The scientist and society

When people ask me what is anthropology about, I remember myself years ago completely convinced that anthropologists dug out pre-historic scalps and argue about Australopithecus and what such. So what do they actually do?

In Hobbs' Leviathan, anthropology would be the reflexive capacity of the brain. A luxury few can afford, be it humans or nations.

In Language and Power in Indonesia, Anderson (1990: 63-65) writes about pre-Islamic hermit-sages, known as ajar, rasi or begawan, and later Islamic kyai, who would get away with dishing out social criticism by virtue withdrawal from society and thus staying outside any kind of political power struggle. I guess better social scientists, with enough civic conscience, spare time and knowledge, are like those ajars: Paul Farmer, Noam Chomsky, Stuart Hall and Michel Foucault spring to mind.

In reality, very few social scientists act as Socrates' famous social gadfly. Ridiculously overworked, they more often than not have no time to preach scientific truth to the masses. They speak a professional lingo essential to describe life in all its complexity. It takes years of hard effort to master that skill. By then, they become unintelligible to nearly everyone outside the ivory tower, both in terms of what they say and how. Most of those who become public intellectuals sell out to populist dualisms and thus are but glorified journalists. Most voiciferous of  them are also the least likely qualified to talk about what they talk about: exemplo praelucere, Richard Dawkins. Thus all domains of knowledge remain safely aloof from each other.

The value of money, an anthropological view

A critical insight into manufacturing money reveals that in fact it is created out of nothing. Despite money itself having no inherent value (in fact, it should be a mere systems of measures for exchange of commodities, akin to the metric or imperial system ), it acquires a value of its own: just like in case of social identities, in relation to the other, one currency in relation to another (and all others). It is everyone's belief in its value that creates and sustains it. Money's value being imaginary makes it none the less real.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen through Bourdieu's lens

I know it's not really kosher when teaching social theory, but I have been known to give case studies for homework, once I see that the student has a good grip of  key terms and can juggle them with a degree of ease. 

Now this one simply begs for some social analysis, I mean, Mad  Dogs and Englishmen. Explain it through Bourdieu's lens! A no-brainer, really but helps put thing in pespective for some.

"In tropical climes
There are certain times
Of day
When all the citizens retire
To take their clothes off and perspire.
It's one of those rules
That the greatest fools
Obey,
Because the sun is far too sultry
And one must avoid its ultry
Violet ray.

The natives grieve
When the white men leave
Their huts.
Because they're obviously,
Definitely
Nuts.

Mad Dogs & Englishmen
Go out in the midday sun.
The Japanese don't care to,
The Chinese wouldn't dare to,
Hindus and Argentines
Sleep firmly from twelve to one,
But Englishmen
Detest a
Siesta.
In the Philippines
They have lovely screens
To protect you from the glare.
In the Malay states
There are hats like plates
Which the Britishers won't wear.
At twelve noon
The natives swoon,
And no further work is done,
But mad dogs and Englishmen
Go out in the midday sun!

Such a surprise
For the eastern eyes
To see,
That though the English are effete,
They're quite impervious to heat.
When the white man rides
Every native hides
In glee.
Because the simple creatures hope he
Will impale his solar topee
On a tree.

It seems such a shame
When the English claim
The Earth,
That they give rise
To such hilarity
And mirth.
Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha,
Hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo,
He, he, he, he, he, he, he, he,
Hm, hm, hm, hm, hm, hm.

Mad dogs and Englishmen
Go out in the midday sun.
The toughest Burmese bandit
Can never understand it.
In Rangoon
The heat of noon
Is just what the natives shun,
They put their Scotch
Or Rye down
And lie down.
In a jungle town
Where the sun beats down
To the rage of man and beast,
The English garb
Of the English sahib
Merely gets a bit more creased.
In Bangkok
At twleve'o'clock
They foam at the mouth and run,
But mad dogs and Englishmen
Go out in the midday sun.

Mad dogs and Englishmen
Go out in the midday sun.
The smallest Malay rabbit
Deplores this foolish habit.
In Hong Kong
They strike a gong
And fire off a noonday gun
To reprimand
Each inmate
Who's in late.
In the Mangrove swamps
Where the python romps
There is peace from twelve to two,
Even caribous
Lie around and snooze,
For there's nothing else to do.
In Bengal,
To move at all
Is seldom if ever done.
But mad dogs and Englishmen
Go out in the midday
Out in the midday
Out in the midday
Out in the midday
Out in the midday
Out in the midday
Out in the midday sun! "

Identity, between the psychic and the discursive

Hegemonic discourses always compete to hook up on and exploit the invisible, yet mighty powerful, psychic forces of individual. Once internalised, those discourses become Bourdieusian doxas informing our habitus: in plain English, values that determine our behaviour. 

What needs to be made visible is how that hooking actually works. Many seem to be able to intuite that and it is sort half-recognised in the domain of common public knowledge: e.g., how advertising uses sex to see nearly everything. 

Commercial advertising, however, is a recent contender to manipulate our lives to its ends, we are more easily aware of its attempts. More established human life energy abusers become perceived as Weberian traditional authority: thus, for example, we believe that the Queen has an inherent undeniable right to rule Britannia "because it has always been so". The fact that her people arrived not such a long time ago from Germany seems to bypass any kind of rational conscious. An invented tradition is only legitimised once it internalised on the subconscious, "irrational" level.

Members of Parliament and other elected power-contenders have a bit tougher run for their money, as we only accept their right to rule us, once they are elected. Their rational authority still needs a bit of conscious persuasion. So we are invited to rationalise: well, since it is us who elected them, we need to put with them no matter what, it was our choice after all.  The fact that, say, Obama was elected by just over one half (51%) of the voting age population (80%) who bothered to come and vote (57.5%), means that essentially he was voted in by about 21% of the population (65,899,660 out of 313,914,040). To make us oblivious to that simple maths a whole fantasmagoric rigmarole has been invented and enforced.

Once we have been tricked into  giving legitimacy to "the democratic election", our assumption that once they are in power they will "take care of us" is again utterly irrational. It is the same projection of a father-figure sentiment that Freud (1927) insisted lied at the heart of every religion. However, we go to the voting polls in complete confidence that we are acting as rational human beings (cf. the Homo economicus myth that so many of us buy into  together with economists' explanations for the strategies used to govern our lives). Thus notwithstanding what Spencer (1970:129) argues about democratic being a value-rational type of authority, a closer look reveals that it is, in fact, but a face-value-rational authority.

Charismatic authority, irrational by default, hooks us up on the psychological mechanisms of group socialisation that can be based on staggeringly spurious criteria (Elliot 1968, Tajfel 1970). Ben Anderson's (1990) observation that charisma does not travel across borders can be explained exactly by the fact that  it is projected onto a group: in case of nations, one imagined within certain linguistic-geographic borders, thus using the same subconscious mechanisms responsible for group dynamic and ultimately instrumental in our collective survival as a species. 

As “identity is constructed at the point of intersection ('suture') between external discourses and practices and the internal psychic processes that produce subjectivities” (Hall 1996), whoever controls the discourse will hold the strings tied to the powerful forces in your subconscious. When that relationship is not consciously recognised, the subjectivity is but a marionette jerked around in the Foucauldian "nexus of knowledge and power", and the individual agency is but an illusion. It is the individual effort to disentangle themselves from those strings that can bring true liberation, not the Marxist kind of mass salvation from alienation.

(Some Wikipedia articles have been cited above for the sake of a more popular appeal. More academically inclined readers can easily track down the original peer-reviewed sources, should they wish so.)
 

Marxist analysis of political economy

Marxist analysis of political economy is like psychoanalysis without subjective consent: it mightily pisses off the analyzed, because it blows up their social cover and exposes truths they can't face.

Between the social and the subconscious: the frail canoe of the human conscious

Navigating precariously between the forces of social structure beyond one's control is the human being, him/herself only aware of what is available to the limited conscious inquiry of his/her mind, which itself, like a frail canoe, bobs audaciously on the rough waves of the great bottomless ocean of the subconscious.

The National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM)

"The National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) forms part of the Economic and Social Research Council’s (ESRC) strategy to improve the standards of research methods across the UK social science community. NCRM was established in April 2004 with funding from the ESRC to provide more strategic integration and coordination of ESRC’s investment in research methods.

NCRM provides a focal point for research, training and capacity building activities. These activities are aimed at promoting a step change in the quality and range of methodological skills and techniques used by the UK social science community, and providing support for, and dissemination of, methodological innovation and excellence within the UK."

Harry Harootunian and Japanese History

Last Wednesday I attended a public lecture by Harry Harootunian, a semi-divine presence in Japanese History known to have almost single-handedly revolutionised the discipline as well as a sort of figurehead of modern Area Studies. Goldsmiths College has apparently invited him all the way from NYC to inaugurate a kick-off of two interdisciplinary MA courses.

In my early MA time, his papers were prominently featured in our required readings. Dense and acerbic scholastic prose, they unfailingly took a few serious attempts to crack, always rewarded however with a yet another Zen-like epiphany with regards to how we look at the past and present of Japan.

Put simply, he proposes that we cannot use the same Euro-American yardstick to study other histories. Just because Europe had Middle Ages and feudalism, does not mean every society has been or should go through that too. My BA course in Japanese History was exactly along those, actually very Marxist, lines, so in my MA I had to go through the great pains of unlearning everything everything I knew about it.

He backs up his theoretical claims with amazingly rigorous factual research, each time each time delivering a blow to our stale Eurocentric preconceptions.

So now you see it is no wonder that I haven't yet washed my right hand since I shook his last Wednesday. 

Database of Japanese researchers

After  a couple of years of googling around my research topics, I've stumbled upon this website: Directory Database of Research and Development Activities (ReaD). It lists all Japanese research institutes, researchers and their research interests and published titles, both in Japanese and English. 

That is how I have finally managed to track down, perhaps, the only person on the third rock from the Sun with the same research interest as mine. I feel like a lonesome whale, who after a long journey out there in the ocean has finally detected a faint sound of another whale's sonar clicking!

Quantitative methods: statistics based bogus science

The quantitative methods course I am attending this term has so confirmed my suspicions: there are completely legit ways to tweak data into whatever suits your agenda. That is done by adjusting the so called significance levels, a technicality most of the media-consuming public have never heard of.

 

Even more abuse goes on on the stage of operationalising your hypothesis: turning your assumptions into numbers. A deliciously brazen example has been recently publicised, to next to none fanfare in the Guardian: determining how forward-looking a country is by its aggregated Google searches Physicists and mathematicians(in this case quite an eminent bunch of them) seem  very kin on churning out this kind of nonsense is by the brick shithouse-full when allowed to pontificate about society and stuff. 

 

The worst thing, because it contains lots of numbers arranged in nifty graphs, it is peddled as Science to the widest swathes of gullible population. This kind of PowerPoint style persuasion has direct implications onto everyone's daily life as it is used to advise decision-makers, craft policies and create the social imaginary that shapes everything else into existence.