A first issue is of ongoing confusion around shorthand phrases like “gender is a social construction” or “race is a social construction.” I now tend to avoid such shorthands because they so quickly lead to an assumption that by “social construction” there is a denial of reality, or an implication that–as one biologist put it–people “generate their own truths based on their own experiences and imaginations.”

When social scientists use shorthand phrases like “gender is a social construction” they are 1) in no way denying that humans vary biologically in many different ways, or claiming that biology is irrelevant; and 2) not trying to say that these social effects are somehow not real or important; and 3) not saying that they are necessarily subject to extensive individual manipulation. Those shorthands simply indicate that many observed behavioral characteristics and life experiences are heavily influenced by social expectations, norms, and roles. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t real–they are quite real and can become biologically real as well.

The reality of social constructions is something anthropologist Jeremy Trombley succinctly tackled:

We have to get past the idea that things that are socially constructed are somehow not real. I encountered it again today in something I was reading. “X is socially constructed” or “X are social constructs” as if to say they are only or just social constructs–as if to say X is not real. But social constructs are real–that’s what makes them so powerful. Race, Class, Gender–these are all social constructs, but it is because they are socially constructed that they have tremendous effects on the lives of people who live in a particular society.

Trombley has also recommended a recently-published book The Reality of Social Construction. From the book-jacket:

‘Social construction’ is a central metaphor in contemporary social science, yet it is used and understood in widely divergent and indeed conflicting ways by different thinkers. Most commonly, it is seen as radically opposed to realist social theory. Dave Elder-Vass argues that social scientists should be both realists and social constructionists, and that coherent versions of these ways of thinking are entirely compatible with each other.

While I agree with Trombley on the need to emphasize the reality of social constructions, part of me feels like Elder-Vass’s book would never have needed to be written if the idea hadn’t been misinterpreted from the beginning. Social construction and realism never should have been opposed.

A related example: Money is obviously a social construction. We all choose to believe that pieces of paper with pictures of people on them (or electronic bits without any visible reality) have value and can be used to purchase real things in the world. We trust that when we exchange something for those bits of paper or computer bytes, it is because the next person in the chain will also accept that as real currency. (My economist colleague Karl Seeley, inspired by David Graeber, has written about the importance of belief and trust in a multi-part series on money for his blog Economics as if the physical world really existed.)

Or we could do an anthropological tour through different times and places and marvel at all the different kinds of objects pressed into the service of currency. We can readily agree that money is a social construction. But that doesn’t make it not real! It has a direct influence on life chances, experiences, ability to do things. It can have very real biological effects, like hunger and even starvation–the bodies and motor habits of the poor and rich can turn them into quite biologically different creatures. Moreover, simply imagining or believing that I have more money does not make it so. I may be able to use my imagination to do something to “make money,” but my efforts are far from guaranteed.

With that in mind, we can return to the issue of sex and gender. Initially, social scientists sought to distinguish sex from gender. As my introductory anthropology textbook defines sex: “observable physical characteristics that distinguish two kinds of humans, females and males, needed for biological reproduction” (Lavenda and Schultz 2012:365). As is clear in this definition, sex is mostly experienced as dimorphic, although the textbook does talk about various ways “genetic or hormonal factors produce ambiguous external genitalia.” So there are some ways biologically in which we might talk about a male-female continuum, or even contemplate other-sex categorizations. It is useful to recognize that the human primate seems to be something of an outlier in comparison to the standard measures of sexual dimorphism in non-human primates, and there is still a lot of evolutionary explanation needed for why human primates are unlike other primates in this way (see Adam Van Arsdale’s The complexity of human sexual dimorphism for an interesting contemporary take and also Greg Downey on The long, slow sexual revolution).

But understanding human sex difference would be frighteningly incomplete without considering gender, or “the cultural construction of beliefs and behaviors considered appropriate for each sex” (Lavenda and Schultz 2012:365). Social scientists introduced the term gender as a way of talking about all those expectations and beliefs we load onto people with certain physical characteristics. And we could do a tour through history and different cultures to find out how very different those expectations and beliefs can be, which is why we say they are “socially constructed.” However, that does not mean there is no biological variation, nor does it mean those beliefs and expectations don’t have very real effects, nor does it mean a particular individual can “generate their own truth” about gender. In fact, our beliefs and expectations can have quite dramatic biological effects, in terms of how boys and girls are differently fed and the spaces and activities they are assigned. And in some cases, most notably with eunuchs, there is the deliberate fashioning of a third-sex role (we are hardly the first or only society to engage in sex operations).

Gender roles and identity have often come as a duality, but there are a number of societies where “supernumerary gender roles developed that apparently had nothing to do with morphological sex anomalies” (Lavenda and Schultz 2012:368). Many of these cases are from the peoples indigenous to the Americas, which very often had a third-gender (or even fourth-gender) roles for “Two-Spirit Peoples” (which the French denigrated as berdache). These people typically took on tasks appropriate to the other gender; they often but did not always “cross-dress,” and many had special ceremonial roles in their communities. While some have glossed this as “homosexual,” it really does not correspond to such designation, and many contemporary Native Americans have rejected this gloss.

Of course given this biological sex variation and gender role variation, the question of sexual identity and sexual practices gets really tricky. We have typically thought of heterosexuality as both normal practice and identity. More recently there has been an idea that both homosexuality and heterosexuality are normal variants, and surely there are biologists searching for that “gene for homosexuality.” Others have talked about homosexuality and heterosexuality as a continuum. However, none of that gets at the even crazier range of human variation. For example, sex with a “Two-Spirit Person” would be considered neither strictly homosexual or heterosexual. There are also societies in which male homosexual practices are considered vital in order for men to later engage in heterosexual intercourse. Other societies gauge homosexual or heterosexual activity not by the biological sex of the partners but by their role in the sex act–a man can be perfectly “heterosexual” and have sex with other men, depending on the type of sexual practice involved. Hopefully we’ll soon be finding the genes to explain all that stuff…

Note: That last line was supposed to be a joke, based on the idea that it would be silly to search for genetic causation for that sexual diversity. However, I may have to be more circumspect, as the idea of faster genetic evolution combined with ethnicity–what I’m calling ethnobiogeny–may indeed result in such claims. See the end of Race redux for more on ethnobiogeny.

As useful as it has been to think about the social aspects of gender and sexual identity as related to but potentially quite different from biology, there has been some frustration with these approaches. First, gender was almost immediately used as a euphemism for sex. After the 20-week ultrasound, many people ask “what is the gender of the baby?” I was tempted to joke: “The sex is female, but we haven’t decided on gender yet” (note however that parents play an important but only auxiliary role in fashioning gender expectations). Second, people immediately misinterpreted the “social construction” argument in the ways described above, as a denial of biological variation or difference. Many analysts therefore wanted to push the point further, showing how our gendered social expectations actually become embodied, incorporated into our developing motor habits, musculature, and bodies, so that it was not just gender that was socially constructed, but sex too. In other words, the bodies we see as male and female are in part due to social environments. For example, many societies actively discourage females from participating in sports or other activities that would build muscle mass, as this would be unfeminine. While there are some who believe such differential expectations have lessened or disappeared in the industrialized world, I note the irony that technologies like the ultrasound now enable people to frontload gender expectations in ways that would have been impossible in the past–many people have their nurseries appropriately decorated and buy gender-coded baby clothes months before the baby is born!

In the context of people who were already familiar with many of these assumptions, a philosopher colleague recommended a chapter from Georgia Warnke’s After Identity: Rethinking Race, Sex, and Gender. Warnke is precisely attempting to push some of these boundaries in order to critique assumptions that males are evolutionarily programmed to be bread-winning but promiscuous whereas females are similarly programmed to be at-home and choosy about mates. Warnke reviews much of the ethnographic and historical record I have referenced above–and is really drawing on a lot of anthropology–to conclude that these roles are hardly anchored in our genes or evolution, but are more a product of relatively recent gender expectations. What we see as science is influenced by what we already believe to be true about males and females.

When anthropology talks about human sex, gender, and sexuality, we insist that we must take account of what humans say, think, and believe about their activities. To do otherwise is arrogant, presumptuous, and a root cause for why people become suspicious of the people who call themselves scientists.

To say this is not to deny evolution, to deny science, to deny that humans are animals, or to claim some sort of ethereal special place for the non-material. It is simply to ask that a role for human activity and imagination be included as part of our understandings. And of all the products of the human imagination, the idea that organisms are ruled or determined by genes is surely one of the most bizarre–but apparently also one of the most far-reaching and pernicious.

My last sentence is borrowed from Tim Ingold’s The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, and takes us back to the heart of “The Human Question”:

And of all the historical products of the human imagination, perhaps the most decisive and far-reaching has been the idea that there exists such a thing as an “intelligence”, installed in the heads of each and every one of us, and that is ultimately responsible for our activities. (2000:419)

Anthropology on Sex, Gender, Sexuality – as Social Constructions Living Anthropologically

Building on my recent theme of Anthropology and the Liberal Arts, I’ve recently been included in a YouTube Liberal Arts conversation. Inspired by the “Inventions of Leonardo da Vinci” exhibition at Hartwick’s Yager Museum of Art & Culture, President Margaret Drugovich convened five faculty to consider the Art of Science, the Science of Art. I had the privilege of sitting down with President Drugovich and my colleagues Mary Allen (Biology), Min Chung (Mathematics), Jason Curley (Music), and Stephanie Rozene (Art).

Much of what I had to say was about understanding how art and science were once unified endeavors and it is only in the relatively recent past that they became separated and even seen as dichotomous. I was cribbing Tim Ingold’s Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill, especially from some of the chapters I am currently teaching:

Etymologically, ‘art’ is derived from the Latin artem or ars, while ‘technology’ was formed upon the stem of the classical Greek tekhnē. Originally, tekhnē and ars meant much the same thing, namely skill of the kind associated with craftsmanship. The words were used, respectively in Greek and Roman society, to describe every kind of activity involving the manufacture of durable objects by people who depended on such work for a living, from the painter to the cobbler, from the temple architect to the builder of pigsties. . . .

The decisive break, according to Raymond Williams, came in the England of the late eighteenth century, with the exclusion of engravers from the newly formed Royal Academy, which was reserved for practitioners of the ‘fine’ arts of painting, drawing, and sculpture (Williams 1976: 33). It was, of course, symptomatic of a general tendency to distinguish intellectual from manual labour, along the common axis of a more fundamental series of oppositions between mind and body, creativity and repetition, and freedom and determination. But the more that ‘art’ came to be associated with the allegedly higher human faculties of creativity and imagination, the more its residual connotations of useful but nevertheless habitual bodily skills were swallowed up by the notion of technology. . . .

The source of the problem, in my view, lies not in the concept of art, nor in that of technology, but in the dichotomy between them. (349-351)

Somewhere in this conversation I also had the anthropological skirmishes in mind, of how to achieve humanistic science and scientific humanism.

The other thing I like about this YouTube Liberal Arts segment is how it seems to closely link to the film about Pierre Bourdieu, Sociology is a Martial Art: “I often say sociology is a martial art, a means of self-defense. Basically, you use it to defend yourself, without having the right to use if for unfair attacks.”

YouTube Liberal Arts: The Art of Science, The Science of Art Living Anthropologically

I single out philosophy and anthropology because those are two fields–along with zoology, art history and humanities–whose majors are least likely to find jobs reflective of their education level, according to government projections quoted by the Associated Press. But how many college students are fully aware of that? How many reroute themselves into, say, teaching, accounting, nursing or computer science, where degree-relevant jobs are easier to find?

Meanwhile, Adam Van Arsdale uses a pair of insightful posts, The usefulness of anthropology and Thoughts on an anthropology curriculum to ably defend anthropology when it appears as #9 in a list of the 13 most useless majors.

These ongoing slights on anthropology seem hardly worth the concerted defense mounted after the Governor Scott comments. My Florida Governor’s Daughter and Undergraduate Anthropology Major still gets some traffic on these issues, in part because I used Max Weber to talk about how “academic life is a mad hazard” and got a prominent link from the viral Open Letter to My Students: No, You Cannot be a Professor.

However, the latest salvo did seem worth some response, as these are issues that emerged during a recent admissions event, and my college president talked about how the New York Times Op-Ed had called anthropology a “useless major.” These are things I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Like Adam Van Arsdale, I see anthropology as a critical part of a liberal arts curriculum–not only worth defending, but crucial for thinking through contemporary political, economic, and social issues.

1. Anthropology is growing. As I emphasize at the beginning of What is Anthropology, there is a growing interest in the field, a growing number of undergraduate majors, a growing international presence, and projected job growth. While we should still encourage and support the anthropology done at main research universities, we should also recognize anthropology’s potential in small colleges, internationally, and the work of applied practitioners. Anthropology is growing not because we are telling students they can get jobs “in anthropology” (many anthropologists go out of their way to caution against such direct vocational messages), but because people are interested in what anthropology has to say and anthropological approaches to human problems.

2. The issue of jobs and college is part of a broader political and economic failure. This really does not have as much to do with anthropology as it does with the fact that getting a college degree simply does not lead to employment, and unemployment figures for the young are pretty bad. As Paul Krugman writes in Wasting Our Minds:

What the young need most of all, then, is a better job market. . . . We should be expanding student aid, not slashing it. And we should reverse the de facto austerity policies that are holding back the U.S. economy–the unprecedented cutbacks at the state and local level, which have been hitting education especially hard.

Yes, such a policy reversal would cost money. But refusing to spend that money is foolish and shortsighted even in purely fiscal terms. Remember, the young aren’t just America’s future; they’re the future of the tax base, too.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste; wasting the minds of a whole generation is even more terrible. Let’s stop doing it.

[I note here that the state and local cutbacks are exactly what propelled me into a run for my hometown Oneonta school board.]

Basically any college degree–and even some of the previously sure bets like law degrees–are no longer guarantees. But that’s where the flexibility and creativity of anthropological training and liberal arts skills are most needed: to weather uncertainty at a time when majors can go from useless to useful in a matter of months.

3. Anthropology courses are an ideal complement to vocational-track majors. Interestingly, my liberal arts institution, Hartwick College has programs in all the fields Bruni lists: “teaching, accounting, nursing or computer science.” And in each one of those fields, I’ve had very strong students take at least Introduction-to-Anthropology if not several courses or a minor. Sometimes those students switch to or add an anthropology major–other students go from an interest in anthropology into one of those fields. Anthropology coursework can be quite vital and well-integrated with any of these more vocationally-oriented programs. Some of these programs even require or strongly recommend anthropology as an essential dimension of this training.

4. Anthropology is a quintessential liberal arts major. We have the natural sciences, evolution, biology, quantitative approaches, data-mining, statistics. We have the humanities, arts, literature, writing, music, dance. We have the social sciences, history, economics, politics, geography. Anthropology as a major is inherently interdisciplinary. And if there’s ever been a discipline that stresses critical thinking–as radical examination of received categories–anthropology is at the forefront. In short, an anthropology major should deliver the thinking, reading, writing, and collaborative skills that every employer survey says they want from employees.

5. Anthropology continues to be interdisciplinary in graduate school and beyond. Although many graduate programs and departments are all about specialization and narrow focus, anthropology retains a core holism that cultivates interdisciplinary reach. Kate Clancy has recently put up a great post on these matters, I Can Out-Interdiscipline You: Anthropology and the Biocultural Approach, which already has a few spin-off posts from some of the big-name anthropology blogs, and a vibrant comment stream with more heavy-hitter anthropology bloggers. If I read Clancy correctly, she’s arguing for thorough training in a single subfield, but also a canon of additional reading and conversations across the traditional boundaries.

To summarize: Anthropology is a growing, vibrant field of study with many useful contributions. Gaining an anthropological perspective can be quite world-changing and re-orienting. It is deeply connected with the liberal arts mission.

All that said, how much debt would I acquire to pursue anthropology? That’s where things get tricky–debt is extremely limiting, often crippling. I’ve been extremely fortunate to have financial aid and fellowships–one of the well-hidden secrets of elite institutions is that often their high sticker-price is ameliorated by generous financial aid. I attended Phillips Exeter Academy, one of those snobby elite prep schools, but it’s free for any admitted student with a family income of $75,000 or less. I went from there to Williams College, again elite, but with a need-blind admissions policy. The trick is to get accepted, but it can be worth aiming at institutions that initially seem out of price range.

Anthropology and a liberal arts approach is more needed than ever. But for many students it can mean too-heavy debt loads, and that’s something that really needs to be addressed. As Krugman puts it, students incurring debt in order to graduate “into an economy that doesn’t seem to want them” is a recipe for short and long-term disaster.

Update 2 May 2012: Since writing this, I’ve found two highly-related commentaries. First, an interview with Andrew Delbanco, author of College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be, touches on many of these points, from the purpose of college, to mission, to student loan debt, to the role of elite institutions. Second, Did Anyone Ask the Students? by Jeff Selingo talks about how “face-to-face education matters even more now,” why “more career exploration is needed before college,” and that in some ways “majors don’t matter.”

Update 14 May 2012: At the Washington Monthly, Joshua Tucker has a great piece Correcting the Record on College Graduates and Job Prospects. Tucker notes that while this is a brutal job market, the idea that things suddenly fell off a cliff for recent college graduates is based on faulty numbers. Moreover, the evidence that STEM is the only hope is also misguided:

Are the mal-employed all art history and anthropology majors? . . . The cost of being a humanities/liberal arts major may not be as high as Bruni claims. While the chart shows that about one third of humanities/liberal arts majors were mal-employed, about 30% of business/management majors were similarly mal-employed, and about 18% of engineering and math and computer science graduates were mal-employed.

Anthropology and the Liberal Arts Living Anthropologically

So April-May has been a lot more electoral than I imagined, and I’ll hope to get back to posting about Introduction-to-Anthropology soon.

Elections, Elections, Elections Living Anthropologically

Woost will discuss gem mining in the southeastern part of Sri Lanka, where has has done research since 1985. Gem mining has been a part of history and legend in Sri Lanka since the first century A.D. Arab traders’ accounts from the 12th century speak of trade in spices and gems with people of the “Serendib” (the ancient Arabic name for the island of Sri Lanka).

Woost has returned to Sri Lanka almost every summer, and is an example of combining committed long-term fieldwork with engaged teaching in a small-college liberal arts curriculum.

Woost’s volume on Economy, Culture, and Civil War in Sri Lanka (co-edited with anthropologist Deborah Winslow) provided an in-depth analysis of the civil conflict in Sri Lankan society. Woost has since used innovative methods and long-term fieldwork to examine gem mining within this larger economic and historical context.

Looking forward to a great talk and prelude to more publications from a scholar I am grateful to call a colleague and friend. I’ll hope to provide an update following the lecture.

Michael Woost, Treasures of the Serendib: Gem Mining in Sri Lanka Living Anthropologically

There is a particularly poignant part of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, when she visits the Museum of the Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung. The 1955 Bandung conference inaugurates a vision of the Third World. Tsing reminds us of a long-forgotten vision of

the Third World, here imagined as a nonaligned block of emerging nations whose united presence could stop the Cold War. Their unity would define them as a global force. Their freedom would sponsor global peace. Peace and freedom would work together to remake the globe. (2005:83)

Tsing rightly comments, perhaps with understatement: “How many times the world has turned since then! How few today remember the meeting in Bandung” (83). But Tsing also continues: “When we consider the importance of the Bandung dream of peace and freedom, the inadequacy of the bridge seems hardly a good enough reason to have abandoned the quest” (85).

I’m just out of the last panel at the Society for Applied Anthropology 2012 meetings. Part of me feels like I was in three different conferences. At one extreme papers celebrating straight-up applied anthropology: how anthropologists contribute to development or health by understanding different cultural ideas. At the other extreme, the special track on Alternative and Non-Capitalist Political Ecologies. And then there were the people attempting activist reform, like Josiah McC. Heyman, trying to break into the “black box” of the immigration bureaucracy, or Jane Henrici asking for researchers to pay very close attention to the money.

We live in strange and uncertain times, when people are making difficult and painful choices. At what points do we side with powerful states and corporations to encourage development? When do we try to reform, resist, or ameliorate the ongoing marketization of social life? Or is it best to throw our lot toward explicit alternatives? These are all issues confronting me in the now, with the planned closing of my neighborhood school, which may end up in me running for the local Board of Education (see Ain’t it a little late in the game to throw your hand in?).

It seems worth noting that although the developers, reformers, and revolutionaries often end up fighting each other, we really hardly have any idea–in each locality–which tactic, strategy, or combination is going to be successful, for whom, and the eventual implications. It seems worth an injunction to attempt to dampen or re-consider the usual stereotypes we have about differently-positioned others.

A paper by Sarah Lyon, “Growing the Market Town by Town: The Moral Ambiguity of the Fair Trade Towns USA Movement” really captures some of the dilemmas. Lyon has been organizing to help her town achieve a Fair Trade designation. Some of these campaigns have not been successful until a “buy local” component is included: Buy Local, Buy Fair. Or to elaborate, “buy local–and if you can’t buy local, buy fair.” It’s a powerful idea, but the practical consequences are ambiguous–in order to get the Fair Trade designation, they may have to include and advertise several mega-corporations, including perhaps even Walmart. Lyon wonders: “Am I being elitist? What kind of community are we building with $5 lattes and $20 entrees of grass-fed beef?”

These are important questions, without easy answers. But on the subject of Walmart, I note that one commonality across many papers is the new importance of data and mapping–this seems to potentially provide more analytical power than was once possible. If the data, mapping, and visualizations could be made more widely available, it perhaps augurs different imaginations for projects of development, reform, and revolution. As Frederic Jameson muses about Walmart and planning:

The Walmart celebrated by [Thomas] Friedman becomes the very anticipatory prototype of some new form of socialism for which the reproach of centralization now proves historically misplaced and irrelevant. (Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, 2005:153)

I am especially thinking of this quote–which I came to via my Hartwick College colleague Robert Seguin–as I prepare for a guest lecture in Seguin’s class on the subject of anthropology and utopia.

What to say about anthropology and utopia during these times?

Back to Tsing:

The universal bridge to a global dream space still beckons to us. The bridge might take us out of our imagined isolation into a space of unity and transcendence: the whole world. We find ourselves like a man looking out from his parochial island toward the vast but hazy world of the mainland. The bridge of universal truths promises to take us there. Yet we walk across that bridge, and we find ourselves, not everywhere, but somewhere in particular. Even if our bridge aims toward the most lofty universal truths–the insights of science, the freedom of individual rights, the possibility of wealth for all–we find ourselves hemmed in by the specificity of rules and practices, with their petty prejudices, unreasonable hierarchies, and cruel exclusions. We must make do, enmeshing our desires in the compromise of practical action. We become hardened, or, alternatively, we are overcome with grief and anger. The bridge we stepped off is not the bridge we stepped upon. Yet to cast away the memory of the first bridge denies desire. To pretend it is the same as the second bridge is the baldest lie of power. It is only in maintaining the friction between the two subjectively experienced bridges, the friction between aspiration and practical achievement, that a critical analysis of global connection is possible. (85)
–Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction

Development, Reform, Revolution–and the Bridge Living Anthropologically

At the Society for Applied Anthropology 2012 meetings in Baltimore, anthropologists Boone Shear and Brian Burke organized a special track of events on alternative political ecologies, grouping together a plenary session, panels, papers, and related events. This is primarily about the opening plenary, featuring talks from Stephen Healy, James Igoe, Kevin St. Martin, and Paige West.

Boone had contacted me about possibly participating in the track after I wrote Anthropology, Moral Optimism, and Capitalism: A Four-Field Manifesto. While this piece has been far and away my most viewed blog-post, almost no one likes my list of ten things that “anthropology urges.” Some people felt it was fine for anthropology to critique but not propose. Others said it would kill capitalism. But Boone said there was nothing non-capitalist about the proposals–that they were proposals to modify or reform, but not to go beyond capitalism, which is what this special track proposes.

At the time I was certainly drawing on critiques of capitalism which stressed a need to move beyond criticisms that essentially reproduced ideas of capitalist invincibility. My main sources for this re-thinking have been Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Both these books speak of capitalism’s destructive record–but they also speak of new imaginations and desires, of potential and possibility within and alongside capitalism.

I was less familiar with what the alternative political ecologies framework has been drawing upon, the work of J.K. Gibson-Graham The End Of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy and the follow-up A Postcapitalist Politics. From their website Community Economies, J.K Gibson-Graham is the pen-name of Katherine Gibson and the late Julie Graham, feminist political economists and economic geographers based at the University of Western Sydney, Australia and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The talks below have been inspired by this work.

First up at the plenary was Stephen Healy. Healy has a forthcoming co-authored book which aims to provide concrete metrics of the community economy. The idea is to “desire and enact post-capitalism in the present moment” and he stressed the use of mapping and linking technologies for self-consciously alternative economies. The book aims to make this re-evaluation of economic life into a habit, providing ethical questions toward the goal of “negotiated interdependence.”

Next was Kevin St. Martin. St. Martin brought in the idea of the commons, but again linked these ideas to the role of mapping and data collection. He initially set up an opposition between Community Supported Fisheries (CSF) and Marine Spatial Planning (CSF)–that on their face, the CSF is an effort to establish community and a commons-like fishery, whereas MSP looks like a typical neoliberal project to enclose and privatize marine resouces. However, his own research has mapped a community using GIS technologies, so that in some ways MSP data is actually foundational to the CSF, that by making a map the people were able to “perform the commons.” This is therefore an effort to go “beyond alternative binaries” of markets as automatically opposed to commons. (These kinds of ideas have been very important to my own collaborative work with Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, pushing toward ideas of how marketplaces and economic activity can be reconceputalized in the framework of a commons.)

Paige West followed, speaking about her work on the themes of how new worlds can emerge. However, she then shifted more toward talking about new worlds in the context of social reproduction and academic reproduction. West seemed perhaps to be something of an outlier here–in a later paper titled “Moving Beyond Reform,” Vincent Lyon-Callo would say that assigning West’s book made the students even feel bad about fair trade–and West’s main point seemed to be talking about making our scholarship and theory more accessible. In a memorable final quote, West said that “to build new worlds, we have to understand the one we’re in” and she criticized excessive theorizations based solely on inaccessible Western traditions. This point blended quite nicely with a point Daniel Lende would make at 8am the next morning: that we need not just open access to our publications, but open access to our theory. (Lende promised to write a blog-post about this, and it also reminded me of comments I made in a guest post for Savage Minds, The Bongobongo and Open Access.)

The final plenary speaker was James Igoe, who wove together anthropology with his work on anarchist collectives in Detroit. Igoe talked of how anarchism and anthropology go well together: both are concerned with diversity, with challenging authority, and naturalness, with alternative forms of organizing. Igoe also discussed the influence of a “feminist uptake of the Boasian tradition,” an alternative and salutary influence Boas might not have predicted.

I here hope to have conveyed a selection of ideas and influences from the opening plenary. My follow-up post, Development, Reform, Revolution–and the Bridge, says a bit more about the special track in relation to other panels and papers at the Society for Applied Anthropology 2012 meetings.

Alternative and Non-Capitalist Political Ecologies at #SFAA2012 Living Anthropologically

Even if it’s all over, don’t ever say it was all in vain
And don’t tell me everything we believed has been washed away
Because I know it still remains.
–Little Steven, “Inside of me”

The historian of the future could be quite puzzled to reflect on the United States. How could a country with so much wealth, human resources, and technological innovation go into such precipitous decline? How did this society decide to squander its human capital, accepting an incarceration rate unmatched in modern times? How did this society forsake basic education to such an extent that a majority of students–as Condoleeza Rice and Joel Klein note–are unprepared to serve in the military and do not possess the job skills necessary to use our own technological innovations?

Part of the puzzle is undoubtedly an antiquated system of funding schools with local property taxes, creating perverse incentives for families to seek the wealthiest possible school districts and leave the poor behind: “Just imagine if we funded health care the way we fund schools, asking each property owner in the community, employed and unemployed, with and without children, to decide how much they are willing to be taxed to provide the town’s children with medical care” (Nothing left to cut but quality). Especially when combined with exacerbated social inequalities and cuts to state aid, the poorest districts are ever harder hit. This comes at a time when class inequalities now trump race for determining student educational outcomes, as Education gap grows between rich and poor.

But for my town and the neighborhood school now threatened with closure, the question is stark: Will this be the decisive moment when we shutter one of our best and most crucial institutions?

Let’s be perfectly clear. We have options. Closing the school is not the only alternative. With a bit of planning, study, and forward-looking thinking, we have the opportunity to make a very good local education system into a gem, magnet, and anchor for community living. It will make our town attractive to young professionals and a bulwark against the rising tide of rural inequality and stagnation. On the other hand, if we prematurely mothball this school, it will precisely capitulate to short-term economic rationale and political expediency.

While much has been made of the idea that closing this school would “save one million dollars,” this number is quite incorrectly calculated. Rather:

• Transportation, Environment, Health. Part of the savings is because our school district does not yet use its full state busing allowance, and so closing the school would apparently be “costless” for transportation and busing. However, this is not a true calculation of economic costs. It will mean 200 students moved from mostly walking to mostly buses and automobiles, enormously increasing transport costs. Students already on buses will have longer routes. More CO2 emissions and more jammed intersections. Moreover, as we learn about the long-term health consequences of increased sedentism, it just cannot be a good idea to move toward more buses and automobiles.
• Jobs, downtown, regional economy. As economist Karl Seeley has calculated, closing the school building directly saves only approximately $250,000, or one-quarter of the big number floated. Most of the projected savings come from cutting jobs. Certainly from a business perspective, laying people off “saves money,” but from a community and regional perspective, that money would be almost entirely spent within the local area, with a multiplier effect for local businesses and real estate. It cannot be a good idea to slash income and potential spending while trying to revitalize the downtown and local shops on Main Street.
• Educational quality and poverty. In a 2010 book, Targeting Investments in Children: Fighting Poverty When Resources Are Limited, two economists compared programs in terms of their lifetime earnings. A few things that worked: Class-size reduction, curriculum reforms, teacher training, increased teacher pay. So why would we want to move toward increasing class sizes and curtailing our teachers? (The book also gives examples of ineffective programs, possibly providing a template for how to allocate scarce budgets.)
• Taxes, real estate values. I’m doing my taxes now, so I can say that even the very scariest floated percentage increase would be a less than one dollar per day increase in school taxes. Given the clear correlation–if not causation–between closing a school and declining real estate values, it seems a pretty risky proposition to close a school that could be kept open for an average tax increase of around thirty cents per day.

I am no sentimentalist about this school. I do live a few blocks away and have two elementary-school-age children. However, I did not go to school here and did not grow up in this town. If after a truly public study and planning effort it is demonstrated that school consolidation is our best alternative–and I am certainly aware that consolidation can have advantages–then I will support such a decision. But this is strikingly sudden, at a time when smarter alternatives are available.

As I’ve been involved in this, someone from my old home region (northwestern Montana and northern Idaho) contacted me to relate a similar struggle:

Hi Jason, I know we haven’t talked in about 25 years, but I am an elementary teacher in Coeur d’Alene, ID and we just went through this fight 5 years ago with our elementary school downtown. You should look up the story of Sorensen Elementary. Our parents fought hard to keep our little school open and now it is the diamond of the district and has brought an estimated 50 homeowners back downtown to buy houses.

And indeed, there is now the Sorensen Magnet School of the Arts and Humanities in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

We can do it too.

Ain’t it a little late in the game to throw your hand in?
Ain’t it a little late in the game to forget everything we’ve been?
–Little Steven, “Inside of me”

Update: For more on how this issue has developed, please see the Local is Possible blog.

Ain’t it a little late in the game to throw your hand in? Living Anthropologically

Meanwhile, teaching classes and in the middle of all this came across one of my favorite Tim Ingold quotes, from The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill:

Far from confronting one another across the boundary of nature, both the people who call themselves scientists and the people whom scientists call hunter-gatherers are fellow passengers in this world of ours, who carry on the business of life and, in so doing, develop their capacities and aspirations, within a continuing history of involvement with both human and non-human components of their environments. (2000:38-39)

It’s a profound call for a bit of humility, a bit of empathy, things I see sorely missing from contemporary debates. Especially when I survey the ongoing comment streams about race, intelligence, and education, there seems to be a self-satisfied smugness and assurance of being right. There also seems to be a prevailing sense that innate ability–or intelligence–determines life-position, without considering how much life-position influences ability and intelligence.

Adam Smith, writing in the 1776 The Wealth of Nations knew better:

The difference of natural talents in different men is, in reality, much less than we are aware of; and the very different genius which appears to distinguish men of different professions, when grown up to maturity, is not upon many occasions so much the cause, as the effect of the division of labour. The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education. When they came in to the world, and for the first six or eight years of their existence, they were, perhaps, very much alike, and neither their parents nor play-fellows could perceive any remarkable difference. About that age, or soon after, they come to be employed in very different occupations. The difference of talents comes then to be taken notice of, and widens by degrees, till at last the vanity of the philosopher is willing to acknowledge scarce any resemblance. (1776)

The vanity of the philosopher indeed. Smith is also calling for a bit of humility, for a bit of what he termed sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and what we might more appropriately call empathy today. Except that today, unlike in Adam Smith’s time, residential patterns are so intertwined with the pronounced social inequality that these school-children are quite unlikely to ever play together. There are fewer opportunities for empathy or even sympathy. Their differences come to appear natural at a much earlier age, the degree of difference now taken to be due to the degree of intelligence. Back to Ingold, and how he ends Perception:

And of all the historical products of the human imagination, perhaps the most decisive and far-reaching has been the idea that there exists such a thing as an “intelligence”, installed in the heads of each and every one of us, and that is ultimately responsible for our activities. (2000:419)

I used to wonder if that was an effective way to end the book, but it is precisely what most needs to be said, now more than ever.

fellow passengers in this world of ours Living Anthropologically

April 2012 Update:
For more on how this issue has developed, please see the Local is Possible blog.

We now know where that kind of framing leads–to the planned closure of our central neighborhood school. Here’s what we’ll get for a projected savings of one million dollars:

• 200 students re-districted and moved from mostly walking to mostly buses and automobiles. On that basis alone it seems difficult to believe the one million dollar savings will materialize. At a time when people worry about CO2 emissions and the health consequences of increased sedentism, it cannot be a good idea to move toward more buses and automobiles.
• Laying off 10-14 people, which is really the bulk of where these so-called savings will come from. Cutting jobs in a fragile economy, in an already economically-depressed region. It cannot be a good idea to slash income and potential spending while trying to revitalize the downtown and local shops on Main Street.
• An increase in class sizes across the district to the contract maximum. All elementary school classes will be at 25, 30, 35 children. More kids, more potential disciplinary distractions from learning, more kids falling through the cracks–it all means a decrease of instructional time, which is the one clear determinant of improved student learning outcomes.
• A decrease in real-estate values in the already beleagured central neighborhoods–this will only increase the incentives to live outside the city limits and exacerbate a trend of people commuting from outlying areas. Property taxes may not rise–but those so-called savings could very well be offset by real-estate decline.

I write as someone who is very personally concerned with these issues–two kids in elementary school, and having bought a house precisely to be able to walk to schools and the downtown. And I cribbed my reasons from my daughter’s drawing above. This plan is far from a done deal, and I would urge anyone in the area to check out the Facebook group Support Oneonta Schools and Closing a school is a problem–not a solution.

The general issue is larger–it’s about the false economy of choices based solely on short-term budgets and political expediency. It’s about re-framing these issues in terms of a human economy (see also The Stakes for Anthropology in 2012). And we have to again realize that a discourse reducing all choices to economics, markets, and budgets “may not be the most respectful of the planet we share, nor indeed the most accurate nor the most practical. We owe it to ourselves to say that it is not the most beautiful nor the most optimistic” (Trouillot, Global Transformations, p.139).

The Cost of Savings and Saving Schools Living Anthropologically