“I think it’s too bad that a lot of scholarly work never gets read, usually because it’s just plain difficult to read,” she says in an interview with Nicole Merritt of MyShelf.com. “Being difficult is sometimes necessary, but sometimes there’s deliberate obfuscation going on … ‘If you can’t understand what I’m saying, I must be exceptionally smart’.”

David Brooks reviewed it at The New York Times, an honor not always bequeathed to anthropological texts.

The paperback is published by Hill and Wang, rather than an academic press, and the book is written in a humorous, even sarcastic tone, in accessible language that feels like a leisure read full of rich philosophical implications and shocking detail.  The focus of the work is how the laboratory became the locus of power and authority, the fountain of knowledge for social scientists and governments alike, eventually contributing to an extension of the laboratory to world settings – so that the United States, as a colonial power, utilized whole peoples for experiments on the premise that human behavior could be understood, controlled, and even engineered on a massive scale.

Lemov also describes how laboratory science, with its emphasis on objectivity and distance from the subjective – as well as the subject – is built around experiments on animals as the ideal approach to studying human behavior and, yes, even the social.  Yet this practice is built on a puzzling paradox: although humans are assumed to function behaviorally in the same manner as animals, animals as nonhumans (and, in some cases, certain humans considered less than civilized) are permissible subjects of often painful and exceedingly demoralizing experiments.  Furthermore, as Lemov demonstrates, laboratory science itself was generated by personalities, men in fact caught up in a range of personal fears and anxieties – in short, subjectivities.  Yet despite these contradictions, laboratory science built on the assumed subject-object, human-nonhuman distinction is as pervasive as ever, if not more so.

Without proposing any conspiracy theories – in fact, Lemov makes it clear that a lot of these guys were wayward do-gooders and philanthropists who couldn’t possibly know the full ramifications of their brand of science – she points to the lasting effects widespread ideas about the social self have on our lives even today, even in the marketplace, in malls, in everyday politics.

With the laboratory, Lamov writes, scientists “built a stressful world that predicted our own: a world in which stress and its effects can actually be engineered, ratcheted up, and in some sense capitalized upon” (101).

Admittedly, this sounds pretty incendiary for an anthropologist, and Lemov certainly doesn’t pretend to participate in any kind of dalliance with objectivity.  There is something very brave and honest about that.  Lemov is an anthropologist – a person with a PhD – but she clearly isn’t ashamed of her own biases, nor is she interested in putting on a veil with her thinking cap.  Perhaps more importantly, she’s talking about things that sound boring and inaccessible – science studies, subject-object distinctions, intentionalities – in a way that is likely to stimulate more dialogue and participation among a wider range of people than your standard stodgy academic article.

Not that those are unimportant.  It’s just that they, too, are part of the laboratory world.

I think there may be another element to anthropology, too: rumor has it that it’s an outsider’s discipline. It’s full of eccentrics, artists, people who aren’t happy with science, religion and the like as we know it. Liberals, progressives, and would-be revolutionaries. For all our studies of social norms and cultural traits, don’t we tend to identify with the underdog? Do you see a little of yourself in the panhandler?

Here’s a test of your humanism and/or your renegade self: what do you do when a homeless person asks you for money?

I have often heard people say that if you want to help someone who’s homeless, you should give the money to an agency that is responsible for delivering aid. The reasons behind this I suppose are that aid agencies are supposed to give handouts to those most in need; they usually give in the form of food, vouchers and housing rather than cash which could be used for addictive substances. That all makes sense — on the other hand, you’re paying for administrative costs, and the aid you want to give may not ever filter down to that person who is most in need, for various reasons, much less the person asking you for a dime right in front of you. Plus, you’re paying for whatever doctrines that agency wants to espouse. If it’s church-driven, the homeless people you sponsored might be attending mass or uttering prayers, regardless of what they believe — in order to obtain a place to sleep at night. (That really happens.)

It’s a strange dilemma for me, since I come from a very poor background myself, and panhandled as a kid. We received a great deal of help from food banks and the like, but I remember that individual generosity had a huge impact on me. Having been subjected to my share of ignorance and derision from the general public, it made all the difference in the world when someone would speak openly with me as if I merited human contact, or gave from a place of generosity and some degree of trust. On the other hand, those who showed a blatant lack of compassion had quite an effect as well. We always used the money for food, clothes or some other necessity; in my experience there were a number of people on the streets who were most interested in acquiring food. Alcohol was a popular commodity for some.

When I think about it, most of the compassionate and/or genuine human contact I experienced occurred through interactions with other poor or homeless people.

I try to give a dollar or so, and a genuine smile, to a few people who ask for it. I figure that no matter what, I can’t know what they’re going to spend the money on, and in many cases that very small symbol of compassion and personal interest, rather than the money itself, is what is most liable to make a difference in that person’s day. Very few people actually want to panhandle; it’s not exactly lucrative, in case you haven’t noticed by the kinds of clothes panhandlers wear. It’s not an act, as many people seem to think. Many homeless people aren’t equipped with the skills and resources to pull themselves out, and though many people would yell “get a job” at them, virtually no one will hire a dirty bum off the street.

Most striking for me, about my memories associated with this issue and my experience of the present, is the way I experience human contact compared to the way I did then. It’s a lot more abundant, now. People who would have spit some hateful remark at me or turned away from me-the-adolescent, are able now to look me in the eye and smile, or say hello. My co-worker doesn’t blink an eye at lending me a few dollars if I’ve forgotten my wallet one day, but she might feel very conflicted (understandably) about giving those dollars to someone on the street who obviously needs it a great deal more than I do. One thing I’ve learned with a resounding bang is that with class, comes privilege. I am sometimes astounded to find myself on the other end of the spectrum, the person being asked for change by the bum, who in turn looks at me and hasn’t the faintest inkling that I once did the same thing myself.

But am I somehow more human now, than I was then? Because I certainly feel less untouchable.

To this day — probably largely because of my own experiences — I cannot fathom how people can automatically behave so derisively as they often do toward homeless people. Turning a blind eye to others’ predicaments, ignoring them — that I can understand better. Sometimes another person’s suffering is just too overwhelming to look at.

Throughout high school and my early days of college I lived in an area of the country where many military personnel lived. As a result, I had several friends who were in the service, and had also many friends who were deeply involved in such matters even as civilians. I was also a peacenik, so I sort of saw both sides of the spectrum, which in itself was an interesting experience. I remember doing a speech at a peace rally about what it was like for U.S. troops and some of the issues they faced — low pay, rigorous training, lack of post-military career development, personal and psychological trauma … and even interesting types of discrimination, most of them having come from uneducated lower to middle class families with a history of patriotism and service. Needless to say, the reality of the lives of servicepeople and the lives of most peaceniks were disparate, and I found a mixed reception to my views in both arenas. Indeed, there was very little conversation going on between pro-war and anti-war folks, and arguments tended to be so volatile as to result in categorizing the other as the bad guy. Some peaceniks would blame military personnel for the war, while many people in the military felt discriminated against by the “left”.

Since then, I’ve thought about how meaningful and insightful it would be to conduct an ethnography of the military, to document the kinds of hazards they experience in a controversial war, to learn how their risks and sacrifices are determined by higher-ups who will never appear on the front lines themselves, and why they continue to serve as a member of the military institution.

I’m not sure if anything like this has been done in anthropology, but I’m curious what people think about this issue. After all, Michael Moore in the making of Fahrenheit 911 added new dimensions to the scope of the media by addressing how the war affects families and communities of military servicepeople.

The old fashioned definition of “community” mandates that geographic location is the most important factor. That is, people that live close to one another, or that live within certain geographical boundaries, are in a community. Urbanization, the introduction of “communities” online that have no locational basis whatsoever, and the use of the word by various kinds of social and political movements, have called this definition into question. But even before that, the concept that communities should be defined by location is full of philosophical pitfalls. For example, where exactly do you draw the lines around a given community, where the community members say to draw it? What if they disagree? What if two populations are fighting over a piece of land, and disagree about which community it belongs to? What if no one in a given neighborhood knows one another, such as is the case in many urban settings? Is community only location-based, or does it require communal interaction among its members?

Others say that what’s important about community is the interaction between individuals that makes it happen; the idea that people form a network which may include certain shared social norms, a language or dialect, and other types of “communal” knowledge. This means, of course, that the hearing impaired are able to have a community, because they are able to connect with one another based on shared values and experiences and, often, a shared language. Lesbians and gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people may participate in local, national, and global communities which may include all of the above populations, while more specialized communities may exist within that that are comprised of say, lesbians. The values of these communities are often communicated through media and the arts, such as films and popular music, and through various kinds of technology. The internet, of course, has enabled people to get together with others with whom they identify in unprecedented ways, fostering discussions in forums, chat rooms, and blogs. For both the hearing impaired and LGBT folks, using the word “community” fosters a sense of pride and gives them larger political clout in, for example, the public policy arena. Community names and validates the space that people use to connect with one another based on shared values, experiences, and interests. Calling people a “group”, for instance, just doesn’t hold the same kind of clout.This notion of community as a pliable and constructed network of individuals, which can be instigated, developed and maintained through media- and technology-based interactions, is something that has caused scholars to debate over whether we should ourselves use the word when others use it. Some scholars, especially those who consider themselves activists, too, use the word to describe populations they study as a way of validating their sense of empowerment, a fact which the informants themselves often appropriate as further proof of their unity and power as a population. Other scholars recommend a more cautious approach, steering away from the word altogether, because it is a political act in itself for a researcher to name something a community. Also, using the word blindly may prevent the researcher from approaching a topic with a critical eye and getting at what people are actually doing as opposed to what they say they are doing.It’s an interesting debate, and I think the solution is probably context-driven; personally I tend to use the word community when my informants use it, but in the interests of empiricism and the critical perspective, this may not always be the best option. What I do know is that my professor, arguing that communities could only be formed by people who lived close to one another, appeared inflexible in his argument, which did not allow for the way in which technology has changed the communication landscape, nor for the dynamic nature of human language and thought to explore and describe such changes. That kind of inflexibility can be damaging to the relationship between researcher and informant, or professor and student, if the concept of community comes with a sense of empowerment that the professor or researcher (who is in a place of power) appears to be denying — even if that’s not his intention.

As well as the more advanced version.

Even though I have studied a great deal of anthropology, including some physical anthropology, and have always been interested in evolution, I find that only the image of males evolving is stuck to my brain. What women looked like through the years? The gradual progression of sexual dimorphism, when things happened and what it looked like? Not so sure. If anyone knows where I could see an illustration of the evolution of women, that is, something that doesn’t depict us constantly cleaning the floor, I would be much obliged. Even though anthropology has taught me a lot about how women as gatherers were usually responsible for bringing in the most sustenance, and how societies with matrilineal kinship systems and egalitarian property structures are typically more peaceful and less patriarchal, I still get other messages from a lot of the images and language associated with our discipline. This is despite the fact that the canon of anthropology, at least on the cultural side, has been developed and influenced by female scholars.

Anthropology has, like most other sciences, been traditionally male-dominated. However, there have been a number of influential female anthropologists, the most popular of course including Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and some more contemporary women like Sherry Ortner. Other prominent female anthropologists can be found here.

Many of these anthropologists have questioned traditional philosophical paradigms that were based on deeply rooted Western canons whose development were heavily centered on the male perspective. Many female scholars have challenged traditional notions of sexuality and gender, Margaret Mead is perhaps best known for her endeavors in that arena, and in their own lives, ahead of their times, exhibited the fact that women can do science, write well, conduct intensive fieldwork, and lead very interesting personal lives. While these women were typically relegated to lower posts than their male counterparts, or earned a lower rate of pay, they introduced and influenced a great body of work that contributes a great deal to what anthropology is today. Female scholars have also developed a lively discourse in feminism and feminist anthropology, working to understand gender and power from a cross-cultural perspective. Women almost everywhere face various kinds of oppression, but not everyone experiences oppression, or empowerment, in the same way. In recent years, it has also become important to look at how gender inequality affects men, the concept of “maleness”, and the gender continuum which varies apart from biological sex.

Despite all of this, anthropology still seems alarmingly malecentric. For a field so heavily developed and influenced by women, I have to wonder where the women are depicted, and who understands their impact. It has been said that the way we talk about things filters what we understand of our reality. Images work the same way. If I’m a woman and I want to know how we as humans evolved, but all I can find are pictures of apes turning into men, I can’t see where we are in the picture. I don’t see humans, I see men. There are a lot of discussions going on in our field about how science textbooks, particularly in the field of biology, reinforce patriarchal notions, associating the male body with the stereotypical role of aggressor and sexual predator, for example, through the use of precise language and visual depiction. It seems that anthropology should be at the cutting edge of questioning and confronting those stereotypes.

“asks us to identify our deepest ethical-political convictions, and to let them drive the formulation of our research objectives.”

Rather than attempting to suppress those convictions,

“activist research endorses the contrasting tack of making our politics explicit and up-front, reflecting honestly and systematically on how they have shaped our understanding the porblem at hand, and putting them to the service of our analytical endeavor.”

The researcher utilizes personal convictions as a strength, incorporating it into her methodology. Part of activist anthropology involves developing the research questions and project while working with informants, allowing them to participate in the production of knowledge which will contribute to understanding the issues they face and how to resolve them.

“The goal is to carry out the research such that a specified group of people can actively participate, thereby learning research skills themselves, contributing to the data collection, taking an active role in the process of knowledge creation.”

I think that Hale is right that people will provide much better data if they are involved in the data-production process, and that activist anthropology can be a very useful approach when you’re working with activists, or with a population that is experiencing the effects of economic and other kinds of oppression, or that is dealing with ethnic conflicts, etc. Most of the time I think that it is crucial to fully address, and even to embrace one’s own personal-political stance and account for how it directs and affects the research process — in any project. However, I imagine that some kinds of research endeavors require some attempt at distancing oneself — suppressing the subjective, as it were, to some degree. For example, what if the researcher is working with populations that oppose each other, and her own bias gets in the way of generating data, while an appearance of neutrality might grant her more insight into the big picture? What if she’s working with a population whose ethics and politics contradict her own? In other words, how feasible is activist anthropology if the anthropologist is trying to study an “elite” population and doesn’t already sympathize with their concerns? Isn’t there some value to the traditional “outsider” and constructivist “mock-objective” approach in situations like these?

Hale asks some similar questions in the paper, but doesn’t address them there. I wonder what others think …

The article lists various cultural culprits including: lots of work and lack of time, television rather than the dinner table absorbing the center of family life, the advent of technology, and the ever-present cornucopia of enriched and over-processed foods that are available to Americans. Okay, so there’s an epidemic of obesity; seems to me there’s also a parallel obsession with dieting and losing weight. I can’t help but wonder how much of this obsession has permeated the medical industry … like the possibly unnecessary removal of wisdom teeth, perhaps? After all, I’m sure that many women will tell you that the BMI – which is used to calculate whether or not someone is obese or just overweight – must be based on a man’s body as the prototype. The article says that people in industrialized societies are steadily getting fatter, but I think the issue may be more complex – after all, the “ideal” body type that models represented in the old days was more buxom and has only recently dwindled to anemic status. Maybe part of the equation has to do with people watching TV, seeing a model rejoicing over a Coca-Cola, and thinking, “Real people don’t look like that.” Does Uma Thurman make you think of doing push-ups?

It’s interesting to me how this article paints a happy picture of these upper-class gay vacation towns, without addressing the larger political and social issues, and even makes the comment that “gays and lesbians can vacation almost anywhere these days”. I beg to differ – as far as I can tell, discrimination is commonplace, and where LGBTQ folks hang out has a lot to do with where they feel safer – in numbers. I think that it’s important to understand that LGBTQ identity is a highly mobile identity, in that many people move or travel to construct that identity among other people who share it. It’s not something that one is born into; if one wants the identity and the culture, one has to find it, and to some extent, create it. People I have talked to have expressed a basic feeling of being deprived in areas where heterosexual couples are allowed to express their affection for one another on streets, in restaurants, at public events, etc. while same-sex couples often face negative scrutiny, comments, and even assault just by holding hands. As a result, many people feel a sense of celebration and pride in areas where people are allowed to express their feelings for another person of the same sex. I have a hunch that the people at the forefront of gentrification are generally already fairly low-income and are looking for a place to land that is cheaper, safer, and offers opportunities to network with others like themselves. These people may often be gay … or artists … I would personally like to see more research about the relationship between gentrification and these populations.

*Please note: I use the acronym LGBTQ because it is a common and inclusive way to speak about lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, transgendered people, and people who identify as “queer”.

“Hezbollah, Hamas, together with Syria and Iran comprise the world’s new and ominous axis of terror, an infamous club the entry to which is the blood of innocents and the terrorizing of the entire world.”

I find the use of the term “axis of terror” very interesting. More on the conflict between Israel and Lebanon can be found in this article.

I’m thinking of the discussion that came up a couple of entries ago, this one called “Where is Anthropology Going?” It seems that anthropologists might have the tools to go into a place like this and help opposing sides understand one another. After all, being a cultural anthropologist takes both a lot of diplomatic skill, and being able to respect and attempt to represent the people you’re working with. Strangely, you rarely see anthropologists on the front lines at times like these. I think there are probably many reasons for this, one of them being that anthropologists issue a lot of political statements but may be discouraged by the nature of the field from getting too politically involved … in the interests of attempting to be objective where no objectivity exists, perhaps. (I’m with the camp that says that everything is subjective, “hard” science or not.)

I wonder if anthropologists should attempt to get more involved in world affairs and what it would take to accomplish that? Historically, several anthropologists have worked for the U.S. government as “spies” and subsequently been shunned out of the discipline. Spying is a different line of work from diplomacy, but I wonder if the stigma carries over to all government work. I suspect it does.

But which do you think is really more ethical – getting actively involved in promoting human rights and peace in as many contexts as possible, or hanging back and observing, watching, and doing under the umbrella of academia?