inferiority complexes or fear of losing face causes many teachers and students to become unwitting cooperators in a kind of conspiracy of silence wherein everyone pretends that after four years of Chinese the diligent student should be whizzing through anything from Confucius to Lu Xun, pausing only occasionally to look up some pesky low-frequency character (in their Chinese-Chinese dictionary, of course). Others, of course, are more honest about the difficulties. The other day one of my fellow graduate students, someone who has been studying Chinese for ten years or more, said to me “My research is really hampered by the fact that I still just can’t read Chinese. It takes me hours to get through two or three pages, and I can’t skim to save my life.” This would be an astonishing admission for a tenth-year student of, say, French literature, yet it is a comment I hear all the time among my peers . . .

You might have read somewhere that it takes a vocabulary of several thousand Chinese characters to read a newspaper, but the truth is that it is actually much harder than that:

what such accounts don’t tell you is that there will still be plenty of unfamiliar words made up of those familiar characters . . . Plus, as anyone who has studied any language knows, you can often be familiar with every single word in a text and still not be able to grasp the meaning . . .In addition, there is the obvious fact that even though you may know 95% of the characters in a given text, the remaining 5% are often the very characters that are crucial for understanding the main point of the text.

Truth be told, I’m quite proud of the fact that after years of struggle I can claim a certain degree of fluency and literacy in Chinese. Doing research is one thing, but it has taken over a decade of constant hard work for me to really feel comfortable teaching in Chinese. Despite my pride in having gotten this far, however, I am still quite embarrassed about my Chinese ability. I probably would never have been able to complete my Ph.D. or hold my current job without the aid of computers, and it is this reliance on technology that I wanted to write about today. Saying so is a bit embarrassing, but David Berliner’s wonderful short piece, “How to get rid of your academic fake-self?,” convinced me I should do it anyway.

Let’s start with the basics: I can read some genres of Chinese pretty well, but I can’t write well at all—and can do little more than sign my name if I am forced to write by hand. In some ways technology has made my students the same way. I’ve seen my colleagues take a red pen to handwritten texts by masters students, finding dozens of mistakes. Computers make it easy to write in Chinese if you recognize the characters without having to remember all the strokes. My poor handwriting is a problem even when copying text (which solves the problem of having to memorize all the strokes). That’s because unless you spend time every day practicing your handwriting, it is very hard to write elegantly. I still can’t fill out my address on official forms because I can never write “Shoufeng” (壽豐) clearly in those little boxes. I either have to scan the thing to a computer or ask someone to help me.¹

For teaching and advising I have all my students hand in their work in electronic form. The biggest advantage of having an electronic version is that I can open the text up in an app that lets me get instant definitions for characters or words just by clicking on them.). When I first started studying Chinese using a printed Chinese dictionary would sometimes take so long that I forgot what I was reading by the time I found the character! I simply never would have finished my Ph.D. or gotten my job without the help of the fantastic Pleco Dictionary. I first ran Pleco on a Palm Trēo and didn’t dare upgrade to an iPhone until I was sure I’d be able to use Pleco on it.²

My Taiwanese students rely heavily on similar tools to read English. Unfortunately, many are over dependent on such tools. There is a big difference between looking up a solitary word in a sentence and trying to read something by translating it word-for-word. It is abundantly clear that my students who read this way this simply don’t understand what they are reading.

When I first started studying Chinese machine translation tools were completely useless, but after an important update last year Google translate has gotten significantly better. It still isn’t useful for reading social science texts in Chinese, but Google translate can nonetheless be quite helpful with particular tasks, such as skimming over texts (the issue mentioned by David Moser’s friend in the quote above). A great example of how difficult it can be to skim texts in another language comes from Gail Weinstein-Shr’s 1993 article on literacy practices among the Hmong in Philadelphia. She describes how one couple with limited literacy skills read their mail:

When Chou comes home, he and Sai open mail. They both read out loud as they slowly process the correspondence. A letter can mean the difference between continuing or losing their welfare benefits. One afternoon I watched first Sai, then Chou read aloud through a long computerised luggage advertisement before deciding. in the end, that it did not interest them. They did not have the mechanisms yet for quickly screening important documents from ‘junk’ mail.

This is how I felt for the first few years on my job, when I was getting hundreds of emails a day from the university and was spending hours each day trying to figure out what was important. Now, even though I’ve gotten significantly better at skimming, I occasionally use Google translate to quickly figure out if I need to spend time reading something carefully in Chinese or if I can trash it.

I’ve also developed tricks for dealing with text that can’t be found in any dictionary. For instance, since proper names and movie titles are often not listed in dictionaries, I search them in English Wikipedia and then click on the Chinese version of that page. Another trick is to search for a word in English, but limit the results to Taiwanese academic websites. Since many academics include English technical terms alongside the translation, this is a good way to see how people are currently translating academic terms in Chinese. (Limiting it to Taiwan is especially useful, as the translations of some phrases can differ between China and Taiwan.)

Even with the aid of computers I still waste a lot of time on stuff that would be trivial for a native speaker, but without them it would be even worse. The truth is that we are all cyborgs. Writing is a technology. Reading glasses are a technology. Book indexes and the Dewey Decimal System are technologies. But talking about needing glasses won’t cause people to question your competence in the same way that admitting to using a Chinese dictionary when you grade student papers might. But even though I was somewhat reluctant to hit “publish” on this post, having deleted several versions of it over the years, it isn’t as bad as what some other scholars go through. The author of a piece published in the Guardian last year saying “I’ve finally admitted that I’m a dyslexic academic – and I’m terrified” chose to remain anonymous. Hopefully if we all talk more openly about our limitations and how we depend on technology or the support of others to address them, it will also create more room for scholars with special needs to talk about it openly.³

There is something to be said for this change. The confusion over emotions and social norms allowed men to be emotional and sensitive. Alien women may have objectified, but race (supposedly) no longer mattered. But the figure of the clueless scientist who just doesn’t understand women is not harmless. An obvious example is someone like nerd-hero Richard Feynman who was confused as to why women wouldn’t trade sex for sandwiches. The sexist culture that seems to exist within companies like Uber and Google makes it difficult for women in those industries, and arguably affects the kind of products and services offered by tech companies. Twitter’s foot dragging on the issue of online harassment is a good example of this.

There is a debate within linguistic anthropology which helps explain just what is wrong with our society’s continued celebration of the clueless naiveté of nerd culture. In 1991 Senta Troemel-Ploetz wrote a review essay of Deborah Tannen’s bestselling book: You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation in which she took Tannen to task for letting men off the hook to easily.¹ She accuses Tannen of treating male-female communication as a matter of cultural misunderstanding, not unlike the confusion Spock faces when faced with Kirk’s emotions, but says that in doing so all the burden of addressing such misunderstandings falls squarely on the shoulders of women. As Deborah Cameron wrote in a 2007 Guardian column:²

Perhaps men have realised that a reputation for incompetence can sometimes work to your advantage. Like the idea that they are no good at housework, the idea that men are no good at talking serves to exempt them from doing something that many would rather leave to women anyway.

It is time to stop celebrating and coddling the naiveté of male nerds³ and geeks and start holding them to a higher standard.

UPDATE: It has been pointed out to me that I’m being unfair to Kirk. I’d actually read this article about how our memory of Kirk isn’t the same as the one on the show back in April, but somehow it slipped my mind when writing this.

The US cannabis landscape is shifting quickly, and so is the way we talk about the plant and its uses. The push to end its prohibition has entailed a proliferation of stakeholder groups, each with its own labeling preferences. Interviews with Southern Californian parents using marijuana medically for children with intractable epilepsy (pharmaceutically uncontrolled seizures) taught me that what’s in a name matters—a lot. How it matters differs depending on who is talking, and what he or he seeks to accomplish when it comes to this plant and its products.

Cannabis—marijuana—has many medical applications, including for epilepsy. Parent interest in this rose sharply when CNN profiled its success with a child in Denver. However, little scientific research has been done with the plant (its legal classification makes that tricky), so doctors generally will not assist parents proactively in regard to its use. Word of mouth, online resources, and purveyor promises are often all that parents have to go by as they work out dosage and other aspects of their child’s cannabis regimen. My research explores how they manage this, which has implications for our understanding of how regular citizens contribute to biomedicine’s knowledge base and therapeutic tool kit. Findings also may be used to help improve service provision for these vulnerable families.

In pressing their case for access, most parents prefer the plant’s scientific name over lay terms. Cannabis, technically the genus label, sometimes is accompanied by species information too (i.e., Cannabis sativa or Cannabis indica). Many refer just to the key phytochemical CBD (cannabidiol); some talk also of other components of the plant (e.g., CBN, THC, THCA, and various terpenes).

Some parents advocate a whole plant approach, seeking to leverage what experts call the ‘entourage effect,’ in which plant chemicals act synergistically with one another. Such parents generally also prefer local or home grown raw materials and homemade or artisanal products. They tend to call the plant by its popular names (e.g., marijuana, pot). CBD, when referenced, is spoken of as part of a whole.

Yet most parents prefer scientific, medicalized rhetoric even when more generic terms would do. Cannabis, for them, is always capitalized and italicized. CBD and so forth are spoken of as isolates or molecules. In this discourse parents praise the regularity and predictability of big pharma’s highly systematized but reductionist production regimes.

Language is power

Through medicalized speech choices, parents proclaim themselves as knowledgeable insiders who belong in conversation with medical experts. It is the case that their children are often medically unique; parents often do know more about their children’s conditions than their doctors; they certainly know more about pot: they have to. But to get doctors to acknowledge this, parents cannot speak in lay terms. By calling pot Cannabis, using chemical names, and so on, parents assert their right to participate in discussions with authorized experts as more than ‘just’ parents.

They also assert their difference from casual or recreational users by refusing terms (e.g., weed, pot) that others associate with, as one mom put it, Cheech and Chong. Not all parents frowned on recreational use automatically. Some saw the medication–recreation binary as clearly prejudicial. But the primary aim of getting children high was not something with which any parent wished to be associated.

It is no coincidence that parents initially prefer low or no-THC formulations; they also prefer cannabis oils, dropped under the tongue or into a feeding tube, rather than inhalation or having the actual herb in the house. Their children’s medicine looks how medicines are ‘supposed’ to look; and it is treated accordingly.

Of course, recreational users also deploy medical language—at least in states where the only legal way to purchase cannabis is with a doctor’s referral. These are notoriously easy to get and people continue the charade in ‘dispensaries,’ which are used not so much by sick individuals (who favor home delivery) as by a young and healthful crowd that talks about ‘medicating’ rather than ‘partying’ or ‘getting high’ (terms that I am told are used where doing so is legal)..

The recreational market has invented new terms too. For instance, ‘dispensary’ sales clerks are ‘budtenders.’ In so obviously equating pot to alcohol, this term’s use may be read as a raspberry blown to law enforcers; or it may be an optimistic and celebratory disavowal of the need for subterfuge given changes in legalization that appear to be on the horizon. It certainly acknowledges the ludic side of leisure use.

It is not that parents are overly sober: laughter and ironic humor infused many an interview. But having a sick child is no game. Having to call one’s provider a ‘budtender’ is degrading to medical customers who deeply desire authentic, recognized legitimacy—not a nod and a wink. This need is one reason some parents were willing to wait up to one year to be seen by one of the region’s few well-reputed cannabis-approving physicians instead of using a fly-by-night referral mill. The need for real medical advice, and concern about cannabis’s interaction with their children’s other medications, also came into play.

Use of cannabis slang also was seen by some as degrading, implying likewise that one’s turn to the drug or drugs that this plant produces is neither medically indicated nor necessary. Take the term ‘weed,’ which suggests that cannabis should not be considered a legitimate cultivar. Silly strain names such as AC/DC and Sour Tsunami connote a kind of playfulness that may be seen as inappropriate when it comes to serious illness. Some terms even are—or at least were, originally—xenophobic or racist. For instance, the word ‘Marijuana’ was promoted purposefully by US anti-drug interests in the 1930s specifically because it sounded Spanish and thus provoked or leveraged, in some Euro-Americans anyhow, anti-Mexican or Hispanic sentiment. Associations of the older argot with criminality also are rife. Indeed, based mostly on this history, some activists have chastised the media for using lay terms and puns (e.g., “high time”) in cannabis-related headlines and reporting.

Using the language of science instead highlights the legitimate medical potential of the cannabis plant. It helps parents gain credibility with (other) experts by giving a ring of legitimacy to their claims. In the short term this may help speed access to pharmaceutically manufactured cannabis medicines by increasing the publicly perceived legitimacy of this need. As an added plus, pharmaceutical manufacturing processes help in the regulation of dosing and they insure consistency across batches, and purity, reducing the necessity that parents send what they buy out for testing to find out what it really contains. For such reasons, using scientific terms and referencing chemicals makes good sense.

Must we choose?

Yet, history suggests that overly-insistent medicalization will have costs. It may support a transfer of all authority over cannabis to the mainstream healthcare system, disenfranchising parents—whose empiricism and perseverance helped open the healthcare industry’s eyes to the plant’s promise to start. Resulting dependence on corporations and expert systems could foreclose the option of growing and preparing treatments oneself despite the relative ease of doing so. Some parents fear loss of access to the entourage effect because isolated compounds like CBD are being favored over whole-plant products in pharmaceutical processes; price hikes also could occur. For reasons such as these some activists say that at least high CBD strains of cannabis (also known a hemp) and CBD-based medicines, which have no psychoactive component, should be left out of the debate; there is a bill making its way through congress right now (H.R.5226) that would reclassify these as non-drugs, making them as legal to possess or prepare as sauerkraut.

Whether or not that happens, whole-plant language reminds us that cannabis-based drugs come from a flowering herb. It also can help consumers retain some authority over their use of that herb for health and healing. Preserving consumer rights is particularly important in regard to conditions such as intractable epilepsy, which by definition mainstream medicine cannot treat.

This is not to say that medicalized rhetoric is wrong and whole-plant language is right. Rather, we must preserve a context-sensitive combination of ways of talking about pot. In parallel with the entourage effect, each mode of expression, taken together, may well be more effective in fostering human health than a single discourse used in isolation.

Elisa (EJ) Sobo is a professor of anthropology at San Diego State University and President of the Society for Medical Anthropology. She is on the editorial boards of Anthropology & Medicine and Medical Anthropology and she is the Book Reviews Editor for Medical Anthropology Quarterly. Dr. Sobo has written numerous peer-reviewed journal articles as well having authored, co-authored, and co-edited twelve books, the most recent of which are: Dynamics of Human Biocultural Diversity: A Unified Approach (2012), The Cultural Context of Health, Illness, and Medicine (2010), and Culture and Meaning in Health Services Research (2009). Her current research includes not only parent use of Cannabis for children with intractable epilepsy or seizures but also cultural models of child development in Waldorf or Steiner education, and parental thinking on pediatric vaccinations and herd immunity. Interviewers for the Cannabis project include MarkJason Cabudol, Tiyana Dorsey, and Gabriella Kueber.

We mourn the loss of her brilliant mind, quick smile and mischievous humor. She was known for incisive scholarship on politics and social justice. She wove a keen artistic sense for poetics into her ethnographic observations, as evident in her 2013 book Political Oratory and Cartooning: An Ethnography of Democratic Processes in Madagascar. Her eye-opening insights into the language of American politics were featured in national media. Jennifer served the American Anthropological Association, first on the Executive Board’s student seat then the Society for Linguistic Anthropology’s Executive Board.

There will be a memorial in her honor at the AAA in Denver. I didn’t know her personally, but here in Taiwan we are honoring her by reading her ethnography. It is a great book and well worth reading for many reasons, but I especially loved her description of the discipline of linguistic anthropology in the introduction (pp. xxiii-xxv). (It’s a long quote, but I couldn’t see anything in it that I would want to cut.)

what we do as linguistic anthropologists, in particular as ethnographers of speaking/communication/communicative interaction/ social interaction or all of its variants. We generally leave behind the classroom, the textbooks, the grande no-fat no-whip soy lattes, the complacent gaze at familiarity that comes from being completely “at home” in a place, and we head for places that look, feel, sound, smell different. Even if this is within our same home country, the subtle suddenly appears more obvious. We engage deeply and over a long period of time with people in their everyday lives in order to observe language in its context of action. We yearn to know how people use words, gestures, grunts, and even silence and to what effect; what they think and say about those acts and the people who do them; and how this all changes over time, space, or other context. These everyday micro-practices – little acts of talking, writing speeches, drawing cartoons, talking about doing these things, interacting with one another at the dinner table, buying rice at the marketplace – may appear as stand-alone practices by separate individuals; however, each of these tells us something about patterns of social life over time and across populations. The patterns are what is key. Each choice in word, tone, prosody, order, the way someone might recall or reenact a story, hearkens to those patterns. These are ways of doing things that are shared among communities of speakers, point to something beyond the speech act itself, and they generally sit just below the threshold of awareness. But they are there, very much there, and they “mean” something out there in the world they reflect and shape. In fact, this is generally where meaning in language is located, some-where other than the linguistic act itself. Syntax no longer means just word order in a sentence but an index of social discrimination. Phonemes are no longer minimal units of sound but sound patterns that point to a river or mountain that creates just enough physical distance between speakers to account for an accent or dialect difference. And out of this difference grows evaluations about who says what and how. Each of these individual moments in the everyday reflects these patterns while also tugging on them just a bit, sometimes a lot, to the extent that either they reinforce situations and the social roles in them, or they change. And we have to be there, long enough and with a steady handle on the social, historical, and political forces that prevail, to reckon with the ways in which these patterned micro-practices come together as shared, tacit understandings of ways of doing and being that combine to shape macro -orders, such as institutions, laws, belief systems, and language itself. It is a constant trip between the everyday and the over-the-long-term, from the individual speech to the institutionalization of, say, class hierarchies, the reproduction of some standard of speaking across multiple contexts over time – in other words what happens right here and now with some larger issue or institution out there we might otherwise think of as a black box, a “they,” the work of some invisible hand. We bring the practice of words into abstract social categories and constructs such as colonialism, gender, the state, and civil society, to activate them, unpack-ing and reframing them not as things but as existing insomuch as they manifest through practice. We make these connections between micro-practices and macro-institutional orders so that nothing gets away without an explanation of its creation, its shape, its reproduction, its growth, its death through social change. For all of these reasons linguistic anthropology, particularly through its ethnography, to my mind, is both methodologically and theoretically grounded to go after both realms of human activity – from chunks of the obvious to the grains of the subtle – and to show their connection and the ways in which they articulate with various social, cultural, and political dynamics. It heads straight for the voices of the everyday to see the ways in which their talk and talk about talk coalesce otherwise disparate signs to produce new signs that look like, point to, and symbolize grander, momentous frameworks for organizing experience. And we locate the character and movement of power embodied, the power to create, to constrain, to convince, to erase as predicated on this continual discursive production and reproduction of signs culminating in the semiosocial matrix in which we all live. In a sense, we show our readers how the rabbit got put in the hat in the first place, exposing the location of the seeming illusiveness of power as embedded in the semiotic practice of social actors. Doing things this way, that is, reading social phenomena as founded in practice and ideologies about those practices and the people who do them, allows us not only to describe what is going on across a broader scale of social life, but to show to what end and what is at stake that things are the way they are.

Lindsay: Your book takes on how Swedish design is constituted in practice through everyday design work and refracts larger cultural and political ideals about Swedish social democracy. Your observations and engagements with designers not only inspired your book, but also some of your pedagogical strategies like the Ethnocharrette. It is increasingly common to see people working at the intersection of design and anthropology. Do you see this as being a way to make the skills of anthropology marketable outside of the academy or is there something specific that makes this intersection make sense?

Keith: I think the intersection makes sense in a few different ways. In terms of the marketability issue, sure, in a general sense anthropology has a lot to offer all sorts of design fields and is well-positioned to make the work done by designers better according to a number of different metrics. But I tend to think collaborations between anthropologists and most other kinds of professionals are almost always A Good Thing. The question is what makes the match between design and anthropology a fruitful one, and as a follow-up, why is this relationship only recently gaining wider attention, given the fact that anthropologists and other ethnographers have been working with designers outside of academia for several decades.

For me the match makes sense because both anthropology and design (I’m using the term broadly, even though design is a very diverse kind of thing) share a number of basic core concerns, the most obvious of which is a concern with people. Even if the daily work of a furniture designer is focused on sourcing the right sized screws, or an architect spends most of her mornings wrangling with CAD software, that’s all done in the service of creating objects and spaces that help constitute an everyday world of human lived reality. If anthropologists are tasked with making sense of that world, designers are charged with help giving it form, two complementary cuts in a broader human-centered project. Second, both design and anthropology are concerned with, for lack of a better term, stuff. Even though we’re all so focused on people, we also recognize that people never stray too far from their things, and that the forms those things take and the meanings they’re given are critical mediators of cultural and political experience. Third (there’s more, but I’ll keep it at three), design and anthropology both operate by means of research, which is to say, both fields explicitly value exploring and critically understanding the wider contexts in which they’re situated, rather than simply building on preconceived ideas about what they’re looking at.

As for why this relationship is only now taking on a more cohesive form, I think that abstract anthropological theorizing needed to play catch-up with the real world. I see several moments and movements in anthropology as sort of establishing necessary preconditions for the emergence of a more robust design anthropology, including material culture studies and theories of materiality, which bring things and their qualities to the fore in not-necessarily-Marxist ways; reconfiguring the critique of visualism as an attention to multisensory semiotic engagement; and a turn to the ethnographic study of making and its contexts. When taken together, all of these (and more!) begin to dismantle longstanding frameworks that separate production and consumption, material and immaterial, the visual and the textual, form and content, and lots more, and design anthropology is sort of swooping in to help redesign their new configurations.

This isn’t to say that design is perfectly suited for anthropology and vice-versa, and I definitely don’t think the match is always trued. But I do think anthropology and design can definitely learn quite a bit from each other.

Lindsay: Yes, I agree. What I think is interesting is the uptake in visual modalities by those of us whose objects of enquiry are not design or aesthetic/cultural production. For instance, we’ve talked about the debates in the infrastructure literatures that rely heavily on the issue of materiality and what is tangible and seen and what is ‘invisible’. I gained some perspective on this last fall when I participated in a symposium at NYU, Media, Infrastructure, and Aesthetics. There were people from a wide range of disciplines interested in assessing the growing scholarly and artistic interest in the aesthetic dimensions of extraction.  Architecture, design and art were avenues for talking about global resource extraction and its related cultural politics, even for those of us trained outside these specifically visual disciplines. What do you make of this? Do you think this is a select group of people, or do you think there is a broader current in anthropology to take on shared interests and expertise of these other fields?

 Keith: I think that as anthropologists continue to find new sites to examine, and new constellations of humans and their things to puzzle through, we often find ourselves not fully equipped to account for, if we use Eduardo Kohn’s phrasing, the stuff “beyond the human” (and his book is a great example of an anthropologist trying to do just that). This can really be a struggle. Of course anthropology has always cared about the parahuman materials of social life, but as we move toward treating such things less as a context thickly described and more as our central objects of inquiry, our fealty to a textual impulse in both our methods (e.g. field notes) and our representations (e.g. ethnographic monographs) can sometimes stymie us from moving beyond the human in ways that are appropriate to our field sites, and that can push anthropology forward (though I’m personally not interested in straying too far from the human). So some anthropologists start looking elsewhere for inspiration. I think part of the draw toward architecture and design, at least for me, is that, as I said, those are fields whose concerns seem to resonate with anthropology, but whose modalities aren’t ultimately subject to a textual impulse for their legitimacy. They seem to offer ways to engage with the world that are certainly visual, but really they’re multisensory, and they don’t seem to provoke much anxiety around accounting for the semiotic richness of those multisensory forms of engagement — which I think can be alluring to fieldworkers feeling oppressed by the routine obligation to transduce complex experiences into a collection of words on a page. I don’t know whether art, design, and architecture are, ultimately, some perfect parallel panaceas that will help anthropologists really confront the shifting composition of the fieldsites we find ourselves in, but I do think there’s a lot of value in seeing what might come of it.

Since starting to work alongside an artist and a designer, I’ve become more aware of ethnographic practice inflected by art and design. There seems to be a growing number of institutional spaces, degree programs, courses, workshops and books devoted to exploring different combinations of art/design aesthetics and ethnography. While audience and aims vary, one can’t help but wonder what it means for there to be a kind mushrooming of art/design inflected methods and outputs (Design Anthropology, Anthropology Design, Design Ethnography, Sensory Ethnography to name a few and see for instance a last year’s ANTROPOLOGY + DESIGN series on Savage Minds). While visual anthropology has an extended history, and anthropologists have long been interested in the intersections of aesthetic and cultural production, is there something of a “visualisation of anthropology” (Grimshaw & Ravetz 2005) underway? Is an attention to art and design in anthropology ‘new’ or simply new to me? For those of us not designated as ‘visual’ anthropologists, are we being asked/invited/demanded to engage with different modalities for fieldwork and scholarly output?

I decided ask an expert. Keith M. Murphy is an anthropologist of design. His new book Swedish Design: An Ethnography is just that. It is a rich description and analysis of how everyday things (furniture, lighting) are made to mean through processes of design within the context of larger cultural flows. Like some of the iconic objects he describes, Keith’s writing is sharp, uncluttered and politically aware.

In addition to researching and writing about design, Keith experiments with how to harness design modalities to anthropological and ethnographic practice. Through the Center for Ethnography at the University of California, Irvine, Keith and George Marcus host occasional events called ‘Ethnocharettes’. An ethnocharrette is described as a collaborative session of intense activity in which design thinking and methods are used to interrogate and explore ethnographic concerns. Their most recent installment was in March. I was fortunate enough to be there and do what anthropologists do best: hang out, watch, listen, and ask questions.

I reached Keith at his standing desk in his Long Beach home via FaceTime. Our conversation tacked back and forth between the particulars of the ethnocharrette exercise and his speculations on why ‘the visual’ and borrowed modalities from art and design seem to be growing new roots (routes) in anthropology. It was less of an ‘interview’ and more of an ongoing conversation we have been having for the past year or so. I re-assemble our discussion over two posts and invite you to join the conversation.

Before I arrived in California, Keith described the ethnocharrette to me as “this thing”. The ambiguity of his shorthand reflected the changing form of the event since its inception. A charrette is a common activity in design disciplines. Keith described it as more than brainstorming, less than consequential. It is inherently collaborative. Whereas a classic brainstorm involves individuals tossing out ideas and then selecting ones to choose, a charrette is designed collaboratively create by bringing things together.

The impetus for the ethnocharrette experiment came partly from Keith’s own exposure to design thinking in his research, through an earlier pre-doctoral internship at Sapient, and from working briefly as a member of the COLAB team at Syracuse University. Since Writing Culture, George Marcus has increasingly been interested in exploring the appeal of design and the studio as a legitimate form of experimentation in association with fieldwork projects. Keith was upfront that as a pair they have been willfully sidestepping the issue of whether the charrette model is for pedagogy or ethnographic practice. It has always been done in the context of pedagogy (graduate student training), however they have found the boundary between pedagogy and practice blurred by students themselves. Some of the techniques introduced pre-fieldwork end up being independently taken up by students as they move into their analysis and writing.

The most recent iteration involved students bringing ‘ethnographica’ related to their projects. They were instructed to bring ‘things” (texts, images, objects, sound files) that were easily displayed and shared with others. They were in groups of three to five and had each selected a theorist to think through their materials with. Phase one of the charette involved students giving brief introductions of their materials and then laying out ‘pieces’ of their selected theory on post-its. The culling for simplified parts and constraining them to a post-it is an attempt to disturb anthropology’s penchant for the complicated. “If anthropology had a tombstone it would say ‘its complicated’ ”, remarked Murphy. The charette is designed to extract information from materials before deep thinking. This slows down the desire to ‘complicate’ and take better stock of what is.

Once the theory pieces are up, students are invited to ‘read’ each other’s materials. The ethnocharette works against the normative model of anthropological production where singular people are doing work on singular projects. Instead of having students trained to think as individuals first, collaborators later, the charrette model introduces co-thinking earlier in the academic process. Of course there are long lists of successful collaborations from our field, yet individual projects continue to be favoured and rewarded. In the exercise, students relinquish sole ‘ownership’ over their materials and see the variety of ways in which they can be read. Again, post-its keep track of pieces.

Next, students look at the bits of information they have co-produced and think about how they might sensibly cluster. They can re-arrange and combine them in ways they see fit. Keith describes this as ‘structured non-thinking’. The process asks them to physically relate to materials in different ways. Instead of solely cultivating habits like sitting, thinking, attacking, the charette has people standing, moving, touching and seeing things differently. The groups I observed related to the task in different ways. Some had highly tidy rows of like terms, others had stacks of ideas, while one group was determined to extract from us the ‘correct’ way of proceeding.

Phase two of the charrette asks participants to take what has been assembled and re-present it in light of the process. The idea is that if Phase I is a process that compels the participants to let go of their pre-conceived commitments to their field sites and ethnographic materials, and to find otherwise unnoticed connections between their individual field sites, Phase II is  intended to push students to create something — a rough material or conceptual prototype — that could account for these new connections in unforeseen ways. Theory is important here, too. Each group worked with a specific theorist, and tried to incorporate those ideas into their prototypes as glue that held the disparate projects together. Again some groups quickly set about creating, while others waded through possibilities with some uncertainty what could/should be done. Keith sees this hesitation as part of the ‘ideology of creativity’ that design rests on. Design assumes everyone is creative, whereas many anthropologists assume they aren’t creative. In fact, there are explicit discourses against creativity. The charrette is meant to interrupt some of these [stereotypes] to push the boundaries of what anthropology can be, while not oversubscribing to ‘creativity’ as inherently valuable (sellable).

Here I objected. My migration to anthropology from sociology/ applied linguistics was precisely my sense that there was space for creative scholarly practice and that corners of the discipline were staunchly uncommitted to a sharp divide between art and science. If anything, I remarked, I over estimate my creativity. He reframed. The question is perhaps less about if you are creative, but rather what opportunities do you have to manifest creativity? He had me there. While I have been fortunate to be part of Ethnographic Terminalia in the past, most creative projects have been taken on through art-based residencies rather than academic ones.

I still wanted to push the issue of creativity. The analysis seems gendered. Many women anthropologists take on creative modalities (literary ethnography, creative non-fiction) and while they find an audience in the Real World, they can sometimes seem ‘niche’ in mainstream anthropology. Keith acknowledged that there is a difference between certain kinds of aestheticizations and the regimes of value they find themselves circulating in. Broadening what it means to be ‘creative’ as an anthropologist is about understanding stylizations (creative non-fiction, or jargon laden prose) do stand for themselves as inherently valuable. Rather the question must be asked, what are you attempting to do? Who is the audience? What’s the goal? Ethnocharrette is just a part of a longer conversation that students’ work will be in over the course of their training.

Our own conversation moved to the bigger picture. Later that week, he and I would join a larger group of faculty and advanced graduate students for a Productive Encounter led by anthropologist Christine Hegel and set designer Luke Cantarella. We would be making use of design exercises to think through Doug Holmes’ work on central bankers. Perhaps as a result of my own training, I was inclined to ask the question, ‘why this, why now?’ Why are these modes of thinking/ practicing anthropology appearing? Our conversation continues in my next post.

That Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview in Chinese was big news this week. You can see the start of the interview here:

http://youtu.be/n_168pH9GJk

As you can hear, Zuckerberg’s performance was greeted with “repeated cheers and applause by the assembled students and faculty members.” I don’t want to pick apart Zuckerberg’s Chinese – he only started learning a few years ago, but still did better than some people I know who have lived in Taiwan for over a decade. Nor do I want to focus on the mixed reactions he got on the internet later on. Rather, I want to engage in a thought experiment. Can you imagine a Western audience cheering and applauding a Chinese CEO for speaking in English?

Pierre Bourdieu uses the term “strategy of condescension”¹ to refer to the “act of symbolically negating” the power relationship between two languages. He argues that such a strategy ultimately serves to strengthen the hierarchy between the two languages in question. He compares the excessive praise given to a mayor speaking “good quality Béarnais” with much more fluent Béarnais coming from the mount of a peasant. Unlike the Mayor’s speech, that of the peasant would not only be “totally devoid of value” but “would be sociologically impossible in a formal situation.” Indeed, a Chinese CEO speaking English in public at the level displayed by Mark Zuckerberg in Chinese would be a source of considerable embarrassment to all around.

What is interesting about this, however, is that Chinese is not Béarnais. China’s economy is on the verge of surpassing the size of the US economy and the Chinese language is one of the most important world languages, with the number of Westerners studying Chinese as a second language rising fast. So what is happening? I think there are several factors at work here. One is China’s self-image as the underdog. Pointing out insults to China’s “national dignity” is a frequently used tactic in Chinese foreign policy. Another is the extent to which access to English-medium higher education in the UK or America is still a status marker for the Chinese elite. And a third is a legacy of thinking about Chinese language ability in racial terms. This last one is true in Taiwan as well, as I documented in my tongue-in-cheek post on “Seven Ways to Talk to a White Man.” I haven’t been in China recently, but from what I’ve heard, it is even more unusual for foreigners to speak Chinese well there than it is in Taiwan.

In this regard it is interesting to compare Chinese to French. French was once the language of international relations and the cosmopolitain elite. It still holds on to that status in certain realms, but not to the same extent it once did. French people still expect foreigners to at least make an effort to speak some French, and don’t bat an eye if they speak it well. They certainly don’t cheer and applause. French attitudes towards English may have changed over the years, but a rather blasé attitude towards foreigners speaking French still seems to be the norm. One comparison I like to make is between the Taipei and Paris metro systems. While both the Parisian and Taipei systems have multilingual announcements², with one of the languages being English, the English announcements in Taiwan are unusual, to say the least. Many of the stops have no official English name. Instead, the announcements deliberately mispronounce the Chinese name the way they guess a non-Chinese speaking foreigner might. I certainly can’t imagine the French mutilating their own language to make it easier for Americans who can’t be bothered to pronounce it correctly! Again, this is Taiwan, not China, but I think there is a shared insecurity about the status of Chinese in the two countries, especially with regard to English as a global language.

It is true that Chinese is a hard language for non-native speakers to learn, but it is also hard for Chinese speakers to learn English. I think we can imagine a day when Chinese-speakers expect foreigners to display competence in Chinese equivalent to that they are expected to display in English when abroad. A day when fluency in Chinese goes without cheers and applause. But, for all of the reasons I’ve listed above, it probably won’t happen anytime soon.

UPDATE: Completely re-wrote the section on the Paris metro to reflect the corrections in the comments. (I don’t recall hearing multilingual announcements in Paris this summer, but the sound system on the metro isn’t always working that well.)

UPDATE II: Added a link to an interview with Zheng Wang about his book Never Forget National Humiliation: Historical Memory in Chinese Politics and Foreign Relations.

Rather than writing a a straightforward review of Paul Manning’s wonderful The Semiotics of Drink and Drinking (winner of last year’s Sapir Prize), I thought I’d instead engage with the book by endeavoring to apply Paul’s ideas and analytic techniques to a context which is more familiar to me than post-soviet Georgia: contemporary tea culture in Taiwan.

For those who don’t know, bubble tea is a sweet milk tea, often served cold, filled with chewy tapioca balls one drinks up through an extra-large straw. It was first invented in Taiwan in the 1980s and soon became a global sensation. It is now even available at the McDonald’s run McCafé shops in Germany.

http://youtu.be/OzWRy4S8Q4E

The McCafé ad campaign (embedded above) strikes me as a bit offensive, but it serves to highlight the global spread of Taiwanese-style milk tea. I think it also reflects the association between the drink and an exotic Asian (post)modernity. Here, however, I intend to focus on the semiotics of milk tea in the Taiwanese context; using milk tea to look at attempts to develop a uniquely Taiwanese form of modernity.

Before we get to that, first a little bit of semiotics. One of the joys of Paul’s Peircean approach to semiotics is that it takes seriously the “materiality of the sign.” That is to say, the physical aspects of signs matter, not just what they symbolically represent.

The example Peirce gives is the word ‘man’ written in different media: from ‘semiotic’ perspective, insofar as we are interested only in the capacity of these different written forms to convey the word ‘man’, it hardly matters whether the word is written with ink on paper, chalk on a slate, a marking pen on a wall, or scrawled with a knife in a desk. But from the perspective of a janitor trying to clean up a classroom, or an administrator trying to determine whether the inscription counts as proper use of the classroom or vandalism, the differences in the material realizations of the sign make a good deal of difference, and these various ‘material’ differences can take on a material and semiotic life of their own subsequently.

If various material differences can take on a semiotic life of their own, then something like the difference between black and oolong teas¹ needs to be taken seriously when talking about the semiotics of drink. Not just the taste, but the technology and labor of production and consumption matter as well. One of the main differences between oolong and black teas is how long each is fermented, with longer fermentation tending to make teas both more bitter and more highly caffeinated. Traditionally oolong teas are made from whole leaves from a single origin, not chopped and blended like English style black teas.²

The drinking of oolong teas in Taiwan is simultaneously fetishized and informal. Frequently, when visiting someone’s home, you will be served tea in a quick and efficient manner from a tea set that contains a kettle for boiling water, a pot for brewing, a decanter pot, and small cups for drinking. A more formal version might also include special smelling cups into which tea is first poured and then emptied, leaving behind only the tea’s unique fragrance. There is a considerable expertise involved in knowing how to rinse the tea, how long each tea should be brewed, how many brewings can be had from a pot before the leaves must be changed.

The production of bubble milk tea couldn’t be more different. Milk tea in Taiwan is only rarely sold in a cafe with seats and tables. It is primarily sold on the street and served in paper cups sealed with an air-tight plastic seal. The sealing machines are a marvel of modernity that can seal hundreds of cups in an hour.

http://youtu.be/1HMO4hPBmgQ

The straws are sharpened at one end so that you can puncture the seal without making a mess. This means that milk tea is not designed as a social drink like coffee or traditional Chinese teas (more about those in a bit), but is designed to give one a quick pick-me-up while working or shopping.

In its modernity, milk tea shares much in common with the martini, discussed in Paul’s chapter on gin. While not an exact match, there are three broad similarities between the two. First of all, like gin, the production process of milk tea, “involves the progressive removal of what could be called ‘natural’ sensuous qualisigns.” That is to say, whereas the drinking of oolong teas emphasizes the original tea leaves, with the technique of brewing subtly crafted to the particular sensuous qualities of each type of tea, milk tea seeks to hide the bitter quality of black tea in “vast concoctions of milk, cream, and . . . syrups.”³

Secondly, Paul discusses how the martini glass evokes aesthetic modernism. Here, however, there are slight differences, as the disposable plastic milk tea cups, with their printed labels, strike me as more postmodern than modern. And whereas Paul sees technique as important in the mixing of a martini (“the making of the martini is a connoisseur performance that focuses on the ritual of the mixture process . . . ‘the martini rite’”), the mixing of milk tea is entirely mechanized. The video below shows how it works. Although milk tea is made in a classic cocktail shaker, a machine does the actual shaking:

http://youtu.be/Hoh0GbcTBlg

Third, Paul discusses how cocktail parties where martinis were drunk, unlike the formal dinners of a previous era, “accentuate the participant as an unattached individual whose gender and marital status is irrelevant.” Similarly, one can see a contrast between the drinking of oolong tea in the living room, served by the family patriarch, with milk teas served on the street by anonymous (often young and female) workers. The individualism of milk tea has even created concerns about its environmental impact. A recent news story I saw on TV reported on offices that sought to reduce environmental and economic waste by making large vats of different flavored teas for the workers. One of the workers interviewed pointed out how difficult it was to meet everyone’s individual tastes.

Recent developments, however, are slowly changing how Taiwanese think about milk tea. While milk tea was originally identified as a modern, westernized, product — I remember one tea shop in the early aughts that had a (non-functioning) URL instead of a name — now there is a kind of retraditionalization taking place. Many tea stalls now offer milk tea made with oolong teas. Near my office is one tea shop whose flagship product is a “Tieguanyin Latte,” a drink made from a strong, highly fermented, oolong tea, fresh milk (as opposed to powdered creamer often used in milk teas), and served without tapioca balls. Nor is this retraditionalization limited to their teas. The front page of the website shows their typical storefront, replete with red Chinese lantern, wooden benches, and other signs of traditional nostalgia.

This same attempt to brand Taiwanese modernity as grounded in historical nostalgia with a hint of the jazz age can also be found in the recent Taiwanese film Twa Tiu Tiann 大稻埕, a kind of Taiwanese Back to the Future.

https://youtu.be/rhn1cBKGU_U

In part this derives from the nationalist desire to define Taiwanese modernity (and past) as different from that of China, but it also reflects a dissatisfaction with the mechanized individualism of modern life. It also tastes really good.

More after the jump.

This short film is a fun example of a somewhat reverse situation. “Yu ming is ainm dom” is about a Chinese man who works on his foreign language skills before taking a trip to Ireland.

Finally, when I posted the first clip on Facebook David Leitner recommended this clip from the British comedy show, “Goodness Gracious Me.”

The photo, by Min Hong (敏紅), is of well known Taiwanese historian and political activist, Su Bing. A long time opponent of the ruling Nationalist Party (KMT) who once plotted to assassinate Chiang Kai Shek, it isn’t surprising that he is sitting in front of a poster demanding independence for Taiwan (台獨). What is a little surprising is the use of the English suffix “ing.” The phrase on the bottom is “全民革命ing.” Without the “ing” it is a call to revolution. Actually, the entire banner is the name of an organization which has been translated by Su Bing’s biographer as “Taiwan Independence Citizens Revolution.”

全民革命ing is an ongoing campaign advocating Taiwan’s independence through nonviolent means. The group produces daily web TV shows and participates in rallies against the Republic of China, a regime in exile, which occupied Taiwan after loosing the civil war in China to the Chinese Communist Party. The goal of 全民革命ing is to summon at least 20,000 protesters to call for Taiwan’s independence.

This use of the “ing” was discussed on Language Log back in 2008 where it was noted that this use of “ing” is “apparently the derivational noun-forming -ing, not the inflectional gerund-participle -ing — though it’s hard to tell, in the cases where the words have no real English counterpart.” They also note that it was done by students (largely on Taiwan’s still-active BBS community) long before politicians started to do so.

But how do you pronounce it? As far as I know, you don’t. It seems to be largely a written convention that isn’t really used in speech (although I’m sure there are exceptions). But in this charming music video (which I always use to great effect in my linguistic anthropology class) the letters are spelled out “i, n, g.” (The title of the song translates as “loving”):

For more on creative Chinese borrowings and other aspects of Chinese writing, be sure to read the Victor Mair archives on language log, including this post on “er”.

UPDATE: Over at Language Log Victor Mair has a followup post where he “asked several native speakers how they would say “全民革命ing” purely in Chinese.”