FRAMING “NO AGING IN INDIA”• 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

• 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-the-world.’

• 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, post-

structuralism (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

• 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