Archive for December, 2010

Women’s Voices: Their Critique of the Anthropology of Japan
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 19: 17-37 (Volume publication date October 1990)
Mariko Asano Tamanoi
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

During law school, we law students were regularly encouraged to “think like lawyers,” and I feel I know what that is and what it means.  At this point in my anthropology readings I’m starting to wonder what it would mean to “think like an anthropologist.”  How would an anthropologist view a scene differently than, say, a sociologist or psychologist; there’s so much overlap with and borrowing from those two fields.  I’m not completely clueless, but I have no where near the grasp that I do with regard to lawyering.  I think this question comes to me more strongly given that the regional studies concern themselves more than others with discussions of “what” and “how” anthropologists study.

In her discussion of “Women and Family” Tamanoi contrasts sociological studies with anthropological ones.  I wondered whether her conclusions were part of a broader commentary on how anthropology differs from sociology or whether they were more specific to the groups of studies discussed.  Are there clues to how to think like an anthropologists?  She writes that while both emphasized the power of Japanese women (particularly in the domestic sphere), anthropologists paid closer attention to the way women spoke and how they spoke about being female:  ”And since ethnographers pay specific attention to the very language these women speak, the informants’ voices emerge more clearly:  They are not spoken for, they speak.”  She notes that the sociological studies consisted primarily of studies by American female sociologists who conducted fieldwork among urban middle-class housewives; the anthropologists had a broader range of informants.

Is Tamanoi saying that anthropologists are less ethnocentric than sociologists?  Is she saying that anthropologists are more likely than sociologists to use methods that mitigate ethnocentricism?

Directions in the Anthropology of Contemporary Japan
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 20: 395-431 (Volume publication date October 1991)
William W. Kelly
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

Kelly writes separately of Shinto and ancestor worship.  My memory from elementary school is that I was taught that the two were almost synonymous.  W. G. Aston writes that this error of belief came about due to statements by Captain Francis Brinkley, and quotes Brinkley as saying, “Ancestor worship is the basis of Shinto.”  I didn’t have access to Aston’s whole article…sigh.  When I wrote on Monday that Kelly noted some things about Shinto that helped me better understand the connection I felt when first learning of Shinto, what I really should have said was that Kelly noted some things about ancestor worship.  Here’s what he wrote:

[Ancestor worship] expresses a concept of a life continuum in which the household comprises a circulation through, and mutually dependent relationships among, the yet-unborn, the recently born, the “fully” living, the recently deceased, and the long departed (252).

Kelly goes on to say that the term “ancestor worship” is doubly misleading as the practice is not limited to direct ancestors and worship does not give proper attention to the notion that “the living and deceased are linked in reciprocal flows of assistance and dependence.”  The “concept of a life continuum” as described above was very much alive in the rural Mississippi town of my childhood.  Recently, I’ve been thinking more specifically on the way my family life encouraged a connection with the “yet-unborn.”

Speaking with friends and acquaintances with very young children, I’ve made casual notice of the increasing level of parent-to-child attachment from birth.  It appears takes many people at least a couple years to reach the level of attachment that seemed present at birth in my extended family.  I had a nickname before I was born; this was common practice.  At the earliest stages of womb implantation, the anthropomorphizing of the fetus began.  The fetus was talked to and talked on behalf of in full baby-speak.  There were full-on, two-way conversations.  For example, if my pregnant aunt were eating, she might say in baby-speak, “Ooh, Mama, I like that food!”  Someone might respond (to the fetus), “Do you really?  I’m gonna get more of that for your Mama.”  Or, if she were sewing something or shopping for something in anticipation of the birth, she might ask the opinion of the fetus.  The interactions were plentiful and, perhaps, more robust than my examples.  And while fetus-speak might originate with the mother speaking “the mind” of the fetus, others would start to do so more and more as time went on.

The recently deceased were talked about as being present in guiding what a person might say or guiding a person to a beneficial opportunity.  A long-deceased person might be present in the fact that a tree grew in a odd way, maybe leaning to one side in similar fashion to the deceased person.  Both the recently deceased and long deceased might help with acquainting the fetus with family life and the like.

I haven’t read enough about ancestor worship in Japan to have a clear idea of whether the things I remember about the “life continuum” from my hometown are similar to how that concept is expressed in Japan.  I look forward to fleshing this out more.

Directions in the Anthropology of Contemporary Japan
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 20: 395-431 (Volume publication date October 1991)
William W. Kelly
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

With reading “Directions in the Anthropology of Contemporary Japan,” I felt like I reached the goal I set back at the beginning of November of having the level of comprehension from my first read-through that I only got after a second read-through at that time.  The change came faster and more suddenly than I had expected.  I noticed a marked improvement several weeks ago, but it has taken me a little while to settle into the change.  With this review it hit me that I was once again reading in groups of words; I was seeing the written page differently.  I hadn’t noticed that I hadn’t been doing that until I started doing it again.  I think back to the feeling of mental motion sickness while reading, and of how I seemed to have vocabulary stored in my mind that I couldn’t easily access consciously; and I believe the fact that I was reading word by word played a big part since vocabulary is best learned and understood in context.  It was as if I was breaking apart sentences and attempting to reconstruct them when I saw a period.

I experienced a higher occurrence of that phenomenon where common words all of a sudden seemed very strange.  I would see a word like “door” and stop to wonder whether that were really the word for that thing.  I would mouth the word and say it out loud; and it felt strange and it sounded strange.  Maybe this is what comes from seeing words stripped of context whether it’s because the word is actually standing alone or because I’ve parsed out the word in my mind.

I remember back in elementary school when a kid had trouble reading, he would sometimes use a straight-edge to underline the sentence he was currently reading and to partially block off the rest of the page.  Perhaps having this image in mind led me to think on some level that reading in smaller bits was the way to go when rebuilding reading comprehension.  If I had said to myself, “Hey, stop reading in little bits,” would I have been able to do that… or is it that reading in small bits first is just how you learn and relearn to read.

I’ll say more about the actual content of “Directions in the Anthropology of Contemporary Japan” later in the week.  Some of the things Kelly had to say about  Shintoism clarified for me why I felt such a connection to Shintoism when I first learned about it in elementary school.

Small Facts and Large Issues: The Anthropology of Contemporary Scandinavian Society
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 18: 71-93 (Volume publication date October 1989)
M Gullestad
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

“Small Facts and Large Issues:  The Anthropology of Contemporary Scandinavian Society” is a good start on the type of cross-culturalism that I had hoped to infuse into my self-study of anthropology. Marienne Gullestad begins the review with talk of the need for more cross-cultural studies, more specifically the need for Americans and Europeans to study their own cultures in similar fashion to how they have studied “other” cultures, and the need to look more at how anthropologists and social scientists in those “other” cultures view them and themselves.  Perhaps this would be the path to creating something better that just an understanding that exotic is a relative concept?  Horace Miner’s “Body Ritual of the Nacirema” comes to mind.  I remember a similar discussion of “us” versus the “other” from “Anthropologists View American Culture.” I didn’t get a chance to revisit that review, but I hope to do so as there were several similar discussions.

Comparing the discussions of what anthropologists study when they study “at home,” I again was left with the sense that Scandinavians are less nationalistic than other Europeans and Americans.  When Gullestad discussed community studies versus national studies, I was left with a sense that community studies or other types of studying-part(s)-to-understand-the-whole studies had a wider margin of preference in Scandinavian culture studies than in American ones.  I first got a glimpse of this reduced nationalism when reading the blog of Norwegian anthropologist Cicilie Fagerlid living in France and noting how proclamations of French nationalism stood out to her.

Gullestad also discusses how it may be that Scandinavians view “equality” as “sameness” and how having this view is not necessarily at odds with valuing individualism.  I was much reminded of that same discussion from “Anthropologists View American Culture” and how that informed my thinking of what it means to be “post-racial” in the United States.   Edited to add:  Looking  more specifically at how New York Times Columnist Matt Bai seemed to define post-racial–the idea that as long as there is the appearance of the same religion, style of name (in that case Anglicized), social views, etc.,  then differences in skin color or ethnicity wouldn’t matter so much–Gullestad seemed to echo the same:

The Norwegian egalitarian tradition involves not necessarily actual sameness but ways of under-communicating difference during social encounters… In their personal lives, Norwegian men and women like to “fit in with” friends, neighbors, and relatives.  Two people define each other as alike by being accessible to each other.  Inaccessibility, on the other hand, is a sign of perceived dissimilarity.  Social boundaries between classes and groups do not disappear but become subtler and more hidden through graded distancing and avoidance.

Picking up on the idea of being more hidden and “graded distancing and avoidance”… this is similar to Matt Bai’s assertion that when minority political candidates in the US downplay their ethnic backgrounds to be more accessible, they may, in the end, also be less knowable.  Ethnic distinctions don’t go away; they are downplayed. All and all, there’s a lot to go back and compare and contrast.

Apart from the similarities, I was happily introduced to names I don’t remember hearing before this.  And who knew one could write a review of anthropological literature without once mentioning the name “Franz Boas.”  I took particular notice of Gullestad’s discussion of the work of Thomas Højrup.  Gullestad’s summary follows:

Højrup sees society as composed of a number of contrasting “life-modes” that cannot be defined independently of each other.  The three main types are the self-employed, the ordinary wage-worker, and the career oriented life-modes.  A fourth type, the bourgeois life-mode, is not analyzed.  These life-modes are fundamentally different in terms of their place in the economic and political structure, and each has its own outlook on life.  Their interrelationship is one of opposition, competition, and mutual misinterpretation.

Google books has a preview of Højrup’s book, “State, Culture, and Life-Modes: The Foundations of Life-Mode Analysis.”  Or if you prefer the book in Danish, Google has a preview of that, too.  Gullestad gave enough of an introduction and critique to pique my interest.  I’ve added the title to a list.

A couple weeks ago I decided to include more regional studies in my selection of articles in an effort to increase the cross-cultural content in my year of self-study in anthropology.  With that in mind, I chose mostly regional reviews for my next five articles.  Some of them are written by anthropologists who grew up in the region discussed, not that that necessarily makes a difference.

Small Facts and Large Issues:  The Anthropology of Contemporary Scandinavian Society
Regional Anthropology
Marianne Gulestad
1989

Directions in the Anthropology of Contemporary Japan
Regional Anthropology
William W. Kelly
1991

Women’s Voices: Their Critique of the Anthropology of Japan
Regional Anthropology
Mariko Asano Tamanoi
1990

Japanese Sociolinguistics
Linguistics
J S Shibamoto
1987

The Caribbean Region:  An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory
Regional Anthropology
Michel-Rolph Trouillot
1992

Professional Responsibility in Public Archaeology
Annual Review of Anthropology
Vol. 12: 143-164 (Volume publication date October 1983)
T F King
In lieu of an abstract, the publisher reproduces the first page of the article. (Link)

A couple years ago I took an archaeological fieldwork class for which the site was located in a federal park.  Reading  “Professional Responsibility in Public Archaeology,” I was left with an even greater appreciation of the outstanding job the fieldwork professor did as far as creating awareness of and stimulating depth of thought about ethical concerns in public archaeology.  And he managed to do this without at all dampening the excitement of getting to dig and sift and catologue and record.  Looking back, I’m amazed at the smooth, seamless integration of classroom lectures, firsthand accounts of experiences in public archaeology and personal conduct during the course of the class; there was a truly holistic experience of an on-the-job course in responsibilities in public archaeology.  My mind had been thoroughly engaged regarding all the issues Thomas King discusses in “Professional Responsibility in Public Archaeology.”

King organizes his discussion along the lines of asking to whom the archaeologist is responsible.  He states that the lack of consensus regarding ethical concerns is generally based on disagreements over the object(s) of responsibility.  He describes six objects:

1. The Resource Base: responsibility to archaeological sites.
2. Companions-in-Arms: responsibility to colleagues.
3. Research: responsibility to the advance of scholarship.
4. Clients: responsibility to those who pay the tab.
5. The Law: responsibility to legal and contractual obligations.
6. The Living: responsibility to nonarchaeologists with interests in archaeological sites or data.

King says that some archaeologists become “true believers” in a particular object.  I started to think about my own experience in the field class and wonder which object was supreme in my mind.  Briefly speaking….

With consideration to (1) The Resource Base, decisions about where to excavate during my field class involved discussions about where the most gain could be had with the least destruction to what could be valuable data.  Given the excavation methods and techniques available, excavation in area A seemed productive whereas it might be best to leave area B unexcavated with the thought that the future might bring better excavation techniques that result in greater data recovery with less destruction.  It’s one thing to hear this discussion and it’s another to witness the self-restraint involved in making a decision to preserve a site.  As regards (2) Companions-in-Arms, other archaeologists who had worked in the area were brought in to guest lecture.  A walk-through of a site with an archaeologist who has different interests and different areas of expertise was such a good lesson in how data can have varying levels of significance depending on the research design.  With (3) Research, the importance of keeping good records that followed industry standards for the benefit of other scholars was emphasized.  For (4) Clients, personal accounts of working with a wide variety of public archaeology clients gave perspective to the more sheltered experience of working in a federal park.  For (5) The Law, classroom discussion of laws were reinforced with fieldwork examples of situations in which those laws came into play such as when there was a need to determine whether bone found at the site were human remains.  For (6) The Living, the professor was great at talking to people who wandered by to ask questions; he told personal stories that showed a respect for the concerns of living people with a “cultural and genetic connection,” as King puts it, to the site.

Well, that’s quite fast and incomplete, but the experience in the class gave me a lot to think about when reading King’s article.