Chagnon (Again)

Posted on December 3, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I was toying a bit with going to the American Anthropological Association meetings again this year given that they’re right here in Philadelphia, but I’m up to my ears in overdue work of various sorts, and I’ve had a busy few weeks of meetings and talks and so on.

I did see via Inside Higher Education that the controversy over the work of Napoleon Chagnon on the Yanomamo has flared up again, which isn’t terribly surprising. The confrontation is still mired on the most explosive ethical charges laid against Chagnon by Patrick Tierney, which is somewhat irritating. It’s somewhat typical of anthropology as a discipline, however, that what ought to be a debate about the content and uses of scholarly work has swerved into charges about the ethics of fieldwork, and the charge of deliberately spreading measles aside, into some pretty tedious back-and-forth about proper consent and compliance with bureaucratic procedure and such.

The real issue, I think, is that there’s plenty of reason to believe, even just from a straight-up close reading of Chagnon’s The Fierce People, that his account of the Yanomamo should be taken with a sizeable grain of salt. I tend to think that Chagnon is a good scholar to read alongside Margaret Mead, because both exhibit an interesting, often compelling tendency to craft “total cultures” that neatly confirm Enlightenment-style conjectures about the essential or natural state of human beings.

As such, they each have attracted intellectual communities with the same outlook who use their work as straightforward authoritative confirmation of general claims. That’s really the issue for me. At this point, most of the folks who would have cited Mead as a straightforward authority about Pacific societies a generation ago have learned to bracket her off and see her more in the context of an intellectual moment, as a cultural philosopher of sexuality and gender, who found the Samoans she studied “good to think”. Derek Freeman’s critique of Mead, whatever its own merits and demerits in terms of the charges he laid against Mead, was something of a misfire in the starkness of its binary view of anthropology: that an ethnographic study is either right or wrong, that informants either are truthful or mislead. Mead didn’t invent the Samoa she described out of whole cloth, in accordance with her vision of what human beings ought to be, but neither was the narration of what she observed unaffected by what she felt her own society ought to become. What irritates me more, reading today, is not Mead but the later uses of Mead as scientific authorization for projects of cultural or moral transformation.

That goes for Chagnon, too. What’s frustrating is to see his work footnoted across a span of sociobiological and evo-psych scholarship as a blandly scientific verification of the proposition that environment of evolutionary adaptedness humanity was shaped by certain kinds of male aggression and violence. At the least, that should be a footnote followed by an asterix, or a citation used with a certain reserve, with a qualified sense of its authoritative value.

I mean, think about it: if you built a pile of a certain kind of 20th Century popular anthropology (as opposed to the mainstream of scholarly anthropology), here’s are some of the authoritative claims you’d have about human beings “in the state of nature”:

Harmless and peaceful
Sexually liberated and gender-equitable
Male-dominated and violent
Intrinsically cooperative
etc.

At least the Enlightenment philosophes mostly knew they were mucking around with hypotheticals and postulates.

Posted in Academia | 3 Comments

Anatomy of a Search

Posted on November 30, 2009 by Timothy Burke

If there’s anything that I think needs to be learned through experience or through directly witnessing the experience of others, it’s online information-seeking. I don’t think you can give a useful general description of how to search that a student can usefully refer back to while doing their own research. When I teach research methods in the classroom, I often concentrate on doing real-time, live searches based on suggested topics from the class while narrating some of the ideas and choices I’m thinking about as I go from one resource to the next.

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I had a great search experience that I think is worth laying out here, because it captures three of the key dimensions of digital search:

1. Moving from one resource to another, what I sometimes analogize to a sailboat tacking back and forth in the wind
2. How and when you have to know something in order to find anything
3. When you’ve hit the end of what’s knowable online and need to move outside of digital search to know anything more

——

While we were out to lunch on Saturday, my wife mentioned that she’d recently found out her deceased paternal grandmother’s maiden name in the course of filling out some forms on behalf of her mother. Idly, my wife observed that the name might help her learn a bit more about a story that her grandmother always told about her father (my wife’s great-grandfather), about how he had been a war hero in his native Crete, that he’d held up a flag in some sort of battle in a way that rallied or inspired his fellow soldiers. She was told that there was a plaque or monument to him in his hometown of Crete and that his deed was well-known to Cretans. My wife had always been curious about this story: I remember her telling me about it when we were first married, over 20 years ago.

“What’s the name,” I asked.

“Kajiadelakis is what the funeral home had in their records,” she said. I got out my iPhone and fired up Google. No documents.

Here’s the first place where you’d have to know something to get something. Many people know that immigrants to the United States often truncated or changed names upon arrival, and at the least, they often had to invent anglicized spellings of names written in non-Roman alphabets. Like, for example, Greek. So I tried “Kagiadelakis”, the most obvious alternative spelling I could think of.

Two big hits. First, this page from a wax museum in the town of Zoniana, Crete. (The location is something I figured out shortly afterwards.) Midway down the page? A picture of a wax figure of Sotiros Kagiadelakis. Holding a flag on a wall, his gun behind the flag. I back up some and look at the wax museum, which turns out to be an interestingly eccentric personal project in a small village in the center of Crete. Gives me some sense that my wife’s great-grandfather is enough of an iconic figure in modern Cretan history to “make the cut” in this kind of production of historical memory.

(This was one of those moments that kind of blows you away about the technological changes we’ve experienced in our lives. Here I am at a restaurant in downtown Philadelphia, my wife asks a complicated question about a lifelong curiosity she’s had and I whip out a little device that lets me find a big part of the answer while we wait for the next tapas dish to arrive.)

The second hit gives me some key context and the information I need to move on to more searches. It’s a PDF of a newsletter in Greek and French (I’ve linked to the crawled HTML version.) In a section on Elefterios Venizelos, a famous Cretan nationalist, there is a passage about a soldier named Spyros Kagiadelakis raising the flag. At first, all I notice is the mention of his name and that it mentions another name that he’s known by, Kagieles.

I read the whole section of the PDF (dusting off my infrequently used French) and this solves the next issue I’ve got in my mind, namely what conflict this story comes from. In January 1897, I learn, “Muslims” (I’m assuming Ottoman Turks) attack Greeks in Hania, Rethymno and Heraklion (I don’t yet know where these are at this point in the search, but shortly I find out that they are cities in Crete). Cretan revolutionaries respond by demanding unification with Greece. (My heart is sinking a bit, because I am realizing this story is tied up in the history of modern Greece, the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, and the politics of Balkan nationalism in the run-up to World War I, of which I know just enough to know that this is going to be a really complicated, intricate history.) The major European powers of the day send a peacekeeping fleet to Crete and tell the revolutionaries to stand down. They refuse, so the European fleet bombards the Cretan forces, who have hoisted the Greek flag. The flagpole is hit and the flag falls, but Spyros Kagiadelakis picks up the Greek flag and holds it up in a defiant gesture. The PDF concludes that the bravery of this gesture so impresses the fleet that they cease their bombardment.

I also find out that there is a statue of Spyros Kagiadelakis that was put up in 1997 in Prophitis Ilias in Canee, which I’m guessing (correctly) is a French spelling of a location in mainland Greece or Crete.

At this point I know a lot, and it’s largely consistent with the story my wife remembers hearing as a child. The main difference is that she was always told that her great-grandfather was in a battle with the Turks, but I can already see how her relatives saw it that way. Still, the background here intrigues me, and I’m going to want to search up more about that. First, though, a quick search of the other name, Kagieles. This produces a hit back to the PDF and a false hit to a very weird site that appears to be about psychedelic mushrooms.

How about the statue? Where’s Prophitis Ilias, I wonder? A search to that produces a bunch of places in Greece, rather as if I’d typed in “Saint Peter”. Where’s Canee? The word by itself is useless, but how about Canee, Crete? Ah: it’s the city of Chania, and a search of “Chania Prophitis Ilias statue” reveals there’s a hill and a memorial site dedicated to Elefterios Venizelos above Chania. I think I’ve found where the statue was erected in 1997. Let’s try Flickr with the search terms Chania Crete statue. And bam, there’s the statue in a bunch of pictures. And the captions give me another alternative spelling of Kagieles: Spiros Kayiales.

That name opens up some more information. The statue was put up by the Pancretan Association of America, and there’s quite a bit of information on them at their Facebook page, which is hit because it has Kayiales in it. Their web site is an obvious target for some more searches later. There’s a nice description of the Venizelos graves from a blog kept by an English couple who are living in Chania (here I discover that the city is also known by the name Hania). Amusingly, I see that they’ve had no luck finding out anything about Spiros Kayiales on the web, which shows you a bit about how much of a role luck plays in all this. I started with the “right” name to bring me to the PDF which gave me the key details. If I’d started as they did, I’d have had a much worse time of it.

The rest of the Spiros Kayiales hits are to pictures of the statue. Let’s try one more thing, the name of the Italian admiral in the PDF, Carnevaro. This, I quickly discover, also has another spelling, Canevaro. That plus Crete in Google leads me to a very informative Cretan travel page. That gives me a really specific date, February 9 1897 and an intensely detailed account of the incident. It also gives me a name for my wife’s great-great grandfather, my wife’s great-grandfather’s hometown, a bunch of other personal details, a note that Admiral Canevaro’s memoirs describe the incident.

And, jackpot, a website dedicated to the man himself, though it’s in Greek. I am desperately wishing that I read Greek, but I get a lot of information just from looking at the pictures and such. (There appears to be a photo of my wife’s grandmother on the page and possibly some other family members that my wife hasn’t seen in many decades.) I’ve also got yet another spelling of the name, which turns up other resources, including an article in an issue of the Pancretan Association’s magazine.

If I want to know more about the statue, the man, the incident, I’ll need to leave search environments and start emailing people, having conversations, and reading books. Maybe even travel to Crete: could make for a really interesting family trip. I certainly have enough to see and talk about at this point.

Still, I want to know a bit more about context. So I start searching for information about Cretan nationalism and about the Greco-Turkish war of 1897. It is, as I guessed, a really complex history. I actually hadn’t known that Crete was not part of Greece until the end of the First Balkan War in 1913, having briefly been an international protectorate between 1897 and 1913 and before that under Ottoman control even after the Greek mainland won independence. The incident which won Spyros Kayiales/Spiros Kayales/Spiros Kagiadelakis his fame was basically the kick-off to the Greco-Turkish war of 1897. The history of Cretan nationalism, particularly in the mid-1890s, is an obvious area of interest if I want to know more about the man himself and how he came to be holding there up that flag. I’m also fascinated by the fact that the bombardment came from a joint European fleet, not the Turkish navy. There are more than a few curious resonances between this history and a lot of global politics in the early 21st Century. Still, here I’ve arrived at another point where a full-fledged research project is staring me in the face, where I ought to leave Wikipedia behind and dig into historical scholarship.

Still, I can think of one more thing I can do just sitting at the computer in my home office. I drop into Tripod, our college catalog, to see what I can find. There’s not a lot there on the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, though I discover that the novelist Stephen Crane wrote war correspondence from the war itself (I think beginning after the incident in Crete). Checking with the Library of Congress catalog, I see that there’s a goodly amount of primary material on the war and not much of a secondary literature in English. (Some in Greek and Turkish, though.) There’s a few works from the time that I suspect will have a narrative account of the incident in Crete.

I go into the historical newspapers indices through our catalog (behind a password wall, so no links). I get a sense right away of the specific events about Crete in the last half of 1896 into 1897, in particular that in the days before the bombardment of the Cretan revolutionaries there had been serious violence between Muslims and Christians in several cities, including Chania. The British newspapers don’t describe the bombing incident directly, but I’m guessing with some more poking around, I may turn up some specific narrative. I’m not that surprised, though: what looms large in the memory of one community, sanctified through nationalist memory, is a footnote from the perspective of an imperial metropolis. Again, to know more about context, I’ll have to leave behind what a digital search lays out for me, and dive deeper into historical scholarship.

————

The key things to take away from the story of a search like this one are:

1) Serendipidity counts. If I started this search from the wrong place, I’d have gotten nowhere. It all starts with the museum in Zoniana.
2) Multiple iterations of the same search with different keywords turn up notably different results, each of which iterates further into separate branches of information. Harvesting keywords in each generation or branch of a search is the key art of searching.
3) Knowing when to stop travelling down one branching series of searches to come back to the central “spine” of inquiry is crucial.
4) Knowing when you’ve hit a point of diminishing returns within digital environments, at which point you need to go read authoritative scholarship, make personal contacts, or have direct experiences, is critical to success.
5) You have to know a few things already, or at least be able to make educated guesses. I got as far as I did because I know something about the effect of immigration on the spelling of names, because I could hack out a rough reading of a French document, because I know a bit about conflicts in the Balkans and the end of the Ottoman Empire, and so on.

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Production of History | 7 Comments

I For One Welcome My New Infrared Faucet Overlord

Posted on November 17, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Interesting post and discussion at 11d on Sandra Tsing Loh’s latest essay in the Atlantic Monthly, which I read on the train this week. I thought the essay was terrible for a variety of reasons, many of them stylistic. There’s some ingredients in it for an interesting commentary on motherhood, domesticity and family but the alternatively accusatory and wheedling tone was really off-putting.

———-

Tone is a complicated issue in evaluating writing of any kind. It matters: writing is rhetoric, not just content. Content is easier to dispute and correct: this is wrong, this is right, this is confused.

It’s hard to write about tone in a review of a book without complaining that the author should have written the book that you would prefer to have read (or even authored), in which you take yourself as an ideal, typical or important reader.

One example in my recent reading is Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, which I finally got around to finishing. It’s a strange sensation to finish a book where you agree with the basic premise, agree with many of the specific points, acknowledge that the author is quite aware about the history of the ideas that are important to him and still find yourself frequently annoyed as hell with the way he chooses to say it.

I’m all for teaching what Crawford calls “the practical arts”, I’d agree that visceral experience with the material world has a power that abstract knowledge does not have, and that there’s a power in knowing for yourself how things and machines work.

Part of my problem, I guess, is that he oversells his case. There are people who approximate what he calls craftsmen even in knowledge work, for one, who have the agency and ethos that he sees as systematically absent from that world. He often takes material objects, machines and technologies as artifacts which simply exist for the practical, craftmanslike person to work with, showing little interest in the processes by which new technologies are imagined, designed or implemented until or unless they become something he disdains because they are no longer easily accessible to craftsmanlike tinkering. He’s got a fairly shop-worn (pun intended) critique of consumer culture, which is banal but tolerable until you stop to think a bit about the fact that the business that puts bread on his table is maintaining vintage motorcycles that his customers drive for fun down the Blue Ridge Parkway. Hello, 21st Century leisure and consumption! It’s not exactly reshoeing the plow horse for the Widow Stevens so she can plant enough wheat for the coming winter.

Maybe it’s that he complains about erudition but keeps most of his polemic afloat with plenty of readings and citations and some cherrypicking. The best two chapters in the book are his “Education of a Gearhead” about his concrete experiences in motorcycle repair and a small bit of the following chapter on his white-collar discomforts: the rest of it feels, a bit like Sandra Tsing Loh’s essay, like a personal conviction in search of a social narrative, as if his own discoveries and experiences aren’t enough to keep it going. It feels, in that sense, both padded and lacking in confidence, as if he wants his old think tank buddies to think well of him and believes that they won’t unless he speaks their language as well as the new literacy he’s discovered.

Maybe it’s just tone, and personal taste. There was all of what I liked in the book, which was quite a bit. Then I had some more dispassionate questioning of some of his evidence or interpretations. And then there was a growing amount of irritation with the way he chose to say it.

Crawford doesn’t like technologies which automate some aspect of their functioning, which take the manual agency of the user out of the picture. Fine, I guess, but it’s sort of an arbitrary line in a lot of technologies, not to mention a feature of technological history which waxes and wanes rather than moves in a steady line.

What triggered me off, and kept me triggered as I read the rest of the book was a complaint about faucets which have infrared or motion sensors rather than handles.

Crawford writes, “Consider the angry feeling that bubbles up in this person when, in a public bathroom, he finds himself waving his hands under the faucet, trying to elict a few seconds of water from it in a futile rain dance of guessed-at mudras. This man would like to know: Why should there not be a handle? Instead he is asked to supplicate invisible powers. It’s true, some people fail to turn off a manual faucet. With its blanket presumption of irresponsibility, the infrared faucet doesn’t merely respond to this fact, it installs it, giving the status of normalcy. There is a kind of infantilization at work, and it offends the spirited personality.” pp. 55-56

This is like an Andy Rooney monologue that’s gotten in bed with a raging polemic and produced a child more irritating than either. What, a faucet is somehow agency because you turn it? Agency over what? A massive infrastructure which brings the water up through the faucet? Crawford’s got a footnote in which he concedes this very point, as if he read the passage over again and felt sheepish about it. It’s not just the exaggeration of the point itself that annoyed me, however. If you’ve got a first-person point to make, make it with the right pronoun. What’s so hard about, “I find it irritating to wave my hands in front of the infrared sensor”? And seriously, “it offends the spirited personality”? They make spirited personalities pretty fragile where Crawford comes from, I guess.

When the tone is that wrong once, I find I’m much more sensitive to similar off notes and ill graces for the rest of a text. Save for when he’s squarely focused on his own experiences with machinery, Crawford frequently slips into this distanced third-person voice and makes universal and abstract pronouncements on work and agency and human dignity.

It’s not just that I feel a cussed desire to argue with even the statements I’m sympathetic to, but that somehow this voice, this tone, is far away from the substantive argument of the book: not concrete, not practical, not rooted in experience, not visceral. It feels like he’s trying too hard to validate his choices in a sweepingly universal way, as diktat rather than proposition, the same way that Loh feels like she’s writing about anything, everything, that will keep her from having to look too long in the mirror.

Posted in Academia, Books, Consumerism, Advertising, Commodities, Domestic Life, Miscellany | 12 Comments

If You Must

Posted on November 11, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Via Margaret Soltan, an interesting thread on PowerPoint in the classroom.

I still think that PointPoint is a scapegoat of sorts, that bad pedagogy that uses PowerPoint was bad before PointPoint or even personal computers were involved in higher education. That said, I think Carolyn Blogs and her commenters pretty well nail what’s scandalous about some common uses of PowerPoint by professors: basing entire classroom sessions around reading off pre-made slides sold by textbook publishers is the kind of practice that a student who is paying tuition should be furious about. But it’s safer to keep your head down, finish a requirement, get your degree, and move on. If there aren’t many professors around in a given program who are teaching in a much more professional, committed way, what’s the point in protesting?

If you’re going to use presentation software, there’s a basic ground floor of competence. Some of the basics:

1) Don’t read a slide. Ever. Ever ever. The slide is there for people to look at. A professor should be saying something else while the slide is there. Something longer, something fuller, something more explanatory, something expert, something knowledgeable. A slide with pure text is not ideal under any circumstances, but if it’s there, it’s there as a mnemonic designed to summarize points that a professor is making at greater length, with more passion, in a way that justifies and rewards the physical presence of students in that room at that moment. Your lecture outline is for you. It’s not to be put up on a slide on the board and read verbatim. Ever.

One of the fascinating things about this point is that almost everyone seems to agree with this dictum, and yet…how many times have you sat through presentations where someone reads their slides verbatim? Quite a few of those for me, and I work in a discipline where very few faculty or students even use presentation software.

2) A slide is either an image, film clip or audio that’s an impressionistic, performative accompaniment to something being said, or it’s information. If it’s information, it should be up and visible for a long time, so that students can write it down, take notes on it, relate it to what is being said in a verbal lecture or explanation.

3) A good presentation takes as much time to create as a good lecture, essay, or anything else of the sort. It should be practiced, edited and thought about as much as other kinds of classroom preparation. It should be the work of the professor who is responsible for a given class. If it’s unethical to read a lecture prepared for you by a company, it’s unethical to read a presentation prepared for you by a company.

4) There should be some compelling reason why presentation software is being used, something it can do which adds particular and necessary value to a given lecture or class session. I rarely use presentation software, but one thing I have used it for is an opening lecture in my Image of Africa course where I show about fifteen slides on the history of depictions of missionaries or other whites in cannibal cookpots. In that context, it’s a much easier way to convey that information than older slide technologies, especially when I want to integrate film clips, audio or even bits of older text or quotations into the presentation. (I use a bit from an Abbott and Costello film in the presentation, for example.) If there isn’t a compelling reason, don’t do it. Ever.

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy | 7 Comments

Double Down

Posted on October 30, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Every once in a while, you see a public figure say something and think to yourself, “I am almost certain that a historian fifty or a hundred years from now is going to be using that quote to capture the spirit of this moment”.

So last week, during testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, there was this statement, quoted in the New York Times:

“Of course you want to set up a system where an institution dreads the day it happens because management gets whacked, shareholders get whacked and the board gets whacked,” said Edward L. Yingling, president of the American Bankers Association. “But you don’t want to create a system that raises great uncertainty and changes what institutions, risk management executives and lawyers are used to.”

We got to the brink of a global financial meltdown that was demonstrably a result of the system that institutions, risk management executives and lawyers were “used to”. We’re still clinging to the edge of the abyss, in fact. But here we have the people whose practices got us all into that mess talking to the people who went ahead and allowed it to happen, and the resulting consensus seems to be a big thumb’s up to go ahead and do it again. So yeah, I have a sick, uneasy feeling that fifty years or a hundred years hence, that quote is going to be a great example of willful blindness to the icebergs dead ahead.

Posted in Good Quote, Bad Quote, Politics | 3 Comments

The (Skilled) Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Posted on October 22, 2009 by Timothy Burke

Our Associate Provost is organizing a workshop to talk about how (or perhaps whether) we teach presentation and speaking skills in our courses.

I’m planning to attend: I think it’s a really important issue. I worry a lot about many of our students in this respect. While they’re here their writing may improve, their skills in using various academic disciplines may deepen, their knowledge of a particular subject or field may grow very impressively. But many students who grow in those ways do not necessarily become better at speaking or at presenting themselves effectively, not even in the controlled environment of classroom discussion. To be honest, I think some of our students become worse at self-presentation and speaking skills in their time here. Some adapt too strongly to the narrow particularity of academic conversation. Other students get too used to political or social engagement with a community that politely indulges most of their demands or arguments or has a fairly strong consensus culture, never really experiencing serious disagreement or plurality of opinion. I’ve occasionally suggested, semi-seriously, that I feel like we train some students as the speaking and presentation equivalents of baby seals on the ice, waiting to get clubbed.

I think this is a generic problem at a lot of colleges and universities, mind you. The only distinctive aspect of it I see at Swarthmore is the intense value that students and faculty put on being mutually supportive and not seeming to want to show up other students with showy or critical comments. (This is not to say that we completely lack students who are flamboyantly talkative, but I feel as if there’s a bit more reluctance here to stand apart.) In a lot of ways, this is a good part of the culture of the college, but it hobbles students a bit when the time comes closer to graduation to have to present themselves as confident, capable individuals whom someone should fund, admit or hire.

In general, this is why setting out to teach self-presentation is a tricky business. For one, it’s genuinely difficult to assess or grade self-presentation or speaking in a way where feedback works to help a student improve. The major pedagogy you need is more akin to the pedagogy employed in performance or studio art, where the professor needs to react in the moment, and where some of the feedback needs to be as public and shared as the speaking itself might be. That can get very sticky or emotionally fraught for many students. If you’re in a performance class, you expect that kind of judgment. If you’re in a small discussion class focused on an academic subject, you might not be so willing to go through that gauntlet.

More importantly, effective presentation of self is really not reducible to “public speaking” in the old way that this subject was once taught. I got into this issue a bit in a discussion about education and careers at 11d. When schools like Swarthmore tout the virtues of critical thinking and a liberal arts education for the long-term job prospects of our graduates, we tend to stress the value of flexibility and adaptability, that the liberal arts graduate can change as circumstances change. I think that’s basically correct.

Effective self-presentation is a big part of that adaptability, however. If you can’t do that, it doesn’t really matter whether you can think well. Arguably, you can’t think well unless you can speak and present well.

Presenting knowledge or arguments effectively involves putting together a lot of different sub-skills on the fly. You have to understand the context in which you’re presenting, you have to be able to very quickly read the organizational sociology of that context. You need to be able to quickly pick up cues about the psychology and cultural habitus of your audience and adjust when it’s not what you planned for. You have to know when what you’re arguing for is impossible or implausible, and whether there’s something else to ask for, when you’re setting the stage for a long-term objective or just making a temporary response to a situation that won’t repeat itself, when to yield and when to hold firm.

This is all very difficult to teach not just because it can be delicate to give real-time feedback to students, but because it involves some interpersonal, emotional and psychological skills which are not commonly made explicit or discussed as skills. You can’t just teach about those skills in a classroom setting, either. Students have to do other things to learn them: get involved in organizations, work in a group, play on a team, take responsibility for a decision.

On those rare occasions where ideas like “emotional intelligence” receive pedagogically explicit attention, they tend to be constrained to painfully bland normative managerial discourses, to be entirely about how we should get along well with others, play nice with other children, be good citizens, and so on. This is deadly. It’s better not to talk about this stuff at all than talk about it in these terms.

If you teach skills in an academic environment, you’ve got to be prepared to make those skills intellectually lively, contentious, open to interpretation and argument. When I teach writing or reading, I’m not just teaching how to write or read, I’m asking whether and when to do those things, studying why we read or write, discussing what the limits to writing or reading might be. Skills have to be as open to the question, “So what?” as any other subject matter, and you have to teach with a willingness to accept a wide variety of answers to that question.

If we’re going to teach something like “emotional intelligence” as a part of skillful presentation-of-self, one explicit premise from the outset needs to be that we are not teaching how to be a good person or play nice in the sandbox. There are people who are highly skilled at purposeful self-presentation who present as eccentric or as gadflies or as disciplinarians. Effectiveness as a speaker or a presenter is not a function of how nice or respectful or caring you are.

In his working life as an attorney, my father was extremely skilled at reading situations and “dialing in” the self-presentation that would most effectively push for the outcomes he was professionally committed to seeking: he could be just another guy with the guys, he could be the bullfighter jabbing and inciting an opponent, he could be light and funny or volcanic and volatile.

Like more than a few highly effective professionals, he didn’t have the same nimbleness and flexibility when he was outside the focused environment of his workplace. The key point as far as higher education goes is: that’s your problem, your life, work it out yourself.

What we’re concerned with is the competencies you have as a thinking, educated person. Personality can be an issue in learning skillful self-presentation: a narcissist or neurotic by their nature has a hard time with critical parts of the skill-set, such as being able to imagine how you sound to other people or how you’re coming off in the context you’re in. But personality shouldn’t inhibit most people from a baseline competence in self-presentation. Shy or bold, introvert or extrovert, quiet or talkative, nice or asshole: those are not limit conditions.

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | 5 Comments

Marshall, Will and Holly Sell Some Routine Tobacco Products

Posted on October 19, 2009 by Timothy Burke

I’ve been talking a lot lately about the mismatch between levels or scales of social action and social knowledge. Mostly I think that’s a question that involves the design and organization of institutions, governments, and social networks.

Sometimes, though, it’s a lot simpler: it’s a big organization that doesn’t know what the hell it’s talking about and thus being all thumbs when it sets out to act. Case in point: the American Medical Association has a group that looks on an annual basis at the representation of smoking in the movies. The report uses standard media effects analysis, which is to say that it already starts with a lamentably crude understanding of what culture is and how it works.

It’s not wrong to say that Humphrey Bogart’s films helped give smoking a stylish, beautiful image at an earlier moment in American life, for example. That was then, though: films which helped give smoking an embedded attraction did their work within a time and place, and they did their work subtly, even when the message was not at all subtle (as, for example, in early television advertising for cigarettes).

Today? Well, the AMA report names the film Land of the Lost as the chief menace seducing the nation’s youth to the vile ways of tobacco. Land of the Lost. The biggest flop of the summer. Featuring a Will Ferrell character who is a pompous professorial ass. Who smokes a pipe as a sign of his pomposity. Why is the film the No. 1 cultural villain? Because you multiply the number of times smoking appears in a film by the number of people who saw it and the number tells you how many people’s minds had impressions of smoking ground into them.

It doesn’t matter if the film was a flop or critically reviled. It doesn’t matter if Dr. Rick Marshall is very nearly the utter opposite of Sam Spade in every imaginable respect. It doesn’t matter what culture means or how it works. A simple multiplication saves you from having to deal with anything messy or complicated. Number of representations times number of ticket sales. It’s science, I tell you, science.

Posted in Popular Culture | 4 Comments

End User Complaint

Posted on October 16, 2009 by Timothy Burke

The historian Randall Packard gave an interesting talk at Swarthmore last week about the history of malaria eradication. Like many historians, he ends up with a skeptical view of contemporary projects and plans. As he sees it, current attempts to eradicate malaria at the present time are making some of the same strategic mistakes that a post-1945 global campaign to eradicate malaria made. Packard wasn’t arguing that there should be no major global effort against malaria, but instead contended that what we should be aiming towards is a zero mortality campaign focused on pregnant women, infants and children.

I liked the talk and agreed with the argument. I got a bit fixated on one point, far more fixated than Packard does: the contrast between the local context of bed net usage and the technocratic, distant language used about bed net usage in top-level malaria control discourse like the Global Malaria Action Plan. That plan notes very briefly that there are challenges with “end-user compliance”, but not to worry: there’s a place in the plan for coordinated use of communication and behavior change methodologies.

Some of the arguments going back and forth between Jeffrey Sachs and Dambisa Moyo about bed nets are screwed up, partly because Moyo takes a lot of the current critique of development aid from Easterly, Calderisi and other authors and takes away a lot of the complexity and texture of that work. Moyo is convinced that the problem with giving bed nets away is that you put African bed net producers out of business, which really misses the point. I also think the “give bed nets away or sell them” argument isn’t a meaningful or helpful argument about bed net usage in Africa or elsewhere, it’s an argument about an orthodoxy in economics.

Sachs, on the other hand, is pretty much stuck in the same place that the GMAP is when it comes to figuring out why people don’t use bed nets: his perspective is too removed, too far from the actual situations of people who are or are not using bed nets. He knows they should do it, and if they aren’t doing what they should do, then just do some education or something.

Language like “end user compliance” wards off the lived reality of human life like a garlic wards off a vampire. Big plans and sweeping frameworks subcontract out the problem of the local and particular to some yet-to-be-named partner organization who will be charged with dealing with end user compliance in a sensitive, community-engaged, bottom-up, gender-attentive, ethnographically nuanced manner. That way, when the news filters up that end user compliance doesn’t meet expectations, you can just imagine that you haven’t met the right partner organizations yet or that the methodology for securing compliance needs some tweaking. You didn’t get enough medical anthropologists. The medical anthropologists weren’t properly integrated into the plan. Something like that.

The big plan never has to trouble itself with understanding the scene of everyday life or meeting the end users as human beings living in particular places. The big plan doesn’t have to bring what a smart medical anthropologist might tell it about why people use or don’t use bed nets into the language or thinking of the big plan. That’s the subcontractor’s problem. But it’s on these questions that big plans of all kinds stand or fall, and they can only be thought and engaged properly in their own terms, not in bloodlessly technocratic language.

You have to be able think at the top level, in the big plan, about local ideas about illness and local ideas about sleep, local arrangements of household space, local furnishings, local material conditions. And understand that these things vary.

The top planners have to understand that in historic terms, it’s perfectly sensible to mistrust development organizations in many parts of the world. Sometimes they have had actively bad ideas that caused damage to local communities and sometimes even when they have had good ideas, they only pursued them for a short while until they got bored or distracted or there was a new fad or a change in political administrations or the money dried up. Then the people who really bought into the good idea were left holding the sack.

The top planners have to get away from data that shows that bed net usage has a huge impact on malaria transmission to understand that sleeping under a bed net can be uncomfortable and annoying. That many adults who’ve had malaria tend to treat the disease the way we treat the flu: annoying, frustrating, a bit scary, but tolerable. It’s not hard to wash your hands and use hand sanitizer regularly, and those cut transmission of the flu. But for a lot of people, the minor hassle of regular hand sanitizing isn’t quite worth whatever percentage fewer times you’d have a cold or flu.

Every public health campaign that starts from the premise that there’s a simple and rational preventive behavior change that people of course should adopt is setting itself up for failure, because it’s not thinking clearly about how most human beings in general inhabit the landscape of habit and convenience and risk-calculation, let alone local cultural framings of those same things. Public health campaigns sort of start by taking educated professional white Americans and their particular cluster of common attitudes and cultural postures as the norm and everything else as uncompliant end usage or uneducated deviance. Among other things, if you want to convince people to better safeguard their own health and the health of other people around them, you’d better back up a bit and find out whether they care much about their own health and the health of other people around them. That’s not a universal, and not caring doesn’t make someone a monster or a sociopath. If I lived in a world that was full of political disorder, economic failure, endemic violence, if planning for the future was a sick joke, I might find it faintly ridiculous when some well-meaning person kept telling me how important it was to sleep under a bed net.

If you’re planning for action, well, this is what action really is all about. Anybody can make a comprehensive ten-point plan that neatly subdivides the messiness of lived experience into dry subheadings while keeping an antiseptic distance from that messiness.

Posted in Politics | 7 Comments

Reality Got Problem Set #3 Wrong, Not Me

Posted on October 15, 2009 by Timothy Burke

The story this week about two physicists who have suggested that the Large Hadron Collider is being sabotaged from the future so that it won’t produce a Higgs boson (or is it that it will have produced a Higgs boson whose creation then causes physical reality to uncreate it) was at least amusing in a sort of “who’s Occam and what’s this about his razor?” kind of way .

If nothing else, when you look at the things which the scientists think represent reality’s retroactive work at stopping Higgs-boson-creating projects, reality turns out to have a pretty subtle grasp of politics and social dynamics as well as the engineering vulnerabilities of the LHC.

The thing I really worry about is that this adds the most awesome excuse to the armament of students everywhere. “I would have finished my math homework last night, but reality reached back through time and made me play a video game instead, because if I get good at math I will help to create a Higgs boson at some point in the future.”

Posted in Miscellany | 5 Comments

Digital Search II: A User Perspective on Database Design

Posted on October 15, 2009 by Timothy Burke

If I’m anxious about Google becoming a database vendor, it’s partly because the user experience with existing databases has been so dismal to date. On the other hand, Google’s understanding of and commitment to usability is head and shoulders above any of the other vendors in that world. Maybe Google’s completed version of Book Search will have an interface that invites rather than repels use, and has a stable long-term vision driving its design. If so, it might almost be worth it to just let them go ahead and fence off the commons, for the same reason that the consolidation of monopoly capitalism in the late 19th Century at least paid off in terms of standardization across a broad range of products and technologies.

Working on a couple of new projects, I’ve been diving back deeply into catalogs and search spaces and portals. It’s mostly been a depressing experience. Here and there, I have a satisfying feeling that something I’ve used for years has steadily improved. Our own local catalog Tripod is so vastly better in basic design and navigation than a decade ago that it’s almost startling. Another old stalwart, JSTOR, feels more intuitive in its design than it once did.

Travel across various search spaces and databases, though, and several basic frustrations arise.

1. Databases which default to an advanced rather than simple interface upon first access. Sometimes that’s because a portal points to the advanced interface, sometimes it’s because the basic interface is a hidden or obscured option.

2. Basic interfaces which are cluttered or require toggling four or more separate drop-down menus or other settings even to carry out a basic search.

3. Advanced interfaces which are really cluttered, with constraining menus, toggles or radio buttons scattered across multiple columns. Sometimes a search page looks like someone vomited up every kind of interactable object that’s ever been used in a form or UI. (Or as in the case of ISI Web of Science, with a marketing slogan at the top that’s made to look like interactable text.)

4. Diversity of interface designs. By now, we really should be converging on a common design. Instead, every vendor seems to feel an obligation to maintain a different design as a branding tool, not to aid users.

5. Constant shuffling and pointless tinkering with the UI for databases. It’s one thing to make a really big shift (say, towards an inviting basic entry-point interface away from a cluttered entry-point advanced interface) and another thing to constantly move menus around in a page layout. But the latter is very common behavior.

6. Really low standards for the quality of digitization and for searching within digitized text. JSTOR is a happy exception, but some other digitization projects are just hair-tearingly poor once you get into the nitty-gritty and start to make serious use of the resources they hold. There’s at least one company doing archival digitization where I find the type of material they’re digitizing appealing but I’m prepared to argue against ever buying anything they’re doing because the design and usability standards of their work are so slapdash.

7. Fragmentation of material. Rather than moving towards amalgamation and interoperability across databases, you really get the sense that everybody’s been busy grabbing at whatever piles of text they can lay their hands on, building the biggest little mudhill they can manage to put up, and then building walls around it. There are interstitial services that help a user “jump” from one little fragmented collection to another and portals that aim to be a “top level” to return to, sure, but we should be doing better by now.

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | 1 Comment