency to vilify anyone who tries (e.g., Wade Davis) — we shouldn’t be upset if no one outside our field pays us any attention.”

    Ya, and if most anthros tend to villify anyone who writes for write these books, then who in their right mind is going to try? Certainly not younger anthros who are going to conform to everything under the sun in the hopes they will get a job, tenure, or some little academic scrap of meat! Talk about shooting ourselves in the foot! Why aren’t the ideas of anthropology reaching broader audiences? Because we are deliberately keeping ourselves out of that whole sphere. It’s certainly not the fault of “the public,” that’s for sure.

    “Fields that are waaaaaaay more complicated than anthropology manage to throw out occasional blockbuster popular accounts, why the hell can’t we in the last couple of decades?”

    Agreed. When we just give up and say that “it’s too complicated” to explain to wider audiences, that is both condescending (as if nobody can possibly understand what we talk about) and it’s, well, pretty much a cop out.

  5. A footnote to Ryan’s invocation of Tim Ingold. I wasn’t aware of Ingold’s position when, last month, I heard Marietta Baba, now Dean of Social Sciences at my alma mater Michigan State and, arguably, the most successful and influential business anthropologist in the world give a talk at, of all places, a conference in China, in which she pointed out that the equation of anthropology and ethnography wasn’t true in the first place (19th century anthropologists relied on others for ethnographic data) nor, increasingly, does it hold up in the 21st century. Ethnography, conceived as a combination of observation and depth interviews, is now a standard methodological option in the offerings of market research and management consulting firms, a practice embraced and practiced by people with degrees in psychology, sociology, political science, marketing, business administration, etc., etc., etc. Thus, when anthropologists say that what we do is ethnography, the real world reply is, “Doesn’t everybody these days?”

  6. I’ve never seen the value in “pure ethnography”, especially as “ethnography” has become a distended word, meaning a huge number of completely different things. I’ve said before that I think conducting ethnographic fieldwork today is useless for resolving many important anthropological questions, including ones about pre-state social structure and warfare. Historical texts are often much more useful, as is historical linguistics and monographs on archaeological digs. Ethnography is just one method among many available to anthropologists, and more training in linguistics would be better than continuing to mull over epistemological questions about “ethnographic encounters”.

    I’d have liked to have seen a good critique of Guns, Germs, and Steel, but I’ve never come across one. A lot of people accuse it of “geographic determinism”, but Diamond goes out of his way to avoid this and to explain why his position isn’t deterministic. The same is true of Pinker’s books – all of them, but especially the fantastic Better Angels of our Nature. That was one of the best books I’ve ever read (honestly), but so many people hated it – all of them, as far as I can tell, without ever having read it. I read John Gray’s review in The Guardian and developed an instant aversion to him. It was obvious he hadn’t read a word of it beyond the index.

    A lot of people seem to resent these books because they’re about anthropological topics without having been written by bona fide anthropologists – civilians without fieldwork experience (never mind that many anthropologists do their fieldwork in ad companies or robotics labs, and are just as removed from the issues these books discuss as Pinker and Diamond ever were).

  7. The same is true of Pinker’s books – all of them, but especially the fantastic Better Angels of our Nature. That was one of the best books I’ve ever read (honestly), but so many people hated it – all of them, as far as I can tell, without ever having read it.

    To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, I found it a work not to be set aside lightly. I couldn’t make it through Pinker’s book any more than I can an episode of The West Wing, and for pretty much the same reason. Lord knows the world doesn’t need any more erudite cynicism, but what it needs even less is pretentious pie in the sky.

    Don’t mean to drag the thread too far off course. My knee rarely jerks, but Dr. Pinker and his work do manage the trick.

  8. The Ingold talk/article is interesting and not much at all like how it is being represented here.

    [quote]

    But what has become of ethnography? If theory and method are to come
    together again in craft, as Mills recommends, then should not every anthropologist be his or
    her own ethnographer, and vice versa? We can still recognise today the figure of the ‘social
    theorist’, sunk in his armchair or more likely peering from behind his computer screen,
    who presumes to be qualified, by virtue of his standing as an intellectual, to pronounce
    upon the ways of a world with which he involves himself as little as possible, preferring to
    interrogate the works of others of his kind. At the other extreme is the lowly ‘ethnographic

    researcher’, tasked with undertaking structured and semi-structured interviews with a
    selected sample of informants and analysing their contents with an appropriate software
    package, who is convinced that the data he collects are ethnographic simply because they are
    qualitative. These figures are the fossils of an outmoded distinction between empirical data
    collection and abstract theoretical speculation, and I hope we can all agree that there is no
    room for either in anthropology.
    [/quote]

    For Ingold, ethnography does not serve as data for anthropology. It is simply a different type of activity. Further, in contrast to how we tend to think of these things, ethnography is what happens in a turning away (i.e. returning from a ‘field’ and ‘writing up’) while anthropology is not a study [i]of[/i] (i.e. warfare) but a study [i]with[/i]

    anthropology should be:
    [quote]
    It is no wonder, then, that anthropologists are left feeling isolated and marginalized, and
    that they are routinely passed by in public discussions of the great questions of social life.
    I have argued for a discipline that would return to these [great] questions [of social life], not in the armchair
    but in the world. We can be our own philosophers, but we can do it better thanks to its
    embedding in our observational engagements with the world and in our collaborations and
    correspondences with its inhabitants.
    [/quote]

  9. maniaku,

    I am not sure what you mean about how Ingold is being represented here, but I cited him because of his basic thesis in that article, which is right at the beginning:

    “The objective of anthropology, I believe, is to seek a generous, comparative but nevertheless critical understanding of human being and knowing in the one world we all inhabit. The objective of ethnography is to describe the lives of people other than ourselves, with an accuracy and sensitivity honed by detailed observation and prolonged first-hand experience. My thesis is that anthropology and ethnography are endeavors of quite different kinds…”

    (Ingold, Anthropology is not ethnography, 2007:69)

    In my opinion, a lot of people tend to think of “ethnography” as anthropology, at least when it comes to social or cultural anthropology. But as Ingold and others point out, the two are certainly not one and the same.

  10. Further, in contrast to how we tend to think of these things, ethnography is what happens in a turning away (i.e. returning from a ‘field’ and ‘writing up’) while anthropology is not a study of (i.e. warfare) but a study with

    FYI: html uses , not [ and ], and the html to include quotes is

    (with the spaces deleted).

    Well, I don’t know what it means to the study “with” something, but I’m interested in studying pre-state warfare and social structure, both of which were at least formerly within the purview of anthropology, and which don’t seem to have another place within the academy. Whether they’re “anthropology” by Ingold’s definition is really moot.

    MTBradley,

    I’m mystified by the idea that Pinker’s book is pretentious. I have put a response on my blog instead of cluttering up the comments here.

  11. re: HTML. Sorry about the formatting. I thought there used to be a preview button on here somewhere?

    re: Ryan, sorry, I wasn’t criticizing you as such. But since you brought Ingold up, I cited him because his actual perspective is quite distinct from most of the flavour of these posts/comments. Ethnography, for Ingold, is not what goes by the name ‘ethnography’ as a buzzword that ‘everyone does’ in business. Nor is it the kind of ‘raw material’ that then gets taken up by a social theorist to make a ‘sunflower’ if you will. Nor is ethnography a ‘method’.

    I guess this leads into

    Re: AL Well, I don’t know, if you don’t care about these kinds of discussions, I guess that’s fine. If you want to study warfare and don’t care whether that is anthropology, more power to you. I quite sympathize since discussions of what what anthropology is and/or should be often seem a bit weird. But since that seems to be what this post is about, and also what Ingold is talking about, and what he says is quite interesting and non-standard beyond the simply phrase that “Anthropology is not ethnography,” I thought I would intercede.

    As for what studying with can mean:

    What truly distinguishes anthropology, echoing our conclusion from the last chapter, is that it is not a study of at all, but a study with. Anthropologists work and study with people. Immersed with them in an environment of joint activity, they learn to see things (or hear them, or touch them) in the ways their teachers and companions do. An education in anthropology, therefore, does more than furnish us with knowledge about the world – about people and their societies. It rather educates our perception of the world, and opens our eyes and minds to other possibilities of being.The questions we address are philosophical ones: of what it means to be a human being or a person, of moral conduct and the balance of freedom and constraint in people’s relations with others, of trust and responsibility, of the exercise of power, of the connections between language and thought, between words and things, and between what people say and what they do, of perception and representation, of learning and memory, of life and death and the passage of time, and so on and so forth. Indeed the list is endless. But it is the fact that we address these questions in the world, and not from the armchair – that this world is not just what we think about but what we think with, and that in its thinking the mind wanders along pathways extending far beyond the envelope of the skin – that makes the enterprise anthropological and, by the same token, radically different from positivist science. We do our philosophy out of doors. And in this, the world and its inhabitants, human and non-human, are our teachers, mentors and interlocutors.

    Anthropology is not ethnography Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description p.257

    Now, I can understand why that would not fit you, Al, well, since it would be pretty hard to imagine that you are studying with pre-state warfare. But that is kind of Ingold’s point: anthropology cannot be a study ‘about’ topics like that. And it’s not a matter of substituting ethnographic ‘data’ for historical ‘data’, as I understand him. I have honestly never read Guns, Germs and Steel (and its not high on my list) and I have never read a full book by Pinker cover-to-cover, though I have read parts. But I think it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to imagine that they are nothing like what Ingold is talking about. Maybe you think Ingold is uninteresting or you don’t ‘value’ the kinds of work (‘craft’?) he suggests. But I don’t think that, and if all you have is your opinion….Well, opinions are like that. But, unlike Diamond and Pinker, he is unequivocally an anthropologist.

    We’ll see if I did the formatting better this time…

  12. maniaku:

    “re: Ryan, sorry, I wasn’t criticizing you as such. But since you brought Ingold up, I cited him because…”

    No worries. I just wasn’t sure if you meant me or not. I brought up Ingold because I think his whole discussion is really good–and it goes beyond the simple notion that anthropology and ethnography are not the same thing.

    PS: If you want I can edit the html in your earlier comment. Just say the word. Sorry there’s no preview for comments!

  13. Maniaku, I am intrigued by Ingold’s statement that

    What truly distinguishes anthropology, echoing our conclusion from the last chapter, is that it is not a study of at all, but a study with.

    The sentiment resonates well with my own conviction that we should be treating the people whose lives we share and study as peers, whose words and deeds deserve the same skepticism and respect we would like to see accorded to our own. It also has potential as a way to distinguish ethnography conducted in a proper anthropological spirit from the mixture of observation and interviews that comes to mind when people mention ethnography in business circles these days.

    That doesn’t, however, change the basic communication problem for anthropologists trying to persuade non-academic employers that their skills are more valuable than those of others who also present ethnography as a claim to added value. If, to most of the world wine is Gallo, those who insist on Mouton-Rothschild must be prepared to explain why their preference is worth the added expense, not just in money but also in time and training to understand the difference. If the anthropologist is asked what makes anthropology’s version of ethnography superior to others on offer, the answer that you will need to spend at least several months getting to know the people with whom you will be working really well, to build rapport and get them to trust you, is likely to be a hard sell. How do we get around this problem?

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