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.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
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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