Internet Meme: Why do I blog? (Long post)

• How long have you been blogging?

I have been blogging since at least 2005. I started on LiveJournal because I heard the hipsters in my class were writing about their days online. I was once featured on their blog because they took my picture around campus. I did a travel blog for my trip to Europe, but I didn’t have a laptop and there wasn’t much time to use the hotel’s computers.

• Why did you start blogging?

Several reasons, but ultimately I thought that it was cool and I wanted to be cool (oh high school). This blog started as a way to let Ph.D admission committees know that despite not being in graduate school after college, I was being productive in terms of my scholarly development. After writing for two years off and on, I have found a specific voice and learn to run with some of my ideas. It really helps stretch my mental processes, which help my understanding of other scholarly material.

• How many times a week do you post an entry?

As my readers know, both this blog and Patienthood, do not get updated very often anymore. I started off writing everyday, but I slowly found less and less to blog about in my reading. Then I started graduate school and that sucked up all the reflections I had (much to the chagrin of my professor).

• How many different blogs do you read on a regular basis?

I mainly follow two blogs. I do check other blogs and feeds from time to time. I find that the two keep me up to date with everything that is important to me and it keeps me from overloading on information. I do keep track of the news on a commentary/features website and sometimes a straight news site (I thought I was going to be burnt out of election coverage after the election, but I kept going for a good month or two). I tend to read things over and over so I absorb more from each post.

• Do you comment on other people’s blogs?

Yes. I mainly post on the fashion/pop culture blog that I read (Tom and Lorenzo). They typically ask for participation in critiquing outfits and the TV shows they watch. The other blog is more politics based and there are plenty of opinions and while I dis/agree with the users, I try to stay out of the way. I tend to have eccentric opinions. (Yes, Bertrand I agree with you, but US politics is a bit of a boxing ring currently)

• Do you keep track of how many visitors you have?

Yes, but I do not blog to get readers. Although getting more then one reader a week is exciting.

• Did you ever regret a post that you wrote?

Yes, and I took it down. I didn’t think how that could have influenced things with graduate schools looking at my blog. It was not saucy but it was a little too honest for the internet.

• Do you think your readers have a true sense of who you are based on your blog?

I like to think so, but there are many aspects about my self that are not included in the overall experience of the blog.

• Do you blog under your real name?

This blog I blog under taggingreflections/Steven. However, both blogs are associated with me on my about.me profile/resume and other social media accounts so you know who is blogging at all times. I know it may be uneasy for my parents, but I feel I am mature enough to be open and honest about myself on the Internet (although there are still secrets).

• Are there topics that you would never blog about?

I plead the Fifth.

• What is the theme/topic of your blog?

Academic/personal reflection on my current scholarly reading of mostly any topic.

• Do you have more than one blog? If so, why?

I have dozens that I have started and stopped. I like fresh starts when I break in a new focus or start a new leaf (that is why I started Patienthood). I should look back at some of them to see what was inspiring/reading at the time to get a sense of my personal growth as a person and scholar. (Trust me there has been a major change).

• What have you found to be the benefits of blogging?

As I alluded to above, I finding blogging to be a form of a personal archive of my growth of my thoughts and passions. My reflection skills have been honed and I am able to write faster. Although my blogging still has not kicked my bad habit of not checking my work for grammar and spelling before submitting my pieces.

• So, why do you continue to blog?

I continue to blog because I find the blogging process so academically rewarding. I am and have stretched my thought processes and brought them into territory that I did not know they could. While I still have more work to do, I am achieving my personal goals to be more theoretical. While it may not be exactly the perfect fit with public health, I want a strong theoretical understanding of the issues that inform the prevention and intervention strategies that I ultimately are going to research and create.

POSTSCRIPT: I just remembered the four posts I wrote on blogs as middle-class narcissism. While I am no doubt engaging in narcissism (blogging for one way learning and just myself), I also seem to subvert this because blogging is becoming more a personal archive and exercise, I do not seek to comment on and teach others. I think my arguments stand, though, because true dialogical teaching on-line is a still difficult endeavor. 

An Update: Pt. 1203902198

So I am done with break and now am back in full swing of the semester. The winds have shifted, however, not as drastically as before. I still am a researcher, yet not an academic one, but a public health one. This means I likely will not be spending more then 9 years in graduate school. This also means I have more flexibly in terms where I want to live and do with my degrees. I will still update this blog, but Patienthood will be updated more frequently, perhaps reflecting on my internships and further readings.

See you when I post again.

“Do no harm” and Confession: an Ethnographic Grey Zone

In Joel Robbins’ Becoming Sinners: Moral Torment in a Papa New Guinea Society, the author uses data from a confession that was recorded, transcribed and used as an example for what kinds of sins the Urapmin, a group of people in Papa New Guinea, commit. He was left torn about recording the confessions, even though everyone consented to be taped.

For me at least this is something that I would consider a no-no based on my experience as a Catholic and a scholar of religion. Confession is conceived as something private, between the confessor and God/priest. The priest is bound by his faith and role to keep this confession a secret and away from prying ears. However, by recording the confessions, Robbins breached this. Now while the Urapmin are not Catholic, and therefore not bound to keep things private, but somehow this rubs me the wrong way.

As I mentioned this in my book review reflection my professor had a question. Why not included it if it gives a grand insight into the lives of the Urapmin? It is not doing any harm if the subjects are protected by changing their names and not painting a biased, unflattering, unrealistic view of our subjects.

First of all, what is considered biased or unflattering? These terms are highly subjective and I think they require a definition before they are used. My professor mentioned that if say it painted a picture of alcoholism or violence that could be considered painting them in an unflattering light to the Western scholar, then it is doing harm. Does this mean that all depictions must be flattering to the Western scholar? But this is getting away from the main issue.

Is it doing harm when a scholar uses “private” data such as a confession to a priest/pastor/etc? Part of me wants to say yes there is harm done because the confession is a frank conservation about one’s shortcomings in God. It is as if this relationship is privileged as confidential. It does do harm in the sense that it breaks this bond. However, since this bond possibly does not exist in the Urapmin context, it allows for confessions to be “opened” for an outsider to tape the confession. However, I wonder if confessions are that private. This does not mean that they can confess to anyone, but rather the details are not secret, but rather put behind a curtain, easily accessible to those who have the privilege of looking, but not allowing those who are not privileged. It is tempting to go down the rabbit hole that is the concept of privilege in relation to our subjects, but that will be talked about in another post.

When discussing this with my professor, he mentioned that certain types of confessions are off limits, specifically ones that can show negative attributes that the reader can infer as being a cultural trait. If we are doing no harm by showing what the culture is like through confession, could not even negative traits be fine because they show us a look into the culture, good or bad? I think once we open up confession we have to accept the good and the bad parts of the culture. If, for example, excessive drinking is a sin, and most confessors confess to drinking too much, then it is not forcing the anthropologist to discuss the culture of excessive drinking?

I think this is deeper issue related to the co-option of our research. If a religious person, who believes that excessive drinking can be cured by x method, they might get the urge to go to the culture in question and use this method to change behavior. This method could be a finely tuned method because of all the details that the anthropologist put in their book, and thus leaves the culture open to culture change. But I think this ignores the fact that culture processes are ever changing therefore, therefore, are not we trying to protect a certain image of the culture that our book presents?

In an extreme case admitting of a negative trait, this could lead to lead to something bigger then religious conversion, hypothetically civil persecution, etc. But this is all due to the fact that we opened Pandora’s Box of peering into confession in the first place! Like I said above, we cannot just use the “good” confession of minor sins to get around the negative ones. This is not to say that if there was not pattern of “negative” sin, we must include it in our ethnography, but if there is a pattern, we must include it, because then it tells us something about the culture.

But who is at fault when a form of power co-opts our research? Well that is a tricky question. In someway this is the reason why indigenous groups are very wary of researchers coming in and asking question. It is the scholar that is blamed. The scholar, despite trying to be an interlocutor, can become the very hand of imperialism. But to reiterate  this is why using data from private confession can become a problem in the first place. Although this is not to say that only confessional data can be used in a negative way, but it is a slippery slope when this kind of data comes into play in an ethnography.

I should mention that Robbins did feel uneasy about using this in his book. He mentioned that he was conflicted about including it, so wonder if any of these thoughts came to pass.

Fictions of Culture: Interpretations of Our Data

Today I do not have a specific quote although my ideas come from a variety of places of my class readings, although my readings from One Disicipline, Four Ways by Fredrick Barth et. al. placed me firmly into one particular area in American anthropology, the postmodern development that emerged in the 1980′s at Rice University and UC Santa Cruz. While this is no surprise, but it established some new ideas.

The postmoderns place the ethnography in the forefront of the discipline. In critiquing the ethnography as a piece of writing, they came to the conclusion that scholars must use literary genres and devices in order to do so. By borrowing literary theory, scholars distinctly saw a problem with representation. This development brought in literary scholars to critique anthropology coming to the same conclusion.

In analyzing Edward Said’s work, I began to wonder about the role of interpretation and what exactly it does with our data. In a nutshell, interpretation distorts our view of the culture we are observing. Everything from the field notes to the final product is interpretation. We can never really get the full picture despite wanting to be holistic. Our viewpoints edit out things because there is too much data for one person to handle. Now does this mean that we need a whole crew of anthropologists, perhaps, but try to find a group of anthropologists studying the same group of people (ie. one small unit).

Not only are we editing, we are putting people into a specific frame of reference. This frame is the specifics of our research project or overall biases. This shapes our editing, but it also frames what we interpret. Now to say that the various methods of ethnography can be free of this frame is a complete and utter lie. We interpret as we go along, synthesizing the various theories we have learned over our education over our data. Frequently I would be analyzing the way people were behavior, placing everything in context.

So if our data is colored by our interpretations, where does that leaving our data? Well I believe our data becomes fictionalized. Suddenly, the data looses the objectiveness (if there is such a thing) once it enters anyone’s conscious, consciously or unconsciously. This turns the writing/ethnography into a work of fiction, a fiction that is based on events that happened, but a fiction nonetheless. What we write is not necessarily the truth because it has been colored by our interpretive lens.

This isn’t to say there is not anything going on in our subject’s reality that has translated into material culture and synthesized cognitive meanings is foolish. But rather, we as anthropologists can never truly understand and represent our subjects. This, though, gets rather sticky when we introduce an indigenous anthropologist to the mix because what happens when they are in that space of insider/outsider that can understand the cognitive meanings and the material culture, but then turns, according to my observations above, into a fiction. So is this the way to break it out of the “fictionalization of culture?” Part of me is torn. One part wants to say that an indigenous scholar’s interpretation is just another fiction that it creates. But it is more complex then that. If I know the meanings and have established distance, which itself can be tricky, then would not my representations be truer? However, just because it is “truer”  does not mean it is any less “fiction.”

I think that fiction’s definition gets tripped up by the fact that is commonly seen as entirely false, made up, but the way that I am using fiction implies some truths. I hesitate to say objectively real though. The world is not necessarily objective because everything is viewed in context. Perhaps there is an physical object that does x, y, and z, but everything gets fragmented by its signifer. I may call my computer a computer, but does computer have any value? It is this lack of value that fictionalizes our data/signifed. (In other news, I think I am starting to get Saussure *gasp*)

So looking back to the indigenous scholar, the problem now becomes if the academic in question assigns value (culture/meaning) to the signifed what exactly happens? Are they free of the fictionalization process? If they are, what happens to the corpus of anthropology up until the introduction of indigenous anthropologists? That, my gentle reader, is for another time.

Lo and Behold, he returns

So it has been an interesting couple of weeks. Life happened and found that I was more interested in getting a job in the creative field rather then work in academia. I have long thought about doing something creative and every time I lose interest in academia, I keep going back. For the first time I felt somewhat free to do anything.

But then I went back to school.

A few weeks into I changed my mind about my future about four or five times in the space of one day. Design, academia, postmodernism, academia, design, postmodernism, design, postmodernism, academia.

I ultimately found that I was enthralled with my research once again and that while publishing and the academic job market are less then ideal for my personality, I am willing to pursue a career in academia with all the heartaches that go with it.

In the span of six/seven weeks I have a new line of research with research methods that I am itching to share with you, my one reader.

See you soon!

 

Going on Hiatus Until Further Notice

There seems to be a shift in the wind.

Flexible Science

In Arthur Kleinman’s Writing at the Margin: Discourse Between Anthropology and Medicine he discusses the relationship between the harder science favoring almost mechanical explanations for pain and suffering, while Anthropology seeks to put that pain and suffering in context of the larger culture. While normally I would write on this book on Patienthood, Kleinman brought up something that specifically addresses my “crusade” for more flexible categories. He writes,

Though excessive flexibility perhaps limits its function as a science, it presents a serious attempt to codify complex, subtle, interactive views of experience into therapeutic formulations that claim contextual rather than categorical application.

First I want to address the opening statement that flexibility limits science. There is a part of me that want to agree and disagree. As a scientist, even a social one, flexibility is limiting, when hard concrete ways of knowing are needed. This would be the case in medicine where hard categories are needed to properly diagnose a patient, although, when the symptomology is hard to define things can get a little tricky. Flexibility is also problematic in the sciences where calculations are very important, think physics for example. They cannot be flexible on their calculations otherwise the spaceship will not get off the ground. Ultimately any science that is dealing with numbers, which includes quantitative based social sciences, numbers cannot be flexible otherwise 1) the spaceship won’t get off the ground and 2) smudging the numbers, in both the concrete numbers and interpretation, is highly unethical.

Now if we continue with Kleinman’s quote, one can see that I am in agreement with him about the flexibility of categories and how it privileges the nuances of human phenomena. I am a little giddy about this so I might lose some coherence.

First it is important to put the quote in some context of what exactly he is saying is and can be flexible. Most of Kleinman’s research is based in Chinese psychiatry and forms of healing, so here he is showing us that traditional Chinese medicine

attempts to account for psychological and ecological and even moral as well as corporeal phenomena through the use of dynamic, dialectical, process-oriented methods of clinical appraisal

This echos back to my thesis and its overarching idea that we must take in the full amount of phenomena to achieve correct classification. Now I moved away from the emphasis on “correct” and now emphasis “flexible.” Nonetheless, the idea of taking a holistic point of view of phenomena is very important to mine and Chinese medicine’s system. With this holistic approach, the systems take into consideration that no one is one-sided and has many different roles and classifications. This privileges the subject under consideration and not the people in power.

Taking this back to the orignal quote, we see that context is what is important here. Context and holistic go one in the same. One cannot exist without the other. Taking in the whole picture during research is vital, if one focuses on one thing, one looses the context in which everything is situated in. Yes, this does not become generalizable, but even surveys are framed in context because each survey is designed for a particular context to generalize. But generalizing research takes away the context and holistic nature of human phenomena and leaves us with some “objective” residue. Sorry to start ranting here at the end, but I feel strongly about this. This also shows that Anthropology, that takes into consideration context, is the right field for me.