Panel 4: What is the point of description?
Tuesday 5th July, 1.30pm – 5pm
Convener: Marilyn Strathern
Description as politics: An old contrast between descriptive versus
normative approaches in social science rears its head again at the
beginning of the 21st Century. There are 'new' reasons to find much
knowledge worthless, and description incomprehensible as an end in itself.
Impatience with ethnographic detail is part of a politics of knowledge
concerned with what bits of social science really contribute to society.
Marilyn Strathern (1.30pm)
Failing to describe
Abstract:
Following a brief introduction to the panel theme, this paper abuts the
general normative question (what is the point of description?) with a
descriptive observation of a particular case (lack of interest in the
labour of ethnography). The account begins with an institution of higher
education deeply committed to a research ethos, but in any arena than
itself. When it thinks of itself as an institution, it is deeply committed
to a management ethos. And with management protocols about the best use
for information already in place, research with an ethnographic intent
could only have descriptive ends. Is the institution's failure to describe
itself as a social object, and thus as a certain kind of object of
knowledge, simply lack of interest? Too obvious, too arcane? Shortage of
skill [to do so], absence of relevance [to have the will]? No time [to
spend], no funds [to waste]? This is not the only area in which the scope
of description is upstaged by the very axiom that knowledge should be
useful. But what it might suggest about the creativity of description
remains interestingly open.
Bio:
Marilyn is William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the
University of Cambridge and Mistress of Girton College. In 2001 she
received a DBE for services to social anthropology. While she is
increasingly preoccupied with administration (the edited book, Audit
Cultures (2000), subtitled Anthropological studies in
accountability, ethics and the academy, touches on the institutionalisation of good
practice), her research remains a lifeline. Starting in 1964, she has
carried out fieldwork over several years in the Highlands of Papua New
Guinea (Melanesia), the most recent field visit being in 1995. Her
research interests have for some time been divided between Melanesian and
British ethnography. Investigations in gender relations in PNG (Women in
Between, 1972) and kinship in the UK (Kinship at the Core, 1981)
together led to a critical appraisal of ongoing models of Melanesian
societies (The Gender of the Gift, 1988), and of British consumer
culture (After Nature, 1992). Debates around legislation following the
Warnock Report stimulated an interest in reproductive technologies; a
collaborative research project (1990-91) that examined some of the issues
in the context of kinship was published as Technologies of Procreation
(Edwards et al, 1993). Most recently she has been involved with
colleagues, in PNG and the UK, in another collaborative study, this time
of debates over intellectual and cultural property under the general title
Property, Transactions and Creations (Transactions and Creations, ed
with E Hirsch, 2004). Common elements in these projects come from an
ongoing curiosity about languages of description.
Robert Thornton (1.50pm)
How does a University create value?
Abstract:
This paper explains the current vogue of managerialism in University
governance in terms of what I call the 'Economist's As-if'. It asks
whether universities can, in fact, be run 'like a business' as if they
were market institutions. I argue that universities can be run in this
way, but this entails certain costs. Comparing universities to other human
endeavours that can be run 'as if' they were market institutions such as
sex, war, and families, I conclude that while this is possible, it is not
morally desirable, and has certain deleterious outcomes. The reason for
this in the university has to do with the 'meta-knowledge' (implicit
knowledge about how to gain and order knowledge) that universities embody.
The aim of tertiary education should be to produce autonomous intellectual
subjects who see themselves as citizens of a global community of knowledge
and as masters of disciplinary ‘meta-knowledge’ which uniquely enables
them to produce and evaluate knowledge, and to engage in critical
conversation in the university, in the public domain and ultimately in the
global community of knowledge. Since meta-knowledge is embodied in persons
and practices, it cannot be ‘marketed’, and this is the reason why
universities cannot (pragmatically), or should not (morally, normatively),
be run ‘like a business’ and why their value is difficult to establish in
economic terms of the market..
How to ‘do description’ is a fundamental part of this meta-knowledge,
as is knowledge about how to construct good arguments. As other papers in
this conference make clear, description is often ambiguous (its validity
cannot be formally established) and many are ambivalent about its value.
While Stephen Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument, (Cambridge UP, 1958)
revolutionised thinking about how to construct an argument by describing
it (claim, evidence, warrant), we have yet to describe description.
Bio:
Professor Robert Thornton studied at Stanford University and Makerere
University, Uganda, from 1967 to 1972 (BA Stanford 1972), and The
University of Chicago (PhD 1978), before teaching at University of Cape
Town, South Africa from 1979-1989. He spent a year at the Institute for
Advanced Study, Princeton, 1989-90, then at Rutgers University (NJ, USA)
in 1990-91, and has been a member of the Anthropology Department of the
University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, from 1992
to the present. He has published two books: ‘Space, Time and Culture among
the Iraqw of Tanzania’ (Academic Press 1980) and ‘The Early Writing of
Bronislaw Malinowski’ (Cambridge U Press, 1992), 21 articles in refereed
journals, 17 chapters in edited books, 19 major consultant reports, and 20
reviews and other articles. He was a member of the seminar at American
School of Research that resulted in the book ‘Writing Culture’ (1986,
edited by J Clifford and G Marcus), and has conducted ethnographic
research in East Africa and South Africa. Current active research areas
include HIV/AIDS and medical anthropology (in Uganda and South Africa),
and ethnography of traditional healers, traditional authorities, land and
landscape, ecology and tourism in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. Other
interests include intellectual history of anthropology, political
anthropology of southern Africa, study of time, and linguistics.
Alberto Corsín Jiménez (2.10pm)
Describing collaboration as
public good in education
Abstract:
This paper looks at the recent appearance of ethics as a vehicle for
institutional reform in the management of knowledge in universities. The
Council for Industry and Higher Education’s 2005 proposal for mirroring
businesses’ ethical guidelines in universities is a case in point. The
Council calls for making ethics a central aspect of all university
education, echoing similar developments in industry, where an endorsement
of corporate ethical behaviour is seen of utmost importance if trust in
markets, following recent scandals, is to be restored. In this light,
business and universities’ diverse agendas converge at the point where the
ethical is called to make ‘society’ appear. Self-consciousness about the
need for ethics (in management and education) summons an organisation’s
publics (students, customers, shareholders, research councils, etc.) under
one general rubric (the public good) and a similar model of sociality
(accountable relations). Society and the public good thus appear as
coterminous, blurring the differences between higher education and
business, and their distinctive knowledge regimes, in the name of ethics.
A parallel development is seeing the rise of knowledge transfer schemes
and collaborative ventures between universities and the private sector.
The paper argues that though collaboration may indeed be beneficial, the
new language of ethics and public goodness does very little to help
understand the nature of the social processes at work. Moreover, normative
(ethical) descriptions of how institutions organize and manage their
knowledge relations to ‘society’ miss the mark, because of their failure
to redescribe the very social theory that is implicit in their accounts. A
revised social theory of contemporary institutional collaboration, then,
would need to attend to the terms through which the organisations
redescribe themselves, a project that is here illuminated by comparing
ethnographies of ethics in business and academia. Ethnographic
description, unlike its normative counterpart, allows us to see how social
theory naturalises its assumptions. Bio:
Lecturer in the Anthropology of Organisations, Social Anthropology,
University of Manchester. I read Economics in Madrid and worked for a couple of years as an
economic analyst there and in London before switching to anthropology. In
1996 I completed an MSc in Social Anthropology at the London School of
Economics and moved to Oxford to do my D.Phil. (2001), which involved two
years of fieldwork (1997-1999) in Antofagasta, a mining town in the
Atacama Desert, Chile. Between 2001 and 2003, I held a British Academy
Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at St Hugh's College, Oxford, and did
another 6 months of fieldwork in Chile, this time between Antofagasta and
Maria Elena (a desert mining community). I joined the Department of Social
Anthropology at the University of Manchester in 2003.
My interests are in theories of economy, personhood and sociality. I am
also interested in how the social acquires ethical forms, especially under
regimes of capitalist ccountability and organisation. I am currently
researching the emergence of the corporation as a social form in the
Atacama desert in the first half of the 20th century, with particular
attention to the forms of 'society' that it created and related to.
Discussion (2.30pm)
Tea break (3pm)
Casper Bruun Jensen (3.30pm)
Description as inquiry and experimentation: on the multiplicity of
usefulness in/of ethnographic practice
Abstract:
As part of an interdisciplinary research project, which has as a
mandate both to carry out research and to use it to inform policy makers
the pressures of prescriptive interdisciplinarity are palpable. The paper
proposes that these pressures are linked to more general anxieties of the
social sciences, which might be referred to as respectively “the problem
of stepping into” explored practices and “problem of staying on the
outside”. Getting a purchase on the point and creativity of ethnographic
description requires a de-dramatisation of these fears.
My studies suggest that the social scientist has need of both the
repertoires of stepping into and staying outside to accomplish
‘usefulness’ in different settings. This requires a constant effort to
sort attachments to various parts of the field, because the different
versions of the useful do not always align. Making the problem of the
useful ethnographer amenable to description in (more or less) ethnographic
terms is a first step in getting away from the dramatic scenarios of
contamination (stepping into) and irrelevance (staying outside).
The challenge to think about the relation between description and
creativity also encourages an attempt to re-dramatise the capacities of
ethnographic description. What might description look like if taken
seriously as first of all a performative matter of partial connection and
sorting attachments? I want to explore this issue by considering what
happens if an understanding of ethnographic practice and description as
always multiple and variable is connected to pragmatic notions as Dewey’s
“inquiry” and Deleuze’s “experimentation”. Emerging is a view of the risk
and creativity of description as residing in the links, which are built as
ethnographers (partially) describe practices and thereby (partially) make
available different versions which to imagine future attachments and
detachments.
Bio:
Casper received his doctoral degree from Information- and Media
Studies, University of Aarhus, Denmark, for a study of the visions,
development, and implementation of the electronic patient record. He is
currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Communication and ACTION
for Health Research Project, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada.
He has recent publications in Social Studies of Science, Science,
Technology and Human Values, and Qualitative Research. His present
research deals with ethnographic studies of medical practice informed by
non-humanist science and technology studies.
Dr Monica Konrad (3.50pm)
Travelling concepts
Abstract:
Thinking productively about the conceptual issues of concepts cannnot be
the exclusive terrain of the philosopher. The dictum philosophy extracts
concepts, science extracts prospects and art extracts affects (Deleuze and
Guattari) is an artificial condensation of knowledge forms that overlooks
the agility of concepts as potential collaboration devices for a
galvanized comparability. If concepts can indeed travel between
disciplines, traditions, scholars, regions and historical time-shifts,
what might an anthropologist have to say about such knowledge movements in
the light of current theorising in science and society debates?
This paper takes off from that point of exhaustive modernity where
certain scientists and ethicists alike describe scientific breakthroughs
as 'transparencies' - as effects beyond the social. It is said all too
frequently, for example, that 'society' lags behind the pace of cutting
edge innovations in the biosciences. The critical theorist might contend
otherwise: instead of speeding up - ostensibly to catch up - it is
incumbent upon the social sciences at the present time to 'slow down'. An
anthropologically engaged form of 'slow-cook-thinking' might ask the
following: how the value of concepts is to be kept under analytic
vigilance - how the task of conceptual scrutiny is theorised through
encounter with, rather than application to, the cultural objects under
examination. A related issue is the formulation of an alternative
vocabulary to the ideals of transparency and exhaustive coverage. What
place is there [left] for the academic whose descriptions do not seek to
make things explicit?
Bio:
Monica Konrad teaches at the Department of Social Anthropology,
University of Cambridge and is a Bye-Fellow of Girton College. She directs
‘PLACEB-O’ (Partners Linked Across Collaborations in Ethics and the
Biosciences), a Research Orbital bringing together scholars inside and
outside of Cambridge to explore various aspects of collaborative practice.
Her current research addresses the relevance of contemporary anthropology
for global governance in science, international ethics, and
interdisciplinary studies. She is the author of Nameless Relations
(Berghahn, 2005) and Narrating the New Predictive Genetics: Ethics,
Ethnography and Science (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and
currently acts as anthropological advisor to bioethics councils in the UK
and for the UN.
Georgie Born (4.10pm)
Description as excess and evidence
Abstract:
Description is never free of a driving analysis, whether explicit or
implicit, coherent or inchoate. Ethnographic description - and even more
reflexive ethnographic description - can both offend and seduce; it is
accused of being both incomprehensibly detailed and richly suggestive. As
much as ethnographic analysis, it has a history of evolving and contesting
genres of description, which themselves belie any notion of neutral
descriptive adequacy. If it attempts to refrain from the normative mode it
often partly succeeds, but the normative can be glimpsed through the
analytical elipses which frame description. More problematic are uses of
description which claim to eschew the normative. Today even
anthropologists question the wisdom of rich description, which is accused
of excess; while 'thick description' resounds as cliche. These issues will
be discussed with reference to the chequered career of my recent,
intensely descriptive and normative ethnography of the BBC. The interest
of the study is its attempt to experiment formally with yoking 'excessive'
descriptions to 'purely' evidential functions - an archive of events,
practices, discourses - while offering them up also to satisfy the
'evidence-based' demands of policy, all the time allowing them to defy the
latter demands in their unruly criteria of self-adequacy - which refuses
reduction.
Bio:
Georgina Born is Reader in Sociology, Anthropology and Music in the
Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Cambridge. She is a Fellow of
Emmanuel College and in 1997-98 was Senior Research Fellow at King's
College. In 2002 she was a Fellow of the University of California
Humanities Research Institute, engaged in collective research on
Improvisation. From 1996-98 she was Visiting Professor in the Institute of
Musicology, Aarhus University, Denmark. She trained in Anthropology at
University College London and uses ethnography to study cultural
production, knowledge systems and music. Her books are ‘Rationalizing
Culture: IRCAM, Boulez and the Institutionalization of the Musical
Avant-Garde’ (California 1995), an ethnography of music-science
collaborations at IRCAM, which features the composer Alejandro Vinao;
‘Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation and
Appropriation in Music’ (California 2000, ed. with D. Hesmondhalgh); and
an ethnography of the BBC, ‘Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the
Reinvention of the BBC’ (Secker and Warburg 2004). A current ESRC-funded
project, ‘Interdisciplinarity and Society A Critical Comparative Study’,
maps the nature of interdisciplinarity between the arts and sciences, and
natural and social sciences. Other current research analyses the changing
modes of creativity and new ontologies attendant on music’s digitization;
and the transformation of public service broadcasting in the digital era.
Articles have appeared in the journals Screen, New Formations, Social
Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, and the
Modern Law Review. Her studies of the BBC and of PSB have led to
involvement in media policy in Britain and Europe.
Discussion (4.30pm)
Close (5pm)
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