Today I had one of the most powerful experiences of my life. I went to a small village in the Upper West Region of Ghana named Bakbamba to help conduct research on climate change and social-cultural adaptations to a changing environment. I have been doing this work for a few weeks now, beginning in coastal eastern Ghana and moving north. But what I experienced today was a life-changing experience. I will do my best to convey my feelings here, but no words would ever be ample to describe the emotion, compassion, and appreciation I felt in this community.
The Upper West Region of Ghana is the poorest region in the country. Outside of the regional capital, Wa, there is really nothing else but vast savanna covered with Shea and baobab trees. The people are primarily subsistence farmers and fishers. The farmers plant guinea corn, maize, yams, beans, bambara beans, millet, groundnuts, and some other crops. Fishers set traps and mobilize nets in the black Volta river. Women also gather Shea nuts and sell them to foreign buyers who process them into cosmetics and edibles. Over the past ten years, rainfall has become sporadic, inconsistent, unpredictable, and unreliable. In these Wala communities that have been surviving for centuries, people are beginning to give up and move out. They are suffering from climate change and often becoming climate change refugees.
In the course of doing interviews with rural farmers, fishers, and gatherers I heard many stories about failed crops, declining catches in fish, and even lack of fruit from Shea trees. Their story is a bleak one. Most crops fail and the only food Wala and Lobi people can depend on is maize, which takes three months to grow and can be opportunistically planted, and fish. Though they plant other crops, many of them are failing because rains are becoming increasingly unpredictable and deluges and floods more common. There is no source of potable water, so people in the village drink from stagnant, muddy ponds. There is no other option. Most of the people we were able to interview were only in their 30s and 40s – because that is about as old as they live. In this village of 300 people, 20 have already died this year. One particular woman I interviewed was 30 years old, but she looked like she was 60. Poor nutrition, hard work, and no access to clean water are taking their toll.
At the end of the day, the women in the town gathered in a circle and began a traditional dance. The women around the circle were clapping poly-rhythmically and singing with beautifully sculpted, angelic voices. I watched as, one by one, the women would enter the circle and do an energetic, stomping dance. At the end of the dance they would throw themselves into the surrounding circle and be caught by the other women. This went on for almost 45 minutes. I asked one of our local research assistants what they were singing and he explained that the dance was about a fighting couple, and they were saying that if the husband no longer loved the wife he should leave her. The women who were catching each other represented the community. “We should support each other,” a woman told me via translation. I sat down and watched the dance, how the women were moving around in passionate whirls, heaving themselves into the boundaries of the circle to be caught by other community members. In this poor village of hunger, desperation, and confusion about a changing environment they were finding the energy to remember and celebrate the perseverance of the human spirit. I began crying.
The lessons I learned I cannot put into words, but I will never be the same. Whatever life is about, it has something to do with a feeling beyond the person, beyond the individual. Though many people will never get to see such things, I feel it is important to tell this story. I don’t know, I just can’t put it into words and I never will be able to. Let’s just try to remember that we need each other.
Douglas Joseph La Rose
MA Applied Anthropology (SDSU, 2011)
Tuesday, October 11, 2011
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
A San Diego Cultural Narrative - By Conor Muirhead
By its very nature, the art of traveling removes tourists from their home culture and places them temporarily in a different cultural milieu, whether in an adjacent city or in a village halfway across the world.
- McKercher and du Cros, Cultural Tourism: The Partnership between Tourism and Cultural Heritage Management 2002
Over the course of my lifetime, I have been interested in travel and tourist activities. With our modern ability to span the globe in a matter of hours, the astounding rates of tourism and its importance to understanding both local and global processes have seemingly become intertwined with our pursuit of daily existence. For the city of San Diego, California, the Visitor Industry is the third largest revenue generator, following manufacturing and military. Because of the industry’s influence and significance to San Diego’s continuing urban development, it is essential to assess tourism’s impact on the spaces and people that serve to attract all of these visitors. Moreover, linkages between tourism, space, history, and commoditization are investigated across locations, but it is within a city setting that anthropologists have a unique opportunity to study the varied activities that shape a dense, multifaceted and peopled environment.
For this discussion, I would like to focus on a place in San Diego where I conducted my thesis research: Old Town San Diego State Historic Park (referred to as Old Town, OTSDSHP, and the Park). OTSDSHP is a historic urban public park that has developed over the years as a popular tourist destination in San Diego. It is a 12-acre California State Park situated in the heart of San Diego and averages over 5 million visitors annually. Old Town is advertised as the “birthplace of California” and is described as a living history site that uses human interpreters, as well as symbolic representations, to bring to life and teach about the past in our current present. The Park is dedicated to public education, but business operations – with pragmatic concerns of visitor attendance rates, stretching limited budgets, and upholding concessionaire guidelines – continue to muddle the effectiveness of education through history and entertainment. The Park’s “historical significance”, its Interpretive Period, encompasses three unique stages that include major, permanent transformations to Southern California’s landscape: the Mexican Period (1821 – 1846), the Transition Period (1846 – 1856), and the American Period (1856 – 1872), as well as displaying a tad bit of American Indian presence throughout the years. OTSDSHP hinges its continuing evolution as a contemporary tourist location, complete with “authentic” buildings, material culture, employee attire, performances, and cuisine, on this 50 year Interpretive Period.
OTSDSHP can be described as a dreamscape produced for visual consumption and is a place in which Park operators inscribe cultural narratives into Old Town’s built environment. These cultural narratives are played out through the Park’s structural layout, period attire clad employees, multiple commercial operations, as well as Park tours and themed special events held throughout the year. What makes OTSDSHP intriguing is that visitors continue to swarm through Old Town’s buildings, engaging with historical interpreters who tell stories about ourselves by talking about what we imagine the past to have been. San Diego history continues to breathe through present tourist activities, and is constructed by our present ideologies and beliefs about who we are today and who we were (or ideally should have been) in the past. This complex array of placed and misplaced histories, narratives, and personalities all coming together in a distinct location is really quite captivating.
Although OTSDSHP is a distinct location, the Park is representative of the city of San Diego, other living history sites across the nation, and urban public spaces abroad, as well as being tied to larger global processes of theming, commoditization, and tourism. This is because physical spaces, structures, and cultural constructions serve as metaphors for larger populations and environment. I also believe that the displayed themes at Old Town symbolize even more because of Old Town’s setting within the large urban area of San Diego. The exotic, fetishized elements are additionally highlighted because Old Town takes visitors away from surrounding busy city life and transports them not only in place, but also through time. Scholars write that many tourists traveling to living history sites are symbolically transported into actually believing that they are a part of an unspoiled and authentic community. Although spaces are obviously updated with functioning toilets, ATM machines, and electronic cash registers, Old Town makes the stage look authentic through buildings and activities of employees in period attire specific to the Old Town Interpretive Period.
As cultural consumers, visitors are attracted to places that portray particular themes and depictions of life. These places are influenced by cultural norms and trends, putting on display to the public modified and favorable versions of reality. The theming of Old Town’s space is not simply to make the place look respectable, but also to display a particular image that embodies something more than itself. It functions in a fluctuating consumer environment, playing off visitor desires and their willingness to accept the stories told through theming as real, meaningful, and authentic. In Old Town San Diego, important connections are made through the commoditization of San Diego history and by unifying ideas and symbols to create a joyful location to visit. Although the actual history can be important, it is not as significant as how history is reshaped and subsequently interpreted by the ephemeral visitors. Even though tourists have not experienced the 1800s westward expansion and settlement themselves, their participation at Old Town provides a sense of place and identity.
Tourism in Southern California has always had a dual nature. It has been part of the development of a physical infrastructure, while also combining goods, settlers, businessmen, and tourists with the exploration of land. Furthermore, close ties between place building and image building endure, creating a close link between the development and continual reinvention of Southern California’s physical landscapes and social environments. It is important to remember that Old Town is not necessarily creating an artificial fantasy (because the area does indeed have an actual history), but rather staging a version of it in the real past, as documented by experts and historians, with modern amenities to ensure visitor comfort and positive visitor experience. The Park plays off visitor desires in order to continue operations and produce an imagined, historical California landscape and social environment considered to be a multi-faceted form of education and recreation to all who visit.
-------------------------------
Originally published in Anthropologies, Issue 2: Anthropologies of Tourism
www.anthropologiesproject.org
- McKercher and du Cros, Cultural Tourism: The Partnership between Tourism and Cultural Heritage Management 2002
Over the course of my lifetime, I have been interested in travel and tourist activities. With our modern ability to span the globe in a matter of hours, the astounding rates of tourism and its importance to understanding both local and global processes have seemingly become intertwined with our pursuit of daily existence. For the city of San Diego, California, the Visitor Industry is the third largest revenue generator, following manufacturing and military. Because of the industry’s influence and significance to San Diego’s continuing urban development, it is essential to assess tourism’s impact on the spaces and people that serve to attract all of these visitors. Moreover, linkages between tourism, space, history, and commoditization are investigated across locations, but it is within a city setting that anthropologists have a unique opportunity to study the varied activities that shape a dense, multifaceted and peopled environment.
For this discussion, I would like to focus on a place in San Diego where I conducted my thesis research: Old Town San Diego State Historic Park (referred to as Old Town, OTSDSHP, and the Park). OTSDSHP is a historic urban public park that has developed over the years as a popular tourist destination in San Diego. It is a 12-acre California State Park situated in the heart of San Diego and averages over 5 million visitors annually. Old Town is advertised as the “birthplace of California” and is described as a living history site that uses human interpreters, as well as symbolic representations, to bring to life and teach about the past in our current present. The Park is dedicated to public education, but business operations – with pragmatic concerns of visitor attendance rates, stretching limited budgets, and upholding concessionaire guidelines – continue to muddle the effectiveness of education through history and entertainment. The Park’s “historical significance”, its Interpretive Period, encompasses three unique stages that include major, permanent transformations to Southern California’s landscape: the Mexican Period (1821 – 1846), the Transition Period (1846 – 1856), and the American Period (1856 – 1872), as well as displaying a tad bit of American Indian presence throughout the years. OTSDSHP hinges its continuing evolution as a contemporary tourist location, complete with “authentic” buildings, material culture, employee attire, performances, and cuisine, on this 50 year Interpretive Period.
OTSDSHP can be described as a dreamscape produced for visual consumption and is a place in which Park operators inscribe cultural narratives into Old Town’s built environment. These cultural narratives are played out through the Park’s structural layout, period attire clad employees, multiple commercial operations, as well as Park tours and themed special events held throughout the year. What makes OTSDSHP intriguing is that visitors continue to swarm through Old Town’s buildings, engaging with historical interpreters who tell stories about ourselves by talking about what we imagine the past to have been. San Diego history continues to breathe through present tourist activities, and is constructed by our present ideologies and beliefs about who we are today and who we were (or ideally should have been) in the past. This complex array of placed and misplaced histories, narratives, and personalities all coming together in a distinct location is really quite captivating.
Although OTSDSHP is a distinct location, the Park is representative of the city of San Diego, other living history sites across the nation, and urban public spaces abroad, as well as being tied to larger global processes of theming, commoditization, and tourism. This is because physical spaces, structures, and cultural constructions serve as metaphors for larger populations and environment. I also believe that the displayed themes at Old Town symbolize even more because of Old Town’s setting within the large urban area of San Diego. The exotic, fetishized elements are additionally highlighted because Old Town takes visitors away from surrounding busy city life and transports them not only in place, but also through time. Scholars write that many tourists traveling to living history sites are symbolically transported into actually believing that they are a part of an unspoiled and authentic community. Although spaces are obviously updated with functioning toilets, ATM machines, and electronic cash registers, Old Town makes the stage look authentic through buildings and activities of employees in period attire specific to the Old Town Interpretive Period.
As cultural consumers, visitors are attracted to places that portray particular themes and depictions of life. These places are influenced by cultural norms and trends, putting on display to the public modified and favorable versions of reality. The theming of Old Town’s space is not simply to make the place look respectable, but also to display a particular image that embodies something more than itself. It functions in a fluctuating consumer environment, playing off visitor desires and their willingness to accept the stories told through theming as real, meaningful, and authentic. In Old Town San Diego, important connections are made through the commoditization of San Diego history and by unifying ideas and symbols to create a joyful location to visit. Although the actual history can be important, it is not as significant as how history is reshaped and subsequently interpreted by the ephemeral visitors. Even though tourists have not experienced the 1800s westward expansion and settlement themselves, their participation at Old Town provides a sense of place and identity.
Tourism in Southern California has always had a dual nature. It has been part of the development of a physical infrastructure, while also combining goods, settlers, businessmen, and tourists with the exploration of land. Furthermore, close ties between place building and image building endure, creating a close link between the development and continual reinvention of Southern California’s physical landscapes and social environments. It is important to remember that Old Town is not necessarily creating an artificial fantasy (because the area does indeed have an actual history), but rather staging a version of it in the real past, as documented by experts and historians, with modern amenities to ensure visitor comfort and positive visitor experience. The Park plays off visitor desires in order to continue operations and produce an imagined, historical California landscape and social environment considered to be a multi-faceted form of education and recreation to all who visit.
-------------------------------
Originally published in Anthropologies, Issue 2: Anthropologies of Tourism
www.anthropologiesproject.org
Friday, March 25, 2011
Why no looting in post-tsunami Japan? - By Barbara Quimby
The catastrophic, heartbreaking events in Japan over the past week have been painful to watch from our side of the Pacific, but a few scenes of cooperation, patience, and kindness have also brought out some interesting questions about how communities react to disaster. The popular press has tried to explain the Japanese reaction with stereotypes of cultural virtues or the power of the state. Really?
While food, fuel, and even water are becoming scarce in areas near the tsunami and earthquake effected areas in northern Japan, there are no reports of looting-- I even heard a report on NPR describe how vending machines remained full of bottled water while men cleaned oil barrels to use for boiling drinking water. Women with children do not push ahead at the grocery store, but patiently wait hours for their turn. The press contrasts this with other scenes of violence, looting, and chaos after the earthquake struck Haiti and hurricane Katrina swept across the Southern US.
So what makes the Japanese reaction so different? Is it social, political-- or is it about our perceptions and expectations?
The press has remarked on the admirable virtues of Japanese society, their honesty, discipline, and ability to put the needs of the group above the individual. A Slate article critiques some of these claims, pointing out that this assumes homogeneity and is even a bit racist, as it seems to suggest that those who loot (earthquake stricken people in Haiti, for example) are not as ‘civilized’. I appreciated this observation, but I did not accept their counter-argument: state control.
The article suggests that laws and policing account for Japan’s honesty; yet, in the rural communities of the north, physically peripheral to the nation’s urban heart, is state power really the reason? Is this the nation-state failing in some crises (Katrina), yet staying strong in Japan? Perhaps a history which includes rebuilding after World War II and other factors have contributed to a common identity, and shared practices and morals; yet why are these processes so resilient in a moment of crisis...or are they?
Interestingly, Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, published just after World War II, dealt with (and may be responsible for inspiring) some essentialized perceptions about Japanese society as a homogenous, rule-following, group-oriented culture. Benedict may have over-emphasized group cooperation and selflessness in Japanese society, but her observations of what made the “patterns of Japanese culture” different from American society were perhaps most revealing about how we perceive our own values. We are struck by acts of cooperation and self-sacrifice; yet if a similar scene played out in rural America, we would attribute it to core small-town values. So is Japanese solidarity a sign of a cohesive nation-community? Or does it indicate a less individualistic social value than the generalized American world view? Or are these just simplistic ways of understanding a reaction to crisis?
While I cannot offer any quick and easy explanations, I am still inspired by how tragedy reminds us of our common humanity. It’s interesting to ask how are we different, but it is more worthwhile to ask, how can I help?
-------------------------------
If you are interested in making a donation to support Japan, please consider the charities listed here.
Help donate to the cause with Japan relief effort T-shirts.
While food, fuel, and even water are becoming scarce in areas near the tsunami and earthquake effected areas in northern Japan, there are no reports of looting-- I even heard a report on NPR describe how vending machines remained full of bottled water while men cleaned oil barrels to use for boiling drinking water. Women with children do not push ahead at the grocery store, but patiently wait hours for their turn. The press contrasts this with other scenes of violence, looting, and chaos after the earthquake struck Haiti and hurricane Katrina swept across the Southern US.
So what makes the Japanese reaction so different? Is it social, political-- or is it about our perceptions and expectations?
The press has remarked on the admirable virtues of Japanese society, their honesty, discipline, and ability to put the needs of the group above the individual. A Slate article critiques some of these claims, pointing out that this assumes homogeneity and is even a bit racist, as it seems to suggest that those who loot (earthquake stricken people in Haiti, for example) are not as ‘civilized’. I appreciated this observation, but I did not accept their counter-argument: state control.
The article suggests that laws and policing account for Japan’s honesty; yet, in the rural communities of the north, physically peripheral to the nation’s urban heart, is state power really the reason? Is this the nation-state failing in some crises (Katrina), yet staying strong in Japan? Perhaps a history which includes rebuilding after World War II and other factors have contributed to a common identity, and shared practices and morals; yet why are these processes so resilient in a moment of crisis...or are they?
Interestingly, Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, published just after World War II, dealt with (and may be responsible for inspiring) some essentialized perceptions about Japanese society as a homogenous, rule-following, group-oriented culture. Benedict may have over-emphasized group cooperation and selflessness in Japanese society, but her observations of what made the “patterns of Japanese culture” different from American society were perhaps most revealing about how we perceive our own values. We are struck by acts of cooperation and self-sacrifice; yet if a similar scene played out in rural America, we would attribute it to core small-town values. So is Japanese solidarity a sign of a cohesive nation-community? Or does it indicate a less individualistic social value than the generalized American world view? Or are these just simplistic ways of understanding a reaction to crisis?
While I cannot offer any quick and easy explanations, I am still inspired by how tragedy reminds us of our common humanity. It’s interesting to ask how are we different, but it is more worthwhile to ask, how can I help?
-------------------------------
If you are interested in making a donation to support Japan, please consider the charities listed here.
Help donate to the cause with Japan relief effort T-shirts.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Presenting at a Conference for the First Time, As Luck Would Have It - By Jessica Bates
Last spring, I was a very lucky graduate student.
I was lucky to have spent the previous summer in the field for the first time. I was also lucky to have an advisor who encouraged my research partner and I to put together a paper on our data for the Society for Applied Anthropology’s annual meeting. I was luckier still that our graduate student association (AGSA) awarded me a generous travel grant that would help defray my costs to travel there.
However, the unlucky part of all this was that the SfAAs actually accepted our paper.
Up until the point of receiving the acceptance e-mail, I had happily gone through the process of creating a paper on my field experience. I had happily daydreamed about attending the SfAA meeting and networking with all those big-wig famous anthropologists and activists. I reveled in the idea of spending part of my spring break (believe it or not) in listening to other presentations and learning more about the field I was happy to be in.
But after the acceptance, everything changed.
This was to be my first visit to a professional meeting in which I would also be presenting. I had been to the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting once before, and this would be my first visit to the SfAA meeting. I enjoyed the AAAs immensely and was looking forward to the SfAAs...but now the ante had been, well, upped.
If you’ve never presented before at a professional meeting, you probably know where I’m going with this.
Suddenly all I could think about was whether or not I would humiliate myself. How could I possibly - me, a beginning master’s student with barely any experience! - present a paper in front of experts in my field? How could I withstand their brutal questioning, their stinging criticisms, their skeptical looks as I stood at that podium? Would my hands shake? Would my voice make that awful warbling sound that only happens in front of large audiences? Would I remember to match my shoes that morning? Worst of all - could our paper possibly be good enough?
Someone should have told me to just relax.
Well actually, many people did. Our professors, our advisor, and fellow students helped us prepare. We were told to read our papers aloud to ourselves at least ten times, to not sweat the small stuff, and to try to enjoy Mérida, Mexico, where the meetings were being held.
We should have listened.
Our presentation went alright. It wasn’t terrible, and there were things we learned how to do better in the future. Once the paper part was over (towards the beginning, lucky for us), we started enjoying the other things we had come for.
There were presentations that were immensely better than ours. But there were also presentations that were worse than ours. There were people I assumed to be seasoned veterans, and people who I thought must just be starting out like me. We made wonderful contacts not only with professors and non-academic participants, but with other students as well.
In the end, I was very luck last spring. Not only did I have a great support system of people in my academic circle, but I also survived the experience of giving my first presentation at a professional conference. And I’d like to think I survived the ordeal quite well in the end.
I now know that at least the SfAA meetings are not as intimidating as I made them out to be. Not only was our session sparsely attended (lucky for us again), but the people in attendance were kind, supportive, and interested in our topic. Watching other presentations made us realize we were sort of in the middle of the spectrum as far as quality went. Afterwards, I was incredibly motivated to submit other papers in the future, and I would whole-heartedly encourage other first-timers to submit as well.
I’ve already sent in my paper for the SfAA meeting in 2011.
We’ll see how I feel in December if I receive an acceptance e-mail.
I was lucky to have spent the previous summer in the field for the first time. I was also lucky to have an advisor who encouraged my research partner and I to put together a paper on our data for the Society for Applied Anthropology’s annual meeting. I was luckier still that our graduate student association (AGSA) awarded me a generous travel grant that would help defray my costs to travel there.
However, the unlucky part of all this was that the SfAAs actually accepted our paper.
Up until the point of receiving the acceptance e-mail, I had happily gone through the process of creating a paper on my field experience. I had happily daydreamed about attending the SfAA meeting and networking with all those big-wig famous anthropologists and activists. I reveled in the idea of spending part of my spring break (believe it or not) in listening to other presentations and learning more about the field I was happy to be in.
But after the acceptance, everything changed.
This was to be my first visit to a professional meeting in which I would also be presenting. I had been to the American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting once before, and this would be my first visit to the SfAA meeting. I enjoyed the AAAs immensely and was looking forward to the SfAAs...but now the ante had been, well, upped.
If you’ve never presented before at a professional meeting, you probably know where I’m going with this.
Suddenly all I could think about was whether or not I would humiliate myself. How could I possibly - me, a beginning master’s student with barely any experience! - present a paper in front of experts in my field? How could I withstand their brutal questioning, their stinging criticisms, their skeptical looks as I stood at that podium? Would my hands shake? Would my voice make that awful warbling sound that only happens in front of large audiences? Would I remember to match my shoes that morning? Worst of all - could our paper possibly be good enough?
Someone should have told me to just relax.
Well actually, many people did. Our professors, our advisor, and fellow students helped us prepare. We were told to read our papers aloud to ourselves at least ten times, to not sweat the small stuff, and to try to enjoy Mérida, Mexico, where the meetings were being held.
We should have listened.
Our presentation went alright. It wasn’t terrible, and there were things we learned how to do better in the future. Once the paper part was over (towards the beginning, lucky for us), we started enjoying the other things we had come for.
There were presentations that were immensely better than ours. But there were also presentations that were worse than ours. There were people I assumed to be seasoned veterans, and people who I thought must just be starting out like me. We made wonderful contacts not only with professors and non-academic participants, but with other students as well.
In the end, I was very luck last spring. Not only did I have a great support system of people in my academic circle, but I also survived the experience of giving my first presentation at a professional conference. And I’d like to think I survived the ordeal quite well in the end.
I now know that at least the SfAA meetings are not as intimidating as I made them out to be. Not only was our session sparsely attended (lucky for us again), but the people in attendance were kind, supportive, and interested in our topic. Watching other presentations made us realize we were sort of in the middle of the spectrum as far as quality went. Afterwards, I was incredibly motivated to submit other papers in the future, and I would whole-heartedly encourage other first-timers to submit as well.
I’ve already sent in my paper for the SfAA meeting in 2011.
We’ll see how I feel in December if I receive an acceptance e-mail.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
“A Perspective on “the field” and “fieldwork” - By Erin Blankenship-Sefczek
Field. Fieldwork. By the time we get handed our diploma, all of us graduate students will have gone through the experience of going to the field and conducting fieldwork. Until last spring the idea of “the field” was troubling to me. The expression “going to the field” seemed to me to convey the importance of a journey in order to collect information not accessible near by. But, where is the field? How far away do you have to go to get “to the field”? Does it then mean that collected data is only valid if you go wherever the “field” is to get it? What if the information you seek is accessible in your own city?
My husband conducted his fieldwork in Madagascar for five months. Over the course of his trip, he encountered much of what I had envisioned as the typical “fieldwork experience.” Therefore, this was the knowledge I possessed on the subject upon my entry to graduate school. I am a bioarchaeologist. Going on digs to find material is certainly part of the job, but a majority of my field is located within a lab, after everything is removed from the site. Journeying to a lab does not always necessitate a plane ride, it is not always necessary to complete an IRB, or acclimatize to a new environment or culture. I don’t encounter new foods (other than eating at a different restaurant every night because the time and effort to cook is all but absent at the end of the day), or a different language (unless deciphering skeletal biology terms counts). Working in a lab does not necessarily mean sleeping in a tent, on the ground, or in a gracious host’s house for months at a time. Most labs my colleagues had worked in were housed in US major cities. Because of the absence of typical experiences and encounters in lab work, I continually asked myself “how do I deal with the concept of ‘the field’?” Is there a difference in merit for traveling a thousand miles or five miles to collect data?
Reading for my first seminar in graduate school included the book Anthropological Locations. The authors deal with the troubling concept of the field and what constitutes acceptable fieldwork. Some authors argue in favor of not qualifying what “the field” has to be, saying a definition limits what work can be done, while others discuss the exoticized notion of the field and the elevated importance of data collected there. For me, salvage anthropology comes to mind at the mention of the later point. The unspoken (or maybe not so unspoken) notion that the only valuable data comes from far off places with cultures “untouched” by the rest of the world. Words like savage, primitive, and remote being used like currency for publishing quintessential anthropological research. In all actuality, with a more recent history such as this, “the field” has taken on an identity of it’s own. Accruing validity from specific guidelines set down by who exactly? Anthropological Locations suggests that perhaps the time has come to re-evaluate what “the field” really is. One major question has stuck with me because of its relevance in my own work; Is it still considered the field when the researcher stays within their own city to collect data? Though I am now in a place to express my opinion, at the time I could discuss these topics at length in theory, but I couldn’t handle these questions on a personal level. After all, I hadn’t experienced any of it for my self, so how could I make a reliable judgment? Therefore, I stored the notion of “the field” in the middle of my brain (middle because it was never quite gone, but wasn’t always present) for the next few semesters. During this time, I watched several colleagues board planes to foreign countries and remain gone for a few months to conduct their research. I watched them leave, and return filled with stories and pictures from their time abroad. My conflicting notion of the field remained unresolved. Whether I studied in San Diego, or traveled elsewhere in the States for research, my “field” would not be the same as theirs. I wasn’t so much concerned about missed experiences as I was worried about the validity of research done in a different setting. This may all sound unfounded, but my goal is to become an active bioarchaeologist, and everything I do now impacts that future (and, apparently when you are a graduate student, the stress messes with your judgment).
I should have known all that theoretical concern was for not. Last Fall I was offered the extraordinary opportunity to study a Maya skeletal collection from Belize for my master’s thesis. The remains are curated at SDSU’s Maya Archaeology Lab located right here in San Diego. I can’t express the amount of excitement that wells up in side me every morning in the lab. It is unlike anything I have experienced before. I fall asleep recounting what I analyzed and what it means for the people whose stories I am beginning to tell. I am willing to bet that the feelings I possess are the same for those people who journeyed a thousand miles to research what they love. The information they seek just happens to be located farther away.
Those theoretical issues on the validity of “the field” don’t seem to matter anymore. I work in a lab and that is my field. I know now, it is not the location of the research, but the dedication behind it that counts. It doesn’t matter that I return to my house at the end of the day instead of a tent, a hotel room, or a cot on the floor in some far off place. The fieldwork I am doing right here in my own city is worth just as much.
My husband conducted his fieldwork in Madagascar for five months. Over the course of his trip, he encountered much of what I had envisioned as the typical “fieldwork experience.” Therefore, this was the knowledge I possessed on the subject upon my entry to graduate school. I am a bioarchaeologist. Going on digs to find material is certainly part of the job, but a majority of my field is located within a lab, after everything is removed from the site. Journeying to a lab does not always necessitate a plane ride, it is not always necessary to complete an IRB, or acclimatize to a new environment or culture. I don’t encounter new foods (other than eating at a different restaurant every night because the time and effort to cook is all but absent at the end of the day), or a different language (unless deciphering skeletal biology terms counts). Working in a lab does not necessarily mean sleeping in a tent, on the ground, or in a gracious host’s house for months at a time. Most labs my colleagues had worked in were housed in US major cities. Because of the absence of typical experiences and encounters in lab work, I continually asked myself “how do I deal with the concept of ‘the field’?” Is there a difference in merit for traveling a thousand miles or five miles to collect data?
Reading for my first seminar in graduate school included the book Anthropological Locations. The authors deal with the troubling concept of the field and what constitutes acceptable fieldwork. Some authors argue in favor of not qualifying what “the field” has to be, saying a definition limits what work can be done, while others discuss the exoticized notion of the field and the elevated importance of data collected there. For me, salvage anthropology comes to mind at the mention of the later point. The unspoken (or maybe not so unspoken) notion that the only valuable data comes from far off places with cultures “untouched” by the rest of the world. Words like savage, primitive, and remote being used like currency for publishing quintessential anthropological research. In all actuality, with a more recent history such as this, “the field” has taken on an identity of it’s own. Accruing validity from specific guidelines set down by who exactly? Anthropological Locations suggests that perhaps the time has come to re-evaluate what “the field” really is. One major question has stuck with me because of its relevance in my own work; Is it still considered the field when the researcher stays within their own city to collect data? Though I am now in a place to express my opinion, at the time I could discuss these topics at length in theory, but I couldn’t handle these questions on a personal level. After all, I hadn’t experienced any of it for my self, so how could I make a reliable judgment? Therefore, I stored the notion of “the field” in the middle of my brain (middle because it was never quite gone, but wasn’t always present) for the next few semesters. During this time, I watched several colleagues board planes to foreign countries and remain gone for a few months to conduct their research. I watched them leave, and return filled with stories and pictures from their time abroad. My conflicting notion of the field remained unresolved. Whether I studied in San Diego, or traveled elsewhere in the States for research, my “field” would not be the same as theirs. I wasn’t so much concerned about missed experiences as I was worried about the validity of research done in a different setting. This may all sound unfounded, but my goal is to become an active bioarchaeologist, and everything I do now impacts that future (and, apparently when you are a graduate student, the stress messes with your judgment).
I should have known all that theoretical concern was for not. Last Fall I was offered the extraordinary opportunity to study a Maya skeletal collection from Belize for my master’s thesis. The remains are curated at SDSU’s Maya Archaeology Lab located right here in San Diego. I can’t express the amount of excitement that wells up in side me every morning in the lab. It is unlike anything I have experienced before. I fall asleep recounting what I analyzed and what it means for the people whose stories I am beginning to tell. I am willing to bet that the feelings I possess are the same for those people who journeyed a thousand miles to research what they love. The information they seek just happens to be located farther away.
Those theoretical issues on the validity of “the field” don’t seem to matter anymore. I work in a lab and that is my field. I know now, it is not the location of the research, but the dedication behind it that counts. It doesn’t matter that I return to my house at the end of the day instead of a tent, a hotel room, or a cot on the floor in some far off place. The fieldwork I am doing right here in my own city is worth just as much.
Monday, November 1, 2010
An Untitled But Extraordinary Entry By Sam Kobari
A matter touched on several times during the course of my (and your) academic journey is the style of writing in various journals and books. With one camp contesting the dense nature of some writing we have had to read, arguing it is unnecessary, and does much to dilute the authors point. Others claim it is the very nature of this writing having an elite vernacular that allows expression of certain theoretical points not suited for prose. In my summer readings I came across David Foster Wallace. I am not alone in thinking him one of the true literary geniuses of our time. In relation to this debate this is an excerpt from Consider the Lobster (I know it is long, stay with it)–
The issue is Academic English, a verbal cancer that has metastasized now to afflict both scholarly writing –
If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime superstate need to be decoded as the “now all-but-unreadable DNA” of the fast industrializing Detroit, just as his Robocop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration through violence upon the racially heteroglassic wilds and others of the inner city
-and prose as mainstream as the Vilage Voice’s
At first encounter, the poems’ distanced cerebral surfaces can be daunting, evading physical location or straightforward emotional arc. But this seeming remoteness quickly reveals a very real passion, centered in the speaker’s struggle to define his evolving self-construction.
Maybe it’s a combination of my SNOOTitude and the fact that I end up having to read a lot of it for my job, but I’m afraid I regard Academic English not as dialectical variation but as a grotesque debasement of SWE, and loathe it even more than the stilted incoherencies of Presidential English (“This is the best and only way to uncover, destroy, and prevent Iraq from reengineering weapons of mass destruction”) or the mangled pieties of BusinessSpeak (“Our Mission: to proactively search and provide the optimum networking skills and resources to service the needs of your growing business”); and in support of this total contempt and intolerance I cite no less an authority than Mr. G. Orwell, who 50 years ago had AE pegged as a “mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence” in which “it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning”
It probably isn’t the whole explanation, but with the voguish hypocrisy of PCE, the obscurity and pretension of Academic English can be attributed in part to a disruption in the delicate rhetorical balance between language as a vector of meaning and language as a vector of the writer’s own resume. In other words, it’s when a scholar’s vanity/insecurity leads him to write primarily to communicate and reinforce his own stature as an Intellectual that his English is deformed by pleonism and pretentious diction (whose function is to signal the writer’s erudition) and by opaque abstraction (whose function is to keep anybody from pinning the writer down to a definite assertion that can maybe be refuted or shown to be silly). The latter characteristic, a level obscurity that often makes it just about impossible to figure out what an AE sentence is really saying, so closely resembles political and corporate doublespeak (“revenue enhancement,” “downsizing,” “proactive resource-allocation restructuring”) that it’s tempting to think that AE’s real purpose is concealment and its real motivation fear.
The insecurities that drive PCE, AE and vocab-tape ads are far from groundless though. These are tense linguistic times. Blame it on Heisenbergaian uncertainty or postmodern relativism or Image Over Substance or the ubiquity of advertising and PR or the rise of Identity Politics or whatever you will – we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with pretention and interpretation, one in which the relations between who someone is and what he believe and how he “expresses himself” have been thrown into big-time flux. In rhetorical terms, certain long-held distinctions between the Ethical Appeal (=an argument’s plausibility or soundness, from logos), and Pathetic Appeal (=an argument’s emotional impact, from pathos) have now pretty much collapsed – or rather the different sorts of Appeals now affect and are affected by one another in ways that make it nearly impossible to advance argument on “reason” alone.
Okay any thoughts? Arguments?
The issue is Academic English, a verbal cancer that has metastasized now to afflict both scholarly writing –
If such a sublime cyborg would insinuate the future as post-Fordist subject, his palpably masochistic locations as ecstatic agent of the sublime superstate need to be decoded as the “now all-but-unreadable DNA” of the fast industrializing Detroit, just as his Robocop-like strategy of carceral negotiation and street control remains the tirelessly American one of inflicting regeneration through violence upon the racially heteroglassic wilds and others of the inner city
-and prose as mainstream as the Vilage Voice’s
At first encounter, the poems’ distanced cerebral surfaces can be daunting, evading physical location or straightforward emotional arc. But this seeming remoteness quickly reveals a very real passion, centered in the speaker’s struggle to define his evolving self-construction.
Maybe it’s a combination of my SNOOTitude and the fact that I end up having to read a lot of it for my job, but I’m afraid I regard Academic English not as dialectical variation but as a grotesque debasement of SWE, and loathe it even more than the stilted incoherencies of Presidential English (“This is the best and only way to uncover, destroy, and prevent Iraq from reengineering weapons of mass destruction”) or the mangled pieties of BusinessSpeak (“Our Mission: to proactively search and provide the optimum networking skills and resources to service the needs of your growing business”); and in support of this total contempt and intolerance I cite no less an authority than Mr. G. Orwell, who 50 years ago had AE pegged as a “mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence” in which “it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning”
It probably isn’t the whole explanation, but with the voguish hypocrisy of PCE, the obscurity and pretension of Academic English can be attributed in part to a disruption in the delicate rhetorical balance between language as a vector of meaning and language as a vector of the writer’s own resume. In other words, it’s when a scholar’s vanity/insecurity leads him to write primarily to communicate and reinforce his own stature as an Intellectual that his English is deformed by pleonism and pretentious diction (whose function is to signal the writer’s erudition) and by opaque abstraction (whose function is to keep anybody from pinning the writer down to a definite assertion that can maybe be refuted or shown to be silly). The latter characteristic, a level obscurity that often makes it just about impossible to figure out what an AE sentence is really saying, so closely resembles political and corporate doublespeak (“revenue enhancement,” “downsizing,” “proactive resource-allocation restructuring”) that it’s tempting to think that AE’s real purpose is concealment and its real motivation fear.
The insecurities that drive PCE, AE and vocab-tape ads are far from groundless though. These are tense linguistic times. Blame it on Heisenbergaian uncertainty or postmodern relativism or Image Over Substance or the ubiquity of advertising and PR or the rise of Identity Politics or whatever you will – we live in an era of terrible preoccupation with pretention and interpretation, one in which the relations between who someone is and what he believe and how he “expresses himself” have been thrown into big-time flux. In rhetorical terms, certain long-held distinctions between the Ethical Appeal (=an argument’s plausibility or soundness, from logos), and Pathetic Appeal (=an argument’s emotional impact, from pathos) have now pretty much collapsed – or rather the different sorts of Appeals now affect and are affected by one another in ways that make it nearly impossible to advance argument on “reason” alone.
Okay any thoughts? Arguments?
Friday, November 13, 2009
Does SDSU Anthropology need a four-field approach?
by Barbara Quimby, Anthropology Graduate Student
Anthropology is the Madonna of social sciences, reinventing itself with the times while staying true to its roots. Aside from adopting a British accent, what that really means is keeping the four-field approach established over 100 years ago while adjusting each sub-discipline’s method and theoretical basis, as well as how they cross-pollenate, to match the current scientific knowledge and needs of modern inquiry.
Yet, some major universities have abandoned this classic approach. Stanford’s anthropology department has split between cultural and physical anthropology. Harvard has also recently chosen to divide human evolutionary biology from the more socially-focused anthropology department, though the two maintain connections. If these influential institutions have chosen to separate the sub-disciplines, does that mean SDSU should follow suit and abandon it’s unified approach? Especially when budgets are tight, should our department specialize and not try to do too much?
There are a few things to consider to answer this. First, institutions like Harvard and Stanford are somewhat biased towards post-doctoral research. Their institutional funding comes from private individuals and foundations who wish to contribute to the cutting edge of these fields, at the highest level of research. Although they are serving an undergraduate student body as well, they do not offer MA programs in anthropology except leading to the Doctorate. At SDSU, our mission and motivation is completely different: our department is funded primarily through undergraduate enrollment, and the graduate program focuses on the MA degree. So, from an academic standpoint, the department serves a different educational community, one that benefits more from the breadth of the program and provides the most complete picture of anthropology and its practical application for non-academic life. From a financial standpoint, a highly specialized department would attract less undergraduate students, not only for the anthropology degree but also new degrees like the cross-discipline sustainability major.
Putting aside the practical issues of funding, a holistic approach to the complexity and diversity of humanity is valuable, perhaps more than ever. There is much you can learn by separately investigating human culture or evolutionary biology, yet there is so much gained by understanding how to bring the pieces together. Breakthrough studies such as environmental anthropology, behavioral ecology, and medical anthropology are built within a cross-sub-discipline framework . As a graduate student, I see the advantage of the program’s diversity in providing multifaceted views of my research interests and a solid foundation for a career where I expect to teach Anthropology 101 at some point.
Our program is funded by students who will have careers both in and out of academic life, as well as in and out of anthropology. We need a program of quality, diversity, and unity to meet both the university’s mission and the students’ ambitions. Linguistics, archaeology, socio-cultural, and physical anthropology are all necessary components for a truly modern and relevant department of anthropology at San Diego State.
Anthropology is the Madonna of social sciences, reinventing itself with the times while staying true to its roots. Aside from adopting a British accent, what that really means is keeping the four-field approach established over 100 years ago while adjusting each sub-discipline’s method and theoretical basis, as well as how they cross-pollenate, to match the current scientific knowledge and needs of modern inquiry.
Yet, some major universities have abandoned this classic approach. Stanford’s anthropology department has split between cultural and physical anthropology. Harvard has also recently chosen to divide human evolutionary biology from the more socially-focused anthropology department, though the two maintain connections. If these influential institutions have chosen to separate the sub-disciplines, does that mean SDSU should follow suit and abandon it’s unified approach? Especially when budgets are tight, should our department specialize and not try to do too much?
There are a few things to consider to answer this. First, institutions like Harvard and Stanford are somewhat biased towards post-doctoral research. Their institutional funding comes from private individuals and foundations who wish to contribute to the cutting edge of these fields, at the highest level of research. Although they are serving an undergraduate student body as well, they do not offer MA programs in anthropology except leading to the Doctorate. At SDSU, our mission and motivation is completely different: our department is funded primarily through undergraduate enrollment, and the graduate program focuses on the MA degree. So, from an academic standpoint, the department serves a different educational community, one that benefits more from the breadth of the program and provides the most complete picture of anthropology and its practical application for non-academic life. From a financial standpoint, a highly specialized department would attract less undergraduate students, not only for the anthropology degree but also new degrees like the cross-discipline sustainability major.
Putting aside the practical issues of funding, a holistic approach to the complexity and diversity of humanity is valuable, perhaps more than ever. There is much you can learn by separately investigating human culture or evolutionary biology, yet there is so much gained by understanding how to bring the pieces together. Breakthrough studies such as environmental anthropology, behavioral ecology, and medical anthropology are built within a cross-sub-discipline framework . As a graduate student, I see the advantage of the program’s diversity in providing multifaceted views of my research interests and a solid foundation for a career where I expect to teach Anthropology 101 at some point.
Our program is funded by students who will have careers both in and out of academic life, as well as in and out of anthropology. We need a program of quality, diversity, and unity to meet both the university’s mission and the students’ ambitions. Linguistics, archaeology, socio-cultural, and physical anthropology are all necessary components for a truly modern and relevant department of anthropology at San Diego State.
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