This book, by William Y(ewdale) Adams (1998) has been on my shelves making me feel guilty. No longer. Why do anthropologists do what they do, indulging in the natural history of the human species. They don't look at themselves but leave that to sociologists. They concentrate on 'other', people different from white middle-class Americans - people in tribes, the Papua or Amazonian rain forests and so on. Is this studying humans in their raw state? (and are these people really 'primitive'?). Is the fact that they are uneducated (into western values) part of the attraction? I am not going to summarise the book, a survey of many philosophical schools. The conclusion indicates that the author doesn't know the answer either, either for the anthropology profession as a whole, or for individual anthropologists. We can't keep the 'primitive' in aspic, in a cultural museum, so many now educated descendants of classic studies may well not appreciate what has been concluded in their family name. The anthropologist goes in, observes, listens, and then describes. They have then had pet theories - evolutionism (we still talk of stone-age aboriginees and bushmen), functionalism, structuralism - most of which have now withered. The answer may be the same as why do we bother, with great discomfort for the professionals, to follow moose and snow tigers and watch them killing and having sex. Seeing rare things, admiring, the thrill of the chase, the collecting instinct perhaps. 'I have seen a trance dance, got the photos and the tea-shirt'.
An educational parallel are those who go into schools as observers, watch, listen, comment. They may use a theory or two to help find a way through the dense forest of words, gestures and transactions. They may believe people they should be more sceptical of, and seek out people whose voices might otherwise be silent. They purpose, perhaps to cast light on something that needs attention and suggest improvements. That is a political philosophy, a demand for quality, for justice, for equity, and for respect. Tom Harrisson the anthropologist did this in the 1930s in Savage Civilisation - the savages of course meaning us, the imperial powers. Others, like Napoleon Chagnon, on the Yanomami, did great damage (for status and profit) by describing the tribe as chronically violent and providing excuses for genocide by loggers. An anthropologist today has to be socially critical: in schools, this excites an interest in power and powerlessness, democracy and voice, freedom and repression, sarcasm and support, bullies and victims (adult as well as young), deception and honesty, lies and truth. An educational anthropologist with such an interest would probably not be invited into school twice.
Tuesday, 27 December 2011
Sunday, 25 December 2011
Garden Blog
To see our garden on Christmas morning, see
http://romancourtgardens.blogspot.com/
Christmas Greetings, Stephen
http://romancourtgardens.blogspot.com/
Christmas Greetings, Stephen
Sunday, 18 December 2011
Marriage and statistics
Nick Clegg criticises tax breaks for married couples as social engineering.
The Tory Centre for Social Justice think-tank's Gavin Poole said: "Nick Clegg's stance flies in the face of all the evidence, completely ignoring national and international data demonstrating how important marriage is to the health and well-being of children and families."Marriage is important because one in three couples who live together when a child is born split up before that child is five, compared to only one in 11 married couples."
The logic then is that if more people are bribed to marry, they will stay together longer. I am not against marriage, having been married 43 years and counting, but am against the abuse of statistics. Those couples with a deep commitment tend to stay together longer and tend to get married. Those who don't get married may have a deep commitment (2 out of 3 stay together on these figures and some would marry over time) leaving a comparatively larger number (as compared with the married group) of insecure couples in this non-married group. These are not suddenly going to become more secure because they have a marriage licence.
The argument is therefore statistical nonsense.
Thursday, 8 December 2011
Children on the street.
A long absence, my apologies. Too much other writing.
This item is about my former PhD student, Barnabe D'Souza in Mumbai. He has worked tirelessly for most of his life working with street children, attempting to rehabilitate them into jobs and worthwhile lives. This means educating them about drugs and safe behaviours, and offering them a sense of togetherness and purpose. Needless to say their lives judder from one crisis to the next. Abandoned once, society at large would continue to abandon them unless strong people get up and struggle on their behalf.
Congratulations to Barnabe. His PhD thesis is available on http://eprints.worc.ac.uk/512. His book From Ecstasy to Agony and Back: Journeying with Adolescents on the Street is available from Sage.
This item is about my former PhD student, Barnabe D'Souza in Mumbai. He has worked tirelessly for most of his life working with street children, attempting to rehabilitate them into jobs and worthwhile lives. This means educating them about drugs and safe behaviours, and offering them a sense of togetherness and purpose. Needless to say their lives judder from one crisis to the next. Abandoned once, society at large would continue to abandon them unless strong people get up and struggle on their behalf.
Congratulations to Barnabe. His PhD thesis is available on http://eprints.worc.ac.uk/512. His book From Ecstasy to Agony and Back: Journeying with Adolescents on the Street is available from Sage.
Thursday, 28 April 2011
Visual Methods in Social Research
I have found the following helpful: http://researchthatmatters.blogspot.com/2011/02/visusal-methods-in-social-research.html on
Banks, Marcus. (2001) Visual Methods in Social Research London, UK: Sage and
Collier, John, Malcolm Collier and Edward T. Hall (1986) Visual anthropology: Photography as a research method University of New Mexico Press. [New edition of Collier, John Jr., (1967) with the same title, published by Holt, Rinehart & Winston.]
Saturday, 2 April 2011
The biology of religion
It seems likely that homo sapiens was a religious creature - that is, religion emerged early in humanity's history. Recent scepticism by some is balanced by the wide range of orthodox and unorthodox religious views by others, views on the paranormal, the soul, magic, life force and above all evil forces and entities, so loved by pulp writers and films.
Why is this? The core reason is simple. Early humans developed language which at some point became complex enough to ask Why? Small children do this early enough. The trouble with children is that some questions are too difficult to answer at their level, or so the adult thinks. The trouble with humanity was that they had insufficient knowledge to answer accurately cosmological or existential questions. So an earthquake needed an understandable cause, and was understood as an 'act of God'; jealousy needed an explanation, so evil spirits provided good explanations, as also they did to explain disease and death. Whether personalities live on after death, and in what form, produced all sorts of theories about ancestors. Over-excited causality about the origins of the world produced creator deities and origin myths.
It is hard to test this out. Anthropology may help. The San Bushmen of southern Africa (see my paper) are modern humans who have lives wilderness lives with technology derived from nature (stone, wood, leather) whose ideas were not modernised by western education. Their stories have been paintakingly archived over the past hundred years. When they looked at the stars, they saw not the 3D with huge distances, but the 2D star pattern as presented. So too must early humans. They interpreted the sky intelligently, it the light of their own understanding; and they observed and studies landscape, prey animals and food plants. So they were systematic scientists. They studied the brain too, using the plant drugs they had tested and mesmeric dancing and rhythms, so altered mind states were part of their reality, rubbing shoulders with their dreams. Above all, life for them was a game of chance. They felt themselves caught in the cross-fire of hostile forces; the best they could do is to have enough understanding to recognize it and dodge if they could. Bushman religion is hardly a religion at all, but an interpretation of natural life with supernatural explanations for the unexplainable. There were gods and they were feared, but they were not worshipped or even respected. What ritual was observable, the trance dance, was social and anti-religious (designed to chase spirits away).
So humans are hard-wired to wanting certain answers to questions, even if they have to subconsciously invent that certainty. All questions have answers, however improbable, as Douglas Adams would have said. In evolutionary terms, this is helpful because it helps to plan safety strategies rather than being unconcerned with danger. Humans are hard-wired to be anxious, and have evolved extraordinary ways of resolving this anxiety in order to live with it. Anxiety about socially unacceptable behaviour led to in-group morality, whatever the level of out-group violence. Therefore, humans are also hard-wired to be conformist and conventional. Stanley Milgrom, a holocaust survivor set up a famous (some would say infamous, but I disagree) experiment where experimental subjects were asked to give severe electric shocks to partners (actually actors, unbeknown to them). Two thirds would not resist the demands of authority (the researcher telling them to do it and not spoil the experiment) and administered shocks that would have been lethal. Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiments similarly showed that two thirds not only followed orders, but many did so enthusiastically and sadistically. We are hard-wired to obey, and follow the crowd. As one who has always swum against the tide, ever since my three year old campaign to discredit Father Christmas, I find this hard to comprehend, but I recognize that, in evolutionary terms, in a different society I may have been dead before adulthood, just as any American white in a former generation would have been risking his or her life by protesting against lynching a black victim. German resisters against Nazism put themselves, and their families, in great danger. The herd obeyed.
Nevertheless, we need to deal with this hard-wired obedience. Because of it, humans have been the most violent of species. Principles, standards, virtues, morals and human rights have all been tried.
For the origins, supernaturalism leading to spirits, powers and gods can be viewed as 'religion' but maybe just a set of assumptions. Where early religions (that is, 3000+ years before the present) organised themselves, such as Ra and Aton in Egypt, they were declarations of power. Assyrian gods supported military conquests. Formalised religion produced a group of 'us' who fought against 'them', as Yahweh's Elijah did against Baal, and as all Hebrew prophets did. The final editing of Hebrew Bible texts such as the Torah and histories, and the assumptions of Ezra and Nehemiah, show that after the return from exile in the 5th century BCE, a powerful elite tried to set an exclusivist agenda, even requiring foreign wives to be divorced.
Religions which followed are outside these comments, but I invite readers to consider power implications within the religions which survived, and also the resistance to power that some of them reveal. Ethical religion may be a way of taming the religious impulse which over centuries caused such damage.
Why is this? The core reason is simple. Early humans developed language which at some point became complex enough to ask Why? Small children do this early enough. The trouble with children is that some questions are too difficult to answer at their level, or so the adult thinks. The trouble with humanity was that they had insufficient knowledge to answer accurately cosmological or existential questions. So an earthquake needed an understandable cause, and was understood as an 'act of God'; jealousy needed an explanation, so evil spirits provided good explanations, as also they did to explain disease and death. Whether personalities live on after death, and in what form, produced all sorts of theories about ancestors. Over-excited causality about the origins of the world produced creator deities and origin myths.
It is hard to test this out. Anthropology may help. The San Bushmen of southern Africa (see my paper) are modern humans who have lives wilderness lives with technology derived from nature (stone, wood, leather) whose ideas were not modernised by western education. Their stories have been paintakingly archived over the past hundred years. When they looked at the stars, they saw not the 3D with huge distances, but the 2D star pattern as presented. So too must early humans. They interpreted the sky intelligently, it the light of their own understanding; and they observed and studies landscape, prey animals and food plants. So they were systematic scientists. They studied the brain too, using the plant drugs they had tested and mesmeric dancing and rhythms, so altered mind states were part of their reality, rubbing shoulders with their dreams. Above all, life for them was a game of chance. They felt themselves caught in the cross-fire of hostile forces; the best they could do is to have enough understanding to recognize it and dodge if they could. Bushman religion is hardly a religion at all, but an interpretation of natural life with supernatural explanations for the unexplainable. There were gods and they were feared, but they were not worshipped or even respected. What ritual was observable, the trance dance, was social and anti-religious (designed to chase spirits away).
So humans are hard-wired to wanting certain answers to questions, even if they have to subconsciously invent that certainty. All questions have answers, however improbable, as Douglas Adams would have said. In evolutionary terms, this is helpful because it helps to plan safety strategies rather than being unconcerned with danger. Humans are hard-wired to be anxious, and have evolved extraordinary ways of resolving this anxiety in order to live with it. Anxiety about socially unacceptable behaviour led to in-group morality, whatever the level of out-group violence. Therefore, humans are also hard-wired to be conformist and conventional. Stanley Milgrom, a holocaust survivor set up a famous (some would say infamous, but I disagree) experiment where experimental subjects were asked to give severe electric shocks to partners (actually actors, unbeknown to them). Two thirds would not resist the demands of authority (the researcher telling them to do it and not spoil the experiment) and administered shocks that would have been lethal. Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiments similarly showed that two thirds not only followed orders, but many did so enthusiastically and sadistically. We are hard-wired to obey, and follow the crowd. As one who has always swum against the tide, ever since my three year old campaign to discredit Father Christmas, I find this hard to comprehend, but I recognize that, in evolutionary terms, in a different society I may have been dead before adulthood, just as any American white in a former generation would have been risking his or her life by protesting against lynching a black victim. German resisters against Nazism put themselves, and their families, in great danger. The herd obeyed.
Nevertheless, we need to deal with this hard-wired obedience. Because of it, humans have been the most violent of species. Principles, standards, virtues, morals and human rights have all been tried.
For the origins, supernaturalism leading to spirits, powers and gods can be viewed as 'religion' but maybe just a set of assumptions. Where early religions (that is, 3000+ years before the present) organised themselves, such as Ra and Aton in Egypt, they were declarations of power. Assyrian gods supported military conquests. Formalised religion produced a group of 'us' who fought against 'them', as Yahweh's Elijah did against Baal, and as all Hebrew prophets did. The final editing of Hebrew Bible texts such as the Torah and histories, and the assumptions of Ezra and Nehemiah, show that after the return from exile in the 5th century BCE, a powerful elite tried to set an exclusivist agenda, even requiring foreign wives to be divorced.
Religions which followed are outside these comments, but I invite readers to consider power implications within the religions which survived, and also the resistance to power that some of them reveal. Ethical religion may be a way of taming the religious impulse which over centuries caused such damage.
Tuesday, 15 March 2011
Cultural capitalists and their symbolic violence.
Reading about Pierre Bourdieu in theses and articles, you might wonder when his critical fangs were removed. This post returns to Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture by Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) to repair his bite. Reproduction means how the cultural status quo is reproduced. It has two parts, or 'Books', the first theoretical, the second an application to French society. I am focusing here on Book 1.
It is the result of a partnership in which every sentence and paragraph was poured over and constantly redrafted to produce the most rational argument they could for the science of society. At its centre is Power, held and exerted by those with influence who set all significant agendas. They control what is taken to be truth and knowledge by allowing no doubt, debate or counter voices: this is a process of symbolic violence. The education system is a site of this symbolic violence, as the curriculum is controlled formally and informally by the arbitary decisions and agendas of those in power (arbitrary is the opposite of rational). Where the link between the decision and its genesis in power is hidden, the violence is illegitimate: the imposed interpretation is claimed to be the only truth. A pedagogic action is, in objective terms, symbolic violence where it is arbitrarily imposed. The claim for privilege implies pedagogic authority and those who are allowed to exert it are carefully policed and trained so that the arbitrary conditions of privilege are reproduced in the next generation. This pedagogic work is inculcated to produce a durable internalisation of the principles and assumptions (habitus). Opposition to the habitus are subject to sanctions and punishments to police the privilege. The assumptions are declared legitimate (consecrated) and at the same time their genesis in power is obscured: the interpretations are simply declared to be true. The edifice of this privilege is built with symbolic artefacts, which combine to make a culture. These symbolic artefacts can be viewed as cultural capital using a financial metaphor. The privileged are 'rich' with cultural mechanisms to impress and gain status. Critical analysts of society need to uncover the arbitrariness and decouple truth and knowledge from power and privilege.
Applying this, the church and governments are viewed as privileged power holders; the working class and immigrants are the losers. Social justice demands that we work to overturn such privilege and expose its arbitrariness.
It is the result of a partnership in which every sentence and paragraph was poured over and constantly redrafted to produce the most rational argument they could for the science of society. At its centre is Power, held and exerted by those with influence who set all significant agendas. They control what is taken to be truth and knowledge by allowing no doubt, debate or counter voices: this is a process of symbolic violence. The education system is a site of this symbolic violence, as the curriculum is controlled formally and informally by the arbitary decisions and agendas of those in power (arbitrary is the opposite of rational). Where the link between the decision and its genesis in power is hidden, the violence is illegitimate: the imposed interpretation is claimed to be the only truth. A pedagogic action is, in objective terms, symbolic violence where it is arbitrarily imposed. The claim for privilege implies pedagogic authority and those who are allowed to exert it are carefully policed and trained so that the arbitrary conditions of privilege are reproduced in the next generation. This pedagogic work is inculcated to produce a durable internalisation of the principles and assumptions (habitus). Opposition to the habitus are subject to sanctions and punishments to police the privilege. The assumptions are declared legitimate (consecrated) and at the same time their genesis in power is obscured: the interpretations are simply declared to be true. The edifice of this privilege is built with symbolic artefacts, which combine to make a culture. These symbolic artefacts can be viewed as cultural capital using a financial metaphor. The privileged are 'rich' with cultural mechanisms to impress and gain status. Critical analysts of society need to uncover the arbitrariness and decouple truth and knowledge from power and privilege.
Applying this, the church and governments are viewed as privileged power holders; the working class and immigrants are the losers. Social justice demands that we work to overturn such privilege and expose its arbitrariness.
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