Tag Archives: Pedagogy

Anthropology in the classroom.

Wild Thoughts

It’s time now for another installation of “Wild Thoughts” (previously and unimaginatively entitled  Updates and Shorts ), in which I catch up on all the stories I’ve been saving for a “future post” which never seems to get written.  First, some updates:

  • In Party Like it’s 1954 I described the loyalty oath requirement recently imposed on adjuncts in my school.  After a lightning-round of research on the Constitutionality and legality of the oath, and after communicating with a Faculty Senate member, I decided to sign the oath and pursue the fight once I’d secured my job.  I’ve learned of an unsuccessful legal challenge that was mounted by a full-time faculty member some time ago, and am hoping to get more information from him.
  • The Meskwaki adoption case I described as “settled” in my earlier updates post has encountered new complications. The motehr in the original case, who after being disallowed by the tribal government to allow her newborn son to be adopted by a non-Indian couple outside of the community, has turned the child over to Human Services after being involved in a drug-related arrest and herself testing positive for marijuana and drug use.  
  • Meanwhile, in the world of establishing ethnicity through DNA testing , the LA Times adds some context to the Wired piece mentioned by Kerim earlier.  What’s intriguing to me about the turn to DNA testing is that it essentially substitutes the uncertainty of competing sociocultural claims with the uncertainty of scientific claims — DNA testing has, so far, not come one whit closer to establishing ethnicity than the methods it replaces, but has become preferred for its air of scientificity.  What will be interesting is when the Pakistanis get wind of all this and start applying for tribal enrollment (Pakistanis often come up as “Native American” with current DNA testing methods).

And now for some things completely different:
Continue reading →

Courses I will never teach

There are the courses that I hope I never have to teach, and then there are the courses that no one would ever LET me teach. It can easily envisage a time when a conjunction of sabbaticals and illnesses will force me to fake my way through Intro Physical Anthropology, despite the fact that I have never taken a physical anthro course in my entire life. But when will The Powers That Be let me run with some of these?

Anthropology of Professional Wrestling
This is a topics students know and care about. There is a large literature on the topic starting with Roland Barth’s essay to the more recent “Steel Chair to the Head”:http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=3438-0. What better way to explore gender roles, the body, and performativity? We could even have a lab section featuring suflexes and the Camel Clutch. But no, they will never let me teach it.

First Contact — For Reals
There is a large literature on colonial encounters and first contact — in fact this is one of my areas of speciality. But how about When The Aliens Land? Admittedly there was an ‘Anthro and Sci Fi’ moment that resulted in the “Anthropology Through Science Fiction”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000AY0TVQ/qid=1128739722/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl14/104-0327787-9330300?v=glance&s=books&n=507846 reader and a few other pieces (including one wonderful kitschy volume with a contribution from Sol Tax!). But once ‘far-out’ faded away and it was clear NASA was not right around the corner from developing a warp drive, interest faded out (although some people, like Ben Finney, are still thinking it over. WHY? I am fascinated by First Contact novels that probe the limits of humanity and intercultural understanding. And after all, what will we do WHEN THEY ACTUALLY LAND? I think it would be great to have a class where you could read by both First Contact (by Connolly and Anderson) and First Contract (by Greg Costikyan). But no, they will not let me teach it.

Cohen and Kahuna: Hierarchy and Taboo in Comparative Perspective
I’ve always been fascinated with Polynesian notions of taboo (or, as we say in Hawai’i Nei, kapu) and various Jewish systems of taboo — especially the ones that are no longer practiced today (when was the last time you smashed a clay vessel because it was pasuch?) And just in general it’s an aesthetically pleasing juxtaposition. But alas, no one is interested in talking about blood and semen and food prohibitions the way they used to be. Someday, perhaps, this sort of thing will come back into fashion. But let’s facti it, they will never let me teach it.

Meaningless Relationships
I have actually done a reading course with one of my professors on this one, so I practically already have a syllabus ready. We regularly talk about ‘commodified’ relationships or life under capitalism as being less ‘meaningful’ than more supposedly robust and authentic face-to-face subsistence communities. There is also a large literature on one night stands, the short con, and so forth. Finally there is (again) the literature on culture contact. Why not do a whole course on what it means to have a relationship (or just interact with them) when you barely know them at all? We could start with Silent Trade, move on to 80s ennui (perhaps watch Better Off Dead or something), do something on the sex trade, or anonymity more generally. You could even through in ‘first contact’ or do some stuff on identity on screen. But because this is just a great topic rather than a clearly slotted ‘theoretical’ or ‘ethnographic’ course, they will never let me teach it.

Any good academic can take a good idea and turn it into a something that requires a reading list, but no matter how flexible your university is — for instance, mine has allowed me to teach a course of Virtual Worlds — there just comes a time when they don’t let you go there. It’s too bad, since my “Coffee and Gin: A Historical Anthropology” course is all ready to go…

I’ll show you mine if…

Since Ozma is speaking of syllabi, I’ll share mine. Two of my syllabi are now up on my website, an “introduction to cultural anthropology”:http://alex.golub.name/res/HPUAnthro2000Fall2005.pdf course and a course on “the anthropology of virtual worlds”:http://alex.golub.name/res/HPUAnthro3830Fall2005.pdf.

So, what are you teaching this semester?

Blinded me with science!

So this post is a bit of a fishing expedition — I’m looking to add materials to a course on weird economies. Not “Freakonomics”:http://www.freakonomics.com/thebook.php – style – weird, but late capitalist – style – weird. If you’ve read a particularly compelling ethnographic (or even pop) treatment of black markets, strange markets, marginal and/or avant garde markets, well, do send along the refs!

And if you want to share your thoughts on how the logic of Freakonomics totally makes sense if you’ve drunk the economic man koolaid and totally does not make much sense otherwise — hey, you won’t hear any complaints from me.

The working course description of the course in question is:

“Anthropology of Alternative Economies”: a course considering the theory and ethnography of marginal, secret, and even magical economies in the contemporary world.
While in recent decades we have heard much about the emergence of a “new” global economy, many members of the world population have access to neither this “new” nor to the “old” (wage-labor) economy. Instead, they enter informal, paraformal, and/or illicit economies: providing goods and services outside of (and often in spite of) legitimate frameworks. These workers realize that the economic systems in which they live operate according to strange logics, and they sometimes develop surprising cultural theories to explain them. Such processes are generating exciting new theorization in economics and anthropology. They also present special ethical and methodological challenges to researchers. The course will cover theoretical and empirical readings, from globally diverse contexts and interdisciplinary perspectives, on these multiple sets of issues.

Intro courses and the viability of four-fields

It’s that time of the year again and my thoughts, like those of Rex back “a few weeks ago”:/2005/08/17/the-grim-smile/, turn to pedagogical issues. One things that has been haunting me for my entire teaching career (OK, OK . . . 2 ½ years!) is the viability of a four-field intro course. Semester after semester, I try to cram in the so-called “tip of the iceberg” of anthropology into 45 hours (minus tests, pre-test reviews, post-test revisions, assignment explanations, occasional cancellations, fire drills and so forth). And semester after semester, I try to decide ahead of time where I will wind up having to cut. Because I always wind up having to cut, despite my best intentions. I could fit it all in probably if all I did was lecture but about half of my class time is spent in learning activities. So . . .

This leads me to question how useful the four-field approach is in pedagogical terms (i.e. as a teaching tool). The more topics one tries to cover in one semester, the more each topic gets watered down. So what is important to us as teachers and professors of anthropology? To cram as much info into the brains of our students as possible for later regurgitation? Or to help them learn ways of thinking and analysing that are part of the “anthropological project”?

In any case, the nature of the course has been decided for me so I have to deal . . .and figure out where I will cut (if I have to, of course, which I probably will . . . ). Keeping in mind, of course, that 99.9% of my students will not go on to take university-level anthropology courses (this is Cégep we’re talking about which is a 2-year general studies programme between high school and university – a neat little Québécois idiosyncrasy) helps me determine what is important and what isn’t.

What will help them in their future careers as teachers, plumbers, lawyers, secretaries, nurses, police officers and so forth? What will whet their appetites enough to get them to take one of our 200 or 300 level courses such as Race and Racism, Community Studies, Archaeology, Human Evolution, Culture and Sexuality, etc? What will help them in their everyday lives as residents of multicultural Canada? These are the questions I need to ask when determining what stays and what goes . . . and this is what I’ve been forgetting to ask myself in the past 2 years as a newbie teacher.

So now I’m trying something new. I’m going to start backwards. Well, not completely. But rather than start with the usual physical evolution stuff, I will start with where we are now and meander through different topics with occasional flashbacks to pre-history. I’m not sure how I’ll be able to pull off the dream-style sequences when it’s time for a flashback but . . . I’ll figure something out.

Now excuse me while I go back to mixing a soundtrack for my course . . .

The Grim Smile

The pre-class rush is upon me, complete with additional deadlines for articles in various editorial stages, and so I haven’t been posting much. Although to be honest perhaps the largest reason for my silence is how gun shy I am about posting about Yali given how I’m the token Melanesianist on SM. Anyway, since many of us will begin teaching again, perhaps a quick post on pedagogy will touch on something that is on the minds of those revising syllabi and preparing for the fall.

I had the experience of a superb undergraduate education at a liberal arts college which allowed me to con my way into a Major Research University where there were practically no teaching opportunities and the faculty was very focused on developng grad students but paid scant attention to undergrads (this is making a long story short — I’m not knocking the college at my alma mater) or teaching graduate students to teach them. As a result I’ve been furiously reading through the literature on what makes a good teacher, subscribing to email lists, developing my own sense of pedagogy, and focusing on improving my teaching with the zeal of a convert.

So far I’ve conluded that the ‘mirrors for princes’ genre is pretty hit or miss when the prince in question is a college professor. I do have my favorites — Maryellen Weimer’s Improving Your Classroom Teaching and Gerald Graff’s Clueless in Academe among them — but a friend of mine who recently won a teaching award recommended The Sociology of Teaching by Willard Wallard. This weighty 1932 tome reads like the Annee Sociologique running berserk through the ethnographic richness of an American highschool. Chapter XXI, “The Battle of the Requirements” includes sections entitled “Cribbing,” “‘chiselling’,” “Responsive attitude as a technique of chiselling,” “play of social forces upon requirements,” and so forth. It has Mauss’s sensibility, but it’s as if Weber edited all the joie de vivre out of the manuscript. Thus in Chapter XXV — “Traits Determining The Prestige Of The Teacher” — we get entries on “stable domination,” “relationship of container and contained,” “institutionalized courage,” and, my favorites, “teaching mask,” “synthetic smile,” “wan smile,” and “the grim smile.” The last deserves quotation in full:

Those who live by controlling others must take thought even of their laughter. There are some teachers who think that they should never smile. They may be right, for where the moral order is frankly imposed upon students from without they will welcome any show of relaxation on the part of the imposing agent as an opportunity to break through. Sometimes teachers compromise by acknowledging the ridiculous with the grim smile, which does not simply mean, “I am a fellow human being and like you I find some things amusing,” but says rather “I am of course the teacher. But I am willing to admit that this is amusing. But do not forget that I am still the teacher.” … In this there is no artificiality, but the frankly ambivalent expression of both amusement and the desire to maintain order. This compromise of authority and friendliness is for many teachers, for all those who have not learned how to get the classroom situation back under their control at once after they have allowed it to take its own natural course for a while, the best compromise for classroom purposes. It allows students to see that one has a sense of humor, or that he is friendly, but it does not open the gates.

One of These Frosh Is Not Like the Others…

Speaking of pseudonymous professors, an anthropologist using the name Rebekah Nathan went undercover as a college freshman in order to produce an ethnography of modern college students. Now, I’m still working through the fact that this study represents a blatant example of covert research and the ethical implications of that, but my first impression is not about the ethics of the work but about the workload. Nathan, in her 50s, went through a lot of effort and expense to find out things she could have asked any of her younger colleagues about! New teachers are only a few years out of their undergrad studies — I’d been out for 8 years, but then I’d spent a lot of time doing non-school stuff before and during my grad school years — and I’m sure she could have tracked down a 28- or 29-year old professor, probably in her own department, if she’d tried.

In any case, what she discovered is that students talk among themselves about their professors in “less than flattering ways”, and that their discussion of coursework focuses primarily on “grades, upcoming tests, and complaints” rather than on “substance”. Of somewhat more interest was her examination of inter-racial and inter-ethnic friendship, where she found that although most students will claim to have close friends from different racial or ethnic groups, very few actually spend time with members of groups other than their own. Most intriguing — and hopefully significantly explored in her upcoming book, My Freshman Year: What a Professor Learned by Becoming a Student is the egalitarianism that shapes student classroom participation — “so much of student culture is about being equal” so few students are willing to single themselves out by asking or answering questions.

This last point merits a book on its own, because of the deep reflection of current American culture as a whole it represents. Against the individualism that is so often highlighted as a feature of American identity, this kind of “Apollonian” conformity and refusal to individuate oneself seems odd (with a nod here to Ruth Benedict) — though clearly as much a part of American identity as individualism. I remember skipping several sessions of geology lab as an undergrad when I began feeling the resentment of other students over my 20-point lead blowing the curve. But I wouldn’t quite chalk it up to an idealistic “equality” — my own sense of my students and my remembered student days suggest that there’s a healthy dose of fear and even coercion at work in inter-student relations. Which, of course, is perfectly in line with Benedict’s depiction of the Appolonian Zunis, for whom witchcraft accusations were often the reward for “standing out”.

I can imagine that Nathan’s book will be useful for professors, especially those who have been out of school for a couple decades or more, but I’ll have to think about those ethical issues a lot more before I can justify buying the book. I realize that there’s some sorts of research that just won’t work if its subjects know it’s research, but I simply cannot believe that undercover ethnography is the only way to get the information Nathan has recorded.

Ethnoblogs

I have spent the last few days preparing course syllabi for the fall semester and I was thought-experimenting about ways I can possibly incorporate blogs and other online technologies into the classroom.

Then I remembered that a few weeks ago over at Fieldnotes, Tad McIlwraith had wonderful things to say about Aaron Fox’s new ethnography Real Country: Music and Language in Working Class Culture (and also reported by Lorenz over at anthropologi). So I went over there to take a quick look.

Fox’s ethnography, which is a study of how country music expresses Texan working-class identity in a particular local community, is of interest to me because it is related to my dissertation topic: his treatment of class culture has made me think about a chapter of mine that deals with mineworkers in 1950s & 60s Japan who were into writing haiku poetry.

Yet besides his rich ethnography, I was also struck by Fox’s decision to “extend” his book into cyberspace. At his website for Real Country, he has all kinds of materials — interview transcripts, some real stellar photographs, audio files, and even a video clip — pretty much everything short of reproducing the book itself. I had so much fun going through his multimedia files, and I can see how students would too. It looks like he has not uploaded all the materials he has, but the site is very organized and easy to use.

What’s even more impressive is that Fox has begun a blog devoted to discussing the book with his readers. He wants the site to be a place “where students can interact with [him] and ask questions about the book.” Sure enough, there have already been a few students reading the book for class who have logged on and chatted with the author. Some of the discussions have been really enlightening. For example, when he was asked about his photographs, he talked about his passion for “working class documentary photography.”

So I am wondering if any of you august readers and bloggers of Savage Minds know of other online presentations of ethnographic materials? Or a list of ethnographic blogs already out there? Or better yet, your experience with such blogs in the classroom?

Thanks! I promise I’ll return the favor by compiling them into a list and posting it here.

Politics Through Pamphlets

It’s very strange how teaching begins altering the way your brain processes the way you consume information — everything book you read, browse through, or even glance at gets parsed by your brain in terms of if, when, and how you could incorporate it into a course. I’ve always been an inveterate syllabus writer — I have one simply entitled “Leviathans” that starts in Assyria, runs through Bodin and Furnivall, and ends in Latour — but this is getting ridiculous. My latest endeavor is to create a syllabus based on the fact that all of the books are the same size. I’d call it ‘Politics Through Pamphlets’ and it would be a gentle, featherweight elective course that breezed through some version of the relation between authority, self-presentation, and rhetoric in politics and the academy. Required texts include:

Don’t Think Of An Elephant by George Lakoff

Talking Politics by Michael Silverstein

Microcosmographia Academica by F.M. Cornford

On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt

Any other ideas?

Anthropology, Educational Psychology and Experiential Learning

The funniest thing happened in my Psychology of Learning course this past winter. The instructor had set up a class debate about the developmental theories of “Jean Piaget”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Piaget and “Lev Vygotsky”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Vygotsky . Whereas Piaget’s work, in a grossly oversimplified nutshell, looks at children’s development through the various cognitive stages as a natural occurrence of sorts, Vygotsky’s ideas bring forth the importance of social interaction in the development of children’s cognitive abilities. In other words, it is interaction with more knowledgeable individuals that pulls children along through their cognitive development. The process whereby adults present children with problems that the children could not solve on their own and provide support so that the children can effectively learn the appropriate tasks is called scaffolding.

Oh, that wasn’t the funny part, by the way. The funny part is that I, the token anthropologist in the room, was randomly chosen to speak on behalf of the Vygotsky-ite team whereas the spokesperson for the Piaget-ites (ians?) was . . . you guessed it . . . a biologist (also randomly chosen).

Oh, it was great fun! I got to accuse her of biological determinism. (I should mention that I love accusing people of biological determinism and I do it as often as I can, in all sorts of contexts and in my most indignant voice: “You biological determinist, you!”) OK, so I guess you had to be there.

While the experience was a hoot, it got me thinking about teaching anthropology, especially to people in their late teens, which comprise the bulk of our student population at Vanier College. The knowledge that I gained about learning theories in this course was invaluable and, ever since I completed the course, I’ve been experimenting with ways to apply them specifically to anthropological content.

For example, Vygotsky’s sociocultural approach to learning is quite appealing from an anthropological perspective. It is in line, after all, with our notion of enculturation. It also fits right in with the middle ground in the nature vs. nurture debate where one refuses to go the extremes of biological or cultural determinism.

The compatibility goes beyond that, however. Vygotsky, like Piaget, can be categorised as a constructivist according to my instructor, which signifies adherence to a body of thought that posits that knowledge is constructed by the learner as opposed to being something that exists “out there”, external to the learner.

This has allowed me to move away from a teacher-centered classroom to a certain extent. With experimentation, I have found that my students already know much of what I’m there to teach them. By asking them questions such as “What do you think are some functions of religion?” and seeing that they explained most of what I was about to tell them, I saw that, in fact, all I was doing was giving them tools with which to discuss what they already know from an anthropological perspective. By posing questions that require them to think about prior knowledge in a new light and by providing them with tools that will help them to do it more effectively, I am providing scaffolding for them in their construction of anthropological knowledge rather then simply filling their brains and notebooks with knowledge that comes from outside of them.

Now, of course, I couldn’t just leave well enough alone. I’m a big fan of experiential anthropology (a.k.a. radical participation) and “Jean-Guy Goulet’s work”:http://www.abdn.ac.uk/chags9/1goulet.htm had a big influence on my M.A. research. Naturally, then, I was attracted to the idea of experiential learning where students engage in meaningful activities that will help them learn through the very process in which they are engaged.

In other words, I’m seeking to get away from the tendency to tell students what they need to know. Rather, I’m working toward using a greater number of activities that will allow them to realise that they know stuff (and I do call it stuff, just because . . . ) and that they can, with a little help from me or another qualified professional, figure out what it all means.

An example of an exercise that I’ve experimented with is the use of different coloured poker chips to demonstrate various methods of distribution such as generalised and balanced reciprocity. Before even telling them what these methods are, I set them up in small groups with little scenarios that they must act out according to what they think makes sense. You got it . . . we do play acting! Weeeeee!

When the gut reaction of the hunter is to keep all of the meat for herself, I ask her to think about the long run. A light goes on and s/he realises that s/he would lose social credibility if s/he did not share and that this could result in others not sharing with her a few weeks down the road. I get the students to explain all of this to me and then I give them a term: generalised reciprocity. And they get it because they already knew it in their own way.

So, what I am getting at with all of this is that the teaching of anthropology, especially to students who will not necessarily go on to major in the field, needs to be centered not just on learning anthropological jargon or on reading ethnographies but on figuring out, through experiential means, why things make sense in their various cultural contexts. The students at this age (17-19) have the capacity to do so but, as per Vygotsky’s theory, they need to be pulled through and supported in the construction of this knowledge. With more understanding of how learning takes place (in other words, with a little help from educational psych), I think that anthropology teachers can become more effective at this and, indirectly, have a social impact which reaches farther than the classroom and into the lives of future math teachers, business administrators, lawyers and plumbers.

Blogs, Methods.

I don’t blog much. There, I’ve made my excuses for what will no doubt be intermittent posts. It’s not that I haven’t tried. In fact, I was so blogging way before it was cool; but no one else was, which kind of defeated the purpose. In 2000, I started a fieldwork blog while I was in India
to which I invited a number of people to participate by adding comments or asking questions. Interestingly, the result of this experiment was clear: no one really wants to be part of your fieldwork but you (and maybe your family and your S/O). Five years later, three of my grad students are active bloggers–two in the field and one during write-up–and they are getting a much better comment rate, though not, it should be said, from any of their professors except moi. All of them, however, are happy I made them do it (or at least, that’s what they tell me).

Kerim’s post on the subject of arm-chair anthropology actually made me think of the other experiment. In 2002, I had the idea for a blog-like project that would turn the kind of unspecified fears about the discipline that Kerim points up into more well specified methodological questions–to which working anthropologists would be asked to respond briefly, but in numbers. It was called “been there.” The end result would be an archive of structured questions and answers about how different methodological issues are dealt with across fieldsites, areas, traditions etc. The whole project was very much focused on specifying the advantages of ethnographic method; so a question like “What difference does being there make?” was intended to give people a way to articulate the importance of being there that Kerim mentions. Or, alternately, to articulate the new necessity of both the Internet, and writing, arguing, blogging, counter-discoursing informants. I thought it would be great to have a growing archive of comparable answers to focused questions– a kind of living tips and tricks handbook.

Three people agreed to participate, one person wrote a response, and so I gave up again…

But perhaps the Savage Pansies will be my new methodological guinea pigs. Perhaps I will inaugurate a sub-pansy theme related to method. Indeed, I find that non-anthropologists are just as curious about what makes ethnographic method distinctive as anthropologists are, so perhaps it might make for interesting reading. I think it will have to start as a stealthblog though, a blog within a blog, a submarine blog, ck: blog mole. I must return to baby care and scheming now.

Nothing Is Just

Last night, I had the last session of class for this semester. Since students have already finished their finals (a take-home essay test), their brains are pretty much not accepting new information during the last class, so I use the last period to get some feedback about my course (and hopefully sneak in some “words to grow on” in my responses). We were discussing a film we had watched the week before, and I mentioned that there was one scene that really bothered me.

The film, Slavery: A Global Investigation, details instances of modern slavery around the world. The segments I show describe slavery in the cocoa plantations of Cote d’Ivoire, and in the housekeeping staff of World Bank employees in Washington, DC. In the cocoa segment, there is a scene which includes 19 young men and boys recently freed and staying with the Malian ambassador while arrangements are made for them to return home. Some of the boys and men are covered with scars, the result of the slaveholder’s efforts to “soften” them until they accepted their fate. “How would they beat you?” the filmmakers ask. One of the men, an unnofficial spokesperson for the group, demonstrates, pulling the shirt off of one of his comrades and forcing him to the ground. The camera cuts to a close-up of the “victim”, his face in the dirt. Whack! Cut to the first man, a belt held high over his head, and then whack! And again, whack! The scene is staged so that it appears that he really is beating the other young man with his belt. After seeing the segment 5 times, I still cringe a little, and my students gasp at the first strike. It is not until the 6th whack! that the camera pulls back and we see that he is beating the ground, although of course a part of us must have known that was the case.

I told my class that I felt this was unethical, a filmmaker’s ploy to pull the heartstrings of the Western viewer. It is an incredibly effective scene, but I can’t help thinking, “how effective?” How effective was it for the 19 young men, recently saved from bondage, when the filmmaker said, “Show me. Show me how he beat you.” When, for my students’ edification, this young ex-slave forced his fellow ex-slave to the ground and began pulling off his belt? There’s an element of “guilt porn” in it — show our viewers how you suffered so they can feel guilty and yet absolved by their concern.

So I’m explaining this and one of my students says, “I never knew there were ethics in filmmaking, I thought it was just making movies.” If anthropology had to choose a single message as its central lesson, this is what I would choose: Nothing is Just. Filmmaking isn’t “just” making movies. Marriage isn’t “just” a marker of committment. Family isn’t “just” the people you are related to. Giving gifts isn’t “just” a form of exchange. Earlier in the semester, we had read an essay on American football, and the student who had chosen to present it had disagreed with some of the author’s conclusions. “Football is just a sport,” he said. But it’s not — it’s a means of enculturation (why are so many parents happy to see their kids go out for football?), it’s a way of expressing and containing aggression, it’s a symbol (and also a referent) of American masculinity, it’s a ritual of American social solidarity (never short of war are more Americans focused on the same thing than on Super Bowl Sunday — which is, if you think of it, a kind of war in itself).

I could see the “aha moment” coming, so I pressed my case. Of course there’s an ethics of filmmaking. There’s an ethics of everything. Journalists have a code of ethics. Anthropologists have a code of ethics. Heck, even librarians have a code of ethics. (Here I must admit I got sidetracked on the greatness of librarians, even to the point of urging my students to go talk to their librarians next time they were in the library and tell them “thank you” for all they’ve done for the rest of us.) Although formalized ethical codes can be problematic, they at least point to an underlying concern with how to act ethically in a given field of practice. And they indicate the always-present possibility of abuse — every field of practice gives its practitioners some kind of power, and all power is subject to abuse.

Which is why no field is “just” itself — but it’s also why no field is “just”. That is, no field of practice inherently produces justice or can wholly forestall the possibility of injustice. The condition that we might feel is “just” is the outcome of a whole raft of choices — and subject to differing opinions as to its “just-ness”. As a teacher of introductory anthropology, this is by far the hardest thing to teach — that what we feel and experience as the best way of doing things (when we think of it at all, when it’s not “just” living) is as culturally constructed, as historically contingent, and ultimately as deep-down weird as the Sambian ritual of oral insemination of young boys to make them into men. As I pointed out last night, the Sambians must look at us and shake their heads and think how disgusting it is that none of us cares enough about our sons to make men out of them through ritual oral insemination (yes, Virginia, we are talking about blowjobs here). When Catholic missionaries show up and ask the natives to eat their Lord and drink his blood, it is eminently reasonable to say, “No thank you, we’re civilized here and do not do such things. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a meal to prepare for my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather’s spirit.”

I guess you could say it was a “teachable moment”.

Armchair Anthropology in the Cyber Age?

The just-so story we tell to all first year anthropology students is that the modern anthropology emerged largely as a result of Malinowski’s desire to stay away from Europe during the First World War. As a result, he “discovered” the ethnographic method and “participant observation.” While Malinowski was certainly not the first writer of ethnographies, nor even the first to get involved with his subjects, we can certainly give him credit for the popularization and institutionalization of this methodology. To this day, participant observation is a ritual that nearly every anthropologist must complete in order to secure a place in the discipline.

When I initially described the work I wished to do to my committee they objected that it was not “anthropological” since it was too historical or theoretical. When I pointed to successful works by anthropologists which were both historical and theoretical in focus, it was pointed out to me that these were largely second books. The first one is usually an ethnography. I relented and, in the end, I am happy that I undertook participant observation. While my dissertation did end up having a strong focus on theory and history, it would not have been the same if I hadn’t spent so much time in the field, absorbing Taiwan through the pores of my skin. I’m not sure I was successful in articulating how the ethnographic process influenced the final work, but there is no doubt in my mind that it was absolutely essential.

It is largely for this reason that I head back to Taiwan next week. As I figure out how to proceed with publications, post-doctorate applications, and my career, I don’t feel I can do this in the vacuum of my own own home – even with the internet. Face-to-face interaction does bring something intangible. I’m not sure what it is. Perhaps it is simply all the down-time. On the internet you only pay attention to what you want to pay attention to. I’m even pretty effective at eliminating any annoyances from SPAM or internet ads. While I do have e-mail and voice-chat with friends from Taiwan, when you sit with someone in a cafe drinking bubble tea, or in a restaurant drinking Taiwan Beer, things happen that are random and unexpected. All those off-stage actions we usually ignore, and which we can filter out on the web, suddenly grab our attention. And there is the powerful force of serendipity, making unexpected connections for us which can only be discovered “in the field.”

And yet … And yet the web is changing. Folksonomy is creating new forms of serendipity. Video chat is leaking us more off-stage information. And the ubiquitous presence of wireless and broadband access is perhaps even giving us more opportunity for down-time observation.

But, and I always seem to get to my point late in the game, I think the web is going to change anthropology in another way. I predict that we will slowly see the return of the “armchair anthropologists” Malinowski so famously dethroned. Armchair anthropology was a colonial endeavor. Missionaries and colonial officers collected data in the field (often following manuals detailing how such data should be gathered), and scholars back in England compared and collected this data from all over the empire. Such broad synthetic studies are largely out of favor in Anthropology today (as came up in the comments to my last post). Sure, there are a few people, like Jack Goody, but they are largely exceptions.

I predict that will change.

For one thing, the web offers a tremendous, and ever growing database of lived experience. One need only look at the ways in which Google has already been leveraged by linguists to study language change. This past semester I had my students use Flickr as a source of ethnographic data for one of their papers. As more and more of people’s lives are lived online, it will become possible to not only conduct cyberethnographies of online communities, but leverage the power of social tagging, Google, and other such tools to conduct broad synthetic studies of the kind anthropologists have not done in some time.

The problem, of course, is the tremendous digital divide. Anthropology is no longer a discipline that only focuses on “those people,” the traditional subjects of colonial inquiry, and yet anthropologists are more aware than most of the importance of not excluding huge swaths of humanity from our analysis.

It is here that the work of Ethan Zuckerman enters the picture. He has been working hard to encourage blogging in developing nations. Ethan argues that “bridge bloggers” (a term coined by Hossein Derakhshan) can cross linguistic, cultural, and digital divides, and has set up several projects to do just that.

One of these projects is the Global Voices Aggregator, a public bloglines reading list of blogs from around the world. (Ethan is working on a high-powered replacement which can handle the huge number of feeds.) As Ethan points out that there is hardly a region of the world where there isn’t somebody blogging.

In other countries, where blogging is less widespread, we sometimes discover that there are only one or two bloggers talking about the country. Sometimes that person is an expatriate aid worker, like Yvette Lopez in Somaliland. Other times it’s a non-resident expert, like Nathan Hamm of Registan.net. A Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan until 9/11, Nate speaks Uzbek and Russian and is able to contextualize and translate events in Central Asia for a global audience.

These accounts are important – but they are perhaps not yet the stuff of anthropology. Many of them are focused on news, politics, human rights, and other pressing matters, but do not necessarily provide the kind of data which would be necessary for a modern day armchair anthropologist. However, if someone were really motivated to do a massive synthetic study collecting data from around the world, these bridge bloggers could function in much the same way as nineteenth century missionaries did for the first anthropologists.

I know putting it that way sends chills up the spines of most anthropologists, but I am not proposing a colonial endeavor. I’m not proposing anything in fact. I’m just pointing out that the capabilities exist to do this kind of study, and predicting that anthropologists will eventually figure out how to make use of it. I’m also hopeful that the de-centered nature of modern networks will mean that such future studies are conducted in an open and transparent way.

I’m off to Taiwan next week for some important face-to-face time with my friends, contacts, and informants. I don’t think ethnography is dead. But I do think that Anthropology will change yet again, and armchair research will not be disparaged as much as it once was.