The Birth of a Social Critic

        I have a confession. When I applied to the University of North Texas' online Applied Anthropology Master's program, my educational desire was to learn how technology is impacting how humans are changing how we interact with each other. I had no understanding of Eric Wolf’s theoretical use of historical context, nor Foucault’s power. I just wanted to the ability to research how humans are interfacing with their digital lives. Arjun Shankar in “Silence and Privilege," a reading from Thought and Praxis II, advances the insight that those with power and privilege sequester themselves and keep silent. I am not fully versed in this theoretical framework, but it resonated. In the past, I considered myself educated and compassionate with conservative values. I was ignorant of my privilege until I saw the PBS documentary “Race – The Power of Illusion.” Another transformative reading was Paul Farmer’s “An Anthropology of Structural Violence.” The historical context of racist policies and the impact on health care was a foreign concept for me. Before this exposure to a different perspective, I would consider my political ideology and values as quite common for a Southern-raised, middle-aged woman: hard work equals a quality life; everyone is responsible for their own decisions and actions; history is history…let’s move on. 
         Now that I have swallowed the metaphorical “Matrix” red pill, I can’t go back, but I do understand the person I use to be and how difficult it is to transform ideas. So, when my eyes were first opened to my ignorance, I felt an urgency to get the message out to friends and family through conversations and social media platforms. Surely when people hear how I have changed because of a deeper understanding of how past atrocities continue to be perpetuated by people like me, maybe, just maybe, the suffering can begin to ease! I was naïve. The consequence of my passionate conversion was comparable to that of a drug addict that just found Jesus. I annoyed people. My zealous obsession found censorship and rebuke. The disapproval I experienced is nothing comparable to other greats who have been castigated and ostracized for their beliefs, but for me, in my own community, it has been impactful. Engagement on social media is rewarded when my posts are congruent with who I was before. Pictures of travel, kids, or jokes are celebrated. Uncomfortable posts are ignored. In real life, family and friends decided it would be best not to have certain conversations with me and eye rolls of dismissal do not go unnoticed. Consequently, this late-in-life adolescent crisis of sifting off ideas that are not authentic for me has resulted in change, in relationships and activities. As Shankar discusses, anthropologists are facing an identity crisis as well. Being a social critic is not for the weak. There are actual fiscal, cultural, reputation, and life repercussions.  Not only are there personal implications, but the discourse itself will have consequences for our already divided nation. When I think about my family that supports Trump, is anti-immigration, pro-life, anti-homosexual, pro-guns, and global warming naysayers, I understand. I was once there. That is humbling. So yes, there is something uncomfortable that comes when you critique something so close to where you live. I will see something of myself in the appraisal.
         The question to ask is how does transformational change occur? I do believe that anthropologists can be most effective in their native land because of the familiarity and our relationship with the issues. In the same way, voices should be raised for women to have equal pay and violence against women should cease, but it will require engaged men to stand up for that belief for transformation to occur. I believe racism should end, but it will require White people acknowledging their racism for change to happen. I am not saying the power is only in men or White people, but I am saying the ones who maintain the current conditions have the greatest potential to revolutionize humanity.

References

Shankar, Arjun. 2016. “Silence and Privilege Renegotiated.” Accessed from https://culanth.org/fieldsights/995-the-shattered-echo-chamber-experiences-of-amanth2016-in-the-wake-of-the-election.

Susser, Ida. 2010. “The Anthropologist as Social Critic: Working Toward a More Engaged Anthropology.” Current Anthropology. Vol. 51, 2.

Thoughts about the "Other"

Returning to graduate school was hard, especially the writing. To communicate well is an art form that takes practice and I was definitely out of practice.  One purpose of this blog is to practice more. The other purpose is to archive my transformation of anthropological thought and consequently, some personal beliefs. This is a section from my final paper written for Thought & Praxis I at the University of North Texas. This class is instructed by Dr. Christina Wasson who was trained in linguistic anthropology and was instrumental in developing the first online Master's Program in Applied Anthropology in 2007. She draws upon design anthropology, anthropology of technology, linguistic anthropology, and organizational anthropology in her work. Dr. Wasson's research interests can be found at her website https://www.christinawasson.com. 

The Anthropological “Us” And “Other”

           People categorize things. Determining what is harmful or safe has been a very handy human instinct providing information for the best prospect for survival. People categorize people. Race, gender, age, religion, nationality, sexuality, occupation, wealth, beauty, behavior, and status are just a few filters in how we identify another person, group, society, or culture. These filters are most easily identifiable by our senses. For example, we see a woman and categorize as female, we hear a different language and classify as foreign, we smell expensive perfume on a person and label as wealthy. People categorize perspectives. Creating distinctions based on ideology, how one thinks and believes, traverses the tangible filters mentioned above and creates a more complicated process of grouping. For one cannot determine religious, political, or social beliefs of another from information gathered only through the senses. Classification of things, peoples, and perspectives different from ourselves is not a disputed fact. Paradoxically, in categorizing another, we also categorize ourselves. However, the simple statement that people categorize things, people, and perspectives obscure the complexity of this process.
            Naturally, this instinctual categorization would even impact the anthropologist. As a discipline, anthropology has improved our filtering distinctions through our knowledge, internal criticism, and advancement of theory. We began to see evidence of categorizing in our writings and moved away from “othering,” especially as it related to the impacts of colonialism and propagating the marginalization of peoples. Additionally, in exercising our recently acquired reflexivity, our discipline has shifted away from “us-ing” as it created an unbalanced power dynamic with participants of research.   As the anthropology progresses, constituting who we see as different, “the other,” and who we see as “us,” has become a more difficult processing exercise. But the continued inquiry into us as situated researchers will produce conscious, awake, and aware writers who will actuate a greater richness and depth to our works. We will now look at three contemporary writers and how they portrayed “us/other” in their work.

George Marcus

            Marcus’ “us” is at the center of his writing, and it is not a person or culture but a methodology. The multi-sited method he proposes is a new tool for the ethnographers to research locales, not as independent situations or cultures, but, as an interconnected, complex movement of objects, people, and ideas. Following objects, people, and ideas through space and time differentiate the multi-sited research from single-sited ethnography, which I would define as his “other.” Whereas single-sited ethnography gives more time and less space to a subject, multi-sited research is given more space and understandably, less time. Marcus introduces multi-sited methodology and thereby “othering” single-sited research because single sites could not adequately address today’s complex fragmented, transnational, complex world system. It needed to adapt (Marcus 1995, 95). However, Marcus does not entirely dismiss benefits from single-sited research. For Marcus, single-sited research, produced indispensable writings influenced by the macro-constructions of a “global system, historical political economies of colonialism, market regimes, state formation ad nation-building” (Marcus 1995, 96). Yet, the new complexity of a “world system framework...captured in concepts like post-Fordism, time-space compression, flexible specialization, the end of organized capitalism, and most recently, globalization and transnationalism” were concepts that required a different approach to fully understand the subject being studied (Marcus, 1995, 98). In fact, Marcus argues that the different approach will diminish the activity of creating “us/other” as a result of negotiating multiple sites.

            Maybe in more simplistic terms, “following” is his “us” as he says “following connections, associations, and putative relationships are thus at the very heart of designing multi-site research” (Marcus 1995, 97).  In the context of the definition of “us," his “other” could be defined as “confining,” the act of limiting or restricting to an “intensively-focused-upon single site of ethnographic observation” (Marcus 1995, 96).

Marietta Baba

            In the same context as Marcus, Baba mainly portrays the "us" in her writing; however, her piece is separated into two themes which produce two distinct “us” and “others.”  The first section of her writing traces the history and development of business and industrial anthropology.  I would define her “us” as “the growth” of business and industrial anthropology and the “other” as “obstacles” to growth for the field. She explores several key developmental events that began in 1927, starting with the Hawthorne Effect that was discovered during research at the Western Electric Company. Development continues today, ensuring the presence of anthropology in business and industry research. She writes about “obstacles” as mainly the lack of a second generation of researchers and a substantially complete anthropological absence from industrial research for a period of time. Those barriers included shifts in labor relations with management, lack of educators to produce a second generation of industrial anthropologists, and a growing distrust of government and big business as employers of anthropologists (Baba 2005).  Her “othering” appears informational and provides context to the challenges faced by this subfield of anthropology.   

            In the second section, the application of business and industrial anthropology is her “us,” and the “other” would be the researched subject, be it a company, worker, or customer. Her writing was to show how the “us” is relative and is beneficial to the “other.” She provides many illustrations of how her “other” needed her “us.” The case studies demonstrate how anthropologists can give business a better understanding of customers, how we can assist in new product design, how we are uniquely trained to understand corporate cultures, provide insight when change is needed, and we can explain differences in cultures in an increasingly globalized economy (Baba 2005).

Edward Said

            Unlike Marcus and Baba, Said’s “us/other” is an overwhelming theme in the first chapter of his book Orientalism. His resounding “other” is Western Orientalism and is critically illustrated in his writing describing the British rationale for the occupation and rule of “inferior” Egypt. The rationale was that the knowledge of Egyptians gave the “superior” British the authority to have power over the Egyptians (Said 1978, 34). Orientalism is “the knowledge of the Orient that places things Oriental in class, court, prison, or manual for scrutiny, study, judgment, discipline, or governing” (Said 1978, 41). He argues that Orientalism is a tool used to manufacture knowledge of the East and in doing so constructed a disadvantaged “other” of the Egyptian “race” and even for that of the present Orient. He provides two contemporary examples of “us” and “other” maintained by Orientalism. First, in his essay Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy, Kissinger, in a binary oppositional language, describes undeveloped countries as cultures lacking in analytical processing and again creating an argument that a superior society needs to dominate the “other” (Said 1978, 46). Another example is from a 1972 article in the American Journal of Psychiatry. In this article, a momentous task of condensing a 1,300-year period to provide a psychological profile representing100 million Arabs in four pages was attempted (Said 1978, 48). The actual purpose was to assert the dichotomy of the irrational Arab and the wisdom of the Westerners.  This perceived superior insight and fabricated portrayal make “management easy and profitable; knowledge gives power, more power requires more knowledge, and so on in an increasingly profitable dialectic of information and control” (Said 1978, 36). The implications of this theory are profound for me. It draws attention to the cyclical growth of power and fabricated knowledge used to create generalizations, whether it be employed on a “weaker” country or in the confines of the imperious government’s borders.  The “weaker” construction of another person, community, race, society, and nation dehumanizes and transforms the “other” into “human material” to be dominated.

            Comparably, Marcus’ and Baba’s processing of “us/other” through mainly the use of “us” is in direct contrast to Said’s writing that focuses on the “other.” With Said being Palestinian, he identifies with the East, his “us.” But his “us” is wholly situated within how the West manufactured and controlled the East.  Said says that “men have always divide the world up into regions having either real or imagined distinctions from each other” (Said 1978, 39). I would also argue that Said’s West "needs" to be the hero. And to be a hero, there has to be a person in need and also a villain. In this particular writing, he shows how produced knowledge propelled the British to see the Egyptians as a people in need of their governance. Ironically, there is an “othering” paradox found in his writing. He “others” the West because of the West “bothering” the East. 

            Lastly, Said ask if there is a way to avoid the aggression and animosity when this great divide occurs among explicitly different fields of humanity? He posits that when we create these categorizations, as I discussed in my introduction, and situate them as the filter to see, understand, and apply distinctions, the “other” becomes more “othered” and the “us” more “us.” To temper this divide, he would prefer to remove the generalizations that come from "us" and "other," and do that through historical understandings of "one's" history in the context of an “other’s" history. 

References

Baba, Marietta L. 2005. “Anthropological Practice in Business and Industry.” In Applied  Anthropology: Domains of Application, edited by Satish Kedia and John Van Willigen, 221-2261. Westport: Praeger.

Marcus, George E. 1995. “Ethnography In/Of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” Annual Reviews Anthropology 24:95-117.

Said, Edward W. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books.

Tulips and Bicycles: Amsterdam April 2016