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.