A matter of interpretation

The poststructural stereotype of structuralism, or modernism, was that the latter presumed certainty and correctness, that it was the right way to know and interpret the world.

The reciprocal stereotype of postmodernism is any view is as good as another.

These are extremes, of course. Neither structuralism nor poststructuralism is or ever was monolithic. Both are more complex than their critics like to admit. Still, stereotypes linger and inform arguments.

William H. Gass, in a review of essays by the noted literary scholar M.H. Abrams (and Gass’s former professor), characterizes the poststructural critique of literary theory in just this way: anything goes.

“But suppose,” Gass writes, “as has been proposed by followers of Jacques Derrida, there is no right reading of the work, no correct sense for it. Out of a cage of calculations, suppose we are free to choose the pigeon we like best.”

Perhaps that is the way it goes in the literary world (though I doubt even there you get to pick your pigeons). But these arguments needn’t always retreat to the corners.

The poststructural turn grew out of (or was at least cognate with) anthropology’s idea of cultural relativity. This assertion is a matter of interpretation. But it makes sense historically.

Contact with other societies over the 19^th and 20^th centuries (coupled with misgivings about slavery and colonialism) eroded the West’s confidence that it had things right, had a privileged view of others, let alone humanity.

A gross extension of this uncertainty is there is no better view: one pigeon is as good as another.

But that’s a leap: it’s one thing to say the culture of my family has nothing privileged to say about your family, quite another to say that the culture of your family has no privileged platform from which to think about itself.

One family may eat food with silverware; another with hands. The fact that these practices are relative to respective families does not mean there is no right way to eat, just that their views about each other must be taken with a grain of salt.

This might smell like I’m saying that a culture critique may only be mounted from within. That may be so. But I’m not making that argument.

I’m suggesting that the challenge to modernism of cultural relativity was more specific than general: a European could not hope to understand an African from a European perspective alone.

That doesn’t mean any view goes, or that there is no basis from which to interpret and evaluate cultural forms (such as literary texts). It’s only to say that a person from one culture is likely to get another culture wrong if she relies on her own cultural resources alone. It is does not deny the possibility that there are better and worse interpretations.

There is, in other words, a middle view between a) modern certainty and b) postmodern uncertainty.

One can make better or worse interpretations from premises, and perhaps complex and nuanced variations with other premises, and that a critical “post” modern perspective is not "anything goes" but that "it depends" on the premises, it depends on perspective. Each interpretation is a function of its location relative to what is being interpreted.

Derrida’s project was not to say anything goes. If that was all, why would he have bothered to say anything? His aim as I see it was to expose the reality of multiple possible interpretations, to open up the possibility of richer, more nuanced readings. This is something I think Gass would applaud.

Indeed, Gass once did in a great essay called “In terms of the toenail: fiction and the figures of life.” Here he spoke of the power of metaphor to model (and interpret) the world. Metaphors matter. Perspectives matter. Some metaphors work better than others. We make choices; our choices matter.

In the Jones family they eat with their hands, in the Smith family, with a fork.

It’s not “anything goes.” It is a matter of tradition, presumption, culture, point of view.

The texture of things

As I get older

It is the texture

Of things that matters

The rub of wind

On my cheeks

The feel of a pencil

Between fingers

The tongue of bitter coffee

These once trivial

Facts I comprehend

While the politics

Of idealism

Theories of aspiration

Are inconsequential

As a recipe.

A matter of orientation

This morning, while I was sitting against the wall, a mosquito began to buzz my ears. I let it be, and it went away.

Then I heard it buzzing my coffee cup which rested on the desk nearby. The cup was warm from the coffee I’d just finished before starting my meditation. I suspect it was warmer than I, for I think it was the cup’s warmth that drew the mosquito away from my ears. I made this hypothesis quickly and returned my attention to the wall.

Then I corrected myself, for to ignore the mosquito and face the wall then was, in a sense, a failure to be present. The mosquito was here, resting on my cup, and I had not really observed it.

So I quietly lifted my reading glasses from beside the cup on the desk, put them on, and watched the mosquito. The mosquito landed on the outer wall of the cup, its front legs splayed out before it like the curved runnels of an old sleigh. Finding nothing to bite it hovered and landed again. For a few moments it probed the porcelain surface of the cup with its stiletto proboscis, and eventually finding no pore, lifted off. In a moment it was buzzing again around my ear.

The experience got me thinking afterwards about my habit of making quick assessments and moving on – I rarely really observe anything but glance, quickly “figure out” what is there, what is going on, and then turn my glance upon the next thing.

Of course, I prefer close observation, to stop myself and see – study  – what is there rather than to see briefly, noticing only what I expect.

Not that I observed the mosquito all that well. The room was dimly lit in the morning dark by a single bulb the other side of the desk. But I’m glad to have looked again at the mosquito, for I did notice that it wasn’t simply a little slit of gray wings resting on the side of the cup, but that it had the hunched head and shoulders of a microscopic stork and the front legs of a winter sleigh, and I wouldn't have noticed those features if I’d relied simply on memory, the prototype of a mosquito I had carried around in my head.

I read the following passage from Shunryu Suzuki. He was quoting the Zen master Tozan: “The blue mountain is the father of the white cloud. The white cloud is the son of the blue mountain. All day long they depend on each other without being dependent on each other. The white cloud is always the white cloud. The blue mountain is always the blue mountain.”

This passage reminded me of a poem by Dogen:

All my life false and real, right and wrong tangled.

Playing with the moon, ridiculing wind, listening to birds…

Many years wasted seeing the mountain covered with snow.

This winter I suddenly realize snow makes a mountain.

The Tozan quote helped me make new sense of the Dogen poem, the idea of both independence and dependence, that the mountain depends on the snow, just as the snow depends on the mountain, and that a snowy mountain is made by snow just as much as it is made by mountain.

I suppose the self is a parallel case – being utterly dependent on everything in its sphere (and all spheres beyond), and yet distinct, itself. The self is and is not. It is independent and dependent. It is distinct as a wave in water: we can point at a wave and understand its being in a sense separate from the water generally and yet also know that it is not separate from the water at all but part of it. Likewise, we can speak meaningfully of a self, and act accordingly. We do it all the time. We must do it or perish. Even so we are simply separate waves emerging for a time upon an ocean of water only to slip back into it eventually.

The contrasts between dependence and independence, mountain and cloud, snow and mountain, self and not-self serve to orient us. They are, like many of the oppositions we decorate our lives with, useful distinctions, good (albeit distracting) to think.

They are like the contrasting white and black keys on a piano. There is nothing in the color of the keys that is essential to the sounds they make. There is nothing about the contrast that is essential.

Except for one thing: the contrast, the difference – or rather the différance of Jacque Derrida – the contrast orients the player’s hands to the keyboard.

This matter of orientation is the key thing, and returning to the idea of the self, is the deciding difference: the idea of a separate self orients us vis-à-vis the rest, the not-self, but does not exist in itself any more than the contrasting keys of a keyboard exist in the sounds that they make. The idea of the self (as the “idea,” the contrast, the différance between the keys) is orientational, helps us make the next move.

Hurt hawks

I am drawn to hawks. A sighting makes my day. So when crows mob a hawk, and crows hereabouts are never far behind a hawk, I sympathize with the raptor. What do crows have against hawks?

Perhaps the scene reminds me of old playground dramas of insiders ganging up on one or two of us outsiders.

The other day, in a breezeway amid the athletic buildings on campus, I heard the familiar “scree” of a red-tailed hawk, looked up, saw one. And then another. A mating pair perhaps, or courting.

Then a swoop of crows. And my heart hardened – until I saw one of the hawks lift off the roof with a baby crow in its talons.

Suddenly I understood why crows are so murderous of hawks.

Even so, my sympathy for the crow family hardly diminished my admiration for the hawks and their “... old implacable arrogance.”

They are a kind of royalty, and even as we despise kings, we do look on them with envy and pride.

Why anthropology?

There’s a telling scene in last week’s Times Magazine story on Napoleon Chagnon.

The anthropologist, having thrown in with a politically corrupt Venezuelan foundation to gain access to the Yanomami Indians, has been tossed out on his ear.

But Chagnon is unrepentant: “I got a year’s worth of data,” he said. “It was worth it for that reason.”

In the swirl of debate over the publication of his latest book, Noble Savages, which refers in equal measure to the Yanomami and his critics, the question that’s been missed is Why anthropology?

What might an answer to that question tell us about how to do anthropology?

The debate over Chagnon himself will never be resolved. The Yanomami love a fight. So does their chronicler. No doubt Chagnon is pleased with all the attention.

The arguments about him turn on matters of fact, which are now too cold to prove, or matters of principle, such as between positivism and interpretivism, which divide the discipline more deeply than Chagnon himself.

They are, in my view, beside the point.

I didn’t get into anthropology to learn about uncontacted people living in a state of nature (as the naïve Nicolas Wade fantasized in the Science Times). Uncontacted people don’t exist. If they did, they wouldn’t be interesting.

Human beings are interesting not for what they are in some pristine, static, or removed sense, but for what they do with other human beings. The Yanomami aren’t interesting because they represent original humanity. They are interesting for how they understand and manage their affairs with each other and their neighbors.

They are interesting – that is, they are human – for how they solve the problem of their humanity.

I am suspicious of the impulse to study so-called “uncontacted” people. They are trees falling alone in the wood without anyone to hear them. Anyway, they are lost, like Vladimir Nabokov’s butterflies, in our encounter with them. They are logical impossibilities.

I am just as suspicious of the impulse to extract knowledge from other people, whether it is pharmacological or textual, just to learn what the other knows.

That model of knowing assumes that knowledge is content, that others have something, and we want it, too. It is a naïve and exploitative understanding of knowledge.

I’d rather think of knowledge as a process, an encounter with the world. Such a view of anthropological knowing is not extractive but collaborative. We know with others, not from others. This is what Johannes Fabian meant when he described the ethnographic relationship as “agonistic.”

Our ethics of informed consent insist on a collaborative view: if the Yanomami don’t want us, then we shouldn’t study the Yanomami. We follow Immanuel Kant here: the Yanomami are ends in themselves. To view them as data, to view them as means to data, is unethical.

It was disheartening to read Chagnon’s selfish justification for his slippery associations in the Times Magazine. He simply misses the point.

I understand the confusion. Anthropology is a field discipline. Cultural anthropologists do field work with living people. We come back with notes, and having worked hard to collect them, we come, if we’re not careful, to value the notes more than the relationships that produced them.

Our careers, it seems, are made from our notes, not our relationships.

A romance with the idea of “heroic” anthropologists setting off for exotic locales and returning with a treasure of data has displaced what gives our data value: not the exotic, not the data themselves, but the human-to-human encounters.

In reality, the “field” in our discipline is not some far-flung place. The field is the space between us, the meeting of one human with another. That is where anthropology occurs, and it happens wherever there are humans.

The field includes South American rainforests and African deserts. It also includes suburban households, downtown coffee shops, Midwest farms – wherever humans do business. That is the anthropological frontier, the area we explore. We needn’t travel half way around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar. There are cats right here in our backyard.

The exotic, the distant, the remote: these have become distractions.

Anthropology ought to shed its reputation for knowing strange people. Basing our work on the exotic – rather than the human – trivializes what we do. We are not in pursuit of strangers. Our job is making each other familiar.

The photograph above is from Noble Savages by Napoleon Chagnon via The New York Times.

Folklorist: Why death?

We think of murders as mysteries – problems to solve. Murder is an industry of storytelling, theater, cinema. We don’t, however, think of death itself as a mystery. We used to. Myth pondered death as a mystery, a story in need of a beginning, or an end. But now few give it much thought. Yes, we think about death. We don’t think why death. It’s taken for granted, inevitable. Why death? We might as well wonder why we don’t fly or breathe under water.

Just so. 

Carrying swords

There’s an old Quaker story about William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, and George Fox, founder of the Religious Society of Friends.

Penn, who’d been a soldier, was now a bit of a dandy, and at the time dandies like soldiers wore swords. Penn was converting to Quakerism. He asked Fox what he should do with his sword.

Fox told him to “wear it as long as thou canst.” Fox thought Penn should decide for himself.

As the story goes, Penn did lay down his sword.

Quakers nowadays don’t think the story is true. But it gets told often, a pacifist message of laying down arms and a spiritual message about following an inner light as opposed to social dictates.

I’m struck (and embarrassed) by how often I look over my shoulder to see if others approve of me and my behavior. How much energy do I expend anticipating what I cannot know?

Of course, being human, a social creature, it makes sense that I care what others think. We wouldn’t be a society – there wouldn’t be a Society of Friends – if we consistently disregarded others’ views.

Indeed, Quakers are famously intolerant of carrying armaments, despite our joy in repeating the apocryphal story about Penn’s sword. Quakers believe in social force, collective will.

I don’t think the story is about the sword. Or even about going one’s own way, regardless of the group.

It expresses a Quaker value in discernment: not following or not not-following forms mindlessly, but mindfully choosing what one does and doesn’t do. And for Quakers that is not entirely an individual process.

Humans are social and individual, conforming and creative, collective and individual. The story about Fox and Penn speaks more to the latter side of our natures than the former.

The story emboldens us to think for ourselves. The story also concludes with Penn laying down his sword and thus conforming with Quaker practices.

I’ve never carried a sword. I’ve only ever seen swords in museum cases.

When I was a kid I wanted to carry and use a gun and hunt with my grandfather and father. I owned and even hunted with an air rifle.

I belong to a growing number of people who believe guns should be regulated – not banned or eliminated, but controlled and monitored. We monitor births and deaths, why not do at least the same for guns?

Guns are the swords of today. But I don’t think the story about Penn and Fox speaks to gun control, not anyway to public policy about swords or guns.

It speaks to the importance of being personally mindful about the swords we carry (whatever form they take) and not carrying them simply because others do, and not laying them down simply because others do.

The story urges us to be aware and awake and conscious of what we do.

(Photo above of a painting of William Penn at 22.)