Dear Dori

Thank you for this wonderful and informative post with your reflections 
and thoughts on the field of anthropology. Most stimuilating, thank you.

I have been arguing that design is a class apart from both science and 
art, although it uses both these in full measure at its best, and at 
many times falls between these two stools in our interpretation and 
description of the field. Today it is being appropriated by business and 
management under the strategy banner that the business magazines are 
harping about. Soon economists will be substituting the word planning 
with design and the word will take on new hues as we go forward and find 
that Apple is succeeding in the marketplace, they have returned stunning 
financial numbers this quarter, by the way.

While Anthropology is an exciting and vibrant field with many facets, I 
still see it as a science that helps explain human relationships and the 
human condition in many contexts. You say that anthropology helps in 
early stage design directions and I am in full agreement with that 
notion and I do believe that design must use more of anthropology tools, 
techniques and knowledge base in this and other stages of decision 
making and exploration as part of the design process. However design is 
about the creation of the future – its artefacts, procedures, events and 
infrastructure and policies – with the use of imagination and insights 
about the human condition and I do not think that design is actually 
concerned about creating the frameworks for our undrstanding of the 
human condition as a science would do, although I must hasten to add 
that most design activities do throw up many such frameworks of 
understanding as well as new knowledge, but that is not its primary 
objective.

Here anthropology seems to be that science that can provide us with such 
knowledge frameworks and explain to us the context and the relationships 
that operate as well as provide the design teams (not just designers) 
the means to make the decisions that must be an act of faith if it is to 
do with the future, which as Wolfgang Jonas says is essentially 
unknowable, and I agree with his position. Design is speculative and 
opportunistic but it can be validated only in the field or the 
marketplace and never in a laboratory since it is not just a concept but 
a situated object or event or activity that has infinite connections and 
therefore complex and unknowable.

If I treat anthropology as a science then it is not design, since design 
is not science nor is it art, although it is confused with both. So we 
will need to invent a NEW DESIGN DISCIPLINE and give it a name and start 
some new programmes to teacgh it and that discipline would use 
anthroploogy as its core knowledge resource and it will then no longer 
be anthropology (as a science) but become a field of design. tee hee. 
Wonderful. Lets discuss.

With warm regards

M P Ranjan
from my office at NID
26 July 2007 at 10.35 am IST

Prof M P Ranjan
Faculty of Design
Head, Centre for Bamboo Initiatives at NID (CFBI-NID)
Chairman, GeoVisualisation Task Group (DST, Govt. of India) (2006-2008)
National Institute of Design
Paldi
Ahmedabad 380 007 India

Tel: (off) 91 79 26623692 ext 1090
Tel: (res) 91 79 26610054
Fax: 91 79 26605242

email: [log in to unmask]
web site: http://homepage.mac.com/ranjanmp
web domain: http://www.ranjanmp.in
blog: <http://design-for-india.blogspot.com

Tunstall, Elizabeth wrote:
> The wonderful thing about anthropology is that its approaches cover the
> entire range of epistemologies depending on the sub-specialty (physical or
> biological, linguistics, archaeological, and socio-cultural), the age and
> education of the practitioner, and the anthropology question there are
> seeking to answer.
>
> Mythologies of the "field" of anthropology
>
> There are four sub-fields of anthropology, not just socio-cultural anthro.
>
> Because physical/biological anthropologists often interface with
> biologists, epidemiologists, geneticists, forensic doctors, etc, they tend
> to fall on the positivist side or at least have a fluency in the positive
> languages as part of the culture.
>
> Linguistics can run the gamut from the positivism of computation
> linguistics (which informs a lot of the computation work in natural
> language modeling) to the highly interpretive work done in everyday
> conversation analysis (Deborah Tannen's, You Just Don't Understand: Women
> and Men in Conversation, William Morrow, 1990; is the popular version of
> this kind of work).
>
> Archaeology in the past was more positivist, but the interpretive school,
> led by figures such as Ian Hodder, now at Stanford, represent in many ways
> the contemporary practice of archaeology. In terms of community
> participation, the repatriation laws, in the 1990s, of native artifacts
> have made archaeology now one of the most inclusive and least colonial of
> the anthropological fields, when it was the most colonial. For example,
> when I was an archaeology TA at Stanford (in 1995), we had Native
> Americans on staff at all digs and if any significant materials were found
> (human remains especially) the dig was stopped and went to the tribal
> council for resolution.
>
> Cultural anthropology runs the gamut, but it is now quite dominated by
> women and people who were former colonized subjects, who fall into the
> post-structuralist/post-modernist/feminist/postcolonial camps. To Danny
> and Norm's comment about the critiques of Samoan anthropologists. There is
> every type of anthropologist under the sun and moon. The practice evolves
> with every new generation while still maintaining an understanding of the
> old. Right now, I am finding the work of visual anthropologist, Sarah
> Pink, most useful to my art and design students.
>
> The contemporary practice of anthropology by those who are engaged with
> design are not of the positivist sorts at all. My own intellectual
> genealogies are from the Boasian (4-fields, actively engaged in current
> issues, historically sensitive, attempt to understand interrelated
> systems, albeit partial understanding, highly documented processes) and
> Geerzian (interpretive, attention to form and content or representation,
> sense of positionality of researcher, focus on significance of the mundane
> as well as the sublime) traditions. Right now, I am most influenced by
> Paul Rabinow's reframing of Foucault for anthropological
> "problematization" as opposed to the study of groups of tribes. All
> graduate students at Stanford since the 1980s are steeped in French
> post-structuralist, international feminist/womanist, Marxist, and
> Post-Colonial (Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, and Valentin
> Mudimbe) thinking.
>
> Mythologies of field work
>
> This is often used to distinguish between anthropology and design
> research, without contextualizing the practice of long term field work.
> First, anthropologist only have one long term fieldwork period. This is
> when you are a graduate student doing your major fieldwork. Normally, you
> needed to stay a year or more because you spent the first six months
> learning to speak the language. Tee hee. Really, its the anthropological
> equivalent to spending a summer in Europe as an undergrad. It happens once
> before you get at real job and it never happens again, but you always
> refer to it as the "golden days" of your youth.
>
> After graduate school, you will spend maximum of 4-8 weeks in your field
> site(s) at a given time and that is if you work in an academic context.
> Hopefully, you still know the language. For some halfie or "native"
> anthropologists (as many are now), you may live in your field site most of
> the time, so the point is moot.
>
> I spent 21 months in Ethiopia doing my fieldwork, but it was because I had
> to travel to over 5 different regions, in which I spent only 3 months
> maximum in each.
>
> Mythologies of relevance to design
>
> The point of my post is that if design is moving into problem formation,
> then anthropology provides lots of knowledge and experiences about how to
> go about that ethically. Anthropology has that knowledge because it has
> screwed up in the past and now its just about started to get it right:
> this is called now Anthropology 2.0. <smile> The contemporary role is the
> anthropologist is different in that we are used as a mediator between
> global forces and local meanings. Design is wanting to move into that role
> as well. My point is that we can help ease the transition, so they don't
> screw up as much as we did, but don't go about labeling things as design
> when it is really anthropology. tee hee.
>
> There is not a human phenomena under the sun in which there is not an
> anthropologist somewhere trying to studying it or has studied it in the
> past. My favorite past time is providing students with over 10 articles,
> spanning 50 years, about some topic they are wanting to explore (ex. the
> visualization of subjective time). It's not about methods of data
> collection, but rather tools for analytical reasoning and exploration that
> anthropology can provide to design. Anthropology is not the only field,
> but it is the one that covers human experience to the same breadth and
> depth of the field of design. There are sub-sub-fields of anthro like
> psychological anthro, medical anthro, anthro of education, political
> anthro, social anthro, cultural anthro (those are distinct depended on
> which side of the pond you live on), visual anthro, anthro of work, anthro
> of consciousness, humanist anthro, applied anthro, design anthro, and
> probably an anthropology of anthropology. Anthropology is the super
> hybridizing field because its subject is the entire range of human
> experience across time and space.
>
> And that variation in anthropological approaches works. When I taught my
> class, Design Anthropology, different types of designers gravitated
> towards different anthropological approaches. The electronic visualization
> students like structural-functionalism and its ideas of rules and
> functioning parts that work together, because it matched their own
> programming mentalities. The graphic designers and artists gravitated
> towards the interpretive and post-structuralist approaches because it
> matched their own ideas about the variability of meaning and the fluidity
> of the sign/signifier relationships.
>
> One student working on Chinese iconography for the Olympics explored
> archaeological history and interpretation. Another working on consumer
> culture engaged in anthropological theories of consumerism like Arjun
> Appadurai, Mary Douglas, and Daniel Miller.
>
> I don't understand why anyone would not want to avail themselves of such
> rich knowledge before going out and making under-informed statements about
> the way the world works, which is what problem formation is about.
>
> Mythologies about design and colonialism
>
> There are lots of studies of the role of design in the colonial project.
> Two of my favorites are Lifebouy Men and Lux Women by social historian
> Timothy Burke (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996) about
> commodity culture in Zimbabwe in the post-WWII period and Imperial Leather
> by English lit and feminist scholar Anne McClintock, which looks at it
> from a feminist perspective(New York: Routledge, 1995). We all have
> colonial skeletons in our closet. Tee hee.
>
> But this has been a very exciting conversation that has helped me to
> sharpen my thinking on the topic. So thanks all for sharing.
>
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>
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