Anthropology (catch all)

[marct]

Hi 120mm,

I have to confess that I didn't read the article until now. But I've been down with a virus for the last 5 days and am going stir-crazy, and now that I've read it, my pulse has pegged at least three times.

Well, a least it brought some "excitement". Honestly, when I was researching / writing it, my pulse spiked about 20-30 times. I had to rewrite the final section at least 10 times before calmed down.

After I calmed down, I am reminded of a young Anthropologist who came to live with us in a small midwestern town in the early 90s. She was from upstate "NWYARK", and was studying the small town midwest (nothing like working what you know, eh?). In particular, she was interested in the interaction of the old guys downtown, and spent a lot of time just hanging around them.

let her run on the line for about 3 months before I shattered her little idealistic world. I was working in a Social Work field at the time, which is how she came to us, and one night over supper the conversation turned to her work. She discussed some of what she'd "learned" in her observations, and I let the hammer drop. I merely asked her how she was dealing with contaminating her subject. Long silence and look of confusion. "Contaminating my subject?" she responded. In short, I asked her how she thought that she was actually observing genuine "old man in a midwestern town" behavior, when she was 23, from upstate "Nwyark" and quite beautiful. She had no idea that old men in a small midwestern town might adapt their behavior when in the presence of a young, beautiful woman who was considered by the men to be their social superior AND was there for some ulterior purpose. She also had absolutely no clue about male-female interaction, as she had been thoroughly washed in the PC "men and women are no different" blood.

What always gets me about the "observer effect" is how poorly it is taught and understood. 120, I've seen people who are just like the woman you are describing; all too many of them, and you are absolutely right to tie it back into the PC assumptions that now permeate much of the discipline.

I think a large part of the roots of this problem go back to two culture traits inside much of modern Anthropology: a) a "distaste" (trans. "hatred") of mathematics, and b) a "distaste" (trans. "ignorance" or "politically motivated rejection") of older (pre-1973) Anthropology.

For years, now, the discipline has been importing ideas from physics. Indeed, Malinowski, who I consider to be one of the best Anthropologists of the 20th century, had his first doctorate in natural philosophy (math, physics, etc.). Ever since the mid to late 1960s or so, there was an increasing rejection of mathematical axioms and an increasing reliance on "theological / theoretical axioms". The general popularizations of physics and mathematics were coming into the discipline as opposed to the models which had been written by people who understood the mathematics.

Starting sometime in the 1970's, I think, the concept of Schrödinger's cat starts to appear in the form of "the Observer Effect". The problem is that it appears out of its mathematical context and, often, is applied outside of the theoretical space in which it was created (i.e. the idea that, without direct observation, no exact statement of "reality" can be made but, once observed, the act of observation "creates" that reality by "selecting" one option from a manifold of potential options). In it's original formulation, designed to talk about quantum mechanics, you have to at least theorize an infinity of possible states.

So, now we come to your example of the 23 year old, good looking female Anthropologist. Ideally, she should "know" that she will affect the people she is studying. If absolutely nothing else, there is something very disturbing about the idea of a young, pretty woman not recognizing that she will have an effect on older men (thank you very much radical separatist feminism!). Now, if she had been trained well, or had bothered to study how she influenced people, or if she had bothered to read Malinowski's Appendix G to Coral Gardens and their Magic, she would have realized that she will influence how they react and what they would talk about in her presence. Ideally, if she had followed the older traditions in American Anthropology, she would have been working with a male partner.

You are quite right when you say she was blinded by the "equality of the sexes" axiom. She has confused a transcendent, "ideal" (in the Platonic sense) valuation with a material reality and, from the sounds of it, like many true believers, she confused "Truth" with "reality" and her research would, inevitably, be seriously flawed as a result.

If she is an example of what passes for Anthro today, I wonder just how useful Anthropologists will actually BE for the military.

That is a very good question . So, let me toss an observation back a you in my usual round about way. As with many groups, the military tends to conceive of people outside of their group using stereotypes. This isn't a value statement, it's actually a very pro-survival characteristic (hey, you don't train soldiers to stop and exhaustively analyze every situation rationally, do you? Nope, train for specific mission types and "guide" the "analysis" of a given specific by the ROE). But this type of training encourages stereotypical thinking, and we see this all the time in the search for the stereotyped, "ideal" weapons system.

The current "popularity" of Anthropology with the military as an institution comes out of this mind set: Anthropologists are being "sold" as an "ideal weapons system" based on the idea that you can plug in an Anthropologist (120 volt, DC power source needed) and get actionable intelligence. Take a look at how the Human Terrain Project is described and you will see what I mean.

There is, however, a flawed assumption operating here: Cultural Anthropology is not a "plug and play" discipline by its very nature (that's why I went into all that stuff about verstehen). To make matters even worse, many of the current conditions within the discipline mediate against the proper use of verstehen while maintaining the outward form of participant observation research. In order for it to "work", it must a) be balanced with other types of knowledge and b) the person using it must "know themselves". If either of these additional two criteria are missing, and both have been under attack in the PC theocratic environment, then the results will be seriously flawed. There is one other point to make about these two criteria: they become, in effect, the divisors for choosing Anthropologists to work with the military. Let me expand on this.

What the military "needs", as opposed to what the Human Terrain Project "wants", is Anthropologists who will give them the best research, analysis and interpretation possible even when it conflicts with accepted military wisdom. This means that you are going to have to find Anthropologists who are willing to tell the military people they are working with that they are flat out wrong at times; not exactly the best way to win friends and influence people . It also means that you are going to have to find Anthropologists whose egos can take being told that they are full of Sierra - an equally rare occurrence .

So, to conclude this monograph , let me just say that Anthropologists, as a group, could help the military - I think we have certainly proved that in the past and continue to do so today. But it becomes crucial to consider Anthropologists not as a group, but as individuals.

Marc