February 13, 2002

Portia’s Lecture

When I was in college, I did a major in environmental education. Where I am now has been an intersting path from that point. Everything I read in college made me more and more depressed and thinking there was no hope for the future. Now I’m at a very different point.

American Culture and the role of Anthropology

I went to Grinnell- I did an independent study in environmental education. I was convinced that behavior was based on your beliefs. It posits that people who are doing bad things need to learn, and that behavior can be fixed by someone like me. I went to England with a semester abroad. It was an anthropological field school. They taught us techniques and threw us into the field. Participant observation was one of these techniques. But the main technique was to write everything down. Take lots of notes. You took your question and went and did it. Mine was “What are the environmental issues in this town and what are they doing about it?” They sent me to Northern England. The number one industry in this is tourism, then dairy and gypsum mines. I had two assumptions when I got to Applebee. 1- If there was a problem, they would want to fix it. And 2, they must be like Americans because they also speak english. I didn’t know anything about England except that I liked their music.

I talked to everyone in town- shop clerks, youths, officials, etc. I found that there wasn’t a prevailing sense that there were environmental problems in the town. I went to a high school and talked to kids there. I heard that about a month before I got there there had been a town hall meeting about a proposal to put a nuclear waste dump under the area. Nobody from Applebee had gone to this meeting. I had to go home and look at my field notes and see what had emerged. What I found was that this town made many distinctions- for example, there were six pubs in town, and each had its clientele. The other thing I thought about was my conversation with students at the high school. I asked if there were any environmental problems, what would they do? Mostly they said they wouldn’t do anything to stand out- they just wanted to be normal and discrete. The feeling I got was that if you made an issue about environmental issue in this town you would be considered an outsider. Gossip was very constraining. This shot down both of my original assumptions. I went home and I finished my degree, but I still felt really hopeless. So I went to grad school for anthropology.

The social sciences are divided up into different categories. Psychology, sociology, anthropology. Anthropology is the study of culture- this brings up problems because no one can agree on what culture is. Anthro began in England when travelers came back from places like Fiji, etc., and started talking and writing about different cultures. In the early 1900s, anthropologists really began to go to places specifically to study these cultures (Malinowski). Anthro came to America in the early 20^th century. Columbia was one of the first schools, and then it spread.

Ethnographic work started with looking at smaller, minority groups. It has now moved into looking at your own self in the whole culture (which is the work I am doing). My interest is about how people do things together- how we make things together. How we exist in the day to day basis. I began to look at weddings. I was interested because they are not necessary anymore for financial security. I came to the question, How are you getting married? I interviewed couples and got a range of answers. Some people who were doing their own ways, and others who were concerned with doing it “right”- observing traditions. I went to their weddings and every one was essentially the same. They all had cake, white dress, etc. I began to think about social facts. How there are forces outside of us that make the decisions. I argued that weddings have become a social fact.

All this led me to where I am today. I am doing my dissertation on love. I have always been interested in kinship. The idea of family/couple is supposed to be in our culture based on love. We don’t take anything else as serious. My current research is the social construction of love- dating relationships, etc. How can people say, oh, those two are so in love. These are constraints on what a relationship should be.

The Kozol book is very similar to an ethnography. He tells it how it is. Those are the best ethnographies. What I like about the book is that it shows that culture is not a level playing field. The most important point he makes is that it’s not about differences in individuals, it’s about differences in options. What gives me hope is that Kozol in his book shows not the differences of these kids, but the similarities. They love their families, think about toys, the same as any American child- they just have a difference in options. We in America have a tradition in opposition- we believe if we can see a problem, we must fix it, or help to fix it.