Part I
Discourses and Practices of the Self
There are ways of talking about the self (or selves). These are conventional means for representing how our person’s actions are shaped. This whole shaping develops through the medium of behavior, objectifying, monitoring, and evaluating the stances that a person sometimes takes towards their behavior. This discourse about “selves” takes on many forms:
- A subjective sense of oneself as an actor/subject
- It may be embedded in claims about others, or
- Expressed directly in pontifications about the self by specialists.
This idea of “self” can take on different meanings depending on the culture. For example the Newar ethnic group of Kathmandu regard the self as “heart”. “Memories, thoughts, and feelings were stored in the heart (nuga),” (p. 19). Because this sense of self is so widely varied on a universal level the questions researchers are now asking what they signify.
The Critical Disruption
Around 1980 there began a critical examination between Anthropologists and their subjects. The main criticism was that researchers, as colonial powers, were looking more closely at male-centered activities. There was also a criticism that anthropologists were using the “ethnographic present” which means they were writing about their subject in the present tense and thus suspending them in time and ignoring their relationship to history as if they were just specimens of science. Foucault depicted social and psychological sciences as constructing, rather than objectively studying their subjects. As a result, this way of scientifically managing people automatically placed them in categories that ultimately determined how they were treated in institutions such as prisons, mental institutions and schools. Because there is such a strong bond between the scientific and the institutional, such findings are subject to a forced reductionism in institutional settings, (p.24).
In the past, anthropologists often focused on the male role as power and knowledge without regard to other structures in place. As a result of feminist theory and critiques who see cultural discourses as impositions, new approaches are now seeing men and women as being pushed into behavior that is compatible with the structures and institutions that favor members of one social category or another. Now, as we study contemporary ethnographers, we are scrutinizing their strategies in research. As a whole, the approach to conducting ethnographies has now completely shifted away from the larger stereotypes such as Samoan Culture, American Culture, or any other culture taken as a whole. Now, Anthropologists are less willing to treat the cultural discourses and practices of a group of people as indicative of one underlying cultural logic. They now place the circumstances in a historically and socially situated text or form. The bottom line here is that cultural forms come in many shapes and variety.
Laurie,
ReplyDeleteIt's so interesting to read this post in light of the comment I just made on your last entry. It seems that anthropology has recently begun to require that researchers consider their own positionality with regard to a subject, or a group of people. As you note, historically, anthropologists focused on male activities and assigned those activities values that derived from a western-centric view of the world. Thus, they were constructing rather than describing cultures (and they also paved the way for future interactions with members of those cultures according to the frameworks they had specified/imagined--scary!)
But in the first chapter you point out that these authors, too, don't consider their own role in constructing the culture they study, and they certainly don't situate their own work as being outside the bounds of normal or accepted practice in the Nepali world they were studying.
It's very hard to imagine our own biases, but in pointing others' out, you'd think these authors might take more time to recognize some of their own.
Too true Penny. It is hard to know what their full motivations are at the time of the study. I saw these researchers as trying to change the caste system by forcing women to act outside of their laws - or atleast test the limits of the laws to see how others would react.
ReplyDeleteHi Laurie,
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that the researchers would have had some prior understanding about how the caste system is/was that they would be more sensitive to how they treated the positions of the women they interviewed and would have selected a location that was suitable for all. That this was not considered was disrespectful on the part of the researchers. Was this partly because of the thinking that some or most cultures are male dominated and hold the power? The thought of male dominated cultures usually throws me out of my cultural element because Pueblo culture has roles of equality that benefit all. I think Erin was right when she saw construction going on rather than describing culture.
Laurie,
ReplyDeleteThe shift in anthropology to focus on socially and historically situated analyses of cultural forms and varieties is important to consider, not only in our considerations of language use or development as researchers, but also as educators. For instance, how do teaching practices (and speech acts in the classroom, through curriculum, discipline, testing, etc.) reflect the shifting social and historical situations for our own students? The demographic of the student body is constantly shifting, as are the social structures influencing them inside and outside of the classroom... yet, the paradigms governing schools remain, relatively, the same. How does that influence our own understanding of identity and cultural construction? How does it effect the students?
Interesting book... I can't wait to read more!
Lacy
Laurie,
ReplyDeleteYour review here an interesting about Anthropologists and how they now study culture in his historical and social context. This reminds me of the article we read by Rudea, Gallego and Moll (2000). Though the article deals with a different topic (LRE), however, the authors mentioned that traditional psychology approaches focused on the features that are primarily within the individual when examining competence or incompetence.
Sociocultural theory , on the other hand, focuses on features of basic social organization and the underlying assumptions of a given social context, and considers the effects these might have on the individual participation and competence as well as how the individual transforms the context. What I want to say here is that regardless of the field of research, it seems that there is always a shift from focusing on an individual to broadening to their perspectives to include social and historical factors as in the case of you book here or social as in the example I gave above.
Noha Ghaly
In this chapter, Laurie, I have one question and one comment.
ReplyDeleteQuestion: Are the authors implying that because the anthropologists have traditionally come from colonial powers (I assume they also mean non colonial but cultural, military and imperialistic powers such as the U.S.), there has been an inordinate focus on the activities of men in the study group? I agree the focus was traditionally much more on men than on women—consider Chagnon and the Yanamamo and other well known studies—but is there any evidence that the colonial/imperial cultural origins of the anthropologists CAUSED the focus on men and their activities? Are there other factors at work?
Comment: I am glad to hear that Anthropology has evolved to the point where "anthropologists are less willing to treat the cultural discourses and practices of a group of people as indicative of one underlying cultural logic." This had always bothered me in the past. The Yanamamo this, the Apache that," and so on. But I do think it is important not to take this trend too far. It seems to have served its purpose so far. As long as no regression occurs in the discipline, field researchers will hopefully be vigilant in terms of overgeneralizing from observed cultural practices. But I also think this trend could go too far in the other direction whereby personal identity would supersede cultural identity. Then we would have another dilemma on our hands; the possibility of having impressed upon a culture our cultural value of the supremacy of individualism.
Laurie, Thank you very much for the interesting blog.
ReplyDeleteAs a person who is always interested in knowing more about different cultures and appreciate all social groups, I really like your comment/summary in the last four lines of your blog. You say:
"Now, Anthropologists are less willing to treat the cultural discourses and practices of a group of people as indicative of one underlying cultural logic. They now place the circumstances in a historically and socially situated text or form. The bottom line here is that cultural forms come in many shapes and variety. "
This is not only important for Anthropologists; this is crucial for people in all over the world. I say this because I feel that there is a tendency among many people to over-generalize their judgments on other groups. For example, especially after 9/11, there was a stereotypical kind of overgeneralization, particularly among many New Yorkers, towards Arabs to be terrorists. Similarly, after Iraq had been invaded by the American troops and military forces, many people, especially in the middle east, started to over-generalize their judgment about Americans to be savage…etc. Of course, these overgeneralizations are supported by the mass media. Regardless of my big question about who is going to benefit from all this at the end, I strongly believe that nobody would lose from these overgeneralizations about people's identities except the innocent ordinary people like you and me.
So, my point is that people in all over the world need to be taught that it is not fair to over-generalize their thoughts and beliefs about an identity of a group of people (i.e. Asian) and regard them as general judgments to include all people who come under this label or name without taking into consideration the historical and social differences.
These are some of my thoughts that came to my mind when I read this interesting blog……..Abdullah