FRAMING “NO AGING IN INDIA”
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Ethnography – doing & writing culture
Anthropology of the body
Temporalities of self & society
Social stratification
Age & aging
Representation, experience, and the production of
subjectivity
FIELDWORK(S)
• TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE
• Emic – local knowledge: how people think,
perceive, categorize the world; what has
meaning in their world-the natives point of
view
• Etic -- shift focus from the “native's point of
view” to that of the anthropologist
FIELDWORK(S)
• TYPES OF KNOWLEDGE -- Reflexivity
• Intersubjective KNOWLEDGE
• Self/scholarly awareness of the impact on the
data produced in the context of doing fieldwork
and writing culture
• how the anthropologist effects the thoughts,
actions of informants
• how the ethnocentrism of the anthro colors
the interpretation and representation of
others thinking & actions
FIELDWORK(S)
• Field data are constructs of the process by
which we acquire them -- intersubjective
• The problem is a “hermeneutical one”
– hermeneutic – interpretation ... “as the
comprehension of self by the detour of the
comprehension of the other”
• Fieldwork is dialectic
– DIALECTIC BECAUSE NEITHER THE
SUBJECT NOR THE OBJECT REMAIN
STATIC
Reflexive Knowledge and Doing
Anthropology as Negotiated Reality
• a mutually constructed ground of experience and
understanding
• an acknowledgement of the dialogue between the
anthropologist and the informant in the experience
of fieldwork
• anthropologists are historically situated through the
questions we ask and the manner we seek to
understand and experience the world
• anthropologists receive from our informants their
interpretations that are also mediated by culture and
history
• the data is doubly mediated
– first by presence of the anthropologist
– Then by a second order self-reflection of our informants
Anthropology and the Ethics of
Fieldwork
• Anthropological researchers -- members of
many different communities, each with its
own moral rules or codes of ethics
• anthropological researchers
– must be open about the purpose(s), potential
impacts, and source(s) of support for research
projects with funders, colleagues, persons
studied or providing information, and with
relevant parties affected by the research.
Ethics and Informant Relationships
• Anthropological researchers have primary
ethical obligations to the people they study
and to the people with whom they work
– avoid harm or wrong
– respect the well-being
– consult actively with the affected individuals or
group(s)
• INFORMED CONSENT
Ethics Beyond the Field
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Responsibility to scholarship and science
Responsibility to the public
Responsibility to students and trainees
www.aaanet.org
“THICK DESCRIPTION”
CLIFFORD GEERTZ
• interpretive anthropology
• The object of ethnography
– Sorting out the structures of signification (9)...
and determining their social ground and
import
• Doing ethnography is like trying to read a
manuscript [text]
GEERTZ
• Culture is not a power, something to which
social events, behaviors, institutions, or
processes can be causally attributed; it is
a context, something within which they can
be intelligibly -- that is thickly -- described
(14)
• The ethnographer inscribes social
discourse; he writes it down (19) -- from
event into an account
GEERTZ
• Culture -- as a set of symbolic devices for
controlling behavior, extrasomatic sources of
information, culture provides the link between
what men are intrinsically capable of becoming
and what they actually, one by one, in fact
become (52)
• He finds them already current in the community,
when he is born, and they remain, with some
additions, subtractions, and partial alterations he
may or may not have a hand in, in circulation
after he dies
COHEN
• interpreting culture through Heideggerian
“breakdowns”
• Breakdowns – the interrupted moment of our
habitual, standard, comfortable ‘being-in-theworld.’
• Narrative shifts from Boston to Varanasi
• multiple and interlocking worlds of meaning and
institutions of social regulation within which the
body becomes a series of subjects over time
COHEN’S FIELDWORK(S)
• book is about senility, dementia, hot brain,
sixtyishness, Alzheimer’s, dotage, weakness,
enchantment, and other states
• A language of behavioral inappropriateness
and the practices of exclusion that come to
encompass the lived experience of many old
people
• structures – bodies, generations,
households, neighborhoods, neurons,
classes, and cultures – that mediate and
sustain the relationship between experience,
significance, and practice.
ANTHROPOLOGIES OF THE
BODY
• Scheper-Hughes & Lock – “the mindful
body”
• Phenomenology & embodiment
• Bourdieu – Structure, habitus, practice
“the mindful body”
• “The body as simultaneously a physical and
symbolic artifact, naturally and culturally
produced, anchored in a particular historical
moment”
• Three bodies – individual body, social body, and
body politic
• The three bodies – three separate but
overlapping units of analysis
– three different theoretical approaches
– phenomenology, structuralism and symbolism, poststructuralism (practice theory – structure & agency)
PHENOMENOLOGY &
EMBODIMENT
• Body is not an object to be studied in relation to
culture, but is to be considered as the SUBJECT
of culture
• body is a setting in relation to the world;
consciousness is the body projecting itself into
the world
• Experience not a primordial existential given but
a historically and culturally constitutes process
predicated on certain ways of being in the world
STRUCTURE, HABITUS,
PRACTICE
• Structure – a particular class of conditions
of existence produce habitus
• Habitus – regulated and regular without
being in any way the product of obedience
to rules
• habitus can be collectively orchestrated
without being the product of the organizing
action of a conductor
STRUCTURE, HABITUS,
PRACTICE
• Practical sense (practice) -- proleptic adjustment
(anticipatory) to demands of a field (structure)
• encounter between habitus and a field which
makes possible the near-perfect anticipation of
the future inscribed in all the concrete
configurations (structure)
• the experience -- objective structures -- played
out as the feel for direction, orientation,
impending outcome
Temporalities of self & society:
the body in time
• temporal categories provide both ways of
thinking and ways of acting
• Lived experience is multistranded
temporality – the play of time
• Life-course and social structure
SOCIAL STRATIFICATION
• the unequal distribution of goods and
services, rights and obligations, power and
prestige
• all attributes of positions in society, not
attributes of individuals
• universality of stratification
Stratification & Status
• status - ascribed & achieved
• ascribed status - social positions that
people hold by virtue of birth
• achieved status - social positions attained
as a result of individual action
• shift from kin based societies to modern
society involves growth in importance of
achieved status
Elements in Social Stratification
• Roles -- tasks & activities that a culture
assigns to people
• Stereotypes -- oversimplified strongly held
ideas about the characteristics of people
• Stratification -- unequal distribution of
rewards (socially valued resources, power,
prestige, personal freedom) between
people reflecting their position in the social
hierarchy
Stratified Society
• stratification means
– there are significant breaks in the distribution
of goods services, rights, obligations, power
prestige
– as a result of which are formed collectivities or
groups we call strata
Class Society
• Unequal access to all 3 advantages, economic
resources, power, prestige
• Open & closed class systems
– the extent to which mobility occurs allowing people to
pass through inequalities
• Closed system
– No mobility
– tend to persist across generations
• Open system
– ease of social mobility permitted
Caste Systems
• caste systems
– closed, hereditary systems of stratification often
dictated by religion
– hierarchical social status is ascribed at birth, people
locked into their parents social position
– legal & religious sanctions, occupation, commensality
applied against people who seek to cross them
• apartheid - caste like system, legally maintained
hierarchy based on skin color (the color bar)
Open Class Systems
• facilitates mobility
• individual achievement & personal merit
determining social rank
• hierarchical social status is achieved on the
basis of people's efforts
• ascribed status (family background, ethnicity,
gender, religion, skin color) less important
• blurred class lines & wide range of status
positions
Ascribed Status & Open Class
Systems
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Phenotype
Age
Gender
“Race”
Age & Social Stratification:
Age as “difference”
• AGE-SETS, AGE GRADES, AGE MATES
• differentiation of social role based on age
• Age sets are a type of sodality
– nonresidential groups that cut across kinship ties and thus
promote broader social solidarity
• Age grades may be marked by changes in biological
state, such as puberty
– Or by socially recognized status changes such as marriage,
the birth of a child, menopause, retirement
• Persons of junior grade may defer to those of more
senior grade who in turn teach, test, or lead their
juniors.
AGE & CULTURE in N. AMERICA:
AGE-SETS/GRADES & THE LIFE-CYCLE
• Age Sets
– ‘Childhood’
– ‘Youth’
– ‘Middle-aged’
– ‘Elderly’
• Age Grades/Classes & Social Power
– Elderly & children – dependent
– Youth & Middle-Age – independent
• economic, political, social power
– Elderly -- dependent
AGE CLASSES
• The social production and cultural
construction of age & aging
• In class and state formation people’s
functions in the division of labor come to
be discernible with reference to categories
of gender, age, and skill abstracted from
their particular kinship connections and
meanings
AGE CLASSES
• Where people become identified
independently of kinship as a constituent
of class for example, biological differences
or functions as defined in the culture rather
than social identities become increasingly
important
AGEISM
• "ageism" -- like other forms of bigotry such
as racism and sexism
• a process of systematic stereotyping and
discrimination against people because
they are old.
• any prejudice or discrimination against or
in favor of an age group
AGEISM in NORTH AMERICA
• Older persons are constantly "protected" and their thoughts interpreted.
• Older persons falter for a moment because they are unsure of themselves
and are immediately charged with being 'infirm.‘
• Older persons forget someone's name and are charged with senility and
patronized.
• Older persons are expected to 'accept' the 'facts of aging.'
• Older persons miss a word or fail to hear a sentence and they are charged
with 'getting old,' not with a hearing difficulty.
• Older persons are called 'dirty' because they show sexual feelings or
affection to one of either sex.
• Older persons are called 'cranky' when they are expressing a legitimate
distaste with life as so many young do.
• Older persons are charged with being 'like a child' even after society has
ensured that they are as dependent, helpless, and powerless as children."
The “Dark Age”
• intensified by certain dominant values in
American culture
– individualist tradition
– Independence & dependence
– productive achievement
AGEISM, Social Mobility & Open
Class System
• Ascribed status of age
• Achieved status and aging
– Viagra
– Working
NARRATIVE EXPERIENCE
• Self continuity and narrative
• Complex negotiation of representation and
experience through which subjectivity is
produced
• Cohen -- Age as a way of representing and
understanding other sorts of differences
between individuals and classes of individuals is
critical to the articulation of individual bodies and
collective ones