Phillips: English 540 Week 12 Post

It's about Hammersly Time!: Ain't Yo Mama's Ethnography

The readings about anthropological ethnography this week are some of the most useful readings I have encountered as a student in English Studies to date. Thank you, Dr. Seloni, for helping me find other voices that help me articulate and understand my resistance to the twenty-first century educational ethnographies that I have been reading.

To explain, my undergraduate degree is in anthropology with a writing minor. Because I am an older student, the gap between when I received my degrees in anthropology (90s) and visual culture (two years ago) is considerable.  The articles we read for this week articulate all of the intuitive irritations I have been having as I read contemporary educational case studies, interviews, and “ethnographies.” I felt like a dinosaur because I thought what I was seeing happening in recent literature about emplaced learning situations was somehow inadequate or, to my mind, McScholarship—too fast, too greasy, and too easy—scholarship that routinely left me ill at ease, but I could not identify quite why. Now I know why I have been having that reaction. It is because I have a fundamentally different perspective on what “ethnography” can be and should do. Of course, these are value judgments based in my historical and ideological understandings of cultural anthropology and cultural geography that I learned from my dad and my professors many years ago.

Hammersly’s article addressed some of the particulars that have been troubling me. He writes:

[W]hat I am suggesting is that we need to bear in mind the consequences of moving from the older anthropological model of ethnographic fieldwork to its more recent forms, in which we study only parts of people’s lives over relatively short time periods, perhaps only being in the field a few days each week. There are problems of sampling and generalization here, and a danger of failing to recognize both cyclical variability and fundamental patterns of change. (6)

Granted, Hammersly points out the economic whys and wherefores of the move to expedient forms of methodological research practices that draw from anthropological ethnography, but he also points out what is omitted in such a move—observation of cyclical patterns and deep contextualizing.  I fear I seem nostalgic, but there is something to be gained from “living among ‘em” that builds a two-way bridge across difference, a bridge we need to foster deep social justice.

Hammersly’s query into how ethnographic research methods may be deployed in online communities is at the forefront of my mind. That we have a different relationship based in different kinds of sensory exposures to each other online makes for an interesting shift in research practices. Because I am interested in how different ratios of sensory perception may impact how we feel about each other in different environmental contexts, Hammersly’s essay may draw attention to what is omitted in online discourse. I don’t believe you can know whether the person on the other side of the screen is “real” or not. This Baudrillardian sense of hyperreality transforms ordinary human interaction. Put differently, one does not have the same kind of sensory engagement one does with another real-live human being or other creature. Sociological studies—Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together comes to mind—begin to examine the disconnect between face-to-face human interactions with online or robotic machine interactions. How does one do ethnographic research of robotic interactions? If so, how does one shift analytic components to reflect the non-human aspects of communication across this two-way bridge? 

Phillips: English 540 Week Eleven Response

Literacy Facts and Fictions

James Paul Gee ‘s purpose is to complicate a “traditional” notion of literacy, one in which “literacy is treated [solely] as a mental phenomenon” divorced from cultural, historical, and political contexts (26). Instead, Gee wishes to define literacy in “social and cultural” terms that acknowledge the power dynamics involved in inequities of access for marginalized peoples (28). He suggests an ideological model for understanding literacy. “An ideological model,” Gee writes, “attempts to understand literacy in terms of concrete social practices and to theorize it in terms of the ideologies in which different literacies are embedded” (76). Gee demonstrates this model, to my mind, by discussing different cultural and historical examples that provide extrinsic evidence to back his concluding claim that, “We ought to be as interested in creating a ‘new society’ as we are a new ‘science’” (86).

Gee proposes three literacy facts. First, he notes that, “Most people in developed countries are literate in the sense that they can read” (30). Second, although many are literate, “…lots of people cannot do more difficult and sophisticated tasks with their literacy skills,” which creates a hierarchy of “service workers,” “knowledge workers,” and “knowledge leaders” (30). Third, “…home-based factors matter deeply” in terms of parental education, culture, and access to literacy materials (31). In essence, Gee claims that there isn’t a “literacy crisis.” Rather, there is a “schooling” problem. He discusses a specific instance from the National Academy of Science (1998) that failed to adequately discuss systemic inequities and instead focused too heavily on “phonemic awareness” (37).

In another example—the “aspirin bottle” problem—Gee refutes claims that all this “fancy stuff” about culture and history and so forth won’t help people who can read a warning label. By performing a discourse analysis of the warning label, Gee pauses to consider the larger issues of status quo ideologies about literacy. That is, what has led to the “legalize” on the back of the label in the first place?

Gee’s concise history of Plato, Baktin, Swedish literacy, and Freire’s “emancipatory literacy” is useful as a refresher. Gee’s point is that, “Literacy always comes with a perspective on interpretation that is ultimately political” (60). I don’t think that is a new concept, but his explanation of “Plato’s dilemma” is one we face when we consider how to interpret texts and whose perspective we choose to respect in our role as student or teacher.

Finally, Gee provides a survey of key developments born out of New Literacy Studies to ground our understanding of the ways in which sociocultural approaches to literacy study might transform the conversation. While I am on board with Gee’s assertion that, “We ought to be…interested in creating a ‘new society’,” I wonder who is going to pay for the cost of that new society and under what circumstances. 

Phillips: English 540 Week Eight Response

 The Whos and Whats: Gee’s Figured Worlds and Five Systems of Discourse

Favorite Ideas from Gee’s Chapter Six & A Pet Peeve

“Different social languages…make visible and recognizable two different social identities, two different versions of who one is” (89).

“All utterances make assumptions about people’s previous experiences and knowledge “ (97).

“A figured world is an assumed part of the context on the part of the writer…” and it implies a set of cultural “…values and ideologies” (101; 106).

“There is no knowing a language without knowing the cultural models or figured worlds that organize the meanings of that language for some cultural group. But all cultural models tend ultimately to limit our perception of differences and of new possibilities” (110).

James Paul Gee poses the concept of “figured worlds.” I find this idea compelling, for, on the one hand, the idea suggests embodiment in the word ‘figure,’ and, on the other hand, the idea suggests a view of the world that a ‘figure’ sees, experiences, and holds. All of this is contingent with her/his own social situation.

Gee references Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (L&J) but doesn’t delve into their ideas about conceptual metaphors to my satisfaction. Gee’s text would benefit from the addition of L&J’s Philosophy in the Flesh, which was published in 1999 almost a decade prior to Gee’s own work, and three decades after Metaphors We Live By, which was first published in 1980. Even though I know no one can ‘read-it-all,’ his omission seriously impacted my ability to read him as generously.

For example, Gee names “idioms” like Time is Money, but I am not on board with his interpretation. L&J frame this as conceptual metaphor and place it into a schema representing Time as a Resource (L&J 161). Maybe I don’t understand why Gee doesn’t take the next step and deconstruct the idioms he poses, or at least reference extant scholarship that does a more thorough job deconstructing the concepts.

Favorite Concept from Gee’s Chapter Seven

Nevertheless, Gee’s description of Five Systems of Discourse provides some good points for consideration. Gee writes: “[D]iscourse [are] stretches of language” that “hang together” …to make sense to some community of people.” (112). He indicates that there are ways in which discourse “hangs together” that we may analyze.

Quoted and Paraphrased from 116-117

1. Prosody = the way things are said…pitch, loudness, stress, syllable length

2. Cohesion = ways sentences are linked, or the text’s glue

3. Over all Discourse Organization = the ways in which sentences are structured/positioned into higher ordered units

4. Contextualization Signals = cues for listeners and readers to situate a text or utterance

5. Thematic Organization = the ways in which themes are signaled and developed (through visuals, focalizers, etc…)

“These five systems are interrelated. … Devices in the first three are used to accomplish the functions of the last two…’ (116-17).

In response to Meg’s query, Gee doesn’t address the body in motion per se, but one might place the ‘figure’ under the heading of contextual signals, or theme (?!), or prosody under “stress.” I’m stretching it here, though.

While I am harsh on the details in Gee’s text, this doesn’t mean I find no merit in his project, I do. I wished to play devil’s advocate in this post to help forward my own thinking with regard to conceptual metaphors--something I intend look at in my intercultural analysis paper.