Right-wing anthropologist

Is there such a thing as a right-wing anthropologist? I am yet to meet one. My guess is that when you take so much time and effort learning about people's lives, walking in their shoes, trying to  understand their world in all this complexity, you can't go right-wing on them: blame them for the life they live, compare them with what they are not, treat them not as fellow human beings but as labels, bugaboos, somehow not-quite-humans and hence non-deserving.

Right-wing sociologists, on the other hand, do crop up every now  and then. I blame Quantitative Methods. When you are trained to reduce people to figures, graphs and spreadsheets, without bearing in mind that it's but an exercise in mental abstraction, that's essentially dehumanisation. And dehumanisation of other humans is a surefire precursor to right-wing thought and right-wing action.

*All that being said, the old-fashioned right-wing vs. left-wing dichotomy has been largely hollowed out in the political world. The majority of Tories and Labour, Republicans and Democrats are but mildly differing flavours of Neo-Liberal (right-wing, in the old sense, par excellence). The crunch nowadays is largely between the old establishment and populists. 

What do you think?

Social science koan: inspired by Baudrillard

All human systems produce difference and waste.

'Mainly' anthropologist: the journey of an interdisplinarist in a non-interdisciplinary world

When schmoozing and networking, I introduce myself as an anthropologist. That makes sense. I have attended seven courses in Anthropology, wrote my MA thesis in Anthropology, and now am writing my quite anthropological thesis based on my ethnographic fieldwork. By far, Anthropology is the language I speak and the questions that I ask about the world are very anthropological. In the course of their training, all academics get by necessity indoctrinated in the axioms and terminology of their discipline. By that token, I am at most ease talking to other anthropologists: we share the same theoretical and methodological base that enables a meaningful qualitative argument (see, anthropologists don't really use regression analysis or p-values to prove their points).

At the same time, I have done more than that. I have taken courses and research method seminars in History, Political Science, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Psychology, Psychosocial Studies, Art History, Linguistics, Studies of Religions, and even Cross-Cultural Management and Quantitative Methods. Each time I sincerely and earnestly went "local" and, by a Kierkegaardian leap of faith, assumed their epistemological claims to be true. The expected and oft achieved result was of the kind that Evans-Pritchard got after living with the Azande and studying their belief system: it all makes sense from within the system. Up to a point, however. The leap of faith, the effort to acknowledge what you see (e.g., another academic discipline) for what it is, is a conscious effort to suspend your judgement just for a while. Eventually, however, the Doubt - one of the great propelling forces of Science - creeps in. Warts, patches and chinks in the armour come to light. You still see the merits and strong points, but not with the starry-eyed naïveté of a full-on convert.

 

To illustrate the point I'm trying to drive home here, I often recur to the tale of an elephant and the six blind men of Hindustan. When they came across the animal one sunny day, they all tried to figure out what it was like by touching it. Each one assumed that it was like the part that he touched. Each one was, effectively, neither completely right, nor completely wrong: knowing well one part of the beast, but not really its ontological entirety. That is how the various branches of science operate: they know a lot about one particular part or aspect they chose to focus on, but next to none about other parts and aspects. They often do not even suspect that the elephant actually exists and is bigger than any of its constituent parts.

I feel like my blindfold has fallen a bit. I don't claim to know everything about the elephant, but at least I know that what I know is far from perfect. I also have had glimpses of the whole picture. In broader terms of the philosophy of science (shame it is not even part of most PhD courses!), this elephant metaphor is situated at a very particular place in the history of the Western scientific project.

The way I see the "academic condition" in our time is that we have moved along the (modified) Fichtean triad from the Cartesian Thesis: "what happens if we assess reality only with oursenses?", to the Modernist Analysis, where we have classified the world into multitudes of competing taxonomies consisting of neat(ish) and handy dichotomies, and now finally to the Post-Modernist Critique, where it has dawned on (some of) us that the taxonomies and dichotomies are but imperfect mental tools, and are not reality. At this point, however, science has faltered for a while: the Post-Modernist debate has largely degraded into the increasingly abstruse debates that mostly resemble spectacularly prolific projectile verbal vomiting. There are still departments and faculties organised alongside Modernist divisions, and also those organised around various brands of Post-Modern  critique. All of them keep getting increasingly specialised (the phenomenon known as academic tribalisation) getting sort of hyphenated identities: the Anthropology of Tourism, Environmental History, the Studies of Yoga and Meditation, let alone the Critical Studies of Medieval Korean Pottery. (Ok, just taking the piss with the last one here, by no means to look down on the ever-rising professional finesse of the actual sub-disciplines). Essentially, however, instead of trying to assemble a holistic picture of the elephant, we got on with specialising in the ever smaller bits of it, while a vociferous minority of Post-Modernists, Post-Colonialists, Literary Criticists, Feminists and such, keep decrying all research results, past and present, in increasingly abstract terms. The critical bunch analyse the socks off the Modernist analysis, while the adepts of the latter, in their turn, analyse the output of the former. This way we're not getting anywhere remotely close  to the final destination of the Fichtean triad, the Synthesis, where the concerned parties would come to understand the entirety of the methaphorical elephant. Diagnosis: analysis paralysis. I won't even go on with any graphic allusive metaphors to the overflow of the cognate 'anal' in this discourse. In psychiatry, however, this level of hyper-reflexivity - thinking, then thinking about thinking, then thinking about thinking about thinking, etc. ad nauseam - is commonly exhibited in schizophrenia. I'm saying no more.

 
Back to my academic affiliation and  sense of disciplinary belonging. Academically, I'm an anthropologically grounded generalist, a Jack of many trades, a master of a couple. I humbly see myself as a kind of, so to speak, God's vessel for the good of the Synthesis stage in science. I'm quite certain that there are others like me out there, probably, increasingly so. However, I'm yet to meet one.  

That is the case also because, to make my eclectic professional stance even more interesting, bureaucratically, I'm affiliated not with the Department of Anthropology but with the only supposedly interdisciplinary centre in my very non-interdisciplinary university. The centre too, in fact, has turned out to be anything but. I have chaired a panel and then presented a paper at what was supposed to be interdisciplinary conferences but they turned out to be 'this-and-that-disciplinary' rather than anything coherent theoretically or methodologically. Last few years, I have often felt like a motherless child, having to find my own course in the vast ocean of science. I do have a sense of purpose and direction, but it still does feel like a very lonely journey. 

But there's still hope. Coincidentally, while writing this piece, I decided to do what I always recommend my students: google around.  And this is what I've come across:  King's Interdisciplinary Social Science Doctoral Training Centre KISS DTC. I shall try my luck there and tell you about the outcome.

The predicament of identity: to join or not to join them

Cultures are defined against each other. As long as you define yourself as "belonging to" this or that culture, you set yourself in opposition to all others, driven by a subliminal urge to flock that you are hardly aware of, except for its external consequences. In human groups, this dynamic becomes a social fact beyond the control of the individuals comprising the group. Individuation, in the Jungian sense, helps the individual become aware of their place in a group as a fully realised individual: it becomes an ongoing conscious decision-making process to cooperate with others without succumbing to the "herd instinct".

Most branches of anthropology and sociology look into purely social facts, knowingly or unknowingly ignoring psychological facts. They are sciences of group cultures, not individuals. I personally am interested in a holistic, philosophical understanding of the human condition, rather than in lining up social facts in the most rational way. That, perhaps, makes more biased towards individuated persons, as I'd rather find out how an individual finds sense and purpose living among other humans, rather than research the infinite variation of the basically same human activity: flocking into groups, creating intra-group social difference and engaging in inter-group relations.

Erratic excess vs. normalising discourse

Brian Massumi apparently made a claim that capitalism has already overcome the logic of totalising normality and adopted the logic of erratic excess: 

"The more varied, and even erratic, the better. Normality starts to lose its hold. The regularities start to loosen. This loosening is part of capitalism's dynamic."

I think normalisation goes hand in hand with erratic excess though, the latter legitimises the former. In fact, the latter happens within the limits of the illusion of choice offered by the former.

Besides, the Weberian rational bureaucracy was more a wishful project than a totalised reality. Anyone who has ever had to deal with it can confirm that it is mostly anything but rational.

I feel though that Baudrillard must have written that long time ago... :-)

A handy term at any rate, erratic excess...

Taste and class: fieldwork delivers a blow to theory

The other day, during a lunch break in an inter-collegiate training seminar in central London, Bourdieu's Distinction, my favourite manual for understanding life on Earth, revealed a gaping chink in the armour.

Just when I thought that I had a good cover and was blending in just right, tucking in my home-made organic brown rice and free-range piperade, two of my lunch buddies, very high-rolling international PhD students from uppity families, went down their candy bars and cola with a child-like gusto, exactly the kind of  food that I, in my ignorance, deemed the staple of the less-educated earthlings. What's more, my declining to partake in this veritable feast of high fructose corn syrup, xantam gum and flavourings identical to natural, was met with gasps of sheer surprise.

- I've never met anyone who would turn this down.

What I learnt today: although class is sure a handy principle of macro-level analysis, individual cases of protein-based social life will defy it, time and over again.

Grabalization

A concept of anything being up for grabs for anyone who knows how to bring down trade barriers or melt down financial markets.

Four best socio-psychological experiments

The four most beautiful and tale-teling experiments that combine the best of experimental science and participant observation are:

The Third Wave experiment

Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes

Stanford Prison Experiment  
Milgram Experiment

They all paint a rather bleak picture of the most of the humanity, however. Apparently, when given the chance most earthlings will turn into monsters. It is only their own pain or the fear of authority - God, government, parents - that keep most of them from that.

Interestingly enough, all the three experiments are considered controversial. All had to be terminated by emergency, as they, nearly or very much so, went out of hand - quite like actual life outside the ivory silo always does. 

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! "