Jen's CHALLENGE QUESTION

What is the role of professional and academic anthropology to us amateur armchair anthropologists? What happens when everyone becomes a participant observer, even Wall Street stock analysts?

I went for a whole 10 years once without anthropology.

After a few ethnography and anthropology classes in undergrad to support a comparative religion major, I took what I needed for critical thinking skills but tucked the rest of those liberal arts away so they wouldn’t interfere with my job search.

Somehow I talked my way into Wall Street, analyzing emerging technology companies that made semiconductors, the machines that made semiconductors, the first Internet companies. There might have been anthropologists hidden away at these places I studied, but they did not push any of the levers on my Bloomberg screen, so they remained hidden from view.

The traders on the floor were hyperventilating over inventory ratios, unexpected growth trajectories, and the precise prediction of exactly how many pennies of earnings per share we expected next quarter. No time in that 5 AM to often 1 AM shift for observation, reflective thinking, or deeper rumination on the human condition. Too bad. My former boss, alleged linchpin of a massive insider trading scheme, may have benefitted from such reflection.

After the obligatory MBA in France, where they do NOT teach anthropology in the core curriculum to the future French business elite, I found myself back in NY, working at one of these internet start ups I had only seen from afar. And there, in week two, when delivering an e-commerce strategy for a computer retailer, I encountered Anthropological Thinking. An information architect wanted to pause for a moment. Do some research. Observe people, interacting with technology. Test out my various business strategies with prototype designs.

It was like an old friend had returned, all of these luxurious, humanistic principles, tucked away in my brain all of those years, but not forgotten.

Since then it’s been easy to keep anthropology close, and in fact I rarely encounter a project or idea that hasn’t been framed by anthropological thinking, whether or not the client or agency or designer knows it or not. Which might be a different kind of problem. Several trajectories have brought anthropology into the mainstream of business culture.

Human Computer Interaction brought humans into the machine making process.

Design as Innovation tool leaned on ethnography for the deepest sort of market-changing insights.

Two years ago at a collaborative curriculum-building conference hosted by the Designers Accord, an organization I helped instigate and support as a founding board member, anthropological inquiry was considered a cornerstone of sustainable design thinking. Since most ecological impacts occur during the ownership phase of products, it would make sense to understand how we humans behave after the moment of purchase.

Now, social media is sucking every last inch of our distracted days, as we watch, participate, reflect, and tweak our connections, wondering if this pastime is actually just making us more disconnected. There is no barrier to entry to becoming a social media guru, and everyone of them (of us) is an armchair anthropologist, commenting on the cultural trends observed while drinking a latte, while listening to a conference call in one ear, and a TED video in another.

I teach – I’m an adjunct at NYU ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program at Tisch School of the Arts in NYC). And I build components of anthropological thinking into a course about systems thinking, sustainable design, and life cycle assessment. I teach geeks and future geeks how to stop, pause, participate, observe and reflect before they commit to making a new thing. But I am not a scholar.

My work is seeped in anthropological thinking, but only occasionally includes verified, AAA-member anthropologists. When the budgets are plush, and we have time – these are conditions I am rarely granted these days.

David's CHALLENGE QUESTION

Do anthropologists engage with the public through the world journalists/media? Or should they go direct to public in books, social media, and traditional channels like radio, TV, and documentary films? If the former what are the risks of using journalists as mouthpieces?

I don’t have any formal training in anthropology. I cover the social sciences (among other things) for The Chronicle, and I’m always intrigued by the public translation and reception of various kinds of scholarly and non-scholarly anthropological projects.

At New Orleans next week, I’ll try to make some coherent arguments that tie together Luke Eric Lassiter’s collaborative-ethnography projects; the Human Terrain System and other manifestations of military anthropology; and the public reception of David Vine’s Island of Shame and Roberto Abadie’s The Professional Guinea Pig.

In my pre-Chronicle life writing about welfare reform in Milwaukee, I often relied on the insights of Michaela di Leonardo and other anthropologists who have written about representations of poverty and labor. [italic added by IT]

In issues covered in the public media two areas call out for more anthropological input today: healthcare and not for profit consultancies.

In the health policy debates of the last year, why didn’t medical anthropologists have a larger voice? Their insights about health providers, health care subjects, and health institutions were not often heard. What could medical anthropologists, policy makers, and journalists do going forward to make that scholarship more visible?

In the not for profit corporations what insights can anthropological consultants bring? What is specifically anthropological about those insights? What kind of scholarly training should such consultants receive? Do most actually-existing anthropology departments do a good job of providing such training?

Arlene's CHALLENGE QUESTION

Do we practice what we preach? How can anthropologists move beyond "race as a social construct"/ a no "race posture" to critically empower others to contend with the legacy of race and racism and its consequences?

The AAA - RACE project: Social inequality and Social Change

The public education project of the AAA, RACE: Are We So Different? produced in conjunction with the Science Museum of Minnesota, is a museum exhibit, a website, and educational programming designed to enhance understanding of human diversity and the concept of race, past and present. The exhibit has been on tour throughout the nation. Its objective is to allow for critical dialogue about race and social inequality. The project also hopes to develop an environment where a host of individuals will commit themselves to addressing social inequities in the various locales, including but not limited to, the school, the workplace, and the public policy arena.

I became actively involved in the project given my frustration over racializing practices I observe in daily life, but more specifically, in educational institutions. I have observed that under the guise of diversity and equal access, practices continually exclude and reinforce institutional racism. These approaches are not particular to educational institutions. In the area of health and (welfare), racial profiling and the policing of bodies is also at play.

When we first started this thing, there were very few Latina/o anthropologists in the conversation. Even though I worked with a team of anthropologists and consultants who understood that the black/white paradigm in the US was much more complex in practice, much of the discussion and suggestions offered to address “Race” relied on historical and contemporaneous examples that still failed to contend with the changing face of the nation.

Often times, being one of two Latina/os seated at the table to plan for the project and to discuss a host of very thorny issues, I needed to continually form alliances to remind my colleagues of absences. However, the immigration marches, national debates, and the changing face of the Deep South as well as rural enclaves throughout the nation in many ways forced the project to consider who gets “raced” and how to represent that process differently. It is still a work in progress.

I got involved in the museum and teacher training part of it, because I am committed to getting children to think through these issues. By the time I get to engage with young people at the University, there are so many misconceptions, prejudices, and racisms at play. There is so much damage, it feels like it would take lifetime to undo the effects. And what is even more troubling is that ways of eliding the issues have been internalized to silence the discussion. (A NO RACE, NO Racism posture is affirmed even when there is evidence to the contrary.) I want children to have a language, to give voice to the possibility for the development of a consciousness that takes the consequences of RACE historically and contemporaneously into account.

Michael's CHALLENGE QUESTION

What happens if we stop calling ourselves anthropologists, taking our humanistic perspective into the big wide world without crediting our training?”

As I read the recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, “Zigzagging Through the Real World”, about anthropologist John Fox’s “non-traditional” career trajectory, posted on our panel’s blog by our colleague Inga Treitler, I found myself identifying with much of his observation on the practice of anthropology outside of academe and his arrived-at stance of being “comfortable wearing many career hats”, while “always [being] the participant observer, always curious about ‘the other’”. By way of offering some view on my own experience in this regard, I share with you a short vignette derived from a project with which I had been involved and which speaks to my role as culture broker in respect of that project and institutional impacts of the project on the domains of two of the career hats that I was simultaneously wearing at the time.

Sometime at the start of the new century, the late Laurence S. Rockefeller, entrepreneur, philanthropist and conservationist, decided to transfer to the people of the British Virgin Islands ownership of an exquisite little island, Sandy Cay, which he had purchased some fifty years previously. Although the island had always remained open to the public as a recreational site, its intended transfer would place it in perpetuity within the care and management of the BVI National Parks Trust as a unique managed-wilderness recreational site. The transfer and its plan of implementation were conceptualized by Mr Rockefeller and Dr Edward Towle, founder of Island Resources Foundation (IRF), a conservation organization whose central mission has been to assist small islands to meet the challenges of social, economic and institutional growth while protecting and enhancing their environments. And thus began an eight-year program of activities which became known as the Sandy Cay Project. Sadly neither Mr Rockefeller nor Dr Towle would live to see the successful culmination of the project.

The Sandy Cay Project (2000-2008) “was both a program of forward planning for the future of Sandy Cay and institutional strengthening for protected area management in the British Virgin Islands. The project was initially focused on the island itself -- its habitats and ecosystems. Over time, it evolved as a longer-term program of sustained and targeted assistance for BVI institutions, laws and policies that support conservation and protected area management.” (IRF)

When I was appointed Chairman of the National Parks Trust (NPT) in 2003, therefore, the Project was well under way and was clearly a major focus of the Trust. But it soon became evident that NPT staff felt beleaguered by the new external demands placed on them by the institution-building aspects of the Sandy Cay Project (new accounting systems, audits, and so on), regarding these demands as distractions from pressing operational matters, and thus not seeing the possibility of long-term institutional benefits. At the same time, the Rockefeller interests and IRF were resolute that all requirements be fulfilled prior to transfer of the island. So, a patient, participant observation perspective was decidedly useful on entry into the system. And having, over time, gained a deeper understanding of what was “going on”, so to speak, my role as culture broker evolved and was, in essence, sustained until the successful completion of the Project.

One of the significant outputs of the Project was the drafting and legislative approval of an Operational Procedures Manual for the NPT Board, making the NPT Board the only statutory body in the BVI to have such a document to inform its governance process. An additional implication here is that this coincided with my efforts under another hat that I wore at the time, that of president of the local community college, to place emphasis on board development at that institution, and so, I was able to introduce the model of the NPT’s Operational Procedures Manual at the college as well.

Antonella's CHALLENGE QUESTION

. Can we teach anthropology through observation and sensorial experience?

My reflection on the future of teaching anthropology comes from my experience of teaching a course in Applied Anthropology last year at John Jay College in the City University of New York. It wasn’t the first time that I was teaching in that particular college and I thought that I was already prepared and well equipped for both course material and that particular audience. This time however, I thought I was even better prepared than previous times, because I was teaching “my daily bread,” that kind of anthropology that it has become almost second nature to me. I could have been able to bring in my experience, examples and anecdotes from my previous projects. I anticipated a good response from the students, because I could see the relation between anthropology and their lives.

Even though I wanted to offer a kind of course that gave the students the opportunity to tie their lives with academia through practice, I was following the usual academic canons. My syllabus was a travelogue of interesting and provoking readings aiming to inform and trigger critical thinking. Since I wanted to make sure that some of the conceptual pillars of our discipline were going to be there, I made sure to rehearse the concept of relativism and of cultural evolution and transformation, to talk about the “founding fathers” of the discipline”, I included sections where race, diversity, and ethics were discussed.

To my surprise, classes did not have the effect that I had anticipated. I couldn’t see many sparkles in the students’ eyes. In fact, their eyes were rolling when I was talking about my testing fieldwork in Latin America. They were not too eager to hear stories about how effective anthropologists can be in the field of human rights, and even not interested in all those “exciting” readings that I assigned. It was a real challenge for me how to get to them.

It wasn’t until the last topic in the syllabus, titled “consumer research,” that I saw that long anticipated sparkle in my students’ eyes. The reason why I put that section at the end, was because I thought that we could venture in this “black sheep” field of anthropology only when all the more intellectual fields had been covered. So, I decided to move that topic to the middle of the course and one evening I met the students at one of the several Whole Foods stores in the City instead of in the classroom. I asked them to observe contents of shopping carts, people’s shopping behaviors, to record conversations in their minds among customers and between customers and shop assistants, to interview shop managers, to pay attention to the location and displays of products within the store.

That was definitely a turning point both for me and for them. A simple un-staged event was what made them curious about anthropology. The observations they gathered at Whole Foods was hands on anthropology and “face-to-face cultural experience. Just by observing the types of food offered at the store and contrasting it with what their neighborhoods’ grocery stores offer had an impact of them. They were able to understand through experience in first person, the concepts of power, inequality, race, and ethnicity and they were able to articulate these concepts in a more powerful way than when absorbed from an article.

The lesson I learned from this episode is that sometime we anthropologists, caught up with definitions and sophisticated thoughts, forget that we dismiss the very notion of culture. There is in fact little to say about culture, but it takes a lot to grasp the basic concept. Students found it at Whole Foods, and I understood it in new ways.

Mitra's CHALLENGE QUESTION

Look at our practices reflexively (yes, I know: “duh!”) and to do so by searching specifically for the most naturalized, deeply embedded, most “secret” assumptions/structures/ballasts that make those practices “successful” within the cultural realms we are operating.

Dear Fellow “Boundary Breachers,”

I would like to take Inga and Dena’s assignment to write a “casual” letter of introduction as an opportunity to disclose a secret that has filled me with trepidation as I prepare to join all of you at the (first ever!?? no way) round table style of executive panel at AAA in a few weeks. Here’s the secret: I did not engineer a “boundary-breaching,” ethnographic pedagogy which I then applied in the course of developing a brand new Cultural Studies program here in northern Minnesota. This is what many of us contemporary anthropologists do: we are required by granting agencies and IRB boards to “know” what we are doing enough to create sound proposals that sound like scientific hypotheses are at play. In the realm of teaching and curriculum development, however, we have a little bit more freedom. It’s only in retrospect that I can write an abstract along the lines I’ve submitted to this panel, in which it sounds like the project of creating pedagogies and curricula for a specific version of Cultural Studies that would fit the location and succeed in drawing undergraduate students was intentional, engineered, fully structured and ultimately – with some tweaking – all went according to plan.

The truth of the matter (and the secret) is that I operated almost entirely on instinct. My challenge question emerges from wondering if modes of boundary-breaching in contemporary anthropology are very likely to be unintentional, unplanned, creative, spontaneous and largely un-engineered. For me, responding to a job call that entailed creating an undergraduate minor in Cultural Studies captivated my attention in 2000 and quickly became an opportunity for me to be “me” in an academic setting that was removed enough from mainstream styles and modes of curricular development that I was allowed, as a new tenure-track faculty member, a great deal of freedom to organize, make alliances, and write curricular initiatives around, for lack of a better word, my instincts. Some of those instincts developed through previous teaching experiences: I had already learned that students do best when they are fully engaged with questions they themselves have deemed important and pursue them in communitarian, collaborative settings (rather than the “solitary confinement” of conventional research papers). Some emerged from the folks at hand who were ready to jump in and create with me: a long-standing humanities scholar with an itch to jump ship to cultural studies, a labor organizer with a doctorate in American studies, a sociologist whose work on gender stratification yielded a popular textbook in the field, and a collegiate dean who was looking for ways to support “on-the-ground” interdisciplinarity and had engaged directly with the creation of the faculty line I had been hired into. The group of us spent a semester hashing out a small program that in its essence pushes anthropology into the realm I’m now calling “ethnographic pedagogies.”

analysis of bathroom use as metric of social trust, courtesy Gillian Tett, Financial Times U.S. editor

Earning the key to the T-suite

By Gillian Tett

Published: November 5 2010 19:54 | Last updated: November 5 2010 19:54

A few weeks ago I was visiting an office in central New York, when I asked to use the “rest room” (aka toilet).

A receptionist handed me a vast key on a wooden board that might have been a prop from a prison drama. Then she sternly warned me to check that the rest room door was “properly locked” after use.

“Why?” I asked.

She glared at me, as if I was a simpleton.

“They are private.”

“But why?” I queried again … but received no response. No surprise, perhaps. Ever since I first lived in America a decade ago, I have been struck by the diligence with which many offices and institutions lock their toilets, particularly in cities such as New York. Americans rarely discuss this topic; after all, rest room habits seem a tad puerile. But precisely because this issue is so rarely discussed, it is rather fascinating from an anthropological view – not least because it speaks volumes about the degree of trust (or mistrust) in parts of American life.

If you walk into an office in central Tokyo you will be able to wander freely into the toilet (or toire), which is usually a delightful place, with warmed toilet seats, bountiful tissue, sparkling floors and background music (to disguise any rude sounds). If you need the “loo” in a London office, you will almost always get open access too, albeit to something rather less elegant and likely lacking loo paper. Locking up the convenience is not considered normal in Europe or Japan; or in central London.

But keys and combination codes are found in many New York offices, as well as many restaurants and gas stations. Indeed, the practice is so endemic that websites welcoming new immigrants to America include a specific paragraph explaining how to ask for the rest room key. Why?

The “official” explanation – or that proffered by those key-wielding receptionists whenever I ask – is “security”. Keeping the door locked ensures that the rest room stays “clean” and “safe”; if the door was not locked with a monster key, the implication goes, then the facilities might become soiled. Tramps could sleep there. Heavens, somebody might even nick the toilet rolls. Indeed, this reflex is so ingrained that the website of the US State Department explicitly tells American companies that “restrooms should be kept locked in high-threat environments”, with “access controlled by the receptionist”.

Perhaps that is a reasonable point to make in places such as Kabul, where there are bigger threats at stake than somebody stealing the mouthwash. But in Manhattan, the argument seems odd. After all, security in most office blocks these days is already so tight that anybody going anywhere near a locked rest room would have already been screened. Or as a lobby group with the wonderful name of the “American Restroom Association” observes: “Typically, buildings in areas where there could be a problem with misuse [of rest rooms] already have access control procedures such as a guard.”

I n my mind, the real issue at stake is social trust and cohesion. A country such as Japan has a high level of cultural homogeneity, conformity and cohesion; everybody presumes that everyone else knows how to behave “correctly”, and there are powerful unspoken social norms to enforce that. At times, this can feel oppressive; but it also creates a climate of trust. Thus, loo doors remain unlocked – and public, or semi-public, infrastructure usually stays in a sparkling state. There is toilet trust.

Places such as New York, however, have far lower levels of cohesion, informal control or mutual trust. That creates a feeling of freedom; but it also means that there is less respect towards public, common infrastructure, compared with private property. Hence the fact that the elites who work in offices feel too nervous to let strangers randomly appear in their rest rooms; keys are needed to impose control.

This makes life darn uncomfortable for anyone with a weak bladder. So much so, that the ARA (mission statement: to be an “advocate for the availability of clean, safe, well-designed public restrooms”) is now lobbying companies and institutions to start providing unlocked rest rooms. “To assure building restrooms are used only by tenants and their guests, many Companies have keyed bathroom entry, [but] unfortunately, this hindered access can be a problem for the restroom challenged,” its website earnestly declares. “After a long trip, for example, a person may desperately need to use the rest room as soon as they enter the building. If they can’t quickly find the organization they are visiting their health is compromised.”

And to further this cause, the ARA website is gathering donations (all major credit cards accepted). But while I wish it well, I doubt its chances of success. After all, current fiscal and economic pressures look set to create considerably more, not less, social friction in the coming years. Just look at the political vitriol swirling around Obama for a sign of that. Those keys, in other words, look set to stay in use, if not proliferate; low-status “outsiders” with a weak bladder had better cross their legs.