As I make my way slowly through Graeber and Wengrow’s marvelous book (I am up to page 347), I am reminded of an experience I had 60 years ago at the University of Chicago. I checked and discovered that I had told the story six years ago on this blog. Since that is a millennium in the blogosphere I will start today’s comment by repeating the story.
In 1961 I left Harvard for an Assistant Professorship at the
University of Chicago, to teach, among other things, in the big required second
year undergraduate survey course on the Social Sciences [thus continuing a
career of teaching things I had never formally studied.] The course
was taught in sections, but several times during the year all of the students
assembled in a big lecture hall for a guest lecture. One day, we
trooped into the hall to hear a report on some research being carried out by a
Professor of Anthropology and his graduate students.
The speaker that day had been leading his students on some
field work in the sub-discipline of Urban Anthropology. They had
been pub crawling the up-scale bars in the part of downtown Chicago known
colloquially as the Near North. Now he was reporting on their
findings, and in one of the most brilliant tours de force I
have ever witnessed, he conceived the idea of straight-facedly recounting
their adventures in the standard jargon used by cultural anthropologists to
describe the "primitive" peoples they have gone off to
investigate. The effect was startling. All of the
students in the lecture hall [and even many of the professors] were quite
familiar with the venues being described, but in the language of cultural anthropology
they were unrecognizable. Without once breaking tone, the lecturer
managed to convey the idea that standard anthropological field reports were
almost certainly distortions of the lived experiences of the
subjects. The men and women of New Guinea would no more recognize
themselves in the journal articles published about them than the students
recognized themselves in the accounts of the bars where they
spent their weekends.
Graeber and Wengrow are, I find, extraordinarily successful
in talking about the people of the countless villages, towns, cities, empires,
and foraging territories whose lives have been recaptured by archaeologists in
the past 50 years or so. Working with the materials excavated by countless
archaeologists – tools, eating utensils, masks, ornaments and jewelry, mud
huts, stone monuments, and all the rest – they imaginatively bring their owners and makers to life
and enable us, the readers, to see them as real people living as much as 5000,
10,000, or 20,000 years ago. Unlike the students at the University of Chicago,
who did not recognize the bars and coffee houses and restaurants they had
actually visited in the descriptions of the graduate students in the
anthropology department, I think that those people, long gone now, might
actually recognize themselves in the accounts given of them by Graeber and Wengrow.
One of the ways in which standard archaeological accounts
can mislead us is by using language that makes it sound as though a culture,
and hence the thoughts and expectations and plans and beliefs of the people
constituting that culture, remain essentially unchanged over periods as long as
1000 years or more. Now if you think about it, it is just plain implausible
that people will get their food, reproduce, go to war, worship, have festivals,
or engage in political debates more or less in the same way for a thousand
years. If they are real people, not
stick figures in an anthropological classificatory system, as time passes they
will argue, speculate about alternatives that might be available to them, try
things out to see whether they work, talk about what it was like in the old
days, and in general behave like people. No sensible person would suppose that
a woman living in Paris in the year 1143 would act and think and hope and fear
and love in exactly the same way as a woman living in Paris in 648 or 1954.
As I have already suggested in previous posts and will try
to summarize when I have finally finished plowing through the book, Graeber and
Wengrow have a quite contemporary political agenda, which they are openly
pushing in this book. But whether you
are sympathetic with the agenda, which as it happens I am, or are opposed to
it, the book is a delightfully lively and detailed account of the doings of
endless groups of people whom I personally had never heard of before I opened its pages.
20 comments:
A review by another philosopher of Graber and Wengrow in The New York Review of Books:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2021/12/16/david-graeber-digging-for-utopia/
Somewhat less enthusiastic about their empirical claims.
Perhaps totally beside the point, but might not the anthropologists be trying to understand things at a different level from the level at which people understand their daily lives?
A parallel? Archers and stone throwers could figure out how to hit distant targets before physicists came along to explain how the laws of motion accounted for the paths projectiles travelled. And to this day people still can hit targets without doing the physics calculations, just as they can ride bicycles without knowing the physics. Yet the physics is still interesting in its own right—and can lead us to understand and do things we couldn’t do before.
Some comfort in the Arbery verdict:
All three defendants guilty of murder.
Would you say that the methodology of Graeber and Wengrow turns on their interest as opposed to disinterest?
To Jerry Fresia:
I don't think you mean "disinterest," which is a virtue in an anthropologist.... ie.e someone who does not allow personal considerations to affect his/her research.
But as the obvious alternative contrast to "interest," do you mean "un-interest" [i.e. lack of interest], which would definitely be a deficiency in one's research?
So, what is your question,Sir? Are you asking whether they are interested in what they do, which is obvious, as opposed to some contrasting stance, yet to be designated?
Actually, I think Jerry means precisely "disinterested" as in dispassionate or "objective." With the point being that perhaps it is precisely because Graeber and Wengrow do *not* feign a (false) "objectivity" that enables them to drive home certain insights less available to others. The pretense of objectivity in the social sciences is just that, a pretense to an unattainable or faux neutrality. Under cover of which, all manner of priors and commitments get a free pass when they are widely shared ("the mainstream" or orthodoxy) but come in for severe scrutiny when not (critics or heterodoxy).
None of this is to say that one should not strive to be as impartial as possible in framing hypotheses, evaluating the evidence, etc. Only that the options are (a) being conscious of one's priors and commitments, or (b) deluded about them. Not not having them.
(Hopefully Jerry will correct me if I have him wrong, in which case apologies.)
Professor Wolff’s story about the University of Chicago anthropologist’s class presentation reminds me of Horace Minor’s “Body Ritual Among the Nacirema,” which was published in a leading scholarly journal several years before the event that RPW relates. You can find it at: American Anthropologist, 1956, 58(3), 503-507. If you haven’t read it, you’ve missed something.
To anonymous....
What does "a false objectivity" even mean?
Are we circling back to the craziness of "post-modernist" epistemology?
Please, say no....
I don't think the meaning of "false objectivity" is intolerably unclear in Anonymous's comments (as opposed to being saddled with philosophical difficulties, like just about anything we say).
If I'm falsely objective, or (in other words) if I believe falsely in my own objectivity, then I have what Anonymous calls "priors and commitments," while also denying that I have them - this denial representing a false belief on my part (at least according to Anonymous). A few thoughts on this -
It would seem at least very challenging (if not impossible) to coherently maintain the view that our sense of objectivity is always false. It's hard not to picture the advocate of this view wishing to persuade critics that it's a product of objective reasoning, that it's true, rational to believe, etc. Doing so would seem self-defeating; depriving oneself of the claim to objectivity would mean depriving oneself of the claim to have justified, true belief.
That said, it also seems clearly wrong (even meaningless) to suppose that our beliefs are not shaped in some way by the non-rational idiosyncrasies of our perspectives - e.g., our desires/interests, our unconscious/unchallenged assumptions, our vantage points in space and time. At least, this is the point I think people are driving at when they mockingly use such expressions as "God's-eye-view."
We obviously can't leap out of our own skulls to compare our beliefs against some external reality, subsisting independently of how things seem to us. But at the same time, some beliefs are obviously "better" than others. I'm not sure that anyone really denies these points, or has a good way of reconciling them (besides simply dropping it and "changing the subject," as Rorty recommends).
David,
I think the distinction I am making between "interest" and "disinterest" is correct.
Are we not taught that a proper scholar ought to be DISINTERESTED in his/her work? Yet Graeber and Wengrow, given the Professor's summary, seem to be less "disinterested" than "interested," if as the Professor reports, they have an "agenda."
Further, and again relying on the Professor, the achievement here seems to be based not on the scholar who observes somewhat distantly, holding feelings and emotions in abeyance, but rather on the scholar who somehow is immersed, virtually as an actor with interest, into the lives, self-understandings, feelings - and seemingly in a kind of language, which I would have thought to be impossible, even metaphorically.
The achievement seems to be not only a better anthropology, but a paradigm shift in methodology.
Am I clear, David? Or confused?
Exactly right, Jerry.
I take your point, Jerry.
Surely Graeber and Wengrow aren't the first anthropologists to be "interested" in the sense of the word as it's used here.
(Btw I wouldn't be too surprised if there were a whole association of radical anthropologists, just as for instance there is, or used to be, something called the Union of Radical Political Economists [URPE].)
There is even a Radical Anthropology Group journal.
http://radicalanthropologygroup.org/rag-journal-archive
Whenever you have a good idea, you can be sure that somebody's already been there.
Perhaps a bit pedantic, but I doubt that All of the students in the lecture hall [largely 2nd year undergraduates, elsewhere referred to colloquially as sophomores ] [and even many of the professors] were quite familiar with the venues being described,
I came to UC as an undergraduate more than a decade later than Prof. Wolff began his career there. At that time, the Illinois drinking age was 19 for beer and wine, 21 for spirits (according to Wikipedia, also see here, in 1961 the drinking age was raised for women from 18 to the same as as that of men, 21). So as a legal matter, most 2nd year students, esp. at UC, were not legally allowed into these places.
Furthermore, getting to the near north side was quite inconvenient. At least when I was there, few undergraduates had cars, so that was not an option. Public transportation from Hyde Park to the rest of the city was not good. The Illinois Central Train line's northern terminus was about a 30 minute walk south of the near north side. The L has never run to Hyde Park and getting to one required a bus ride through neighborhoods that were even rougher -- poorer and Blacker -- than Hyde Park.
When I was there, it was even occasionally dicey just transferring between the bus and the L station. One evening on my way home from visiting my aunt, an African American token-agent at the Garfield station told me that I would have to call the police for a ride to avoid gettin mugged when I stepped out of the station to catch the bus 15 feet away; the enhanced penalties for crime on the L or in L stations was apparently a sufficient deterrent for the group of teenagers on the other side of the station's doors.
If the early 60s were anything like the mid-70s, Jimmies was the main option, with the Tiki and the Eagle, less student-weloming venues, as the primary fall-backs.
The lack of recognition may have been due to other, more local, factors than the anthropological jargon and framework.
Professor Robert, thank you for the sharing of your ideas and for your lectures, I owe you so much, lots of love, your online student from Egypt!
a classic piece of anthropology spoofing
A couple of fun, humorous reads in the same spirit of anthropological reversal:
Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour by Kate Fox (2004)
and
Talk to the Snail: Ten Commandments for Understanding the French by Stephen Clarke (2006)
Dining at high table with an elderly colleague, I listened to his grumbles about the outlandish clothing of young people. Then I intervened to say that I had seen young people with bits of black cloth hanging from their shoulders. My colleague said that he was ready to believe, although he had never seen such black bits of cloth himself. This was while both of us, like all others dining, we in our academic gowns, and so had bits of black cloth hanging from our shoulders.
Dining at high table with an elderly colleague, I listened to his grumbles about the outlandish clothing of young people. Then I intervened to say that I had seen young people with bits of black cloth hanging from their shoulders. My colleague said that he was ready to believe me, although he had never seen such black bits of cloth himself. This was while both of us, like all others dining, were in our academic gowns, and so had bits of black cloth hanging from our shoulders.
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