Those ivory tower perfessers

In the midst of a discussion over on Facebook, regarding the value and purpose of education, some commenters expressed views suggesting that they believe that the purpose of education is preparation for a job or jobs. There was also, the usual American folk notion of higher education being dominated by "liberals" who spend their class time "indoctrinating" students into particular "ideologies," mostly of course leftist (rightwing or conservative views are not, of course, "ideologies").  A number of misconceptions about the nature, purpose, and content of higher education emerged, and I promised to take it seriously and attempt to address some of the issues raised.  Only the gods know why...

Quick take: The Smothers Brothers

The Smothers Brothers sing the "anthropologist" verse of the song "My Old Man."


 

End of semester: The good

This is Kiersten Bradley and me, after our reception Friday for our anthropology graduates. Kiersten is our Outstanding Anthropology Graduate for 2012-13, and after doing way more linguistics-related credit hours (12) with me than anyone probably should, she's off to graduate school at the University of Colorado/Boulder in.... Linguistics!

In addition to our standard introduction to Linguistic Anthropology, Kiersten took a course on American English dialects, and also two independent studies.  In one she explored the evolution of the concept of  linguistic relativity (aka the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis).

In the second she began getting a handle on phonological analysis by collecting data from Korean speakers, transcribing, and looking for the sound patterns.  Although she may not know it yet, the most valuable lesson she might have taken away from this exercise is that analyzing a language is hard, and almost never goes smoothly. 

Anyway, over the years I've managed to send a small handful of students to graduate school, and it's always gratifying to be a tiny part of the stream of linguistic anthropology that began with Franz Boas, ran through my mentor, MJ Hardman, and, modestly, on through me.  So, MJ, meet Kiersten, your newest grand-student.

How to write a book review...

... or at least, how to start one.  Robert Lawless, whose passing is reported in a previous post was a prolific, take-no-prisoners book reviewer.  The morning of the day I learned he had died, Robert sent me an email containing just the beginning of a book review he was working on. He often sent me these reviews asking for help with proofing, but this time I think he just wanted to share his thoughts on what he obviously thought was a pretty important and yet poorly-written book:

This fascinating and necessary book is unfortunately almost destroyed by an abrading, agitating, annoying, bedeviling, beleaguering, boring, bugging, chafing, disturbing, exasperating, galling, irksome, irritating, maddening, peeving, provoking, turn-offing writing style. The author is unable to state his ideas in a straight-forward fashion but instead either uses a completely unnecessary list and an artificial word created with a slash, such as in this headache-producing sentence: "Both theorized, developed, and made popular (in academic as well as in nonacademic/community spaces) the notion that gender (i.e., notions, constructions, and embodiments of femininities and masculinities) are socially, historically, and culturally created, performed, repeated, reinforced, and policed through discourse, institutions, and material practices such as clothing, fashion, or 'drag'" (p. 6). (Notice that this sentence begins nowhere and goes nowhere.) One more example to make my point: "Masculinities, for me, refer to a heterogeneous spectrum of differently situated masculine relocated and situated sex/gender formations and performances, largely in Philippine and diasporic contexts, which were important sites in my study, but also in other overlapping Asian, indigenous/Pacific, African American and European/white contexts, which were also relevant to my fieldwork but not central to the project" (p. 6). And, my last example: "While I agree with Halberstam that female masculinity can be a 'masculinity without men' (a central premise of his book), in chapter 4, I engage and analyze Filipino examples in which (Filipino) tomboy masculinities and manhoods (which I argue can be interpreted as an indigenous/Filipino formation of fe/male masculinity and manhood) are created precisely through proximities and social intimacies with Filipino males/men, specifically alongside working class Filipino seamen" (p. 6). "Males/men"? Give me a break! All three of these sentences are taken from page six where I got my first headache, and in fact I could not read more than five or six pages a day for fear of having to go on sick leave. I will not produce any more examples but will assure the reader that such sentences appear several times on every page of this 183-page volume--many of them far more headache-producing than these three examples. (Does the Press have editors?)

Many of Robert's complete reviews can be found at the Anthropology Review Database.

Objectivity revisited

Back in July of last year I wrote a post about objectivity.  In that post, I complained about the general misunderstanding of the term, and also about how that general misunderstanding plays into the hands of people who want to bash science.  I was particularly hard on cultural anthropologists Emily Schultz and Robert Lavenda:

...let me call your attention to Schultz and Lavenda's textbook, Cultural Anthropology: A Perspective on the Human Condition (Oxford 2012).  This book is written largely from the perspective of non-scientific, postmodern, and interpretivist anthropology.  On page 44, they define objective knowledge as: Knowledge about reality that is absolute and true.

I went on to explain how this is a bad definition of scientific (or, really, any other) objectivity, and I offered a more appropriate one:

[Knowledge] is objective in the scientific sense of the term if it is both publicly verifiable and testable.

Well, now they've gone and done it again.  In their new edition of Anthropology: What Does It Mean to Be Human? (Oxford University Press 2012), they offer this in their glossary (p. 474):

Objectivity: The separation of observation and reporting from the researcher's wishes.

This is not really better.  The reason it's not better is that it makes objectivity an individual trait, rather than a feature of the collective attempt to understand the world. Now, they do discuss this distinction between the individual researcher and the research community in their text (pp. 25-26), and it's not a bad treatment of the problem.  But why, then, do they keep the wrong (i.e. non-scientific) definition of objectivity in their glossary, which presumably some students might consult as an aid to understanding?

To the extent that they do this, Lavenda and Schultz contribute to the problem of the public perception of science in general, and social science in particular.

Florida Governor Scott says we don't need anthropologists

Florida Governor Rick Voldemort Scott wants universities to turn their backs on the liberal arts and sciences and focus on useful things like, you know, engineering and computer science.  Op-ed cartoonist Jeff Parker at Florida Today captures the governor's worldview very nicely:

In addition, Jeff writes:

Instead of a well-rounded, competitive, educated populace, Scott seemingly prefers to develop "foot soldiers for capitalism" as Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce puts it. The Governor appears satisfied with the idea of turning our universities into VoTech centers.
Plus, all that critical thinking and problem solving, nurtured by a liberal arts education, just gets in the way of ideological agendas like Scott's.

Nicely put.  I'll save my own rant for later.

Blog: Anthropologists for Justice and Peace

There is (or will be shortly) a link on the left to a relatively new blog, Anthropologists for Justice and Peace.  Here's how they describe themselves:

AJP joins the academy to building non-state and non-market solutions to social injustice.

Why anthropologists are special

Yeah, I know, I've posted a lot of cartoons and such lately but hey...  And by the way, it's called participant observation.

Science is not that hard

There's a lot of discussion, some reasonable, other not so much, about the AAA Executive Board's decision to drop "science" from its mission statement.  There's a lot of history behind, especially the conflict between the (sometimes legitimate) postmodernist critique of science.  But that's not what this post is about.  This is about the nature of science.

Science reflects, I think, an attitude, a skeptical attitude, toward the world.  The goal of science, as expressed by Jim Lett* and with which I wholeheartedly agree is that:

Science is an objective, logical, and systematic technique for acquiring synthetic propositional knowledge.

The best way to illustrate this is probably with an example.  Every semester in linguistics I start out by presenting students with a little piece of data from Aymara:

[utama]    'your house'

I then ask them what they can tell me about Aymara from this data. They try heroically, but in the end we have to agree that it's not much. I ask them what do we need, and they say "more data." So I give them:

[yapusa]      'our field'

Does this help? No. Why not? Because while it is more data, but it's not evidence; there's no contrast, and therefore no information.  We need evidence that produces a contrast. Eventually someone gets the idea to ask how Aymara says 'our house':

[utasa]     'our house'

Now we have contrast, because while both items contain 'house', one has 'your' and the other has 'our'.  We're on our way. We can create some hypotheses:

[uta]     'house'
[yapu'   'field'
[-ma]    'your'
[-sa]     'our]

As we collect more data/evidence, they discover that [utaxa] can also mean 'our house'. We revise our hypotheses to show that [-sa] is first person plural inclusive (yours and mine) while [-xa] is exclusive (mine or ours, but not yours). At some point, they usually ask for 'his house':

[utapa]     'his house'

And we then have the hypothesis that [-pa] means 'his'.  This is quickly demolished, however, as they continue to discover that [utapa] also may mean 'her house' or 'their house'.  So, we have to revise our hypothesis about [-pa], which turns out to be 'her/his/their', i.e. 'third person', with no number or sex-based gender specified (Human gender is, however).

Eventually, we can take these hypotheses and construct a theory (grammar) of Aymara possession, which could look something like this:

Aymara personal possession can be explained using the categories + Human, + First Person, +Second Person:

[-xa]     +Human, +First Person, -Second Person 'my or our, not your'
[-ma]    +Human, -First Person, +Second Person  'your, not my'
[-sa]     +Human, +First Person, +Second Person  'your and my'
[-pa]    +Human, -First Person, -Second Person  'not your or my (her/his their)'

This set of interconnected hypotheses constitutes what scientists would call a theory (linguists would call it a grammar) of Aymara personal possession, which can be united with a slightly larger theory (grammar) of Aymara personal reference.  This is what "science" does.

I suspect that for some people this doesn't look much like science, because we didn't need a lab, white coats, Bunsen burners and flasks, or intricate technology of any kind other than ourselves, and we didn't apply any quantitative measures. But it is science, because it proceeds from empirical data through evidence and hypotheses to theory. And it's objective (I didn't just dream it up, someone else can collect the same data) as well as self-correcting. There's even room for experimentation (can I say [yapuma], and if so what does it mean?).

In other words, science is more of attitude toward the world than anything else.  And it's not that mysterious or difficult, anyone can "do science."

Reference
Lett, James.  Science, Reason, and Anthropology: A Guide to Critical Thinking.  Rowman and Littlefield, 1997.

Hurricane Anti-Science hits New Orleans

The American Anthropological Association, to which I belong, held its annual convention last week in New Orleans. I was unable to attend, and I may just not bother any more, if what was proposed at those meetings comes to pass.

Anthropologist Peter Wood, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, reports that the AAA Executive Board is proposing a new mission statement that deletes the term "science" and replaces it with "public understanding,"  as in this marked up paragraph:

Section 1. The purposes of the Association shall be to advance anthropology as the science that studies public understanding of humankind in all its aspects. through This includes, but is not limited to, archeological, biological, ethnological, social, cultural, economic, political, historical, medical, visual, and linguistic anthropological research; The Association also commits itself and to further the professional interests of American anthropologists, including the dissemination of anthropological knowledge, expertise, and interpretation. and its use to solve human problems.

Note that they have also deleted the term "ethnological," which has always referred to the comparative study of human cultures with the goal of developing broad general theories about Human Culture.

This is a disturbing development for a discipline that has, since the days of Franz Boas, the founder of American academic anthropology, seen itself as linking the sciences and humanities to gain the broadest and deepest knowledge of what humans are, where they came from, and so on.  But it's not entirely unexpected, as for the last several decades people who call themselves "postmodernists" and "interpretivists" have gradually taken over the field, bringing with them a rejection of the empirically based, objective, systematic, logical, and rational methodologies developed by Boas and those who followed him.

One of the most dangerously bogus claims that these folks have made is that science cannot help sort out immoral from moral aspects of cultures.  This is wrong, because we need good, empirically based, objective knowledge if we want to make valid assertions about who is doing what to whom, to what ends, and at what cost.  Fuzzy-minded "interpretations" of, say, female genital mutilation may be useful and even necessary, but if all knowledge is contingent then any claims we make about the harm this does can always be contested and anthropologists become, essentially, over-educated journalists.

I have a feeling I may be writing more about this...

New Blog Link

There's a new link over on the left to the blog Anthro Jack, written by a friend from the Anthro-L list. Anthro Jack is now participating and observing in the predominantly Cree speaking community of Chisasibi, a town near the  eastern shore of James Bay in northern Québec. AJ is investigating the role of alcohol in the culture and society of Chisasibi.  Fascinating stuff, check it out!

For me, one interesting thing going on in Chisasibi is that they use the Cree syllabary to write the language.  The word Chisasibi looks like this:

ᒋᓴᓱᐱ

Too cool!

Marvin Harris on holistic anthropology

From Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times, page 139 (Altamira Press 1999):

Anthropologists who are committed to holism must come to terms with the risks of making mistakes. In this connection, warning students that the findings of science are provisional and subject to various distortions and biases may help to relieve some of the angst associated with holistic perspectives. Another point to be kept in mind is that the misinformation transmitted through a holistic text or introductory class is not likely to be as remote from current expert opinion as the usual non-academic sources of knowledge about biocultural evolution, such as creationism and New Age necromancy. Bear in mind that only a very small percentage of students take introductory courses in anthropology in order to prepare for graduate school; the great majority are only passing through, and one anthropology course is all they will ever take. Indeed, that one anthropology course may be the only course in the social sciences they will ever take. Given the facts that anthropology has so much to say, that its knowledge is vital for our ability to live as informed and responsible citizens of the world, and that there is so little time and space in which to say it, our students deserve to have us try to give them the most holistic view possible.

Amen.

"Culture" comes to the Naval Academy

From an article in today's Washington Post:

Last month, the Naval Academy department then known as Department of Language Studies quietly changed its name to Department of Language and Cultures.

It hardly registers as big news. But to Clementine Fujimura, the lone anthropology professor at the Annapolis campus, the change is "huge."

Why? "Because it's acknowledging that the Navy is accepting that we need to be teaching about culture," she said.

 Yeah, well, I'm not so sure that this is the "huge news" Dr. Fujimura thinks it is. But first, I have a question:

The Naval Academy only has one anthropologist on faculty???  WTF?!?

 Moving on. Here's why I think that this may not be something to celebrate. When academic departments outside of anthropology teach "culture," they generally have in mind a sort of dumbed-down, laundry-list approach to culture:  Look at the exotic foods these folks eat, or their clothing, or the gestures they use for "come here" and "good-bye."  They rarely, if ever, apply the insights that anthropology has developed into the nature and structure of culture as a human adaptation.

Perhaps Dr. Fujimura is happy with this, but she shouldn't be, unless she happens to count herself among the "postmodern" "interpretivist" cultural types who have participated in the trivialization of the culture concept over the last couple of decades.

Here at UNF, our World Languages department (a fine name, I think) has proposed a name change to the "Department of Language, Literature, and Culture." As a group, we in the anthropology program saw this as outlandishly over-reaching (wouldn't the English Department have to be absorbed?), as well as a usurpation of what is, traditionally, the academic domain of anthropology. Since we are now in the middle of summer, we don't know whether World Languages' quest for this name change will be picked up in the fall or not, but there will certainly be some opposition.
And by the way, toward the end of the full WaPo article there is this:

...anthropologists have ever been wary of the use to which their profession might be put by the military, whose purpose, of course, goes far beyond the passive study of other cultures.

Excuse me. Anthropologist have never really been "passive" in their study of cultures.  The central research method of cultural anthropology is not called participant observation for nothing. And E. B. Tylor (1832-1917) referred to anthropology as "essentially a reformer's science... active at once in aiding progress and in removing hindrance" (quoted in Marvin Harris, Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times (p. 62), Altamira Press 1999).

The AAAs

I had originally intended to blog from the American Anthropological Association meetings in Philadelphia, but that didn’t happen for various reasons. Herewith a few preliminary reflections:

• Minor annoyance: Willy accompanied me to the meetings, and attended my and other sessions with no problem. However, when she tried to enter the publishers’ area she was stopped at the door because she didn’t have an ID badge. When I tried to take her in with me, they still wouldn’t let her enter. WTF? She might have bought a book from somebody, for Jebus’s sake.
  
  
• Slightly less minor annoyance: We had to pay extra for internet service, and it wasn’t very reliable at that. But it seems to me that AAA ought to either hold its meetings in a place that provides internet at no extra charge, or include internet access in the registration fee. I mean, come on, it’s 2009, virtually everybody at the meetings had a computer and had reason to use it, as I did in keeping in touch with my university email, students’ activities on Blackboard, and so on.
  
  
• Major annoyance: Only two sessions out of I don't know how many hundreds had “Caribbean” listed in the program topic index.
  
  
• Another major annoyance: Not finding much of anything with a Caribbean theme, I searched the program for interesting sessions to attend and found.... almost nothing! And I’m a pretty eclectic dude. To be fair, I only had Friday afternoon, Saturday, and part of Sunday to work with, and there were a couple of sessions I would have gone to earlier in the week, but again, c’mon. I did attend an interesting session on Darwin and anthropology, which included Nina Jablonski doing her very smooth rap on the evolution of skin color. And I went to the memorial gathering for Dell Hymes; a moving experience, with a number of his former students and colleagues, as well as his wife Virginia, sharing memories and stories. Of course, maybe it’s just me, but so many session titles seem to be written in some kind of Doublespeak that’s, to me, impenetrable and off-putting.
  
  
• I definitely prefer the meetings I usually go to, like the Society for Caribbean Linguistics and the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics. Smaller, more focused, more opportunities for interaction and feedback. I wonder whether smaller section meetings (Society for Linguistic Anthropology, etc.) wouldn’t be more rewarding. Problem is, I like the opportunity to range outside my normal comfort zone from time to time.
  

Willy and I both did enjoy a couple of days in the Big City, and we practically lived on Philly cheese-steaks from the Reading Terminal Market, right next door to the hotel.