I would like some feedback on this, it is a little snip of an essay i wrote (amongst many) dealing with anthro theory....I am fascinated with Pierre Bourdieu's Habitus and Practice theories, so if anyone would like to discuss this, feel free

______________________________________________

By: Preston Birch

Years of debates regarding the authenticity of the anthropologists main area of research, the ethnography, has succeeded in producing a paradigm shift in the disciplines major theoretical methods. Thus, a “conceptual shift, tectonic in its implications, has taken place (Clifford 1988: 616).

As anthropology moved into the late 20th century, various scholars began to question the disciplines main methods of acquiring and analyzing its data. The ethnography became a major focus of attention to the anthropologists armed with the force of hindsight, who understood this method in its historical context as well as the implicit information that could be received from its readers.

The path of ethnographic theory has led to a diverging road of conceptual methods. The road of objective positivism has increasingly become home to a path overgrown with historical roots and layers of theoretical sediments. While the other, one of subjective openness has been recently the road most traveled. Culture, and all those variables that create it, are no longer being seen as stationary objects that can be studied accurately in a universally recognized world that shares common laws of progress. Rather, anthropologists began to see culture as being a dynamic force, composed of aggregates of living, conscious, creative and imaginative human beings, who through the interplay of their own voices, and their positioned (or historically produced bias) utterances, are constantly reproducing and creating culture (ibid: 608).

This perspective is reminiscent of Bourdieu’s theories of the habitus and practice, which suggests that all human beings are the ‘children’ of the past. Thus we are the heirs of those who have lived and died in every moment of every life. Our worldviews are products of historical living in real moments, and at the same time because we are unique in that our own individual histories are different, we are reshaping the boundaries of culture within the boundaries already in place by history (Bourdieu: 534). So when we set out to study cultures in this conceptual framework, we must keep in mind that our own selves are victims to this same universal law, and therefore we are biased with our perspectives. So even though ethnography “describes processes of innovations and structurations, it is itself part of these same processes” (Clifford: 599). Therefore, social living is the interplay of both the subjective and the objective and if one wanted to gain some insight into a foreign culture one must both explore the objective, empirical behaviors, as well as the subjective explanations as to why the behavior occurs. While all the while, the anthropologist must be aware of, and ensure the reader that he/she is coming from his/her own subjective and objective frameworks. So “what appears as real in history, the social sciences, the arts, even in common sense, is always analyzable as a restrictive and expressive set of social codes and conventions (Clifford: 606).

So it appears as if, for the time being, that the concepts of grand theory have been ‘suspended for the moment in favor of a close consideration of such issues as contextually, the meaning of social life, to those who enact it, and the explanation of exceptions and indeterminants rather than regularities in phenomena observed; all issues that make problematic what were taken for granted as facts or certainties on which the validity of paradigms had rested’ (Marcus & Fischer 1986: 632). So we are in an age of questioning the standard methods and theories on which historical facts and truths have been built upon. Periods of stasis are followed by periods of rapid change in all aspects of disciplines and its conceptual inner-workings. Thus the flow of information runs in concentric circles rather then in a linear fashion, whereby the same theoretical problems are rehashed but viewed from a slightly different perspective. In this sense, the ideas of how one can view a social reality are under question, but from a different perspective. Old theorists applied the understandings in their day to better grasp the concepts they were in search for, and today, we merely extrapolate these concepts within a different field of inquiry. It is no longer the direct methods employed in ethnographic data that is under debate, but rather, it is the actual validity of the writings and the theoretical implications it may present. So “present conditions of knowledge are defined not so much by what they are as by what they come after...” (Ibid: 632).

Living, conscious agents produce the ideologies, the means to an end in the group, and these daily moments become engrained in the unconscious and thus becoming the normal way to act, see, and think. Thus it would seem an intellectual revolution appears to be stirring, and these concepts within recent ethnographies stand to show just how knowledge and facts, behaviors and dispositions come about, and therefore how we can change them; how what we do in our life, in every moment truly does matter. Human organisms are deposited with pre-existing cultural realities, these include ways to feel, think and behave. It is as if, in the reproduction of the species a transference of nonexistent energies (not outside of the world, not inside of our minds) is perpetuated and is allowed to do so because of the nonexistent rules in place that this very act has produced over generations. Culture is merely the ‘exhaust’ of human beings making decisions in every moment of every life, and thus differing classes, power structures, and actual physical realities in our world are the creation of our histories and the decisions they made. We are the heirs of the past, the inheritors of historical decisions. The weight of many worlds rests beneath our backs, and once we come to the realization in our daily lives, once we become conscious of this fact, we can begin to change our reality. A major step in this change is for the disciplines which hold more sway in the existence of cultural facts, like the sciences (anthropology), is to question the grounds in which their facts have come to stand on. And this is where we find today’s recent ethnographical writings.

References:

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans. Richard Nice. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press.

Fischer, Michael M.K 1986. Ethnicity and Post Modern arts of memory. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Eds. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press.