tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post922069461855038718..comments2024-03-29T03:19:09.227-04:00Comments on The Philosopher's Stone: A REPLY TO S. WALLERSTEINRobert Paul Wolffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11970360952872431856noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-40319778636300754312016-02-08T14:19:50.254-05:002016-02-08T14:19:50.254-05:00In response to Mr. Wallerstein: If the task of th...In response to Mr. Wallerstein: If the task of the anthropologist (unlike, say, the political activist) is to describe what life is like in the world of capitalists, then their understanding of themselves as job-creators trumps our (or workers') understanding of them as exploiters. (The analogy isn't quite on target, though, as capitalists, unlike Zhu, are not a self-contained society, but rather a sub-tribe of a larger society in which other members of that society do see them as exploiters.)<br /><br />In response to Bob's response: My wife Eloise teaches nursing administration at NYU, and much of her work is talking about understanding the world of the patient. I've learned more about phenomenology from her than I ever did in school. From the patient's point of view, it often makes a great deal of difference whether the clinician is able to get inside the patient's world or merely sees him as a stage four carcinoma, or whatever. It even makes a difference to the physician's supposed goal: well-being. The nurse's distinctive role is to treat illness, rather than disease, and to do that, he or she has to be able to discern what is important in the world of the patient. (E.g., the impact on his family may be more important to him than the surgery, so simply doing the surgery is not necessarily going to maximize his well-being.) <br />Tom Cathcarthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16136970056480275148noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-69396766609472009132016-02-08T13:45:56.286-05:002016-02-08T13:45:56.286-05:00Dr. Wolff,
I agree with you that any full descrip...Dr. Wolff,<br /><br />I agree with you that any full description of people should include their own self-description or their self-understanding, even if it's a misunderstanding.<br /><br />However, I don't see why that description must include those self-understandings in a way that is comprehensible to the self being described. <br /><br />I have never read or studied any ethnography or anthropology, so I'll take my examples from contemporary social life in capitalist society.<br /><br />Let's take a group of capitalists who see themselves as "job-creators", while we see them as capitalists, exploiters of the working class, destroyers of the environment and the dominant and hegemonic elite in our society. They genuinely see themselves as job-creators and insist on it: they are blind to the fact that they exploit the working class just as the capitalists that you mentioned in one of your first lectures who listened to Mitt Romney were blind to the fact that the "help" were conscious subjects who were capable of understanding the political implications of Romney's discourse and of warning the general electorate of them. <br />They literally do not understand that they exploit the working class. Thus, my description of their self-description is not comprehensible to them.<br /><br />The same problem might arise if we find someone who is exploited or oppressed or dominated, but who considers what we see as their exploitation or oppression or being dominated as "natural" or as "God's plan" or as "fate" or "as the way thing will always be", etc. <br /><br /> <br /> s. wallersteinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17448905469871566228noreply@blogger.com