Dear Ken and Lubomir,  



Dear Lubomir & Ken


Please remember in my post I was addressing Mead's work with the title:-
Coming of age in Samoa: a psychological study of primitive youth for
Western civilization - as a value neutral scientific study this does
seem a slightly prejudicial title even for the early 20th century? 

I apologise for my flippancy in referring to this work on the discussion
list - I trust that you may understand that this attitude of mine arises
from being a member of a community that has often been subject to such
'scientific' investigation. We share a lot of stories about the
stupidity of anthropologists mainly to make us feel good. In this regard
I speak to the context of this study which occurred in colonized space,
a place that I know well.

There are two aspects to my reply; the first being anthropological
science in colonial contexts for Lubomir.

I enjoyed the poetic quote on the list; an aspect of creativity as a
theft... the colonial agency in anthropology may also be seen as a kind
of theft that sees something in another's culture that is valuable for
the colonial project. For example it is contingent to attribute
categorisations of lesser being such as primitive to other peoples
because then all kinds of atrocities can be committed against them
without regret or remorse.  I assumed that of all people Europeans would
be highly aware of this given the acts of anthropology in Germany
through very similar racial categorisation schemas invented and then
applied to Jews, Slavs, Romany peoples and others....given that this is
a similar fundamental bias in anthropological inquiry to Mead's ... that
led through the categorisation of others to equally devastating
outcomes. I believe Levine has published much on the anthropology of the
Reich and there are many studies that address the employment of these
scientific classifications of others to inform the structuring of White
privilege in colonial places. These works are challenging to read but
essential if we wish to address the nature of inquiry across social and
cultural difference in places where extreme dominance is enacted by one
group of humans on another. 

You may also be aware that at the time this work was published the
forced and coerced removal on workers from Pacific Islands to serve as
virtual slaves on plantations in Fiji and Australia was continuing
despite bans by the British colonial office. There was often a shortage
of men on these islands as a result. In Queensland Australia at this
time the entire Aboriginal and Islander population was interred in camps
(called missions) where forced cultural conversion and eugenics were
openly practiced. Employed as domestic servants or plantation workers
the wages of these inmates were collected and retained by Government to
fund their internment and other 'public works'. Huge amounts of money
accrued in these accounts over generations between 1878 and 1984 when
the policy was finally repealed. The full repatriation of funds to
surviving members of this group has yet to be made. Anti-slavery
International has documented such colonial agencies since 1848 and there
is convincing evidence that certain German anthropologists investigated
this model system for the control of lesser races in Queensland during
the 1930's. 

At the time of Mead's study most people in Samoa and the vast majority
of Pacific nations were under the control of strictly fundamental
Christian missions through the actions of organisations such as the
London Missionary Society which commenced in 1878 and quickly enforced a
moral code in these places. Women wore mission-dress - neck to ankle &
wrist cotton covering to ensure modesty. Mission life was harsh but it
afforded some protection from the constant predations of colonial
agency. The lure of free love in places where primitive young women are
'wanton' and lonely attracts a particularly persistent kind of
'civilized' inquiry. If there was free sexuality of the kind popularised
it would most probably be a result of the destruction of 'primitive'
social order?

The kind of predation fostered by Mead's work has led to studies that
investigate the psychology of colonialism. In settler society the
primitive becomes a socially sanctioned bad-object which is free from
the constraints of civilisation and therefore has no constraints and
thus is in need of control. All of this is characterized as transference
because the understanding ignores the constraints of Indigenous society.
Thus the primitive carries the load of projected bad impulses arising
from the coloniser breaking his/her own social constraints. Very
interesting possibilities arise from these mostly feminist
investigations. See Hanna Arendt's work in general, Oliver, K. (2004)
The colonization of psychic space: a psychoanalytic social theory of
oppression University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, and Moran's
Psychodynamics of settler- nationalism.

I trust that you might understand from this brief contextualisation that
in some contexts science is a game open to all for their choosing but in
others science is still a game but the free decision to play or not
often depends upon which end of a gun you are standing or if you wish to
eat or not. It is not possible to disentangle science from the social
movement it informs so it is often in error and sometimes complicit;
also science is always done by humans who are open to bias and deceit
therefore science must always be open to critical questioning; indeed I
thought this was science?

The second part of my answer addresses Ken's questions concerning
anthropological method.

Another interesting assumption is the nature of a question and how the
social act of questioning may be seen in very different ways in
different cultures. A question in European language & culture may
position us to think of an answer- but in many Indigenous cultures
questioning is not a normal or accepted social practice. Indigenous
languages may not have interrogative devices of the same kind as English
and some have no interrogative means at all. Questioning in the context
of Mead's study may position informants to work very hard to devise and
supply the answer that they believe that the inquirer wants or needs.
Modern anthropology addresses these flaws in Mead's and other inquiry
based models. Across cultures the act of questioning is most often a
kind of intrusion that may at best instigate confusion and
self-consciousness. In such inquiries whole Indigenous groups have
demonstrated coordinated and intelligent resistance to such intrusions.

Key issues for inquiry models for cultural anthropology are encapsulated
in the following questions:- is it possible to know the knowing of
others? And if theirs is not our knowing how then can/do we know when we
know it?

Which gives rise to the methodological issue:- is it possible to inquire
into the knowledge of others without changing it? Asking questions may
cause an intelligent and equal subject to readdress their knowing and
change it! Questioning is fraught with these concerns. The device
'primitive' negated such methodological concerns because of the
objectification alluded to above.

This prompts another question:- if we inquire into the knowledge of
others how do we know if they are telling us the truth? Is truth a
significant or even existent subject in their language and culture?
Indeed is it possible from their place in knowing to communicate their
truth to us in our language of inquiry so we may understand it as they
do?

After these it might be apt to visit the inquirers right to know? Does
the culture have sanctions on knowing? Etc etc.

Inquiry models ignore these fundamental questions and so tend to be
primarily processes of contingent image generation; a form of design
which is a socio-cultural expedient of the colonising group. (which
provides many excellent opportunities for education please see other
post).
Many works exist in this area from Vine Deloria Jnr, Marie Battiste,
Taiaiake Alfred and more recently Martin Nakata's Disciplining the
Savages; Savaging the Disciplines.

In this sense colonial inquiry is in accord with colonial projects
because it is a visit that becomes an occupation - which erases
revisitations to the initial reality. Contesting past versions of these
constructions is an internal revisitation that builds on the initial
error- i.e. that the artefact produced to represent the experience of
the other is or can be the experience of this other. It is the ways that
we contest these artefacts that is most significant and may be
interpreted (other post).

Neo-colonial projects derive their agency from revisitations to past
representations of others and employ these as a basis for contemporary
understandings. These internal revisitations are necessary because they
blind us to the ways that the events of the past impacted on original
populations. This denial is a theft of significance because it occupies
and limits present understanding for the settler society while enacting
a new more passive violence on the colonized.

In Indigenous understanding the issue is not the validity of different
versions of this past but the fact that the initial reality of our
particular past unlike the past of empire or science can not be
revisited. The primary action of colonialism was the violent destruction
of our past realities and the secondary action (the actual project of
contestation) is to conceal the reality of this violence. In Indigenous
studies this is another layer of objectification for the Indigenous
primitive where this identity serves as the object for a shared form of
persecutory anxiety within the settler social psyche. Settlers fear the
re-cognition of their own violence embodied in the dispossession of the
'primitive'. The colonial margins truly are the margins where European
sensibilities suffer; but this is also transference. It is the faux pain
of self-recognition in the mirror of colonised space. The ways that
these self images emerge and are deemed social agency in settler society
provide another design-human rights education opportunity in terms of my
previous post ... these are fearfully addressed investigations because
one of the easier and cheaper options in this context for the settler
group is the complete erasure of the Indigenous (new works are emerging
in this design related social psychological area from my team at
present).

Apologies if this thread is on the edge for some of you and thanks Ken
for your questions that allowed me rethink a few issues of import for my
work.

For those who wish to see good works Immersion techniques in
anthropology have been around for some time and are truly valuable for
developing cross-cultural knowledge in contested zones ... among which
the works of Deborah Bird Rose ANU and John Bradley a colleague at
Monash University are models of excellent practice.

Yamin Ya

Norm

-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and
related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf
Of Ken Friedman
Sent: Monday, 30 July 2007 3:15 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Colonialism -- a Carefully Delimited Response -- Quick
Reply to Norm Sheehan

Dear Norm,

Thank you for your note. (I'm assuming you meant me rather than Danny 
... you replied to my note, and you also discussed the anthropology 
of art.)

Michael Jackson's work and Alfred Gell's work seem most interesting. 
I did not know their work and I've ordered the books you suggest. 
Looking into Gell, I found two more books that look to be worth 
reading for issues that interest me.

I agree with your position on anthropology and critical inquiry.

The one question that I don't think we can resolve here involves what 
the young Samoan women who spoke with Margaret Mead told her -- and 
why. Even though a Samoan academic living today may have heard family 
stories and given you an accurate report of the stories, four 
problems could account for accurate stories that fail to say much 
about Margaret Mead. In saying this, I acknowledge that Mead's work 
on Samoa shows significant flaws, something that even her admirers 
grant. Nevertheless, this is not because the young women she 
interviewed for Coming of Age in Samoa lied to her or tricked her, 
but for other reasons.

First, the family stories your colleague told you about are handed 
down at a distance of eighty years. Your friend was not there. She 
told you about you stories that she heard from someone who heard them 
from someone who heard them from someone else. While the stories she 
repeats may be what she heard, this says nothing about the accuracy 
of the stories. Family stories capture beliefs and positions. That 
may be they may all they reflect accurately.

Most of us find it hard to get an accurate account of an argument at 
a cousin's wedding a month ago. If we weren't there, being an 
anthropologist or a physicist would make little difference to what we 
can learn about the incident. Of course, we might not understand 
fully what happened even if we witness the argument in person. 
Families being what they are, family dynamics affecting our 
perception. This is also the case with family stories told and retold 
over eight decades.

Second, the family may have heard a different story than the account 
a young woman told Mead. It may be that the young women shared 
experiences, thoughts, and feelings with Mead that they would not 
share with their families. Mead got a lot wrong about Samoa and that 
she generalized far too much from what she heard, but she may still 
have reported accurately a reasonably accurate account of the lives 
of the young women who shared their experiences with her. The private 
life world of teenagers is a different world than the larger life 
world of the family. The life world of the family is itself embedded 
in a public world of social convention.

Many teenagers speak one way about sex, smoking, drinking, and drugs 
with adults whom they trust, while taking a far more conventional 
position with adult family members. This is especially the case when 
family culture is more conservative on these issues than the 
self-selected world of teenage peers. I don't see why this should be 
significantly different in Samoa in the 1920s than it was when I was 
a teenager in the 1960s, or the way it seems to be for teenagers 
today.

Even if the family stories are a relatively accurate reflection of 
the family conversation, it could be that some of the young women who 
shared their views with Mead told her a relatively true story while 
speaking far more circumspectly within the family. Bonnie Nardi's 
(1984) account of her experiences in Samoa certainly suggest a young 
women's sub-culture that worked at some difference to the larger 
culture within which young women also live their lives.

Third, and this is a key point in Nardi's article (1984: 329), it is 
hard to imagine that all of the twenty-five young women in Mead's 
study lied to her repeatedly over six months of conversations. They 
seemed to be willing to tell the truth about their sexual experience. 
Mead reported half saying that they were virgins, half saying they 
were not. Mead herself was not an interloping tourist. She was 
genuinely interested in Samoan culture, and she made a long and 
difficult journey -- this was the 1920s -- to learn. As Nardi points 
out, it seems odd that all twenty-five Samoan women would show such 
little respect for this investment of time and effort that they would 
lie repeatedly and maintain the same lies over half a year. You can 
only get so much fun out of a joke like that.

Nardi suggests, instead, that far too many people have failed to 
acknowledge the possibility that these young women gave an honest 
account of their life-world, whatever mistakes Mead made in 
generalizing their private stories.

It might even be that your Samoan colleague is repeating accurately 
her family's correct understanding of an ancestor who DID tell a far 
different story to Mead. It could be that her ancestors were among 
the virgin half of the group, and that this family therefore found it 
easy to believe that Mead got ALL the stories wrong rather than 
believe that Mead misinterpreted Samoan culture by generalizing 
inappropriately from honest accounts of sexually free teenage 
behavior.

Fourth -- and this is an important fourth point, slightly different 
to the others -- the family story may be just a story, invented by a 
descendent without reference to the actual experience of the ancestor 
who met Margaret Mead. For that matter, it could even be told of an 
ancestor whether or not an ancestor met Margaret Mead. Even though 
your Samoan colleague may have heard the story from relatives and may 
be repeating it accurately, it may not be a genuine account at all.

Most of us have had these kinds of experiences. I'll give two of my 
own experiences. One occurs in the history of contemporary art and 
music concerning John Cage's famous classes in music composition at 
the New School in New York. These classes were quite small and not 
especially popular at the time. In later years, Cage's class came to 
be seen as a seminal source of contemporary music and art. As it did, 
increasingly more people came to have been Cage students and claim to 
have studied in the class. Over the years, I have met so many more 
people who claim to have studied in those classes than actually did 
that the classes would have had to have been several times larger to 
account for the difference in numbers.

On a personal level, I have had similar experiences. When I lived in 
New York in the 1980s, I found myself at museum openings two or three 
times standing quietly next to people who claimed to be extremely 
close friends of Ken Friedman, regaling their companions with my 
legendary exploits. These stories were so dramatic and entertaining 
that I thought it would have been churlish of me to introduce myself 
or amend the myth. So I suppose that I, too, by my silence, have 
contributed to someone's family stories about a family member who did 
something grand with -- or to -- Ken Friedman.

There may be many reasons that account for your Samoan colleague 
telling you truthfully and accurately what she heard without those 
family stories being truthful or accurate account. They may reflect 
what living Samoans and their families think of Margaret Mead, while 
not at all being what any of the twenty-five young Samoan women told 
Margaret Mead in the 1920s.

It is ALSO possible that Mead was hoaxed, but I can't see the point. 
Bonnie Nardi's argument seem quite reasonable to me.

That aside, I agree with your comments and position on "the different 
roles that [anthropological, scientific, and design] practices occupy 
at their culture center and at various margins at different times."

Warm wishes,

Ken


Reference

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

Norm Sheehan wrote:

>Thanks Danny ...you are correct concerning the stream of research
within
>which I work for critical views of anthropology ... and my response to
>Mead does come from a conversation with a visiting Samoan academic who
told
>stories from her family concerning the games that cheeky teenagers
>played (as they do) with this very serious and seemingly obsessed
>interloper. Much in the same way as Australian kids will sometimes warn
>tourists to be wary of the drop-bear a larger and more dangerous
>relative of the Koala that tends to randomly fall out of trees onto
>people.
>
>The issue under investigation in this critique is not the validity of
>anthropology, science or design but the different roles that such
>practices occupy at their culture centre and at various margins at
>different times. Mead's work so central and scientific at publication
to
>inform the academy about remote practices ... is now valuable in
>revealing the pseudo-scientific origins of cultural anthropology when
>operating from such a centre. Also for Indigenous scholars these flaws
>in academic practice index to the often seen complicity of such science
>in past and contemporary projects of domination at these margins.
>
>One of the leveling games that I play with my students is to present
>Aboriginal stories collected by anthropologists (many eminent pre
1978).
>These stories reveal the narratives of resistance embedded in the ways
>that these active and intelligent agents responded to an
anthropological
>inquiry - one that presented their thematically flexible narrative
streams as
>static primitive artifacts ... mere reproductions for recording and
>preservation.
>
>Much modern anthropology has learnt from these fallacies ... but some
>still build on these themes to present denegrations of Indigenous
cultures
>see Diamond's work on ecocide and the reply by
>
>Peiser, B. (2005) From Ecocide to Genocide the Rape of Rapa Nui.
>In Energy and Environment Vol 16 No: 3&4 pp. 513-539
>
>Michael Jackson's (the anthropologist) work is exceptional particularly
>in relation to place and space & I find Gell's Art anthropology one of
>the most illuminating works where the agency of images is explored ...
>they cause us to talk about them... and the prospect introduced (new
for
>western understandings but integral to Indigenous) -that design
>constitutes externalized cognition.