Data overload

 

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How do we proceed to live in a world in which data overwhelms us? At every point we seem to be participating in capture schemes that reduce us to data sets. As consumers, and loyalty card holders, as citizens and voters, as students and subscribers, just scouring the net, or engaging in everyday civic activities, as well as so much more. And even if we unsubscribe, organisations don’t forget us. Our data is kept and a reminder may be sent, asking if we want to rekindle relationships again. If it’s insurmountable now, what’s it going to be like in future?

It wasn’t that long ago that we didn’t have a digital footprint, that we weren’t known by systems in the way that we are now.  There was an anonymity to life, where you were mostly only locally known.  Now there are analytics of which I’m part of, indeed through this blog even seek to engage with.  “Life was simpler then” we lament. And it probably was, but that had its limitations as we know. With all pros come cons though.

In recent weeks I’ve been involved in discussions with groups about data, about how to work with data, about how to analyse and interpret data, and about obligations to maintain, store and use data although this latter part comes solely from me.  We are all firm believers it seems in the romantic idea that data is everything, a resource, unharnessed, like energy that once harnessed will illuminate our lives and provide the means for the implementation of greater improvements overall, somehow. This must have been like discussion about what to do with electric light. Everyone was wanting it, everyone would be improved by it, the potential was limitless, and people probably didn’t know what they really had. Data is like that too.  And it probably affects our sleep patterns too.

The people  that I speak with are sometimes confused about data. After all, it’s a small word, it’s known and not ambiguous or difficult at all. It seems approachable, knowable and usable, both the word itself and the concept that it stands for.

But here’s the thing,  sometimes we do not know what constitutes its nature, we do not know the boundedness or plasticity of data, and believe that it’s somehow a thing that will serve us, somehow, if only they can figure out how exactly.   As anthropologists we recall our undergraduate lectures on the dangers of reification, of the abstract made somehow real.

Data is the real made into the abstract.  Behind the data are the experiences, choices, options, measures, thoughts and actions of people.

And data is not unproblematic. It comes to us loaded with permissions, limitations, missing bits, mistakes, and unknown complexities. It may be old, useless, unusable, not relevant, partial, lost or not allowed to be reused. It may be in a form that can’t be used by other people, or inaccessible or locked up.

And what is data anyway? As an anthropologist I would always ask too, wells what isn’t data?   And that has broad implications for how we think about and ‘use’ data as well.

Is data only that information that exists in computer databases? Is data only on paper? Or on tape or in audio visual recordings? Is it only digital, or is this the latest format, on an as yet unknown, and unknowable future capture?  What about body parts? Cells, or blood or other body specimens?  What about sound recordings? What about the data that isn’t yet captured or recorded in these or similar ways – are we living as embodied data potentials? What about conversations? What about asides? What about lists that are meaningful or those that are meaningless?  And what about context?

Is data only data when it’s valued? What determines value? Sometimes it’s only time…

And is there a morality of data collection, storage, analysis, reporting and usage that extends beyond the usual ethical considerations that accounts for the inherent greed associated with its volume, capture, storage and use?  Will the philosophy of data be subject to scrutiny by philosophers, scientists, social sciences and the humanities?  This already has begun.

Will data be the new money?

When I next meet with my data chat buddies I wonder what our conversations will be about? Will they honour me by sorting out these questions, or will we move straight into working with questions based on assumptions that we’re all just trying to figure out what to do with it all?  As if that task will ever end.

Fractocurrentism and the anthropologist of the future (TAOTF) …

Will be a world view

Will reconceptualise disciplinary thinking and skill sets

TAOTF will be better known

TAOTF will probably do fiewldwork at home, locally or …

– May not do fieldwork at all

Won’t have to ask all the questions

Will glean greater insights around the textual, but not rely on text alone

Won’t write up a single authored ethnography in the way we’re used to – maybe not ever

Will always be teaching, sharing

Won’t necessarily Probably Mostly won’t be working in an academic department of anthropology

But what do we become if we don’t get to be that identity which we’ve studied to become?

TAOTF will contribute more centrally to dialogues that are greater than the discipline itself, and

Will draw together all the strands

TAOTF will lead teams, working across the arts and sciences in new and creative ways

Will take turns: from the poetic turn to the mutualisc turn, the sensory turn, the purposive turn, the enduring turn, the resources turn, the imaginary turn, the epiphenominal turn, the organismic turn and more

TAOTF should be paid for what they/we contribute

TAOTF will teach us all how to live

Oh and the Fractocurrentism?  In this era it’s not post -post modernism, nor is it alter- modernism.  Or meta modernism.  No we need to identify this era as:

Fractomodernity

As anthropologists of the future, we are now cultural experts of the Fractocurrency era or Fractocurrentism

You heard it here first …

For anthropologists, is interdisciplinarity ever truly a meeting of equals?

 

I recently read a Twitter post which asserted that interdisciplinarity was never a meeting of equals. As an anthropologist working outside of an academic department I met this statement with some unease. Currently, my working relationships are built on a premise of difference, of working with others from bounded, clearly demarcated professions and of thinking critically about if not directly challenging the taken for granted world views in the industry in which I work. I have written elsewhere about the role, function and value of anthropologists in workplaces, but in doing so I wrote from the basis of anthropologists as different but equal.

However, thinking more critically about this has led me to problematize this idea. I don’t believe I’ve adequately taken into account the importance of boundaries, of professions and their knowledges, and the challenges that anthropological thinking may represent for work practices. This is especially true for working in business contexts when we bring anthropological understandings of persons in the world and our armoury of social and culturally based research skills that recognise, situate and give voice to difference into business contexts. Can work environments which may value and seek unifying concepts and ideas tolerate diversity in conceptualisation, in approaches, in performance, in views and at the end of the day, in business practices themselves?

In working across traditional disciplines, we hope to inform and build something greater than the sum of parts. While this is a hackneyed expression, it’s true in my work where my current project challenges and reinvents our products and services, situating what we would be seen to do traditionally in a postmodern context.

I can’t tell my workmates that we are intimately informed by post colonialism in formulating our practices, or that we’re in the process of radically deconstructing our beliefs in reconfiguring power relationships, or that our project is partially informed by cultural theory, whiteness studies or the centrality of thinking about the authority of the first world within globalisation in determining how our business will proceed and upon which specific decisions will be made. But this is in fact, what we are currently doing. And I do try to tell them.

How have we created a space where these practices are okay, more than okay in business? Is this the armoury that partly informs the anthropologist at work outside of the academy? Or am I on my own here??? And how does this and other knowledge affect the decisions made in my workplace? I still ask myself: what does it mean to work with professionals in bounded disciplines?

While we hope that it isn’t so, in fact what I have termed ‘hierarchies of relevance’ do exist when working across disciplines. And this is part of the reflection on power that demarcates one professional group from another. By this I mean that each professional group maintains the boundaries of its knowledge base, its practices, its rules for conduct and less overtly protects the prestige and culture surrounding its existence within the community. Professionals also maintain control over entry, exit and rule breaking within the profession as well as maintaining controls over the education and transmission of the education that helps to create professionals. In this, professional groups control the knowledge base, language, practice and boundaries that form the basis of their professional identity. As anthropologists, we do this too.

So what happens when professional groups collide? I’m not master (or mistress) of the theories behind interdisciplinary thinking, but I do work within an interdisciplinary context and so am familiar with its practices, if not the theories that underpin it.

So in discussions, working on projects, working both internally and externally the issue of relevance often raises its head. If as the anthropologist I am identified as not having the ‘relevant’ expert knowledge, then my contributions are marginalised, often identified as contributing knowledge in some other, exotic way that runs counter to the usual core practices of knowledge acquisition within the business itself. My contributions are ‘interesting’, ‘quirky’, ‘outside the box’ and, paradoxically sometimes also ‘right on target’. In this way I am relevant, but not as relevant as those practitioners who are seen to belong to the core groups, our consultants, experts and the ultimate targets: the consumers of our products and services. Sometimes, I just feel so not-relevant, it’s just not funny.

As an outsider I will never automatically gain entry into the professional groups with which I work. However, if I hang around long enough maybe they’ll give me an honourary membership after toiling away looking at, investigating, updating, improving, teaching on and training people within their disciplines for so long. As an anthropologist I maintain that little bit of professional paranoia that harks back to Anthropology 101 and studies of ritual, sacrifice, demonization and scapegoating, which not so surprisingly still exist and speak to modern day work practices and contexts quite succinctly, especially for those anthropologists working outside of research in business settings where it’s all too easy to take on the identity of the Other.

It would be so much easier to talk frankly about exactly what I do and where I work, but unfortunately that’s not a luxury that I’m allowed right now, due to an array of policies that police my behaviour both publicly and in private, so suffice to say this is the best that I can do. This form of writing however forces me to think ‘bigger’ about what I do, and so while not completely honest is not dishonest and offers food for thought for many anthropologists (I hope) who work outside the academy as I do.

So are we different but equal? Or just different? As the project I’m currently working on gains pace, I find myself central to the think tanks at work, consulted over and beyond my current job title specifications and have access and input into arenas of work that I wouldn’t ordinarily warrant based on my position alone. I went from fear about this project and its implications, to neutrality, to feeling positive, to being involved by responding to requests for inputs, to embracing and now championing this project.

Now, whenever I’m asked I always come to the party and by that I mean that I complete tasks and contribute over and above whatever’s asked. If I’m asked for an opinion, I give it. If a project needs appraisal, I take time to read, review, comment and advise on it. If a vox pop is required to test the feeling and views of staff on an issue pertaining to the change, I’m already all over it (by nature a chatterbox and also keen to find out how my co-workers are going with things generally). Through my silences and non-attendance, I also make clear my views on some work practices, which in less industrialised and unionised times it is difficult for workers to address directly.

Informally I’ve identified myself not so much as a manager in the workplace – my anthropological training and background would definitely preclude this I think – but definitely as a leader. As there are about a thousand theories on leadership, there’s one that fits the kind of work that I undertake in the workplace, that I inspire and the work that I envision as well. And none of this is on my job description per se, but is alluded to as a potentiality, much the same as the potential or capability of any number of workers with contemporary CVs.

So mostly I find that I’m different but equal and have given my peers, co-workers and management a taste of what the social sciences and anthropology specifically can offer to contemporary work settings, both private and public sector organisations. I still believe that the greatest benefit of having an anthropological background lies not so much in trying to attain a position within the academy, positions which are few and far between and not so easily available to women over forty, but in taking up the challenge of flexibly applying our body of knowledge in diverse contexts, of making the theories, theorists, knowledge and practices real.

Do we lose our specialness, our anthropological know-how, our unique identity as globe trotters seeking to document the life of the Other when we’re not surrounded by like-minded, similarly trained professionals like ourselves? Is our knowledge base and are our practices corrupted and diluted because of our work in interdisciplinary settings? I don’t think so. In contrast I believe that we are strengthened by our ability to work across boundaries as anthropologists continue to fight for relevance in contemporary work place settings. We can only make ourselves relevant by, well being relevant. And this is the challenge that I rise to meet when I go to work every day, carrying the identity of the ‘anthropologist’ through all that I do.

And as I’m always blathering on about anthropology I like to think that I’m also educating people who may still think that my satchel secretly holds a pith helmet, notebook and safari suit. But please see my last post for an update on what to wear to work as an anthropologist.

 

The jacket

I’m trying a new strategy at work to raise my oomph and improve my legit appeal. I’m no slouch when it comes to sparring about ideas, concepts and ways of working – in fact I count myself among the innovators and strategists at work. However, my latest theory is that if you’re partnered up at work with a manager who is always – and I mean always wearing suits, including a tie and jacket that never comes off – then as a woman you’re at a disadvantage when you’re not similarly attired. This is probably true for more casually attired men as well, although because of the gendered inflection at work I don’t think so. Not wearing a suit – and I speak here more of the jacket which holds the greatest symbolic value – creates an inequality, a space that is instantly calculated in black and white terms through our cultural understanding of what it means to be influential, respected and in command at work. And if you’re not wearing a jacket, if you’re not suited up you run the risk of being calculated out.

I’ve taken to jacketing up, especially at meetings and workshops where I’m on show and so too are my opinions, perspectives, assertions, theories, explanations, innovations, insights and recommendations. I’m packaging these all up and wrapping them to be presented by what I imagine my audience seeks, or at least seeks to be reassured of: a confident, authoritative, thought leader who will inspire and transform the meeting or workshop in a way that won’t happen (can’t happen) in my very conservative industry if I was in a T shirt and jeans.

I’m finding that jacketing up lends me the kind of authority – and yes, I’ll say it: power – that paradoxically I have challenged in men, as they embodied a workplace subjectivity of which I was not a part, but am finding that I need to borrow and appropriate through this code of dress in order to exert that same legitimacy and authority. After all, I’m not the one judging and evaluating my performance: others are. We all exist within cultural worlds, and I too have to respond to the cues, norms and expectations of workplace cultures as well. And, as I’ve said before, don’t let anyone fool you by saying, “Oh this is informal, don’t worry too much about your speech/PowerPoint/presentation/evaluation” because you’re always being evaluated in the workplace and this is true of how you present yourself in your manner, attitudes and presentation as well as through the products and efforts of your work. It’s not left to the time of year alone when you drag out the PDR form at your workstation to complete for your manager …

We like to imagine that we live and work in enlightened times, but this is simply not true. Articles and blogs appear on social media and in the press with monotonous regularity with the central theme of how the hell are women supposed to manage in the workplace: the glass ceiling, problems for women within business cultures, managing work/life balance, the impossibility of a career structure and managing fertility, then advice aimed at mums on school lunches, childcare and parenting. This is not part of our overt work cultures, their policies, corporate logos or identities but certainly exist in the everyday practices that are inscribed within our everyday work worlds. Just check out who wipes down sinks at work, cleans fridges and organises catering…

Not all these problems will be resolved by simply donning a jacket and I’m certainly not arguing for that. I’m just painting a picture here….

I’m starting to pay attention to the advice on covering your shoulders, suiting up, opting for plain and not patterned office wear and basically wearing the business uniform. Shirts, (mostly) sensible shoes and even pantihose. I can’t come at flesh coloured hose because that’s just too much of a lie: at least black or smoke coloured hose make a statement. But I’m not sure what I’m trying to do here, and will admit that the motivations that may still be inspiring me may not emanate from ‘How To’ women in business handbooks, or the latest thinking on creative leadership, but may exist in the realms of my unconscious, in which case I don’t really know what’s motivating me and may be using this blog piece to explore these themes. Am I trying to make myself invisible? Am I defeminising myself? Have I failed to remake the workplace in a way that I could own by stamping it with my own style? Am I trying to turn into my male counterparts?

This got me thinking: what are uniforms all about? Clearly they are about conformity. But they’re also about letting the work shine through irrespective of the package that produced it. So the thinking goes. This is the line we push at schools here in Australia when we’re arguing with children about hemlines and not subverting the principle of uniformity when they’re trying to wear Doc Martens instead of approved footwear. “It balances out differences!” we argue. “Everyone’s equal!” we rail. “No one’s at a disadvantage!” we spruik.

Uniformity has its advantages: it’s cheaper than buying a huge wardrobe. It’s easier to mix and match. You tend to buy some things that are better quality and hence less affordable, but probably last longer that your usual top and bottom ensembles. Unless you work in the fashion industry or somewhere in the arts (I wish), or outdoors, if you want to be taken seriously you have to dress the part. I should qualify that by asserting that you have to dress the part whatever that means in your industry. Uniformity promotes a teamwork approach and a sense of belonging (I’m told). We’re all wearing the ‘company logo’ or the ‘badge’ by suiting up. At least you signify that you belong in the business world with a suit anyway.

Uniforms mean that you belong in a place because you don’t stand out like a peacock. You also fade into obscurity a bit, which can have its advantages in providing a bit of a level playing field in the gendered sphere of the workplace. You’re heading towards being asexual. Let’s face it, you’re less likely to be taken seriously in that cute floral number with the red and green pattern teemed with a matching cardigan and high heeled black Bo peep shoes… Having said that, I have worked with CEO’s on projects who were indeed dressed like that. As the CEO, there is the opportunity to be the peacock and let’s see anyone tell her otherwise…

Conversely, uniforms do not necessarily mean uniformity. There are issues of gender, class and ethnicity that inflect business wear, its meanings, intentions and embodiment. Not all suits are the same and if you’ve got money you can wear them well. Probably lots of them. I don’t own many suits, but do have a variety of well-fitting jackets and trouser-style pants to match. As I’m not at the high-spending end I have less to invest but the most to lose if I get it wrong. And considering everything I wear to work (almost everything) is second-hand, from Op Shops, Charity Stores, Bargain Basement Sales and NGOs, I certainly face some challenges in getting it together for work. This is a choice that I have made BTW.

Uniformity also dulls individuality, but like many things, if you have enough money to throw at it, I’m sure your individuality will shine through. Me? I make do with a scarf in Winter, but Summer is challenging as the desire to turn up in less, for example thongs (the flip flop kind, not the G String), a short skirt and a singlet top is really strong most mornings. I have come to accept that much like the mask and the role studied extensively in undergraduate anthropology, the insights about the loss of the subject while putting on masks or fulfilling roles still pertain as we as adults morph into the workforce and attempt to fit in, making use of and attempting to fit into whatever the jacket signifies within your particular industry.

Uniforms are also like wearing armour. I can invoke a whole range of metaphors that invoke the compliance required and symbolised by uniforms and uniformity in military settings, and can admit that this too forms part of the reluctance – and paradoxically the desire – to wear the jacket and join my one force with the many to produce something greater, and be part of the victorious, not losing team at work. Amour is made of precious materials, much too like the fine fibres of a well-fitting, tailor-made suit, increasing the magnetism and appeal of that signified by joining the forces and symbolically shedding my individuality to comply with the command structures and personnel in my workgroup, my battalion.

Like all rules, uniformity in attire is merely an external mirroring of the uniformity required elsewhere both in our schools and in the workforce. It is this symbolic statement that I make by donning the jacket at work as I wordlessly tell my colleagues, my managers and directors and clients that I too am knowledgeable of, can understand and interpret and clearly follow the rules. Bodily adornment is a way in which social codes are embodied and enacted. Think pearl earrings and a matching necklace. Bodily adornment too is also a way of challenging authority, but inscriptions on the body must usually be hidden, because once seen, like the knowledge attained through the biting of the apple in the Garden of Eden, cannot be unseen or unknown ever again, marking the individual for symbolic banishment for, like Eve and Adam, their loss of purity in breaking the rules.

In suiting up, I am implicitly making a statement that while I may come from a different background, may have different methods and approaches, use different theoretical perspectives and offer ‘out of the box’ thinking, I can acknowledge my place in the hierarchy, in the workforce, in the culture of both my own workplace and the industry in which I work at large through my allegiance, through my donning of the jacket and all the associations that form a line through history that have informed and modulated modern business sensibilities in the culmination of my putting it on in the morning.  And I wear it well. Sometimes with accessories…

One day I will dump the jacket.  That day will come when I find myself in a workplace culture where the work is paramount, not so much the appearance of the person.  The kind of work culture that I inhabit now can force your compliance in many unspoken ways, of which subtly policing dress codes is one.  However this doesn’t account for everyone, for other people’s responses to me.  While appearances are still so important at work I will continue to show my proficiency in self-presentation through my allegiance to the code.

Until the day it doesn’t suit me anymore…

 

How does an Anthropologist add value in the workplace?

At work I’m not employed as an anthropologist. Not directly anyway; my skills in research and higher education certainly helped me gain my position, but it was mostly the fact that I had a higher education degree that mattered, not that it was in anthropology. But I’ve used my anthropology doctorate to value-add anthropological knowledge and practices within my current work and this has had benefits for me, for the projects in which I’m involved and for the organisation that I work for. It’s sad that this is indirect, not formally acknowledged and certainly not paid as such. And this has not been due to any lack of my constantly pointing out to my managers the benefits of an anthropological perspective and having an anthropologist on tap within the mix of staff.

I’d like to make a claim for a new position at work taking into account how I add worth over and above my job description and to do so I need to put together some sort of business case. In reference to my recent post on how anthropologists are needed in your workplace which you can access here, I think that in the current climate where we’re talking about the contributions of anthropology in applied domains that it’s timely to highlight what I see as the significance of my own contributions to that end in the work that I do.  In this I’m totally partial, but this is a blog and not a research paper.

The following comments allude to my sociocultural training, and while my education was in a specific (and major) sub-disciplinary area of anthropology I feel that there are commonalities within the sociocultural field that apply to anthropological work irrespective of your sub-disciplinary training (let’s not get too separated here). Here’s what I see that I do:

I contribute a cultural perspective to all my work

At work my contribution lies in not discussing culture per se, but taking a cultural approach to understandings of people, including but not limited to ethnicity, work, work practices, perspectives and approaches. The word ‘culture’ often gets people anxious, getting them bogged down in unclear definitions, fears and concerns that they may or may not be getting it right. So ‘cultural’ offers a more dynamic approach to understanding culture, especially when its coupled with ‘belief’, ‘practice’ ‘perspective’ or whatever. I take the approach of embedding culture within everyday praxis, and this seems to reduce the misunderstandings around what culture means and returns ownership of the word back to anthropologists when we embed it within people’s beliefs and behaviours. This can be useful when strategizing over missions, values and sorting out core business plans.

I take the ‘big view’ providing context and a broader perspective to projects

Evans-Pritchard (1950) reminds us that we cannot understand culture without the perspective of history. Along with many of my contemporaries I would go further and bring to the fore the contextual arguments of situating work praxis within social, economic and political contexts as well. I’m fond of saying that all our workplace behaviour has broader, often unacknowledged contexts and have acculturated my workmates to begin to think more broadly about positioning themselves and what they do against the backdrop of a larger canvass. We all need to think critically about what we do at work in the context of larger movements and this helps to make our work more relevant.

I often ask the dumb questions

Maintaining the naiveté of the new fieldworker to ensure that everyone is on the ‘same page’, that we’re all working from the same understanding is an important contribution. This is not new, and has been written about before extensively, especially in anthropological fieldwork ‘how to’s’.  This is done consciously too as a way of asserting for those at work not comfortable with appearing ‘dumb’ (I don’t mind this at all and instead see this as a position of strength, not weakness).

I encourage a critical approach

… even if that means incorporating opposing or contentious views into projects even to just show that my organisation acknowledges these and has taken the perspective into account. This is important to counteract opposition but mostly to show that staff have accounted for the totality of an issue to the best of our knowledge and that nothing is hidden. Critical approaches teach the utility of validating knowledge, of learning to not take at face value everything that is presented to you but to ensure that people are skilled in undertaking quality review or whatever the language in your industry is that represents this skill.

I love to problematize issues

It’s important to get people to think critically about tensions inherent in our work and ways towards resolving or improving our work with this in mind. Let’s turn everything into a problem, or at least that’s how it feels sometimes. This is done with the purpose of open scrutiny, of providing frank appraisal of an issue from every which way, leaving nothing unturned or unexamined.

I raise questions constantly

I’m often aware that I cannot and have no hope at all of providing all the answers, as anthropologists have pointed out that our discipline is known to be fond of creating more questions than it answers. This is an essential part of, and constitutive of our skill as anthropologists in identifying the cultural worlds that we inhabit – and we need to find out about all of them.

I check taken-for-grantedness

The questioning of taken-for-granted knowledge is a given for anthropologists as these understandings form the basis of the obvious, assumed, common sense that binds people within and forms culture. But people can get very upset when you do this as you really sound like you’re off your rocker if you start questioning the contents of the cultural vault that they’ve spent a lifetime learning and getting right – until they’ve learned why. I ask people to take a fresh approach through questioning their taken-for-granted assumptions about individuals, groups of people, stereotypes, accepted ways of thinking, perspectives, use of products or services and other ways that people are engaged with culture.

Anthropologists provide an independent point of view

I’m professionally ‘free’ to talk across disciplinary boundaries, without being stymied by the boundary tensions that can stall or limit consideration of some issues – important in planning and conceptualising projects within industries where your disciplinary alliance and allegiance is extremely important. When you’re positioned outside these structures you can be more open in providing a fresh perspective to old problems. I have ‘free’ in inverted commas because as with language barriers in traditional fieldwork, you may not be as free as you’d like to be in applied contexts in workplaces for reasons just as important as not having the right language to communicate, or some other barrier.

I promote the Laura Nader effect

Anthropologists can work ‘up’ and ‘down’ engaging in authentic interactions at all levels of an organisation. As participant-observers within societies we are less fazed by and can speak truth to the power relations that constitute workspaces. However, as an employee reliant on a pay cheque I might not be able to do anything much about some issues, but that doesn’t stop me from working with this perspective about the benefits of understanding the spaces of power and who inhabits these and how they interact and and exert influence within the workplace. In reality, following my original extensive and confronting fieldwork many years ago, I now find it impossible not to work towards holistic understanding of cultural beliefs and practices – including relations of power – especially in workplaces.

I seek unity in diversity                                                                                                                                                    At work I’m all for looking to strengthen areas of commonality and mutual interest.  There are often multiple areas of difference that exist on a range of measures but as an anthropologist I’m interested in identifying workplace culture and shared aspects and strengthening areas of mutuality.  This makes us all feel more connected in what we do and how we do it.  This doesn’t always work as intended but can have unintended unifying consequences in the longer term.

While all of the above sounds rosy and, at times just too good to be true there is also (always) a downside to working across and outside of your discipline with other professionals. Much as I love collaborative efforts and interdisciplinary energies, the position of the anthropologist as different, as a disciplinary outsider and often as a newbie means that anthropologists are often targets and can be scapegoated when there are problems within organisations. There can exist a slight air of suspicion around you and your work, especially if your foundations and methodology stemming from the social sciences falls outside the business practices in which your work is situated.

This is not dissimilar to fieldwork experiences that abound in the literature in which the lone anthropologist is an easy target for vilification, demonization and all manner of bone pointing and eventual expulsion from field sites. It’s easy to blame outsiders and this is a risk that we run in taking on the role of the inquisitive, critical thinker who loves to point out cultural truths.

We have to remember: like court jesters we too can be replaced.  But at least court jesters were authentic in working in their enterprise.

 

References:

E.E. Evans-Prichard (1950) Anthropology and History, The Marett Lecture

Laura Nader (1972) Up the anthropologist: perspectives gained from studying up.

The Anxious Anthropologist blog on WordPress (2015) Why You Need an Anthropologist in Your Organisation

 

 

An open letter to Prime Minister Turnbull: What would research and work look like if I was in charge?

Dear Mr Turnbull,
If I was in charge of research I would always include children on the research team. Instead of talking about fresh perspectives, I would build this in to the brief. I would always have the unfettered, hopeful perspective of young people in any activity that involved innovation and future planning for the knowledge, products and services needed for the coming ages.

I would also staff my research team with at least two retired, ‘older’ or aged persons as active members of the team. We need the long view, the depth perception, the historical strength that is provided by people with a long experience of living, especially of living through different eras of challenge as well as innovation and change.

I would ALWAYS have a representative of the group, for whom the research or work is intended in the team. This would occur at the dangerous time right at the start before all the creative work was done and awaiting a comment or ‘input’ from the target persons. If it’s going to work in the real world, it has to be created by people in and from that world.

I would build in the non eight hour day as a standard for creative, innovative work. While this does to work for everyone, the alternative of hard slog for eight hours in a row certainly doesn’t work either. We have busy time, mindless time, thinking time, creative spikes and nothing time. This can be followed by periods of intensely focussed, highly productive work, and this is not necessarily recognised by current work place practices.

I would gather like-minded people to work together in organic ways. Sometimes the most productive ideas and new ways of working are generated through unscheduled meetings, through conversations that lead off in new directions between people not necessarily professionally aligned, or who may even be opposed in some way, yet who can work together to generate new solutions to the petrified thinking that prevents true innovation.

Research structures need a shakeup in a way that the social sciences can offer. New ways of thinking are needed to inject fresh perspectives into age old dilemmas, problems and situations. I would bring together new teams of people to work together and not just in tokenistic ways but in a meaningful manner that worked with the best that disciplinary knowledge has to offer.

I would head up my team with non traditional leaders who often quietly have a vision for change, a vision for the future that has not been accessed or brought to life because of stigma, insecurity and the self doubt that comes from an inability to sell oneself and one’s ideas in the way that is taken for granted by others who seem to always effortlessly succeed.

I would take a standpoint perspective and include extra women at all levels of research to redress the imbalance of productive work based inputs that women have been traditionally able to provide because of the demands of biology in bearing and raising children. There never seems to be a right time to have children as a working woman, unless you have an army of unpaid service providers to assist you or lots of money.

If I was in charge I would ensure that social scientists always had access to any institutions that house people. I would also shake our thinking up even further for example through the inclusion of poets, artists and philosophers in engineering, science and medical research. The centre often only changes because of the activities on the periphery, by the people whose work is literally edgy. That is how change comes to the centre, how the offbeat activity of twenty years ago becomes mainstream practice now. It is from the edge where new ideas are generated.

Traditional ways of working and research need to change, we have to incorporate the schisms, the criticisms and make newer, better research and work practices. What will work even look like in fifty years from now?

I have more ideas up my sleeve, but I want to give you a taster of my thinking ‘outside the box’ to show you how a really new talent pool can potentially offer truly new and fruitful ways of thinking. We can’t live in a world where it’s just jobs for the (same old) boys. Just by reading this you’ve already opened up your eyes to new ways of thinking about how to do things. And much of what I’ve said is probably not even new.

Please let me know where to send my brief.

Sincerely yours,

The Anxious Anthropologist

 

Routines of everyday life

It is a classic observation of anthropologists that we seek to document the everyday activities of people within various cultural contexts in order to provide evidence for making meaning and sensible observations about cultural life. We especially look to the routine activities, that taken for granted ordinariness of life that to those involved seems particularly unremarkable. This gives anthropologists our greatest jollies. And you may well ask, “why?”

Many of the activities that are documented, the structures that are associated with supporting them point to well, nothing particularly groundbreaking at all. In reality, much of what we examine often elicits the response, “well, so what?”

But what people fail to account for in critiquing anthropology, is that it is one of the only disciplines that pays attention to ordinary life in this way, taking routines, taken for granted responses and behaviours and attitudes as the stuff of analysis and critical investigation and reflection. And most of what is examined are the routines that comprise people’s daily lives, the kinds of routines that would not ordinarily create a meme, hold social media attention or be unusual in any way other than for expressing difference within ordinariness among diverse human populations.

Humans love to create structure and order the world in particular ways. We create rules, norms and mores around everything that we do, sometimes calling this culture, tradition or just the way we do things around here. In doing so, we routinise our responses to the challenges that face us in our everyday lives, constantly remaking routines and traditions as the need arises.

We love to master a task, show that we can do it or even submit ourselves for examination to prove that we have a level of mastery. In doing so we routinise and create normative knowledge sets and behaviours as well as the forms that indicate competency.

Routines provide stability, predictability and a level of comfort and certainty in our daily lives. We are reassured of ourselves and our roles through our actions and activities and routines provide the behavioural response, the body memory, the actions that partner with the thoughts and anticipation of a thing.

We often attach a feeling of accomplishment to the satisfactory completion of routine tasks and this relationship to routine tasks forms the basis of our behaviour within rituals as well. This is a blog and not an academic piece so I will not reference the extensive and enjoyable literature on rituals, but suffice to say that rituals are a form of participatory action that provide meaning in our lives at a symbolic level as we make sense of aspects of life that are unknowable or uncontrollable.

And aside from the extraordinary nature of ritual behaviour, it is the ordinariness of everyday life that is of greatest interest because this forms the basis of cultural comparison within diverse cultural contexts. This appreciation of the ordinariness of routinised and familiar behaviours makes them more like us and is the way of bridging the gap of cultural difference. Is it so surprising that the way we often meet a new culture is through food? We eat our way in through familiar rituals and routines associated with the production of nutrients for consumption through more or less familiar social avenues. Ottolenghi, Stein and a host of others are the latest media chefs doing the cultural work of making the strange familiar through their presentations of the cultural and ethnic diversity of the world of food preparation, sale and consumption on the world stage. Not that I’m suggesting that they are anthropologists, but the point about presenting routines cross culturally in popular culture has to be made.

Routines are often the most unremarkable aspect of our daily lives that could be imagined. They may be private and personal and attached to the body and bodily maintenance. Routines provide the cycles of everyday life and a level of certainty and predictability around our movements and actions within a day, a week, a month or a year. In the face of uncertainly, we stamp our movements and reign in the unpredictability through normalising expectations and responses. Routines point to the ultimate cyclicality of the body, of nature and potentially of the universe itself.

So next time you catch yourself hating the thought of an approaching task, chore or routine challenge just remember that your actions are part of a greater whole in which you are exemplifying, embodying, enacting and creating your version of that particular task within all of the possible expressions of that task within humanity. And an anthropologist is interested in that.

 

September 19th: International “Talk like a Pirate Day” – Who Knew?

Our calendars are full of special weeks and days to memorialise, commemorate and bring attention to the plight of people with special needs, those underserved, forgotten, marginalised and needy. Think of the ‘Decade of the Brain’, ‘International Women’s Year, ‘Mental Health Week’ and ‘RUOK Day’. We celebrate the child, the volunteer, peace, the critic, the deaf – even prayer and fasting. We have days dedicated to mourning the dead, national days of surgery, international happiness and kissing days.

But who knew about the ‘International Talk like a Pirate Day?

It’s not just a day dedicated to pirates, to remembering and celebrating piratehood, to the achievements of pirates, to remembering poor, suffering and displaced pirates, the seafaring adventures and booty quests, but a specific day emphasising a particular aspect of piratedom that warrants international attention for a full day each year: talking like a pirate.

Who knew?

I wake up and thank God that the announcer on public radio has made mention of this special day. I would hate to be the only person at the water cooler at work today not speaking pirate. I imagine what my work day will look like, more specifically what it will sound like. I will open meetings with an Acknowledgement of Country in a pirate accent, subtly altering it to commence with “Me hearties”. There will be a swashbuckling flourish in the tone of my emails and lunch at the local will be ordered, eaten and savoured in pirate tones. Hushed asides in afternoon meetings will be highlighted by note taking made in map form, accompanied by hearty, rib tickling laughter.

I turn on the TV to listen to the news, wondering what the events of the day and finance reports will sound like in Pirate Speak. Will I be able to take seriously the stock market report delivered in Pirate? Or will the accent merely point to the inequities of Capitalism, highlighting the fact that poor old Pirates might have missed out on letting their stockbroker know to purchase the latest share offering and hope that there isn’t a margin call that will leave them reeling, “to be sure, to be sure”? I’m disappointed that the national broadcaster has not seen fit to remind their newsreader to talk Pirate.

What’s on the news right now? A by-election, the international Rugby, local Real Estate sentiment, bush fires, car racing and the horrible usual assortment of human suffering and tragedy. Will Pirate Speak soften the blow of these harsh news stories, bring some perspective to the sometime excesses of sport and racing and bring to the level of ridiculous any reports within the finance sector?

I wonder what school will be like today – will the day be Pirate themed? Will all the lessons be given in Pirate? Will this be a big ask in Advanced Maths which might as well be spoken in Welsh, or Pirate for all the understanding I have of high school maths? Geography, Economics and Textiles would be my choice of subjects for Pirate-Inflected teaching today. I reckon there’ll be a few Johnny Depp inspired costumes on display too, something you can’t really get away with at work, although a well-placed scarf with some silver coin trim would do the trick…

I wonder what the Parliaments at national and state level will sound like? Will the important issues of the day be delivered in Pirate speak? There seems to be an opportunity here for the Australian Parliament who are currently discussing the position of the Speaker of the House at this very moment. It would be very sage and show great leadership if this position was given permission to speak in Pirate, at least for the day. Make them all look like potential plundering sea-faring robbers.

Of course the day seems to trivialise the reality of Pirates. The day seems to be a celebration of the fictitious, of the Pirates that populate legend, children’s stories, the imagination and movies. Think of the horrifying Long John Silver from Treasure Island, or The Pirates of Penzance or the Pirates of the Caribbean, moving into production of a fifth film.

However, Pirates are REAL. Famous pirates of history have included Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, who came from England and worked the Caribbean in the 1700’s, romanticised in the modern era. Wikipedia lists historical pirates, their dates, a chronicle of their lives and deeds right near put entries on the famous pirates of literature and the cinema. These include the Barbarossa Brothers, Captain Kidd, Henry Morgan, Calico Jack and Madam Cheng. With it being “Talk like Pirate Day” today and all, I want to devote at least part of my day to the cause by looking up Pirate histories and biographies and being moved by these as I reflect on their historical, economic and social realities.

It’s not all swashbuckling and scurvy, after all. I’m not a historian and cannot do justice to the history of pirates and piracy here. There is a modern context to piracy of course that has absolutely nothing to do with accents but everything to do with power and resources and their inequitable distribution around the world – actually just like it always has. But the modern day pirates are not characterised so much by their romanticised and stereotypical accents and aged wind-powered sailing ships, but by high tech and high speed. Everything keeps up with the times and so too does piracy as swords and cannon are replaced with guns and grenades…

But back to The Day: there is a Wikipedia entry for the day, with a history (painful reading, much like this entry), a logo and a category called ‘Linguistic Background’ (pertinent here, so of course), References, Further Reading and External Links: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_like_a_pirate

My work here is done…

 

Change jobs, return to research or enrol in further higher ed?

You get to a point in your life where you start to reflect on your skill set and your current responsibilities and you wonder whether these match up with your desired, wanted skill set and the kinds of things that you want to be doing with your time. We all have an imperative to work, to be productive, to contribute to the social good, whether that be through our paid work or otherwise.

I’m sitting here with my CV in hand, wondering about taking the next step, what that should be, where that will take me and whether I’ll be skilled and experienced enough to do whatever it is that’s calling me away from where I am now, which was after all, a once highly favoured position, or so I perceived it.

I’m faced with questions: what happens when we get to the end of our current jobs, when we’re no longer as useful as we once were, when we dread getting up in the morning to face the same old, same old?

I’ve come to this way of thinking because of a number of changes at my workplace, where the imperatives of the business world are moulding our work practices and I’m not sure that I can honestly contribute to this new pathway. If I have to work in this kind of setting, I’d be better off working somewhere that included an anthropologist, not one working on the margins as I’ve been trying to do for the past three years.

It is not easy being a trailblazer. You have to work twice as hard: work to get the job done, and then work over and above that to promote this new discipline in your current workplace. I feel professionally isolated, and marginalised and coupled with changing business practices, I honestly feel like it’s time to meet new challenges.

Phrases from the new age and career counsellors come to mind: ‘this is an opportunity’ I hear, or ‘failure is a great teacher’ [it hasn’t quite come to that…], or ‘there’s something perfect waiting for you out there’, or similar phrases that preface the entries that come into my Inbox from SEEK, Indeed, UniJobs or any number of other ‘alerts’ that I’ve set up in my quest to find a new position.

University opportunities appear to have closed doors to me before I’ve even attempted to grasp the handle. Am I too old? Am I too long past the completion of my PhD [did I even know that there was a use by date for applications for Postdocs]? How would I mould my area of research into the proposed Postdocs advertised anyway? Seems like there’s little mentoring or assistance for those of us who aren’t assertive enough to be ‘flagrant self-promoters’ which, after all, you do need to be, indeed MUST BE in order to progress in the academic sphere. No space for the shy or retiring.

What other area involves such a critique of one’s performance as academia does? Your thoughts, your ideas, your arguments, your evidence, your appraisals, your plans, your applications, your ethics, your methodology – even your choice of supervisor – all these are critiqued as part of one’s performance as an academic. There are definitely more anonymous jobs around than working in the thought industries and producing new evidence with pats on the back from your peer-reviewers….

But if I’m honest with myself, the happiest times that I experienced in my working life was when I was doing my fieldwork for my doctoral studies. Everything was fresh and new, every experience was significant, all my reading added to my fledgling and emerging thesis, and all I could talk about was my very interesting fieldwork. Added to this were copious notes and a methodology that I took to like a duck to water. The hardest thing was writing up and coming to terms with some of the angst produced through, well the production of something new that made a statement about people and society. That is thrilling and the process of appraisal and review, while daunting is rewarding.

But what now?

If you move sideways and don’t follow through on your own work, your own ideas, your own area of expertise, well that area of expertise gets taken up by other people. You do not become the authority or have anything much to say about the area at all. Working sideways means that you’re devoting your efforts to the completion and fulfilment of other people’s ideas, of other people’s work, which may be aligned with yours or, more realistically, may serve to pay the bills until you can stand on your own two professional feet.

And that may, or may not happen.

Self-doubt is a crippling experience. Once you succumb to this, it’s hard to feel that you can contribute meaningfully to your discipline at all. One way to alleviate this though is to contribute where you can: attend a conference, write about and present what you know, what you’re currently involved in. One thing that anthropologists do well is problematize a set of social circumstances, then pull them apart minutely to examine them critically, then, applying an informed theoretical perspective, put it all back together with the new evidence to make sense of the thing.

This is the seed of opportunity, and if you find yourself floundering where you are, “make a virtue of it” as my Honours supervisor, recently deceased once told me. An outrageous intellectual, he was full of advice about proceeding with one’s ideas that I find I’m still passing on to students who come my way.

So maybe I should do that: take the problems that I’m presented with at work, problematize them as something worth investigating, turn this into a research project, apply for funding and set out to find out something new to share with the discipline.

Or find a Postdoc

Go somewhere else, not in the higher education sector. What the hell would I do? Would I, indeed could I be useful anywhere outside the public sector? Would anyone value my skills enough to want to pay me to work in their company? I’m starting to get the heebie jeebies thinking about this.

What about returning to studies myself? My supervisor at uni encouraged me to go straight from an Honours degree to Doctoral studies, claiming that many women often progressed through to a Masters but were daunted by the thought of taking on a PhD, so I should go straight for the higher qualification. What I didn’t realise was that a Masters was useful in a work sense as it gave some structure through coursework and a minor thesis to areas that were immediately applicable in a work environment.
I should have done an MBA instead of a PhD.

One university in Sydney is currently touting MBA’s for women who are currently vastly underrepresented in this area, offering a pathway with shared costs and sponsorship by employers to assist women in completing this higher level qualification. Here’s the story: http://mq.edu.au/newsroom/2014/11/21/mgsm-announces-major-investment-into-womens-management-education/

But is that me?

This is the issue: if you’re planning on taking up higher degree studies as an adult, then you have to be highly motivated, and above all, really WANT to study the subjects in order to qualify for that degree. If you honestly can’t see yourself majoring in any of the strands offered, then maybe you don’t really want that qualification, or don’t really want to qualify in that area. Further studies in research similarly mean that you MUST WANT to investigate the research topic or idea that’s burning away in the back of your consciousness.

So here I sit, procrastinating as I write this blog instead of reframing my CV and attending to my Inbox. Wait, I hear the ‘ding’ telling me something’s come in…  All offers will be given serious consideration…

 

Telephone con artists

                                          

“Congratulations you’ve won an Android device!” said the guy on the other end of my mobile whose name was Jack, “so long as I can confirm that the details you’ve given me in the recent competition you entered online are all correct” he continued.  

“Wow”, I said, “thanks that’s great. What details are you referring to?”

[A little bit of small talk with the smooth talker on the other end of the phone ensued]

“Can I confirm your name?  And your address?  We need to know where to deliver the device…  And one of our consultants would be happy to speak to you about debt reduction/early retirement or increasing your wealth” he said.

“Well, you already know my name and have my address” I continued.  

“Sure” Jack went on and confirmed these.  Then, ” what time can our consultant come around to see you?  Are you free this week for us to come around and deliver your Android device?”

Then, “We’d really like to speak to your partner as we’ll especially if their name is on the mortgage too.  Do you have a mortgage?  How much do you owe?  And how much is your house worth?  

I hesitated, not wanting to divulge too much personal information to a stranger.  An appointment was made for two days time at midday at my place.

The next day I got another call, this time from a different mobile number.  This guys name was Ben.  

Again, “Congratulations on your win and I’m just following up on yesterday’s call.  I just need to confirm that the details you gave are correct” and he went over my details again.  

This time, “Can you please tell me what your occupation is?  And your partners?  And where do you work? “. 

When I protested and said that it wasn’t necessary for me to divulge this information just to deliver an Android device or offer me general financial advice, Ben continued, “If I don’t ask you this information, I could lose my job” he said in an attempt to persuade me.  “And I need to make sure that there’s no conflict of interest” he went on as if he was an ethical person, “you know, I need to make sure that your partner doesn’t work in real estate… ”

I continued, “I don’t see that it’s necessary to spend all this time talking to you on the phone when your representative is coming to see me tomorrow at home.  It’s inconvenient for me to talk right now because I’m working and I’ve set aside time to talk about financial matters with you tomorrow”

“But it would save a lot of time if I got this information from you before our representative comes to see you tomorrow” Ben continued.  “I need to find out.  How much is your house worth?  And how much do you owe?  We need this information blah, blah, blah…”

Then it got ugly.  He became aggressive on the phone and I told him that I was cancelling the appointment and that a ‘free’ Android device was just not worth this much trouble.  I could hear him hang up in anger and disgust.  

I was stunned,  I googled the name of the company and as it happens, Google always offers search terms that follow on from the words you’re searching for and as the company name came up, so too did ‘ripoff’ and a link to a real estate journalists article about real estate scams just like the one I was about to be hoodwinked into.  Here’s the link (haven’t figured out how to do hyperlinks on WordPress yet sorry): http://www.yourinvestmentpropertymag.com.au/mistakes/the-dark-side-of-property-investing-141575.aspx 

I told everyone.  My coworkers, the family, the folks at the meeting I went to later tonight.  I couldn’t believe that I’d been so gullible. Stranger danger is no stranger when it’s attached to a ‘prize’.  I had a set of expectations in my mind that involved the words, “prize” and “financial advice” and even “choice”, but this was clearly not a shared vocabulary.  

Clearly there was no intention to deliver a prize (stop, I can hear you all groaning already, crying ‘how can she have  been so gullible’)?  

But it wasn’t guilt, or gullibility.  These guys are tapping into people’s greed.  It begins with the ‘prize’ and the warm feeling associated with a lucky win. I was OK with that.  Then it was going to progress to making a fast buck, but clearly I was not OK or even comfortable with the direction that the conversation was going.  

But what alarmed me was how easily these guys had slipped into my everyday world.  The phone calls came through mid morning and early afternoon, when I was sitting and working at my desk.  I wasn’t being held up in a dark alley, it was broad daylight and I was at work.  And I had believed them.  

I hated myself for my trusting nature at that point, but more than that i despised then for taking advantage of my trusting nature and attempting to dupe and coerce me.  

Be warned.

Photo credit: http://residentialsettlements.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/nigerian_rental_scam500.jpg