Friends,

When I started to respond to Danny Butt's note this morning, the
thread on anthropology and design was in a very different state.

It has moved far and fast over the day while I've been thinking. I
will attempt to weigh in briefly on two issues.

Before I do, I should say that my earlier note on Margaret Mead and
Derek Freeman did not address all of Mead's work or even all her work
in the Pacific. I certainly did not elide all of "the work done by
Pacific scholars who have for the last 15 years or so been putting
forward substantial critiques of Mead's work and legacy to not so
much critique her, but the colonial impulses built into anthropology
*as a discipline*." I addressed one specific issue in Norm Sheehan's
post, and David Sless's response. My purpose was a call for greater
care when dropping complex debates into a list discussion.

For that matter, I was not addressing all the issues that Norm raised
-- I admire Norm Sheehan's work, and his posts always give me
occasion for reflection and thought. So did his doctoral thesis, of
which I am fortunate enough to have a copy.

Neither was I addressing everything David said -- and he raised
substantive points to which I did not respond. It was only one issue
that caught my eye, the questions of whether a group of Samoan girls
hoaxed Margaret Mead.

If you'd like to read an excellent review of Mead's original Coming
of Age in Samoa in relation to Freeman's critique, I'd recommend an
article by Bonnie Nardi, an anthropologist who also worked in Samoa.
This is Bonnie Nardi. Nardi (1984) wrote a fine review in Feminist
Studies back when the arguments were fresh. She summarized most of
the issues quite nicely. Many of us know Nardi's work from her work
on activity theory, and her current work in design research and
informatics.

What's my view? As I see it, Margaret Mead was a great scholar who
made mistakes in the course of a long life developing important
ideas. We know more today than she knew. We have come to much of what
we know thanks to her extraordinary contribution. If we see farther
that she did, it is -- in part -- because we stand on her shoulders.
Today, we can see more easily what she did not and could not have
seen in the 1920s or even in the 1970s at the end of her long and
productive life. I don't think she got hoaxed -- she may have got
some issues wrong, but it does not seem to me that the people who
explained their culture to her hoaxed her, nor that she was entirely
wrong about the culture in the part of Samoa where she worked in the
1920s. That said, the debate is deeper and richer than this thread
allows. All I say is that such a debate can't be parachuted in out of
context with a few short comments.

Danny's note raises an important issue that I will try to answer briefly:

Are colonial impulses built into anthropology as a discipline?

As I wrote earlier, anthropologists are scholars who study human
beings in social and
cultural context using an array of methods and mental models.
Anthropology is a science or a branch of the humanities (as history
is to some) or a research field that tries to learn about human
beings in at least four contexts. Dori Turnbull outlined them.

You don't need to take our word for it. If you visit the web site of
the American Anthropological Association at URL

http://www.aaanet.org/

you can see the wide variety of fields that anthropologists study in
the different societies and sections of the AAA. For your
convenience, I list them here below as an appendix.

It is difficult to see what kinds of colonialist impulses can be
driving feminist anthropology, political and legal anthropology,
nutritional anthropology, medical anthropology, the alcohol and drugs
study group, or many of the other areas or subdisciplines.

It seems to me that anthropology offers an array of disciplines and
research methods to the disciplines of design research and to those
who use research to support the practice of design. This gets close
to the original thread that Dori launched, and I'm not quite ready to
say anything to the overall thread.

I simply want to suggest that one cannot condemn an entire
intellectual and scholarly discipline simply because some of its
practitioners have done terrible or silly things. It's true that this
has happened. Where I'd take a skeptical view about making all
anthropologists responsible for the stupidities and wrong-doing of a
few. If we are to hold a research field or a discipline responsible
for the deeds of all who practice in that field, we're back to the
arguments of the Nazi physicists against relativity as "Jewish
science." For that matter, we might have to hold all physicists
responsible for the misdeeds of Nazi physics (including the death of
slave laborers who died in the various weapons programs on which they
worked). And let's not forget the architects, engineers, and
logistics specialists who designed the death camps. Was design
responsible for the holocaust?

That's a tightly stretched analogy, and I mean it to be so. The
answer is that the fields of physics and design are not to be held
responsible for Nazism or the holocaust. Colonialism long predated
anthropology just as genocide long predated the Nazis. Those who
practice dark deeds use and corrupt whatever tools are accessible. At
a time when the emerging field of anthropology seemed useful to
colonial and imperial powers, some anthropologists worked in the
service of imperialism and colonialism. Others worked against these
forces -- but that is another story and a long thread that I will not
launch.

I simply wish to suggest that these issues should not be summarized
in a few short -- and in my view, mistaken -- criticisms that label a
field and all its practitioners guilty of colonial impulses.

I appreciate Danny's questions and critique on this list. I'm
certainly ready to acknowledge that Danny and Norm (and probably
David) know vastly more than I do about the cultures of Australia and
New Zealand Aotearoa. But I'll suggest that they may not know more
about Samoa in the 1920s than I do. They may not know less than I do,
but I doubt they know more. They certainly do not know more about
Margaret Mead or the field of anthropology. Despite my long absence
from the practice of anthropological research, I was a serious
participant in anthropological discourse in the 1960s and 1970s --
without, I hope, being a colonialist, and without feeling constrained
to adopt a colonialist perspective. To the contrary, in those days,
anthropology seemed to be one of the ways to learn about many
cultures, to hear the voices of many peoples, and to fight against
the colonial impulse in geopolitics, economics, and scholarship.

Yours,

Ken Friedman

--

References

Nardi, Bonnie. 1984. The Height of Her Powers. Margaret Mead's Samoa.
Feminist Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2, (Summer 1984), pp. 232-337.


[Appendix]

Sections and Societies of the American Anthropological Association

American Ethnological Society
Anthropology and Environment Section
Archaeology Division
Association for Africanist Anthropology
Association for Feminist Anthropology
Association for Political and Legal Anthropology
Association of Black Anthropologists
Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists
Association of Senior Anthropologists
Biological Anthropology Section
Central States Anthropological Society
Council for Museum Anthropology
Council on Anthropology and Education
Council on Nutritional Anthropology (See Society for the Anthropology
of Food and Nutrition below)
Culture and Agriculture
East Asian Studies in Anthropology Section (See Society for East
Asian Anthropology below)
Evolutionary Anthropology Society
General Anthropology Division
Middle East Section
National Association for the Practice of Anthropology
National Association of Student Anthropologists
Society for Anthropology in Community Colleges
Society for Cultural Anthropology
Society for East Asian Anthropology
Society for Humanistic Anthropology
Society for Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology
Society for Linguistic Anthropology
Society for Medical Anthropology
Society for Psychological Anthropology
Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness
Society for the Anthropology of Europe
Society for the Anthropology of Food and Nutrition
Society for the Anthropology of North America
Society for the Anthropology of Religion
Society for the Anthropology of Work
Society for Urban, National and Transnational/Global Anthropology
Society for Visual Anthropology
Society of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists

Interest Groups

AAA
Interest Group for the Anthropology of Public Policy
Melanesia Interest Group
Post-Communist Cultural Studies Interest Group
Scholarly Communications Interest Group
Sexuality Studies and Anthropology Interest Group (SSA)
Society for Anthropological Sciences Interest Group (SAS)

Sections

AIDS and Anthropology Research Group - Society for Medical Anthropology
Alcohol and Drug Study Group- Society for Medical Anthropology
Bioethics Interest Group - Society for Medical Anthropology
Clinically Applied Medical Anthropology Special Committee - Society
for Medical Anthropology
Council on Anthropology and Reproduction- Society for Medical Anthropology
Council on Nursing and Anthropology- Society for Medical Anthropology
Critical Anthropology of Health Caucus- Society for Medical Anthropology
Disability Research Interest Group- Society for Medical Anthropology
Global Health and Emerging Diseases Study Group- Society for Medical
Anthropology
Federation of Small Anthropology Programs, General Anthropology Division



Danny Butt wrote:

Enjoying this thread, and just a note as someone who keeps an eye on
the anthropological debates on method.

I have no real interest in the question of Mead's rightness or
wrongness, except to say that her work has a very poor reception
among Samoan scholars, who surely must be credited with some insight
into their own life and culture. I am a little annoyed at how Ken's
reframing of the discussion in terms of the Mead/Freeman debate
continues to elide the work done by Pacific scholars who have for the
last 15 years or so been putting forward substantial critiques of
Mead's work and legacy to not so much critique her, but the colonial
impulses built into anthropology *as a discipline*. Linda Tuhiwai
Smith's "Decolonizing Methodologies" and Haunani Kay-Trask's "Natives
and Anthropologists: The Colonial Struggle" being only two of the
most well known. Although Norm did not mention this explicitly, I get
the feeling this is the version of the critique of Mead that he is
referencing, which has little to do with Freeman.

This debate is important for designers because positivist versions of
ethnographic methods continue to be imported into the design
discipline with very little critical assessment of the contemporary
debates in the disciplines that hatched those methods (though Barab
et. al. is an excellent exception which proves the rule):
Barab, Sasha, Michael K. Thomas, Tyler Dodge, Kurt Squire, and
Markeda Newell (2004) Critical design ethnography: Designing for
change. Anthropology & Education Quarterly 35(2), 254-268.

This is not to say that anthropology has nothing to offer design, but
to say a shallow, functionalist reading of ethnographic methods will
not serve designers well if it instrumentalises "subjects" (as Keith
implies) and glosses over the political implications of extracting
knowledge from one community (e.g. "market") to circulate it in
another (e.g. "firm").

Another issue is that in anthro the period of fieldwork is long-term
in a way that few designers really undertake. All in all, as Dori's
initial post suggested, there is still a lot of work to be done in
investigating the correspondences across the disciplines in their
discrete trajectories before too much can be fruitfully said about
their contemporary overlapping or not.