An attempt to learn more...

After our discussions on ethnography and its value as a scientific method (yes, no quotation marks. I will be using the term science as ‘a quest to expand human knowledge’. And, yes, the definition is primarily based on my interpretation of social sciences and my reasons for pursuing a PhD.) and my ‘mild’ comments about the issue, I decided to read Geertz’s “Local Knowledge”. My initial aim was to learn more about ethnographical studies. Maybe, my reactions were caused by my lack of understanding. Also, a week without a reading? Come on, is that even possible? What is next? A day without any meetings? (Plus, Albuquerque is practically a desert town of drive-thru fast food restaurants). Here is my reaction and also my short notes from the book.

I have to admit that Geertz’s argumentative style seems to be better than any other author I read so far. Yet, I still find it difficult to comprehend the added value of immersion-based studies. Here, I am not arguing for large-N studies. I support small-N, and single-case studies – provided that such studies have a different aim rather than describing their case(s).

I believe my issues with ethnography can be categorized under three headings:

1- Assumptions about science: What does science do? What does a scientist do? Geertz claims that the age of finding out the dynamics of collective life and altering them in desired directions has passed. But if I am not to understand and systematically analyze what is going on, why am I calling myself a social scientist?

I have a background in sociology. Our biggest problem was to differentiate what we do as social scientists from humanities. We should not simply make statements about human conditions. We study social phenomena, we try to understand the dynamics and if necessary find ways to alter (or maybe manipulate?) them.

I do not want to say that the information/knowledge we get from humanities/ethnographic studies is unimportant – it is just different. We need to draw a line between scholarly attempts to increase human knowledge and to interpret events in a given framework.

2- Assumptions about knowledge: Can we have categories to analyze social phenomenon? Or are talking about a huge block of information that can be only understood through interpretation? (Especially, when we think about the fear of relativism as an academic neurosis, what is knowledge?)

Now, the role of interpretation is undoubtedly important. So, at the end of the day we will rely on the observations and interpretation of the researcher. However, I strongly believe that researchers should make use of theories and prior works in their field (or similar fields) in order to come up with categories. In other words, when I am observing group A to understand social phenomenon S; I should be able to say, S is the aggregation of B,C,D,E and B can be B1, B2,B3 etc.

3- Assumptions about human natures: Well, humans are humans. Environment changes but we do act in similar ways under certain conditions. Therefore, I believe we should look at either (i) general patterns of behavior or (ii) the relation between these certain conditions and the changes in the patterns of behavior.

I just want to end my list of issues with something Geertz says, on p. 5: “All the essays below are ethnographically informed (or, God knows, misinformed)”.

One quick disclaimer – I believe I should have first read The Interpretation of Cultures to better understand his ideas. But here are my short notes:

Introduction

One important term: hermeneutics: the understanding of understanding. Geertz work on culture fits this term. Instead of trying to explain social phenomena “by weaving them into textures of cause and effect, he tries to explain them “by placing them in local frames” (p.6)

Essay form is the most convenient form because one has to be flexible in writing ethnographic works.

Culture explainers can do ‘translations’ for us. (Translation: “displaying the logic of their ways of putting things in the locutions of ours” p.10)

Overinterpretation and underinterpretation are similar two type-one and type-two errors in statistics.

Chapter 1: Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought

The boundaries between different inquiry techniques in social thinking seem to get more blurry.

p.21 “It is even more difficult than it always has been to regard [social sciences] as underdeveloped natural sciences… [S]ocial…scientists have become free to shape their work in terms of its necessities rather than according to received ideas as to what they ought or ought not to be doing”.

With the recent changes, society is represented less of an elaborate machine or a quasi-organism and more as a serious game, a sidewalk drama, or a behavioral text p.23

Different ‘analogies’ for social life: game, drama, text (looking at ludic, dramatistic, and textualist idioms). And then we have more social, discursive understandings. This change is about what it is we want to know, rather than what is knowledge. He claims that the age of ‘finding out the dynamics of collective life and altering them in desired directions’ has passed.

Chapter 2: Found in Translation: On the Social History of the Moral Imagination

Anthropologists need to provide the reader with the general framework of their writings.

“Life is translation, and we are all lost in it” p.44, from James Merill

We can never understand another person’s imagination.

p.48 The application of critical categories to social events and social categories to symbolic structures…is the proper method for a study dedicated to getting straight how the massive fact of cultural and historical particularity comports with the equally massive fact of cross-cultural and cross-historical accessibility.

Chapter 3: From the Native’s Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding

p.58 The ethnographer does not/cannot perceive what his informants perceive.

Geertz tried to understand how the people who live in the region define themselves as persons.

p.67 The social contextualization of persons is pervasive and, in its curiously unmethodological way, systematic. ( I guess this shows the importance of native’s point? –es )

Common sense: informal annotation of everyday experience.

Chapter 4: Common Sense as a Cultural System

p. 84 – Common sense is not what the mind cleared of cant spontaneously apprehends, it is what the mind filled with presuppositions concludes.

Therefore we need to move away from functionalist approaches to interpretevist ones.

Chapter 5: Art as a Cultural System

The cultural significance of art subjects is always a local matter.

p. 109, A theory of art is…at the same time a theory of culture, not an autonomous enterprise.

(The Islam-poetry example is interesting)

p.119 Art doesn’t appeal to a universal beauty.

p.120 “Semiotics must move beyond the consideration of signs as mean of communication, code to be deciphered, to a consideration of them as modes of thought, idiom to be interpreted.

Chapter 6: Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power

Charisma – cultural or psychological?

The continuation of ‘inner necessities’ for authority.

p.146 “the inherent sacredness of central authority” (I’m a little bit confused, do we have ‘inherent’ aspects of social life? –es)

Chapter 7: The Way We Think Now: Toward an Ethnography of Modern Thought

You shouldn’t interpret cultural materials as individual expressions, they are social institutions.

! The fear of relativism: p.153 an academic neurosis.

p. 156 Three methodological themes: the use convergent data, the explication of linguistic classifications, and the examination of the life cycle.

Convergent data: descriptions, measures, observations

- turning what looks like a mere collection of heterogeneous material into a mutually reinforcing network of social understandings.

Linguistic: focus on key terms to light up a whole way of going at the world.

Life cycle: passage rites, sex/age roles, intergenerational bonds.

! Obsession with enormous multiplicity

Chapter 8: Local Knowledge: Fact and Law in Comparative Perspective

Facts are normative.

Relativity as a flow of moral occurrence p.193

The world is a various place.