Tag Archives: Ethnography

Putting the meth back in Methods

I’m teaching fieldwork methods this fall, for the third time. As some who know me by my works might well suspect, this is unusual because I have never been trained in so-called fieldwork methods in anthropology. I was raised by anthropologists, but also by historians and sociologists, an engineer and one architect who worked for DARPA; so this is an odd role for me. I’m looking for other experimenters to compare and contrast with. If you teach methods, especially this fall, or you know someone who is trying to experiment with this kind of class, I’d love to know about it.

My class is structured roughly around the idea of the architecture studio–students are expected to work together, but on individual projects, and to present regularly and receive criticism from other students. I think of it as more fieldwork tactics than fieldwork strategy (or fieldwork techniques rather than fieldwork design), because I don’t expect students to actually do an ethnographic project in a single (albeit unfairly long) semester. Nonetheless I think students can learn a lot by trying out various things (observations, notes, interviews, audio, video, archives and public sources, transcriptions and codings and annotations, and collaborative writing and so on). I usually have them end the semester with a mini-AAA panel, in which students are responsible both for presenting their own research, and for actually writing something about a classmate’s project as well.

I am avowedly obscurantist about this class, because I don’t want it to be mistaken for a qualitative methods class that deals with inference, small-N issues and other problems of generalizability and representativeness. These are valid concerns for those who want to do qualitative survey research, but they don’t do justice to the difficulty of treating ethnographic fieldwork as an epistemological encounter. I teach ethnography as if it were a tool for testing and re-framing concepts and methods–not only for collecting data. I would much rather challenge students to come in with some familiar anthropological canard and use the ethnographic encounter to de-canardize it (to coin a term) by turning it into a concept that allows students to communicate across diverse topics, sites, areas, or problems. If students can figure that out, then I let them worry about N.

Is the Magic Fading?

The recent debate around FGC on Savage Minds raised some important questions about the political implications of how we choose to perceive social practice. It also raised the issue of agency in our selection of the analytic positions through which we situate practices relationally, and hence within particular political frames of argument. The key point here is not what the issue is, so much as with what other issues is it represented as being articulated in various ways. This articulation may be represented either within a particular social context, as in for example the relation between forms of practice and social outcomes, for which in the recent example read gender. Or, adopting the kind of argument put forward by Marilyn Strathern in her Partial Connections, it may be about how the issue is related through ethnography to what are represented as equivalent examples of social practice across social contexts, that is within anthropological theory or social theory more generally.

The ways in which issues become relationally articulated within anthropology is fundamental to establishing the legitimacy of what become accepted, or acceptable, responses to social phenomena within the discipline, some of which, despite anthropology’s claims to reflexivity and to the consistent examination of constructivist positions, seem remarkably persistent. The disciplinary representation of witchcraft is a case in point. Not only is witchcraft represented persistently as a problem of knowledge, rather than a problem of power, terror, inequality and violence manifested differently at different times and places. It is commonly represented as related to Zande practices of the late 1920’s as somehow paradigmatic, if not in terms modalities of divination then in terms of the essential logic and systematicity of Zande witchcraft cosmology.

Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic provides an account of the place of witchcraft in Zande society and the interrelationship between the persistence of witchcraft beliefs and oracular authority as mediated by princely rulers themselves subjected to Anglo- Egyptian colonial power. This book, a classic of functionalist ethnography and one which posits as its centre the question of the rationality of belief, continues to be a staple of anthropology reading lists, certainly in the UK. It also remains widely cited within the anthropology of religion, science studies and philosophy. This strikes me as somewhat surprising. What Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic actually describes is not so much the rationality of belief in witchcraft, as a political system in which the powerless are liable to be accused of involuntary murder and then forced to pay compensation for the deaths of alleged victims. To suggest that the comparative value of Evans Pritchard’s text lies in the power play of witchcraft as a weapon of violence working in conjunction with regimes of power is not to underplay the salience of ideas and world views in effecting social practice, merely to question why certain interpretations become established. Some of this has to do with what they are brought into relation to. Can disestablishment follow on then from new juxtapositions and new relations?

Seminal juxtapositions

It’s always seemed to me that one of the skills in teaching comes from choosing articles that, when read together, pose a certain problem that students can wrap their heads around and can generate discussion. I just got done teaching “Gil Herdt’s”:http://hmsx.sfsu.edu/faculty/herdt/cv.htm newly-updated The Sambia to students and as usual the papers on the topic of homosexual initiation (boys must ingest semen to become men and undergo puberty) focused on how misled this practice was, and that “if only the Sambia knew the facts about semen” and so forth then they wouldn’t do this stuff. I don’t personally endorse ten year olds performing sex acts with adults, and I admit that Sambia practices would change if they had ‘our’ understanding of exactly what semen does. But the challenge of the course is to see that this is not a case where ‘we have science and they have culture’ –that biomedecine is itself a cultural phenomenon, albeit one that is calibrated to the physical world in unique ways that allow for the control, manipulatin, and prediction of biological phenomenon etc. etc.

Anyway it occured to me recently that a good way to explain this would be to discuss the culturally-specific understanding of semen at play in the US, so I brought some excerpts from “Emily Martin’s”:http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/anthro/faculty/martin.html 1991 essay “The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles” (Signs 16 (3):485-501, btw). I didn’t really have enough time to pull it off completely, but I think in the future I will for sure try to play this article off the Sambia. And I think you should too.

Know How, Know What, Know Who

My post on anthropology as identity or practice has generated some great responses. Most of those who have commented have touched on questions that recur in what we might reframe as the engaged anthropology (as opposed to applied) anthropology debate. This debate highlights ethical and political dilemmas pertaining to the issue of engagement. Do anthropologists as doers of anthropology (see my previous post) have an obligation to engage in public processes as advocates of the communities with whom they have worked, or is the obligation to engage the broader more amorphous responsibility of an empirical social science which seeks not only to understand the world, but to contribute to how it is perceived and acted upon by policy makers and others?

Conversely, is there an obligation only to Knowledge, to the academic project and to a perception of public obligation as limited to making this knowledge publicly available. These are difficult questions and I do not have answers to them. But they bring me to the theme of this post which examines the relation between different kinds of knowing and engagement in policy processes.

Recent graduates and young job seekers in Tanzania have often expressed to me their frustration with trying to obtain employment in the development sector. Its <em>know who</em> they are after, not <em>know how</em>’ they comment, remarking how they have sent numerous applications for a range of positions with no success whatsoever.What you know does not matter in this instance’ , I was repeatedly told. It’s a question of who.

This may of may or may not be an accurate representation of employment practices in Tanzania at the moment. I think that, in reality, the sector is less nepotistic than they imply. Its just that like in academia there are too many highly qualified candidates chasing too few vacancies. In this situation, those who have some experience within the kinds of employing agencies (and hence know who) seem a safer bet to employers than those who have qualifications alone without personal experience of the sector.

I thought of know who and know how earlier this month, while attending a two day meeting of policy makers and representatives of the international community on children affected by HIV and AIDS. I was not attending the meeting as an anthropologist or as someone who does anthropology. Indeed, I do not have anthropological expertise based on fieldwork and ethnographic research on that particular topic, although I do have expertise on rural Tanzania. I was there because I had contributed to some of the background policy analysis which informed one of the meeting themes. Although there were a couple of other anthropologists attending the meeting, they too were there because of their situation within institutions engaged in policy processes around children and AIDS, and not necessarily because they had conducted anthropological research on the meeting themes.

For the anthropologists at the meeting, participation was not determined primarily by disciplinary knowledge, but through knowledge of a different kind: the social relations and institutional nexus of policy and research on children and AIDS. Embedding in social relations brought anthropologists, and indeed other experts to the meeting. In this context, know who mattered more than know how or, perhaps more accurately, know what.

This situation confronts the common sense suppositions about the relationship between knowledge and engagement which is often represented in abstract terms, as if knowledge or research or findings simply filter through and inform policy and public action. They don’t. Whether they do or not depends on the mediation of a host of social and institutional relationships, and on whether individuals engaged in these select or otherwise particular bits of research to make political arguments. Engagement is as much an institutional as an intellectual project. Getting knowledge out and into public processes, whichever side you are on, depends on social relations. Know what, know how, know who.

Anthropology as Identity or Practice?

Last week I presented a paper at an anthropology department in another university in the UK. It was a department where many of the staff had either worked in development, or were working on development as the subject of their inquiry. This was good, because my paper was about development and about the participation of anthropologists in development policy making. Based on recent experience of working as policy maker within the UK government’s aid agency, I argued that anthropologists rarely got involved in policy making as anthropologists, although people who had been anthropologists quite often ended up working as policy makers. Why was this?

I suggested that anthropology and policy making rely on similar conceptual and writing practices, in particular the use of categorical representations. Indeed, both anthropology and policy making are in important ways modes of social ordering, presenting the social representationally. But there are also fundamental differences between them which mean that they can also be seen as the opposite of one another. Whereas anthropology dissembles social ordering through deconstruction, policy making reconstitutes, reconstructs and reorders with a view to bringing into being modified social realities. This has implications for the extent that the practices of anthropology and policy making are compatible. Indeed, when working in the policy field I have experienced what I was doing as practically and conceptually quite distinct from what I have done as an anthropologist.

Engaging in policy making as an anthropologist is difficult. One has to move beyond critique into the kind of reordering which anthropology is more comfortable describing than engaging in. This discomfort, and the general theoretical unease around government across the social sciences more widely, I suggested, accounts for at least some of the anthropological distance from policy processes and from government. As a discipline, certainly in the UK, we have been happier to unpack, critique, comment, translate, explain and witness than to involve ourselves in making policy and in re-envisioning the social.

For an audience committed to understanding anthropology as essentially an identity my suggestion that anthropology was a particular kind of practice was untenable. To maintain that anthropology could be reconsidered as practice, rather than an identity, seemed to imply that one somehow lost one’s anthropological being or status when one engaged in other kinds of practices. The debate then turned to questions of definition and categorisation: who could say that someone was or was not an anthropologist? Were there certain kinds of practices which were not anthropological?

Obviously, to some extent practices and identities go together and what one feels about being an anthropologist as opposed to doing anthropology is highly subjective. Moreover, our identities as anthropologists, whether honed in factory or studio, are deeply felt . Its what makes this a community of Minds and Minds readers. But, having had some seven days to consider the distinction I rashly proposed, I can see some value in maintaining the separation, at least analytically.

Separating out what we do as anthropologists, the special kinds of anthropological practices around ethnography and interpretation (apologies to other fields ) which are largely determined by the institutional contexts which create anthropology as a discipline and profession, from our identity as people who have received this kind of training enables us to perceive more clearly the terms on which we are well placed to engage with the world beyond the University, that is to address what other commentators have called the problem of engagement.

I think some of the problems in dealing with the world outside stem from our adherence to rather narrow anthropological ways of representing knowledge and modes of disciplinary practice , what I have called doing anthropology, which are central to the constitution of the discipline we have built (and which are really interesting and fun and complicated and all the things we as anthropologists love about anthropology). But they are also the same things which make anthropology inaccessible for outsiders and difficult to apply to the kinds of processes in which we claim we would like to be engaged. If we choose to view anthropology as an identity maybe we are less constrained. Anthropology as an identity which encompasses competence in anthropological practices should not preclude our gaining competence in other practices more suited to the engagement we seek. There is much to learn from the outside.

Ethnography and the IRB

A perennial favorite: the Institutional Review Board and the practice of ethnographic research. I am a member of the Institutional Review Board at my University, ostensibly representing the social and behavioral sciences. Recently the board has undergone a change of leadership and staffing, which means new people and a new round of education about how anthropologists conduct ethnographic research as well as how non-anthropologists do so. For those who don’t know, Institutional Review Boards are a result of the 1974 the National Research Act (Pub. L. 93-348) , which commissioned a report on the use of Human Subjects in Research (known as the Belmont Report) and upon which a code of federal regulations 45 CFR 46 is based, mandating that all research institutions receiving any federal support must oversee research using human subjects. If it isn’t research, or they ain’t human, the IRB is not concerned–otherwise, they must make every effort to 1) know about it and 2) approve it. So far so good.

There are however, a couple of sticking points with respect to ethnnographic research that I have run into repeatedly. One is the requirement of confidentiality. The other is the requirement of written informed consent (and here). (There is also the problem of whether or not there are any reliable standards when it comes to “psychological harm” that subjects might suffer at the hands of unscrupulous researchers–but that is a bugaboo for another post). Now, given the anguish Anthropology has put itself through with respect to colonialism, with respect to complicity in the dispossesion of native people’s land, and most recently with respect Napoleon Chagnon and Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado, one would probably be safe in asserting that we are alone among the disciplines who have made the ethical treatment of humans not just a priorty, but virtually impossible to ignore throughout one’s graduate and professional life. We may not have standards of harm that are easily applied across all cases–but we damn well have discussed, in excruciating detail, nearly every possible kind of injustice man can visit on man.

My new IRB overlords, whom I welcome of course, do not see it this way. As far as they are concerned, anthropology appears to occupy a backwater, in which the lack of standardization, the reliance on individual judgment, and the practice of meticulously examining the finest grain of every encounter we have for its justice or injustice are nothing so much as solid evidence that we are in violation of what are clear and reasonable regulations about how scientific research should be conducted.

Take for example, the requirement of written consent. August authorities such as the Anthropological Association of America and the former head (Project Muse required) of the National Science Foundation Anthropology Section have made clear that written documentation may not be appropriate in all cases–the easy cases are those where your informants are non-literate (duh?) or where you are dealing with individuals who have, for instance, a long history of land expropriation due to the unscrupulous signing of documents by ancestors. In these cases they recommend that some other method of obtaining the vaunted “informed consent” of research participants be pursued. But there are a host of less easy cases: those situations where your informants are naturally or historically suspicious of government and its apparatus for instance, or where the presentation of a form would convert a personable and arduously cultivated relationship into a purely formal one. Should the IRB require the presentation of such forms in all cases–even to the extent of rendering some forms of long-practiced ethnographic research impossible? My new IRB Overlords appear to think so.

Or take for instance, the issue of confidentiality. According to the IRB, the only ethical practice is to ensure confidentiality of information, as a default practice, and if necessary, against the wishes of informants. Sure, if the informant is a public figure and the information is public, and the informant wishes to have it made public, then in that case, there seems to be no problem with allowing the researcher to treat the information as public. But if, for instance, an individual of no particular standing, in negotiating whether to participate in your research project, demands that his words be made public and be identified with his real name–do we have the right, or the obligation, to deny him this request? It seems to me that applying this ethical standard across all cases, regardless of the express wishes of individual informants is as suspect as revealing their confidential information. It is, as we should well know, the moral ideal of anglo-american privacy elevated to the status of universal norm. My new IRB overlords call BS on that.

So what I want to know is: experience anyone? I need examples of research in which either the use of oral/non-written documentation of informed consent, or the practice of allowing people the option to be identified has been approved (recently) by IRBs, or articles and documents that describe, or defend such practices. Ultimately, I would like to pen recommendations for use in every such changing of the guard… because otherwise, institution after institution is set to make the practice of ethnographic research as we know it both increasingly formalized and possibly, increasingly impossible.

Taiwanese Aborigine Memories of Japan

Memories of its fifty years of Japanese colonial rule are very complex in Taiwan. When the Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist (KMT) party took over the island after World War II they used the term “retrocession,” emphasizing the return of Taiwan to China. “Retrocession day” is still a national holiday. However, since the eighties there has been a revisionist historiography which seeks to emphasize the unique history of Taiwan as distinct from that of China. Central to this unique history are three things: Taiwan’s Aborigine population, its long history of resistance to imperial Chinese rule, and the important role of Japan in modernizing the island. You can usually figure out what political party a Taiwanese person supports simply by asking them about the Japanese era. This is more complicated, however, with Taiwan’s Aborigine population.

The Japanese wanted to prove that they could govern Taiwan more efficiently than the British ruled in India or the Americans in the Philippines. As a result, the Japanese colonial experience in Taiwan was much milder than that in Korea or Mainland China … for the Han Chinese. It is thus possible for many Taiwanese to romanticize this era, as one sees in the rampant Japanese-era nostalgia that is consuming Taiwan. For the Aborigines, however, it was a different story. At the dawn of the twentieth century the mountainous parts of the island where still largely under the control of the Aborigines. The Japanese forcibly took over those areas in a genocidal campaign of violence. There is no record of the number of Aborigine lives lost, but the Japanese recorded 10,000 Japanese dead as a result of what was a largely one-sided battle. Once under Japanese rule, however, schools were set up throughout the region and many Aborigines first gained literacy at schools run by the Japanese police. When missionaries later came into the region (under the KMT), they found it easy to use Japanese language bibles. In the end, Aborigines became some of the most loyal subjects of the Japanese emperor, many even volunteering to serve in the Japanese armed forces during World War II.

All this is the background for a curious political event which took place earlier this year:
Continue reading →

An old warhorse revisited

Today and tomorrow, I’m taking part in a workshop which aims to get the basic masonwork and scaffolding in place for a new book about culture. Don’t we have too many of those books already? Yes. Well then, do we need another one? Afraid so.

My colleague Øivind Fuglerud, who has written – among other things – Life on the Outside, a study of Somali refugees and long-distance nationalism, took the initiative for the book some time ago, invited an assortment of social scientists he trusted and respected, and wrote a fairly comprehensive outline. More recently, having changed jobs (he no longer directs research on minority issues), he generously invited me to co-edit the book with him.

Specifically, the book is going to deal critically with the uses of the culture term in the debate (academic and non-academic) about refugees and immigrants in Norway. Virtually every West European country has its debates about immigration and minorities, and they sometimes ricochet between countries. A topic raised in France may turn up in Sweden a month or two later, resurfacing in Germany after half a year. In recent years, the public attention in many countries has typically focused on hijabs, enforced marriages, honour killings, low educational achievements among certain immigrant groups and female circumcision. Not exactly uplifting.

Academic research on immigrants in Europe can, broadly, be divided into three phases. In the 1970s and 1980s, the emphasis was largely sociological, focusing on the labour market, discrimination and the quest for equality. From the late 1980s to around 2000, anthropological perspectives dominated, and there was an enormous interest in cultural dimensions. In the last few years, there has been more open disagreement among researchers than before; for example, researchers unsympathetic to immigration have become outspoken and visible.

What we want to say in the book, which will have around a dozen contributors, is that the culture concept has to be retained in the academic vocabulary. Yes, it is being exploited strategically for ideological or political ends, it is fuzzy, it has dubious origins in nationalism and relativism (as well as having underpinned oppressive power structures like the apartheid regime in South Africa), and it never ceases to produce misleading and dangerous essentialisms.

Yet experience tells us that we live in slightly different worlds and that these worlds sometimes vary along the lines of language, ethnic identity or religion – and that cultural differences can be identified quite easily within a these groups as well. Anthropologists have said much about this, in Norway liike elsewhere. We have also pointed out that culture does not explain class diifferences, and that social problems usually do not have cultural causes. We have spoken about hybridity and creolisation, stressed the cultural discontinuities within the majority (fundamentalist Christians are, in their way, just as exotic as conservative Muslims), and described cultural changes within immigrant groups. (Some Norwegian Pakistanis are so Norwegianised that you have to see them in Pakistan to understand it. In Norway, only their differences are generally seen.) There have been lively controversies over cultural rights, mother-tongue training in schools, the role of religion in Norwegian schools and many other issues.

This has created widespread confusion. As Øivind pointed out at the workshop earlier today, college students no longer have a clue as to what to make of the term culture. It appears to be everything and its opposite. A clarifying book is needed. But how?

I think we should try to be faithful to that old ethnographic virtue of crawling on all fours, our noses touching the ground. (The sociologists, psychologist and geographer in the team may not agree, I haven’t asked them yet.) But one needs to stay close to the cases in order to discover that one cannot generalise about cultural differences between particular groups, or about the role of culture in general as a descriptive or explanatory category.

The Parisian riots provide a good case. Some commentators have tried to link the riots to religious revitalisation and militant Islamism in the Arab-speaking world. Yet, others – including the anthropologist André Iteanu, who has done research in these areas for years – point out that the riots have social causes, not cultural ones: The people living in these parts of Paris have no metro, few buses, hardly any libraries – and the majority have no work. Deprived and poor people have rioted in Paris several times before. It has nothing to do with their being Muslim and everything to do with their being socially excluded. Conclusion: Leave culture out of this matter.

Another case, less familiar to most of the readers and less easy to disentangle, is the murder of Fadime Sahindal in Uppsala, Sweden a few years back. Fadime, the daughter of a Kurdish immigrant, was killed by her father, who saw her insistence to live ‘like any other Swede’ as intolerable and unbearable for the family’s honour. In the Swedish public sphere, it had by now been noticed that the people who invoked cultural explanations tended to be right-wing and bigoted. Thus, the official view, voiced by opinion leaders in Swedish society, was that Fadime was the victim of patriarchy and a deranged man.

After a while, the Uppsala anthropologist Mikael Kurkiala wrote an article where he argued that culture obviously had something to do with this: Although ‘Kurdish culture’ did not in any way determine the actions of Fadime’s father, his Kurdish universe offered cultural scripts, one of which consisted in killing a daughter to restore honour. Unaccustomed to the brutality of public controversy, Kurkiala was taken somewhat aback when respected liberal Swedes literally pounced on him, claiming him as a useful idiot for the extreme right wing. Kurkiala’s conclusion, which has recently been developed in a beautifully written book in Swedish, where he discusses ways of handling difference (he draws extensively on his fieldwork among Lakota here), was that if it is impossible even to mention cultural factors as dimensions of society and as ‘models of and models for’, then we have relinquished any attempt to understand our world. Conclusion: Bring culture back in.

So what is my position? I have considerable sympathy with some of the texts from the last couple of decades that have tried to exorcise the evil spirit of culture from anthropology. The have forced us to reach for higher levels of precision. Yet in spite of all the obvious objections and a few less obvious ones, we can’t do without it. To me, the proposition to use culture as a verb (Brian Street) makes sense. It varies within any group and has no clear boundaries, it is relational, it behaves oddly in an era of transnational communication, and it is more of a fluid than a solid. But at the end of the day, Fadime’s father killed his daughter in a world that was originally created in Kurdistan, not in Sweden. Keeping close to the cases is our only hope if the goal is to prevent further confusion. Maybe even some good writing can come out of it.

Sidney Mintz it aint, but…

The New Yorker has a brief “talk of the town” piece about an academic studying Starbucks. It caught my eye because as a grad student, doing fieldwork at hospitals in Boston, I spent a lot of down time in Starbucks thinking about just such a project, every time I witnessed two starbucks employees debate the best way to bilk the Mass. welfare system, or discuss how “fair trade” was not revolutionary, etc. Unfortunatley, most of what this particular history professor seems to be doing is simply going to Starbucks, and occasionally counting the number of patrons, or observing the demographic mix–hardly fieldwork.

I like the idea of a Mintz-esque study of the political economic transformation that Starbucks has wrought–to say nothing of their successful introduction of real coffee to the furthest reaches of America–but I guess I’ll have to wait, or do it myself. But even when I was contemplating such a project, I ultimately decided that if one were serious about a corporate anthropology, or an anthropology of corporations, one would proceed directly to Wal-Mart, without passing go, without collecting $200. Where else could one satisfy one’s pleasure in discovering the exotic in 1300 locales in 10 countries?

Doing Research on Subways in Taiwan

Kerim Friedman invited me to guest blog on Savage Minds. I thought about throwing out for discussion some questions that I encountered while doing research on the subway systems in Taiwan.

My current research focuses on the subway systems in the two largest cities in Taiwan: Taipei, the capital and economic-cultural center of Taiwan, whose first subway line was completed in 1996; and Kaohsiung, the country’s hub of heavy industries and one of the world’s largest container ports, whose subway system is now under construction. I use the subway systems as a focal point to understand the regional, national, and global processes that are unfolding in Taiwan. Given that many Asian countries are investing heavily on infrastructure including highways and subways (to boost the country’s global economic competitiveness), my research is not just about Taiwan but carries comparative angles.

In the course of my research — as well as on occasions when I presented my work at professional conferences — I repeatedly faced the question: How do you do research on the subway system in a big city? Indeed, metropolitan Taipei has a population of 6 million, whereas Kaohsiung is a city of 1.5 million people. Over time, I sort of worked out an answer. My involvement with Taipei’s subways was as both a passenger and an ethnographer. That is, the subways constituted the nearly exclusive means of transportation during my stay in Taipei, except for the times when I took a taxi or was driven by friends or families (Research in Kaohsiung is a different story, as the subways are sill under construction). To acquire a broader understanding of the system, I also rode the different routes of Taipei’s subways at different hours of the day as well as on different days of the week, to observe who rode from where, and how and when. The subways also entered in literally every conversation I had with people, both native Taiwanese and foreign-born residents and visitors, in Taipei and elsewhere in Taiwan (and frequently in North America). This fieldwork was blessed with the fact that the subways were, and continue to be, a novelty in the social life of Taiwan; almost everybody had something to say about their personal experience with, or perception and knowledge about, the subways. By extension, with few exceptions, my subway project seemed to generate genuine interests among the people I met, who were often eager to talk to me about the subways. In addition to participant observation, I also had formal interviews with (past and present) government officials who were in charge of the subway construction and of the making and implementation of Taipei City transportation policy prior to the subways, and with civil engineers and urban planners involved in the planning and building of Taiwan’s subway systems (in Taipei and Kaohsiung). In addition, I read intensively literature, popular reports, newspaper and magazine articles on the subways.

But again, at what point can I claim that I have a full understanding of the subway system in Taipei — or Kaohsiung? How many people do I have to interview or talk to in order to say that I have had enough? Or, to put it generally, when can one call it an end when one’s research site is a city with a few million people?

[Anru Lee is an assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the City University of New York. She is the author of In the Name of Harmony and Prosperity: Labor and Gender Politics in Taiwan’s Economic Restructuring (2004) and a co-editor of Women in the New Taiwan: Gender Roles and Gender Consciousness in a Changing Society (2004).]

What now?

Or, Anthropology for Old People.

So, with the AAAs in the air and most young anthropologists’ thoughts turning to interviews and how to sum up their thesis research in a boffo mini-paragraph, this might not be the most apropos time to discuss What Lies Beyond. But we here at SM shrink from no grim task.

A question likely to echo down the hotel hallways next week, and certain to rustle among the leaves of the groves of academe during next spring’s campus interviews, is what today’s tesista (this word should exist in English but unfortunately “thesist” sounds religious, “thesiser” sounds like a made-up title for a minor nobleman in a fantasy fiction novel, and “writer-upper” is plainly hopeless) plans to do as her Next Project.

One option that comes up often enough to perhaps warrant being considered a pattern is the young anthro — returned from a doctoral project carried out at a field site accessible only by ice ax, dugout canoe, or 20 mule team equipped with propeller hats — who suddenly evinces a serious interest in the same themes as those of the original research — say, exchange rituals — but in a rather more comfortable setting — say, upscale organic grocery stores located in periurban North America. Sometimes in a tone of mild moral umbrage about giving exoticism a poke in the eye.

I for one always felt certain I’d have none of that. No, I’d stay in the South American heartland, polishing my hard-won though still pretty pathetic Guarani language skills and ultimately dying, slowly, of Chagas’ disease as befits any Chaco dweller worth his salt. Neither bug bites nor saddle sores nor sulfurous ground water would stand in my way.

But that was me talking the talk. This fall, walking the Next Project walk (with a visit to my old field site along the way), I’ve discovered the Paraguayan Chaco (my previous work was in the Bolivian Chaco). A good portion of the Paraguayan Chaco has been settled by Mennonites and is, astonishingly, a Chaco with grocery stores, a Chaco with air conditioning, a Chaco with swimming pools (well, one anyway). My anti-colonialist spirit tells me it is wrong wrong wrong for me to want to take a swimsuit next time, while my sensualist flesh says it is oh so RIGHT.

So, I’m wondering (in a self-exculpatory sort of way) — am I just succumbing to the inevitable? Apart from all the condemnations of exoticist exploitation that are heaped upon old-fashioned, out-in-the-impoverished-Otherish-boonies fieldwork, how much of a role does the fact that anthropology is no longer a young upstart discipline, but one with lots of comfy established practitioners, play in the shift of what kind of ethnography “counts” for our collective purposes?

Autistic Culture: celebrating neurodiversity

A couple of months ago, one of “Kerim’s posts”:/2005/06/19/funny-you-dont-look-jewish/ led to a mini-discussion in the comments section about the site “Gene Expression”:http://gnxp.com/. Within this discussion, the use of the term ethno-autism was brought up. As defined by Razib, the author of “this post”:http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/001967.html at Gene Expression, ethno-autism is an:

inability to conceive other peoples and cultures as fully fleshed out organisms who have their own creativity, histories and genius, and most importantly values congruent with those of modern Western civilization.

This wasn’t the first time that I had heard this type of analogy. In another time and place (my vagueness here is deliberate to respect the confidentiality of the people involved), I reacted to an analogy between autism and the incapacity to perceive that others may think differently than oneself. And at yet another time, I read an article (wish I could provide a reference but I lost it) that stipulated that autism was an extreme form of the “male brain”.

In any case, the usage of the term ethno-autism caused a bit of a reaction within the discussion following Kerim’s post (don’t worry, nothing violent) and, at the time, I felt unable to pursue the matter in depth, having an autie in my family and being close to the situation. However, Kathy (aka museum freak) from Livejournal had “this”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/museumfreak/272758.html to say about the term:

. . . gross misrepresentation of autism as a condition. The analogy they’re making is between the autistic’s supposed inability to understand other people’s thoughts and feelings and the, dare I say bigots?, referred to on the site failing to understand the humanity of other cultures.

I’m inclined to agree with Kathy here. I would add that, rather than make such an analogy to describe extreme ethnocentrism, which is what is actually being described in Razib’s post as far as I can tell, it would seem to be preferable to simply call it what it is. The analogy between extreme ethnocentrism and autism obscures the fact that most extreme ethnocentric people are not autistic and are actually perfectly capable of understanding that people from different cultural backgrounds as them might think and perceive the world differently than they do.

Now, I don’t think that Razib was intentionally trying to propagate a negative imagery of autism. He did admit that he hadn’t put much thought into it so I’m assuming that, like many, he’s working under the assumption that there is one single form of autism.

This leads me to my main point (well, one of them anyway): the term “autism” has been thrown around all over the media in the past . . .say . . .decade or so and yet there is still very little social awareness of the realities of this way of being (you’ll understand soon why I call it a way of being rather than a “condition” or “disorder”.) In North America, and possibly elsewhere, we live in a society where I would assume the majority of people have been sensitized to the needs of people with “physical handicaps” and who would acknowledge that holding a door open for a person in a wheelchair is the proper thing to do. However, when it comes to what many people would describe as “mental handicaps”, the mainstream attitude carries more of a tendency to judge and ridicule than to understand and help.

The mainstream view of autism and related modes of perception is highly negative: tragedy, dismay, trauma, difficulties are all words that are commonly associated with the life of an autie and her/his family. By no means am I saying that it’s easy and that everyone would be happier if they were autistic. However, I think that there are interesting alternatives in thinking about autism. The most interesting ways come from autistic people themselves.

For example, I’m highly interested in a recent discovery that I’ve made by following a series of links beginning with Kathy’s post: there exists an “autistic culture”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistic_culture consisting of auties, aspies, cousins and allies. The shared belief is that:

autism, as a unique way of being, should be embraced and appreciated, not shunned or cured

There is an “Autistic Pride Day”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistic_Pride_Day. There are people who seek recognition of “neurodiversity”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurodiversity. Heck, they’ve even got t-shirts! The similarities with queer pride movements are unmistakable and like with any other sub-culture, I’m certain that there is divergence within the group about various issues. In any case, I’m curious to see what kind of momentum this movement will take. I have a feeling that as people become more sensitised, Autistic Pride will become better known.

In the meantime, I’m also curious about how autism is dealt with cross-culturally. What do ethnographers have to say about the way people who would be diagnosed as autistic by North American or European psychologists are treated within their own societies? Are people ostracised? Accepted? Nurtured? Considered to be functional members of the cultural group? Have special status? Not considered as abnormal? What changes came about in various local conceptions of “autistic” people due to colonisation? What changes are coming about due to globalisation?

Perhaps there are obscure answers to these questions here and there in various ethnographies . . . but has there been cross-cultural research specifically aimed at finding out how various societies deal with what psychologists would label as autism and how the individuals themselves relate in their respective social contexts? Is there, perhaps, cross-cultural research that shows that in some cultural contexts, being autistic is not seen as a disadvantage but merely as another variation?

It would also be interesting to have an anthropological look at the above-mentioned autistic culture. As a social movement and as a self-identified culture (who, by the way, actually wrote a “letter to the U.N.”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autistic_community#Letter_to_the_United_Nation in an attempt to be recognised as a minority) with a core set of beliefs, they have gone beyond being “subjects” of psychological inquiry and have much to contribute to our understanding of culture and society. It would be even more interesting if the anthropologists who did the research were autistic themselves. After all, as Kathy pointed out in her post:

The experience of being an autistic is a lot like the experience of being an ethnographer–we’re in a culture we don’t understand, and forced to rely on our ability to observe to learn, get by, and adapt to the world.

On that note, I leave you with a passage from Jim Sinclair’s text “Don’t Mourn For Us”:http://web.syr.edu/~jisincla/dontmourn.htm which is quite telling about the relationship between autism and differences of perception:

Yes, that (relating to an autistic person) takes more work than relating to a non-autistic person. But it can be done–unless non-autistic people are far more limited than we are in their capacity to relate. We spend our entire lives doing it. Each of us who does learn to talk to you, each of us who manages to function at all in your society, each of us who manages to reach out and make a connection with you, is operating in alien territory, making contact with alien beings. We spend our entire lives doing this. And then you tell us that we can’t relate.

Personality and ethnography

In graduate seminars, I remember long discussions about the positionality and identity of the researcher and how these would influence not only the interpretations of the results of one’s fieldwork but the results themselves. Depending on the research topic, the information obtained by a young, unmarried female anthropologist, for example, may be quite difference from that obtained by older and married male anthropologist. I think that this is fairly widely recognized in our field at this point.

One related thing that I have often wondered about and at which we only sporadically hinted in our discussions between professors and bright-eyed grad students was the impact of one’s personality on our fieldwork experience and results. We discussed behaviour, yes. We went over questions of how to go about introducing ourselves to potential informants, how to dress in a way that would not offend our hosts, whether or not to have sex with people in the field (yes, Concordia University is very liberated that way) and so forth. One of my fellow students even brought up the possibility that our hosts might be more comfortable talking about their lives if the ethnographer was willing to open up a bit about her own.

Of course, one’s personality and ideas have everything in the world to do with how one would deal with the situations mentioned above. One’s personality and self-concept will very likely determine whether an individual cares if his manner of dressing will offend members of the host group. This will also help determine one’s behaviour in various situations in addition to myriad other factors such as stress, relative comfort level, length of time in the community and so forth. Finally, one’s personality has much to do with how much one is willing to tell about herself.

However, we didn’t go too far into talk of personalities as such. Perhaps we were all a little worried about not fitting the bill if it turned out that, according to our profs, there was a standard personality type that was generally better suited to conduct ethnographic fieldwork.

One interesting that did come out during a one-on-one conversation with my thesis supervisor was that there might be particular personality types that are well suited for particular areas or for particular research topics. As I sat in her office with the pre-fieldwork jitters, she assured me that I had the right kind of personality for working with Natives. Although I could see why she would say that and felt that she was probably trying to make me feel better more than anything else, I wondered how one might be able to assess this. If we assume personality variance within the societies where we conduct research, is it really safe to say that researchers of particular personality types will be more or less successful?

I think it’s safe to say that one’s personality will influence one’s behaviour and therefore one’s results to the extent that personality influences one’s interactions. It certainly influences how well a researcher will get along with people in the field which will in turn affect the kinds of information that they will be willing to discuss. As mentioned above, however, there is no uniform personality in any location and therefore just about any ethnographer will find both people with whom s/he gets along and people with whom s/he doesn’t. Ultimately, then, any researcher, unless they are completely and utterly obnoxious and disrespectful, will probably manage to get along well enough with a large enough number of people to get the information that is required for his research.

The bottom line, I think, is that young ethnographers, such as myself, and ethnographers-to-be need not worry about how well we can live up to the caricatured image of the uppity authoritative scientist. In fact, as tacky as it may sound, I think it’s important for us to be ourselves in the field. What would be interesting to discuss, though, is how personality might affect the fieldwork experience, results and interpretation in ways similar to the various sorts of identities (gender, ethnic background, age, marital status, and so forth) that have been shown to inform our work.

Tracking Uma Adang

Somewhere between my undergraduate and two graduate programs, I lost a bundle of anthropology books. Before my short and unsuccessful stint as a salaryman in Tokyo a decade ago, I gave my small library away, thinking I would never enter a doctorate program.

But when I in fact did become a Ph.D. student, some of those books were required reading for my core classes. I should have kept those books, I told myself (all those margin notes and underlines!), but decided against buying them again. Except for the classics in anthro theory, I thought it was foolish to make the same purchase twice. Especially ethnographies.

But there were a few exceptions, and one was Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s In the Realm of the Diamond Queen, a work that takes you right into the Bornean rain forests of South Kalimantan. I read this ethnography in 1994 and I remember falling in love it. At the time I didn’t quite understand her arguments, but I enjoyed the way she wrote about her encounter with Uma Adang, a shamaness, a local leader, and her main “informant” in the book. The photo of this Meratus Dayak woman, smiling while cradling a white doll, was for me what Tsing described as “a disorienting caricature of motherhood.”

That image of Uma Adang came to me when I read Tsing’s latest book Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connections. Prompted by a comment by Savage Minds regular Colin Danby, I thought I might post something on Tsing’s nuanced perspective on the way globalization is interpreted in South Kalimantan (The book is an on-the-ground look at the way different groups, such as conservationists, logging companies, and local communities, talk with and past one another in their relationship to the rain forest). But when I opened the book, all I could do was to recall the powerful image of Uma Adang holding a white doll.

Like her earlier book, Friction also presents Uma Adang as a marginal voice that embodies Tsing’s critique of the global political and economic network of power. Although the Meratus Dayak shamaness has a much less prominent role in the new book than in Diamond Queen, I could not help but fixate on this figure.

For one, the way I imagined Uma Adang has now changed. The younger image of her now evokes a different set of emotions for me when juxtaposed against the photograph of her in the new book: she is sitting in what looks like a bar and her expression is solemn — broken but defiant. Behind her is a cigarette ad that has the word “BOMB” in huge letters. The caption reads “Better you had brought me a bomb…” Her explosive anger is directed against the deforestation of the jungle by the logging companies, which by her account is stripping away Meratak culture itself. The smiling figure in the first book now looks to me as one of naivete, expressing truimphant exuberance in carving out a political space for herself and other Meratus Dayak.

But Uma Adang and Tsing also retain their playfulness in the new book, especially in the chapter on biodiversity. And it makes for a nice comparison with a chapter in her earlier book.

In “The History of the World” chapter of Diamond Queen, Tsing writes about her friend’s version of global history, all in fragments, in different narrative forms and temporal registers, and full of parodic mimicry of the dominant discourse. This history, which Tsing treats as an “official” history, is to be read for its coherent unity and political message. But rather than celebrating it wholesale as a moment of political resistance, the anthropologist also recognizes aspects of the shamaness’s historiography that ends up serving the national interest of the Indonesian state. At the end of the chapter this nuanced examination of a local story leads the author to reflect upon the state of identity politics in the U.S., and writes that “the cutting edge of political organizing often is the simultaneously dissociating and validating effect of parroting dominant discourse out of context.”

In the new book Friction, she examines the concept “biodiversity” in a chapter titled ““This earth, this island Borneo” [Biodiversity assessment as a multicultural exercise].” In it she relies on a similar move of parody as a critical endeavor in which she too takes part. Citing both proponents and critics of the promotion of “biodiversity,” Tsing brings to this discussion an ethnographic account of what it means to make a list. Here Uma Adang lists all the flowers and mushrooms and the fish and lizards, in disregard of Linnaean nomenclature and full of strange and non-scientific markers of identification. This, however, is not a simple case of a local critique of Western discourse. Instead, they both acknowledge the pleasure of listing, of writing down and numbering, and hence, of having that very power to picture the world course through their veins.

Uma Adang loved the idea that I was writing down the list and enumerating each item. […] The list took on all the pleasures of writing, counting, and classifying: Uma Adang and I were pretending to be bureaucrats with the authority of state and international codification. We were ordering the world by naming it. As Uma Adang explained to me, “Everyone knows these names; but not everyone knows how to organize them properly.” (168)

Tsing’s virtuosity as a writer shines forth — a partial list of fauna and flora runs down the page margins — and it reminds me of the discipline’s excitement over “the poetics and politics” of experimental ethnographic writing (and readers of Levi-Strauss and Derrida will perhaps recall here “The Writing Lesson” in Tristes Tropique). There are some risks, in my opinion and acknowledged by Tsing herself, of investing in a figure such as Uma Adang a certain subjectivity that by virtue of representing her in an ethnography domesticates the marginal within our own political agenda [footnote 1]. Yet this issue is repeatedly taken up in the book, not only in Borneo but also in other parts of the world. And this moment of parody — playful but also serious — is at least a partial answer to the question surrounding the politics of representation.

I am sure there are other compelling “informants” who span multiple books (I invite readers to comment on who might be other such figures in the annals of anthropology), but for some reason Uma Adang has made an impression on me. There are, I think, many possibilities in writing about the same person in different books over time. At the end of the first book there was a sense of a closure for my understanding of Uma Adang; when the new books takes her up again, it for me opened up new avenues of thought. This opening and closing of someone’s character is a rhetorical strategy I think might warrant some further discussion.

Postscript: As I work on my dissertation, I am finding myself increasingly drawn to good ethnographic writing as models for my own work. So in hindsight, I really wish I hadn’t given away my ethnographies!

[footnote 1: I am thinking here Vicente Rafael’s comments on Tsing’s earlier writings, but I think it equally applies to Friction.]