The inspiration

Today one of my neighbors asked me if I was the girl he always sees on her bike. I said, probably. He chatted with me and asked me how far I ride. He said he'd seen me bike around the neighborhood, as well as on our street. He told me that I was an inspiration -- which was kind of great. He was older, so I'd like to believe he wasn't actually hitting on me. I prefer to believe it was just a pure compliment. It's kind of nice to be an inspiration to someone, sometimes. I was feeling very grouchy because I've destroyed one of my feet, from running more frequently, was having trouble walking normally, and feeling achy in ways that just make me feel like I'm getting old. But in a city where neighbors rarely speak to one another, not only is it cool that my biking has inspired him (whatever the hell that actually means -- I doubt he'll drive less, for example), but also that my biking prompted a form of social interaction. Sometimes it's good to be an oddity.

Public Healthians and Anthropologists -- in a teleconference-off

Gotta work on these post titles -- never my forte. Though since I know that not even my father is reading this blog (thanks, Dad! I feel so loved), the odds of anyone else doing so seem slim, as well.

Yesterday I spent a number of hours in my role as "consultant" to a public health research project. Originally wooed by being told I would be the "architect" of the study, the reality is, of course, more base. The LA people have been great, and they were receptive to anthropological methods (or what public health people like to call, often dismissively, "qualitative" methods) and really did give me a lot of free reign. (Though in retrospect, I learned from the project coordinator, with whom I work the most, and whom I really like a lot, they had not intended to do this part of the project and it just got dumped on the director's desk. Thus, the sense of independence and liberty comes from a desire not to have to take care of it themselves...but as long as I get paid, I'm pretty pleased.) But then, there was the CDC.

I've known, since my own days in the public health research world, that the kind of work I do is baffling and not highly valued to the epidemiologists/traditional science researchers. They love statistics! Counting! Denominators! Risks! And I think those things are also highly subjective measures, though you can try to front-load the subjectiveness by making it all very well-defined at the outset. Still, if I said, all white girls who live in the Los Angeles area, well, not all white girls might consider themselves white, or I might live in L.A. but actually have residence in, say, Baltimore...and then, the categories that the researcher thought were self-evidently defined suddenly are still skewed. Ok...these variations are perhaps rare, etc, but I do think it's important for the public healthians (and some of my best friends are public healthians...though in my mind, the good kind) to not make such clear divides between us and them. Though a number of my friends are trying to fight the good fight by showing how "qualitative" methods can radically enhance information about data sought, we are mainly seen as an amuse-bouche to the more hearty main meal. (Which, let's be fair, is mainly just counting stuff.)

In the course of the conference call, when we were discussing my proposal, for which I have termed anthropology practices as non-alarmingly as possible, it was clear that the bigwig at the CDC felt that the methods were too labor-intensive or not collecting "useful" data. They were also very concerned that in conducting observations in the clinic that the researchers would "influence" the behaviors of the providers. This concern with objectivity really irks me. It's naive at best and over-simplifies and reduces research methods at worst. I have learned in working on projects not to get overly attached to my ideas, especially when I'm low on the totem pole. So I've tried to remain zen about the major reworking.** Though, I suppose in this instance, I'm the one who's going to analyze the data and write the paper, so if it's not something I find well-designed or well-thought out, I'm going to be the one to suffer the consequences.

On the upside, after the conference call, we had a postmortem discussion in the director's office. When I first met in her office months ago, I got a kick out of seeing her glass dildo standing upright on her windowsill so that the light streams through it (no, I don't mean that it's actually "hers"). I noticed this time that she has tacked a vulva puppet up on her bulletin board. While I'm sure I could analyze to bits (urgh, unintentional pun) the material differences between the glass object and the plush puppet, mainly, I'm just happy to be working somewhere that these things are de rigueur (crap, potential pun again). Even if they are public healthians.

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** I do sort of enjoy their resistance. I get a big kick, as many who do not read this blog know, out of making persuasive arguments to demonstrate that I am RULER of all LOGIC, and that those triflin' arguments can be poked apart. This makes me an obnoxious friend/relative, but an excellent pseudo-lawyer. I also write very good contracts.

Not all empiricism produces foregone conclusions

One of the things I find most fascinating when reading scientific studies (or secondary/tertiary discussions of those studies, because I am lazy) is the conclusions drawn from the data collected. This is something I enjoy teaching to students -- forcing them to ask whether the conclusions are necessarily self-evident from the data, and introducing the possibility that many of our interpretations of outcomes are highly mediated through social and cultural constructs.

There are a number of times in which this article, about the neurological "roots" of the "orgasmic mind," makes inexplicable conclusions about current data on the way a brain functions (and functions differently in men and women, homosexuals and heterosexuals) in the course of an orgasm. While I suspect the author intended to challenge social norms about the female orgasm, I find he reinforces simplistic tropes of female desire. The article's conclusion raises one of the more compelling problems for me. The last section is titled "Pleasure Pill?" and returns to the article's opening example, one woman's ability to overcome sexual "dysfunction" depended more on social triggers than any physiological/chemical alterations. Thus, the article points out, though neurological mapping of the mind during sexual response may be a possible solution in the future for those who have difficulty reaching orgasm, understanding the social phenomena that contribute to sexual pleasure may be equally relevant.

Much of the article is about women's sexual response as distinct from men's, but it identifies these differences through an evolutionary framework. (A very questionable framework, in my mind.) But more concerning, the article focuses far more on the "problems" of women's sexual response rather than considering male sexual response as equally as arbitrary or constrained. Most of the article takes female sexual response as more complicated and demanding than male sexual response, which may or may not actually be true, and what bothered me was the intrinsic problematizing of female desire, and the article's failure to ask whether male sexual response could have nuances as well. One example is that males purportedly exhibit arousal only to visual stimuli of their preferred sexual partners, that heterosexual men do not find seeing men naked arousing nor do homosexual men find seeing women naked arousing. In contrast, women are aroused more "generally" regardless of sexual partner preference. Yet, there is no way of evaluating how much of sexual response has social and cultural norms that influence sexual interpretations.

The article suggests that "Indeed, many sex therapies revolve around opening the mind to new ways of thinking about sex or about your sexual partner." The claim that many sex therapies can address mental challenges, rather than chemical ones made me immediately think of how odd it is that male sexual dysfunction has thus far been treated with a pharmacological solution, while women's purported dysfunctions require extensive social probing. I would argue that Viagara didn't involve any "mind opening" at all. Has anyone bothered to conduct Viagara research on heterosexual men to see if they exhibit signs of arousal when viewing non-preferred sexual objects? It just seems that the article takes far too many concepts for granted, and fails to even acknowledge that the availability of Viagara has a lot of social and cultural consequences. The counter to this article, and it seems that the author is thinking of it indirectly, is that we have developed pharmacological solutions, not "mental" ones, to male sexual "dysfunction." Women's desires, as this article ultimately seems to suggest, are far more complicated and "emotional," even though the point of this article is that women's emotional centers turn off during orgasm.

Perhaps I am reading this article incorrectly, but it does seem that there are a lot of logical inconsistencies. Most of them stemming from a retro-romanticizing** of female desire. (Oooh, "retro-romanticizing," that seems like a good new term.)

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** I see that I've been using "retro" in more than one post as a means to suggest it's not a very forward-thinking interpretation. Got to get out of that linguistic slump.

Difference and Sameness

As with most of the posts, this is not an entirely formed thought -- but I've been considering the particular challenges to fieldwork when one is conducting research at home. I spent this afternoon and yesterday with one of the main mothers I've been working with. I've interviewed her twice, been to her home both times, and gotten to know her as a leader of the mothers' group. Though our conversation the last two days faltered often, a few things became clear, mainly the ways in which we were very different, and how that difference may make it hard for me to develop sustainable relationships here in the field, ones that take on their own continuity without the enormous amount of labor I feel that I've encountered thus far. As I think about reducing fieldwork in LA due to the move north, I'm trying to evaluate, as well, why things did not go as well as I had hoped. I tend to internalize and take responsibility for outcomes -- often excessively (and one might even call narcissistically). But when I am the means through which fieldwork "occurs," it's hard not to feel that I've somehow damaged the experiment.

What has happened multiple times in my fieldwork, with various people, is a heightened sense of how much I am not like the people I work with. If I were in another country, that difference might be presumed or taken for granted. But I think being an American, complicates the relationship and the expectation. It's not that I am surprised that fellow Americans are from entirely different cultures than mine (this is why I am intrigued and compelled to study America and its cultural phenomena), but I find it hard to navigate these differences. While conducting research with these other Americans, it's awkward to make clear how my research works. I think that often in foreign places, participants may chalk up their lack of understanding to cultural differences, but that lack of transparency is harder to ignore when you're working in your own country.

A couple of weeks ago, at the mothers' group meeting, we played a game that required you to find people who matched certain categories on the game card. At the end, one mom read off the categories, and if you had been part of that category -- you raised your hand (basically, a form of bingo, but with descriptors rather than letters and numbers). One of the squares identified someone who "reads more than 5 books a month". I raised my hand, but was the only person to do so. A number of the mothers muttered -- well, I read parts of 5 books a month, or, how about kids' books? I read more than 5 kids' books a month. I qualified my book-consumption by pointing out I was a student, but somehow I think I ended up making the mothers feel bad and threatened. There's lots of stuff like this that happen in the course of fieldwork, where my education, or my interests or my lack of having children, somehow stands out in particular ways.

In Morocco, these differences usually were interpreted as misfortunes -- everyone was quite concerned that at 26 I was unmarried. The Moroccan women were eager to help me, as I was clearly in a disadvantaged position. When I admitted to not practicing Judaism, a number of the women I knew worked very hard to help illuminate me and explain to me why I might have not found the connection. So I'm trying to figure out what it is about my role as a researcher in the groups I find myself in here that doesn't allow for a level of openness or eagerness to learn "more" about the lives of the people I'm getting to know. There must be a good way to translate the naive, eager researcher from a place in which I am an obvious outsider, to a place where I'm a less obvious outsider, yet somehow more obviously different.

Itemizing my goodbye list to LA

My plans took a bit of an unexpected turn, and I'm leaving LA in a month. Strange. Yet, I feel like the work I've been doing is hitting a wall, and after 7 months there, it's not unreasonable to admit that things have not developed their own momentum. 2 months in Morocco, though difficult, were definitely more productive, and more self-sustaining, than the work in LA. It'll be interesting to see whether fieldwork in SF will be better, if I will be able to gain the traction that I have experienced in the past with various research projects. I can't tell if this is a U.S. phenomenon, or if this is an LA phenomenon, or what it is that feels sticky and undynamic.

Apparently in an act of desperation, LA is planning on recycling sewage water. I have found the water in LA already heavily chlorinated, unpleasant smelling and makes my skin dry and itchy, so I can't even imagine recycled water. Clearly they have to do something, as I see all sorts of water waste all the time in LA, and that can't be good.

As you can see -- my posts of late have been uninspired, for though my life is going great, work has plateaued.

Something clever in The New York Times

I missed this column when it was first printed, a couple of weeks ago, but it's an excellent and witty criticism of those who argue Obama has only gotten where he is because he's black. Colson Whitehead writes about his experiences as "The Guy Who’s Where He Is Only Because He’s Black" in an extremely humorous way. Little of what he says is radical, but it's a good satire. For all my reservations about the ways in which the two Democratic candidates have been portrayed in the media, I find the rant against Obama's success as being a "benefit" of his race is a pretty excrecable and flimsy position. I suspect that my attempts to explain why I still think Clinton's media and public treatment as misogynist has occasionally sounded as though I object to Obama on some less savory grounds. But I do think we, as Americans, treat race and gender radically differently, and that sexism can be hard to pinpoint.

Retro-intellectualism

Posting while I'm grouchy is perhaps not the wisest idea (they have been drilling the concrete outside my apartment since 8:30am, starting week 2 of apartment complex destruction/construction), but I think it adds a nice curmudgeonly flavor to my blog, don't you think?

Malcom Gladwell covered an intellectual "venture" group in last week's issue of the New Yorker, which re-imagines the role of the venture capital firm -- called, uninspiringly, Intellectual Ventures. (I'd post a link, but since I'm about to rail against them, why increase their web traffic?) I haven't finished the Gladwell article yet (I am reading it at a glacial pace) because it irritates me so greatly.

The gist is that many of the major innovations occur to more than one person around the same time, and there's a firm that tries to tap into the wealth of multiple intelligent people hypothesizing together. Unsurprisingly enough, all the members of this group are men. How very "innovative". It seems that if you actually want to think about how to do things differently or address long-standing problems in a field, having diversity of men and women would be useful. One of the recent podcasts I listened to of my favorite CBC podcast interviewed Ruth Hubbard about her work as a biologist and her application of feminist interpretations to biology. She talks about re-visiting The Origin of Species and thinking about how evolutionary biology anthropomorphizes the animal world and genders and westernizes it (she gives the example of using the term "kingdom" as a basic example). Clearly diversity in thought can come from all sorts of people, genders, race, etc, but it angers me that this organization exists without really including women. On their "staff inventors" they have one woman among 25 people, and there are no women on their "managing directors" board.

Ick. I hope they fail.

Two things, on fieldwork and also on the magic of PR

I will preface this post with the caveat that I'm exhausted and probably feeling unreasonably sensitive, but I came home to receive an email from one of the first non-profit groups I tried to work with when I moved to LA that was incredibly passive aggressive. Everytime I would email to follow up on a project they would not respond. Then they'd email me weeks later and ask where I was. Today I got an email saying they were "sad" that we were never able to "get going" and have me help them out. They mention they had a lot of work for me to do, but every time I would try to organize a time to meet with them or try to follow up, the guy who runs it, would fail to reply to my emails.

Because I've also had problems with the minority women's health organization, I feel that I really need to understand what it was that I did wrong -- as my default interpretation is that I failed somehow. I think some of the issues were with the medium of email -- all contact existed in the ether and there were no "sites" where I could go to do anything. Even with the minority women's health organization, their limited staff made it hard to gain access to the work space because it always had to be highly coordinated to let me in.

I went back and looked at the emails I'd tagged with their label, and in many of them, I propose a date or a set of possible times, and I never hear back from them. I offer to help with a proposal they wanted to work on, and they didn't reply. There's lots of evidence, it seems to me, that suggest I have tried repeatedly to be available and initiate projects, but there are no replies to these attempts. I sound whiny -- I know. I'm just baffled at the forms of miscommunication, especially since I seem to be the constant in both these circumstances. But I fear making that analysis makes me terribly self-centered. Fieldwork is not about me, but as a good friend recently pointed out, Margaret Mead and her posse believed one had to have gone through many years of therapy to be an anthropologist. On the upside, I've had that....

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I write sometimes about the strange digital and technological integrations into popular knowledge and access to information. The other day, before I left town, I got an email from the PR person at the exhibit I mention last post (see below). It was incredibly unnerving to get an email the day after I posted it, though obviously she has an alert set for any references to their exhibit. She informed me that the inventor of the preservation medium used in the exhibit will be speaking in early June. I'm hoping to drag my neighbor/running partner/sole tolerator in LA along for moral support. She seems to be pretty game for any sort of weird anthropological adventure that involves bodies or autism or medical freakshows.

I do feel mildly guilty for disparaging the curation. I thought about it this weekend, and it is in a child's museum...it's not like they've mounted it at the Met. Still, I think of two museums in Philadelphia for kids, the Please Touch Museum and the Benjamin Franklin Science Museum, and they both felt far more accessible and kid-friendly (at least in my very hazy distant memory). I found it unnerving that the museum in LA had a McDonald's inside it, yet the exhibit had a portion devoted to the effects of obesity and why it can kill you. Was no one thinking about the contradictory messages they were sending? There were a lot of cases displaying the hazardous effects of cigarette smoking, and it would not have surprised me if the museum also had a Philip Morris wing, or some such thing.

For the few who read this -- forgive the incoherence. Will come back and edit it soon.

Creepy Austrian Plasticizes

Body Worlds...was underwhelming. At times it was downright nauseating, mainly because they had the beat of a heart in the background of the main exhibition. Everywhere we went, thump, thump, thump, amplified. I felt like I was in a 1950s deterrent film about the horrible outcomes of drinking or sex or marijuana. I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone. Bad curation, bad! In addition, since the "theme" was about the heart (though there were also lots of displays that were not specific to the heart), they had lots of tiresome cliches posted on the walls about the heart and extrapolated the biological to the social and emotional. Blah blah blah, love, heartache...blah blah blah. Such a cynic. I found it unnecessary and uncompelling.

Then there were the bodies. At first, I found it mildly intriguing. But after a while the endlessly dissected, bisected, flayed, butterflied, fileted bodies were just plain overwhelming. At first it seemed that they were only using male bodies, which I found odd. Later in the exhibit came the women's bodies, but now that I think about it, the women were always in "graceful" poses. There was one woman crouching and pulling a bow and arrow with her brain, inexplicably on top of her head, as though it were an elegant hairdo. It was beyond bizarre. Also, it seemed that every version of the female body managed to expose her genitals, which to be fair, none of the men got to have any modesty, either; but it's not that hard to keep women's legs closed, now is it?

The whole experience made me want to be a vegetarian, as the bodies looked like...well...duh, meat. I didn't feel the unease or uncanniness that I expected as I looked at organs and veins disembodied from their bodies. Nor did I find the contortions and displaying of human form as objectionable as I anticipated. There is something about the museum setting that allows for distancing, allows for one to feel as though one were an objective observer. This is something the Museum of Jurassic Technology plays with, at least, the idea of curation as forcing a reverence or respect for the displays, regardless of content. Though that analysis doesn't totally translate, because I'm not sure I felt "respect," but I did feel compelled to be "curious," even when slightly revolted. I found the cross-sections of bodies the most fascinating, as they better represented the interconnectedness of things for me (the horizontal slice).

Still, I did expect to feel differently at the end. Perhaps after a night's sleep (assuming I don't have nightmares), it'll be more coherent. I'm not sure I'm going to write an official "fieldnote" on the experience, so I am haphazardly sharing it here. I am curious to know more about this Von Hagens. I find the whole endeavor a combination of being highly suspect and also a classical scientific fascination gone slightly awry.

Sage advice from Savage Minds

I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the pedagogy of anthropology. Mostly because I feel so much of it has been self-taught. My department, I think, is deeply invested in self-teaching. Sometimes I see that as active neglect (and I think it can be), but other times, it's satisfying to find one's own way. If I were being uncharacteristically optimistic, I might even suggest that it could be very individualized, and they may have quickly noted that I wasn't going to listen to them if I didn't want to, and that it was better to let me flounder and self-create. That may be too forgiving an assessment, but I guess I'm feeling generous at this hour.

Savage Minds has a short post on the near-far (or the fort-da, as I like to call it) of fieldwork. I find it challenging to figure out the relationship between my informants and me. I know the suggestion, "never turn down an invitation," is a good one. But sometimes, one finds oneself unable to go. I rarely accept an invitation and not show up. And I think I've been pretty good about following up with people when they extend invitations. Though I do have one mom, who has repeatedly invited me to stuff, and I've not gone. I feel quite lame about that... I know my other anthropologist friends have struggled with intimacy and distance in their fieldwork. It certainly came up for me in Morocco, and I still feel guilty about how I handled it.