Just a thought..

While watching the film, "Off the Veranda" about Bronislaw Malinowski, I noticed something that catalyzed a series of general thoughts about the study of anthropology as a whole. It was the moment in the film when the narrator said something along the lines of, "Even though he was living amongst the natives, Malinowski did in fact have down time with other white expats living in the village." This was said after the film spent so much time accrediting him for his "off the veranda and into the village" approach on ethnography. My question is, isn't anthropology all about learning about people whose cultures are different then your own in a fair and open minded way? Haven't we progressed from our foolish and outdated ethnocentric roots?  If this is the case, and if Malinowski is really being praised for being so involved and indulged in the lives of those he is studying, then I find it a little embarrassing for anthropologists to not be able to relax around people who are a different color and from a different culture from themselves. The reason that I love to study anthropology is because there is no greater thrill for me than to interact and befriend people from such different backgrounds than my own and I appreciate the way that anthropology has opened my mind and allowed me to do so in an intelligent and amiable way. Furthermore, in refererring to Malinowki's later discovered racist journals, I just wonder what his motives were in studying these people if not for reasons the pure joy and interest in expanding your knowledge and learning from foreign  peoples that share our globe. Perhaps the study of anthropology for some really is just a way to reflect on one's own culture and instill the idea that they belong to a dominant group of human beings.

Margaret Mead’s “Coming of Age in Samoa” Critique

The impetus for Margaret Mead’s fieldwork in Samoa, very much championed by the anti-universalist sentiments of her mentor, Franz Boas, was to challenge and dispute the notion of an over-arching, predetermined psychological development of the individual.  Guiding, to a certain extent, Mead’s decision to examine the uniqueness of the American girl’s adolescent experience was Freud, whose focus on human psychology proposed and perpetuated the idea of a fixed trajectory that every individual, regardless of culture, experiences.  Showing the culturally relativistic background of Boas’s students, seen also in the work of her contemporary, Ruth Benedict, Mead situates herself in opposition to Freud’s concept of programmed psychological responses with her 1928 work “Coming of Age in Samoa.”  Mead’s position was that the American identification and understanding of adolescence, a time of singular unsettledness and unrest for girls maturing to womanhood, is a product of America itself.  That is, “adolescence” in America is not a product of a particular age, but the manifestations of being that age in America.  As Mead poses the question, “Were these difficulties due to being adolescent or to being adolescent in America?” (129)

To answer this specific inquiry as well as the broader question of if civilization has any bearing on the development of the individual (for Mead’s work, at the age of puberty), Mead makes an ethnographic study of young girls in Samoa (130).  Again, Boas’s influence on Mead is underscored in how she conducts her fieldwork.  Boas’s emphasis on understanding culture at the emic level, of the necessity of the anthropologist immersing himself in the culture in order to gain an understanding of their worldview, without doubt informs Mead’s analytic technique.  As stated during class, Mead’s ability to participate, to collapse as much of the division between her own frame of reference and that of the Samoan culture, is one of her great strengths as an anthropologist during the time when such ethnographic methods are just gaining a foothold.  Mead’s claims that the adolescent experience of the girls in Samoa was notably different than in America is lent credence by the depth of her sensitivity to the nuances of the culture, learned by her through “speaking their language, eating their food,” and seeking overall to “minimize the differences between us and to learn to know and understand all the girls of the three little villages” (131).  Mead’s conclusion that developmental behavior is in fact structured through culture leads to her claim at the end of her essay that the study of cultural differences is a useful tool for our own cultural introspection.  In a sense, Mead argues that the perspective gained by stepping outside of one’s culture forces the individual to acknowledge difference and, from this, provides the opportunity for self-realization and development, with an emphasis on the cultural change this may also bring.   

I recognize Mead’s pioneering role in the development of better fieldwork practices and support her emphasis on the role of culture in the formation of the individual.  However, I would like to highlight a specific part of Mead’s motivation for choosing Samoa as her ethnographic study that was not touched on as much during class discussion.  Although this is not a limitation of the fieldwork which she undertook, per say, Mead’s justification that “A primitive people without a written language present a much less elaborate problem and a trained student can master the fundamental structure of a primitive society in a few months” is, in my opinion, flawed (130).  In fact, this can be interpreted as a reversion back to the unilinealists, backtracking entirely from Boas’s progression towards anti-cultural evolutionism.  Embedded in this quote are remnants from Herbert Spencer’s biological metaphor, where cultures are represented on a spectrum of undifferentiated organisms to the intricate, specialized bodily forms of the European civilizations.  Mead, perhaps subconsciously though seemingly overtly, borrows from this antiquated view in anthropological research.  She even likens Europe to a “complicated civilization,” furthering this idea (130).  This certainly discounts Boas’s position that cultures should not be compared, especially when the result creates a discrepancy between a superior and lesser culture.   Although I do not think that this had much tangible bearing on the results themselves of her study on adolescence, I do think that it is a critical theoretical perspective that deserves to be analyzed as an overall weakness of Mead’s anthropological approach.  With this said, this notion did have some effect on the questionable population size she deemed acceptable for her study, as she felt justified in interviewing only fifty girls because Samoa was “an uncomplex, uniform culture” (131). 

Overall, Mead’s contributions to elevating the standards of ethnographic fieldwork and forwarding the importance of culture’s role in the development of the individual are invaluable to the field of anthropology.  Her reformist and activist attitudes are also seen in her call to use comparative studies to make changes in our own society.  In this sense, I think that Mead’s applicability to today is strong.  The use of anthropology as a stimulus for individual introspection, understanding, and change has merits that transcend Mead’s period in the field.  However, I did find the vestiges of evolutionary anthropology in her work, especially as a student of Boas, a step backwards rather than an advance for Mead.   

Response on The Banality of Systemic Evil

Herbert Spencer, the “bad boy” evolutionist, described society as a biological organism- each feature of society whether it be law, family, or the National Security Agency, functions together to meet social needs. Similar to the human body, the institutions we have created within our society are equally as important for their individual purpose, as well as to allow the rest of society to function. Spencer would have attributed the stability of a developed society, such as America to the cohesion and interdependence of specialized groups focusing on very specific tasks. That being said, he is also was a denouncer of public services, considering socialism form of slavery.

            Peter Ludlow,a philosophy professor from Northwestern University poses an interesting question sparked by the recent leaks on the National Security Agency by Edward Snowden: “Has the younger generation lost its moral compass?”

            Snowden, having recently released information about the National Security Agency censoring private phone calls and internet usage, has been called a hero and a traitor. Ludlow explores the events of a few whistleblowers, but I will focus on Snowden’s.  The article quotes David Brooks, an Op-Ed contributor in the New York Times. “For society to function well, there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures.” This leads me to question; to what extent are we to blindly allow our institutions to lead us? Of course trust is a key component in a functioning team, but is it our right to know what is happening in our society, or is it better for our well-being to turn a blind eye to the matters which only affect us once we learn of their existence? It only seems fair that once the public has had their eyes opened to the invasion of privacy, it is their right to retract some trust that we put into the agencies that operate within the United Stated.  But if these institutions were installed for the well-being of national security and the majority of American citizens, then perhaps it is in our best interest to cease the questioning and return to our lives previously unaffected by this matter. After all, ignorance is bliss, right?

            I think that Spencer would see this invasion of privacy as ultimate slavery. I mean, if organized social institutions are a form of slavery, then what’s worse than a secret social institution that lurks around right under our noses? Spencer said, “No one can be perfectly free till all are free.” The problem here is that it may just be impossible to provide freedom for everyone. In the “Land of the Free” we have every law, amendment, and moral code in place to restore freedom for US citizens, yet the way that we do this is by infringing on private conversations. Of course the decision makers of the NSA have good intentions and it is very possible that terrorist attacks have been dodged due to the implementation of these privacy invasions. The dilemma lies in which are more important: respecting privacy or protecting lives of US citizens. When things are going swell, I would surely say that would prefer my conversations to remain private as I expect them to, but the day after a terrorist attack, I would definitely prefer knowing the US government is taking necessary measures and precautions to restore my safety.

            This brings me back to Brooks’ quote about trust. When we elect officials, we are essentially electing representatives to make decisions for us so that we can spend our time studying, or working, or farming, etc. We do not request, nor would I want to be required to know every decision that is made in Washington D.C. With this, I would have to support the notion that in many cases, ignorance is bliss. While the infringement of privacy is a huge plummet to the notion of US freedom, I recognize the fact that until I knew what the NSA was doing I was not personally affected of offended. Even still, I agree with Ludlow that what Snowden did was liberating. I think that while morality, just like most things that we claim to believe are innate, are culturally relative, it is hard to place a stamp of ‘moral’ or ‘immoral’ on Snowden’s actions. Through my exploration of the matter, and over the course of writing this, I decided to answer Ludlow’s question which I posed at the beginning of this post. I think that the younger generation has not in fact lost its moral compass, but that, as culture changes, qualifications for morality change with it. There is a fine line to walk with whistleblowing or tattle-tailing, and it always seems to result in a feeling of anger or distrust where there once was just ignorance of the situation. In Spencer’s defense, socialism brings about it a sense of “ignorance” but in the case of the US, it has boded well in many respects.

Suggestion for blog contributors!

Responding to this essay (from a New York Times blog)  from a Marxian or Durkheimian point of view would make an excellent blog entry!
In any event, read it and let me know what you think.

The Banality of Evil

Guidelines for Posting to this Blog

Some guidelines for contributors to this blog (that is, members of ANT 340 in Fall 2013):  You should post at least six times over the course of the semester.  Three posts should be completed by Tuesday, October 22.   Two of these posts should be critiques of our readings (original pieces, not the textbook).  Two of them should mobilize theory in the process of social-cultural critique.  And two of them should be responses to posts by other students.  Your goal is to be creative, thoughtful, insightful, perhaps funny, often serious, and always extremely careful in terms of your attention to the nuance of theory, the topics to which you apply it, and other students' work.

Suggestions regarding critiques of readings:  Give us the author's argument and the evidence offered in support of it.  Contextualize the author and work for us--e.g. which other thinkers have clearly influenced this work, what movement is  it a part of, how does it compare with preceding and contemporary works, etc.  What are the strengths of this work?  What are its limitations?  What can we learn from it and how can we apply it today?  Critiques of readings should be a minimum of 400 words.

Suggestions regarding social-cultural critiques:  Pick a topic or event of interest to you for which one or more theoretical approaches offer a useful framework for understanding.  Discuss the topic or event through this perspective (or these perspectives), making it clear to the reader what new insights are gained via this mobilization of theory.   Social-cultural critiques should be a minimum of 600 words.

Suggestions regarding responses to posts by other students:  Always be respectful and thoughtful. Good examples of when to offer your responses:

• the other student's post has genuinely made you think about something in a new way;
• you have a substantive disagreement with the post that you want to express;

• you want to build on the argument begun in the student's post.

Responses to posts should be a minimum of 250 words.

You will receive two grades on your blogging, one at mid-term and one at the end of the semester.  In general, posts receiving a grade of B will:

• Be clear

• Be well-written
• Reflect careful and thorough reading
• Follow the guidelines and suggestions given here.

An A post will be even more thoughtful and original than a B post, and it will present a cogent and well-supported argument.  C and D posts fall short of the criteria listed above; students who do not post at least four times will receive an automatic  F.

There are many anthropology blogs out there for you to check out, though not all are particularly oriented toward theory.  For some examples, see:

http://nodivide.wordpress.com/

http://anthropologyreport.com/anthropology-blogs-2013-list/ (lists many of the blogs out there)

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practice/

http://ethnographymatters.net/ (currently features a very graphic and upsetting but apparently faked photo on the home page)

http://backupminds.wordpress.com/about/